Offering models of care beyond capitalist constraints

For too long, questions of care provision and inclusion have been shaped by economic justifications. This has led to the deprivation of care to individuals and communities based on capitalist assumptions about what and who can be cared for. Proposals for a Caring Economy takes these assumptions to task. Moving between examples focused on immigration and agriculture, patients and art audiences, green energy transitions and unhoused people, prison abolitionists and clients of domestic violence services, the contributors here argue that we need new ways to conceptualize care and its applications.

Proposals for a Caring Economy articulates an economy that situates care at the forefront; sees the preservation of individual, community, and environmental wellbeing as the primary good; and focuses attention on building a sustainable economy of caring that will radically transform social connections and possibilities.

Contributors: Chelsey R. Carter, Yale U; David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers U; Stephanie Delise Jones, U of California, Riverside; Sameena Mulla, Emory U; Katy Overstreet, Saxo Institute, U of Copenhagen; Michelle Parsons, Northern Arizona U; Adair Rounthwaite, U of Washington; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine; Emily Yates-Doerr, Oregon State U.

A close-up history of the Yugoslav artists who broke down the boundaries between public and private

 

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb took to using the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. This Is Not My World presents a detailed account of the Group of Six Authors and their circle in the prolific and experimental period from 1975 to 1985, highlighting the friction between public and private that underlied their innovative practices. 

Looking to circumvent the rigid bureaucracy of official art institutions, this freewheeling group of conceptual artists and their peers brought artistic activities directly to an unwitting public by staging provocative performances, exhibiting artworks, and interacting with passersby on the streets. Exploring artworks such as Vlasta Delimar’s act of tying herself to a tree in a busy pedestrian area, Željko Jerman’s production of a giant banner declaring “Intimate Inscription” in the city’s central square, and Vlado Martek’s creation of an artwork on a seaside beach using women’s underwear, Adair Rounthwaite examines the work of these artists as a site of tension between the intimacy of artistic expression and the political structure of the public sphere under state socialism. 

Whereas many histories of modern and contemporary art in formerly socialist countries tend to be dominated by discussions of ideology and resistance, This Is Not My World focuses its attention on the affective aspects of the group’s activities, using artist interviews and extensive documentation to bring the reader closer to the felt experience of their public interventions. Situating the group’s work within the context of broader developments in conceptualism and theories of the avant-garde, Rounthwaite provides a fresh consideration and newly detailed account of this marginalized episode in global art history.