Book Launch: Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital

Book Launch: Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital

Wednesday 20.11.24, 17:00 – 19:00

Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Dyson Buidling
Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus)
1 Hester Road
London SW11 4AY

Please join us for the somewhat belated launch of our book, Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan). We will be in conversation with Larne Abse Gogarty, John Roberts and Stevphen Shukaitis about irony and critique, artistic labour and the legacy of the avant garde. Blurb and bios below. The event is free to attend, but please sign up below:

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She works as a lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is the author of What We Do Is Secret Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (2022). She has published in journals and magazines including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and leader of the Research Cluster ‘Art Philosophy and Social Practice’. His books include Photography and its Violations, (2014); Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, (2015); and The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech, 2002).

Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info). His publications include Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016). 

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus (forthcoming, Strange Attractor | MIT, 2025). They work as lecturers in Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.