Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics

This slippery art world, desperate for clean definitions of everything, anxious to place each work into a category by which it may be diffused and understood and then mastered. This book may help that or it may hurt that for each reader. Jackson collected a vast amount of research to support her position, and it is done exceptionally well. I want everyone who see's my work to have already read this so we can skip over the usual volley of questions. Now I often just tell people to read Social Works and then get back to me. If you choose not to read this now you will find yourself reading it in a few years when it becomes the standard by which we understand the current state of contemporary art. Which is to say, even if you don't agree with the author you better understand the argument.I assigned to my students for next quarter you should too.

Recently finished a thesis about the "participatory artists situations", their negotiations of aesthetics, politics and the social in a way that is very hard to disintegrate from each other, I had more questions in mind than answers. Jackson's book respond to static road maps provided by art historical accounts and bring dynamism to a field whose interdisciplinarity became a pseudo-dialogue between rigid genres. Jackson in this book, with her critical approach to available literature, brilliantly gives flesh to the shifting sensibilities and use of (the) medium(s). An informing, thought-provoking, schema-challenging, very well performed book!Not: The writing style of Jackson might be a challenge for non-native speakers, yet with enough effort invested, her text becomes a philosophical journey as much as a art-historical, social, political.

My son chose t his as a present he has a Phd in Art History and he knows what he likes reading.