Acknowledgements
The development of this book was initially shaped by two experiences. In 2008, I started working with Rachel Anderson in the Interaction department at the art organisation Artangel. At the time, Rachel was producing ambitious, participatory projects that introduced me to the world of social practice in a way that was explicitly politicised, especially with the first project I worked on: Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler’s The Museum of Non Participation, a project which ran over an eighteen month period, and shuttled between London and Karachi, collaborating with street vendors, Urdu translators, architects, housing activists, lawyers, hairdressers, filmmakers, wedding photographers, newspaper printers, artists and writers. I am grateful to Rachel, Noor and Brad for introducing me to questions which are at the heart of this book concerning the difficulties and possibilities involved in trying to situate art as a conduit for social change and cooperation. Concurrent to working on The Museum of Non Participation, I began an MA in the History of Art department at UCL and was taught by Professor Andrew Hemingway on a course called Class Formation in American Art: From the New Deal to the Eisenhower Period. In studying the New Deal art programmes with Andrew, I was struck by the shared concerns of artists, administrators and participants that mark that history, with the work I was doing alongside Rachel, Noor and Brad. Despite the very different socio-political context of 1930s America, and London, or indeed Karachi, in 2008, it was clear to me that there were shared problems around the instrumentalisation of art, institutional limits, and the idea of aesthetic experience as intimately connected with pedagogy and politics, leading me to write the comparative history contained here. Andrew went on to supervise my PhD which forms the basis of this book, and I am immensely grateful for his support, and all I have learned from him.
A doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council made my PhD research in the History of Art Department at UCL possible, and the department was a stimulating and supportive home during the course of my graduate studies. I am particularly grateful to Stephanie Schwartz for her precise and thoughtful co-supervision of my PhD alongside Andrew, and all her invaluable support since. Comments from Gail Day and Michael Hatt assisted in reshaping this manuscript for publication and gave me the confidence to develop this book. I would also like to thank Angela Miller for her helpful feedback on an earlier draft. A postdoctoral fellowship from the Terra Foundation for American Art, based at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, Berlin from 2016–2018 provided invaluable support while writing this book, as did support in 2012 from the Terra Foundation to conduct research in the US. Since 2018, I have been lucky enough to work at the Slade School of Fine Art and would like to thank my colleagues and students for engaging me in new ways of thinking about the questions explored in this book.
I want to thank the following archives and art institutions for making their materials available: The Tamiment Library, The Theatre Division and Jerome Robbins Dance Division at New York Public Library, The Special Collection and Archives at George Mason University, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Capp Street Project Gallery Archives at CCA, Oakland. Warmest thanks to Suzanne Lacy for her generosity with her time, apartment, image and video resources. Unique Holland, Chris Johnson, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler generously gave time for me to interview them. Many thanks to Martha, Suzanne and to Project Row Houses for also supplying images for use in this book. I would also like to thank Arcilla Stahl at the South Side Community Art Centre in Chicago for her generosity in assisting my research there, and Skyla Hearn for her help in accessing related collections at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Center.
While doing my MA, my thinking was transformed by studying alongside Sonel Breslev, Danielle Monks, Jenny Nachtigall, Giulia Smith, Andrew Witt, who remain some of my closest friends and have all been important during the development of this book, from hosting me on research trips, to being excellent holiday companions, to all reading, listening to and engaging with what I have written at various points. The Marxist Feminist reading group I was part of was an invaluable space, and I still think of it as the collective intellectual project I have learned the most from. Thanks especially to Hannah Black, Christina Chalmers, E.C. Feiss, Rose-Anne Gush, Dimitra Kotouza, Hannah Proctor, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt and Josefine Wikström, who were all either part of that reading group, or have been similarly important as friends and interlocutors. Thanks to Hannah Lustig and Emile Kelly, for their friendship and for listening to me talk about this project over the years. I would also like to thank Danny Hayward for his careful editing of this manuscript.
Thanks to my parents Susanna Abse and Paul Gogarty, and my brother Max for their constant support, as well as to my aunt, Keren Abse for always being engaged and encouraging. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Joan Abse, whose relationship to art and politics provided a formative role in my life. I only wish I could have discussed everything here with her. Most of all, with love, thanks to Adam Lane for his intellectual engagement, love and kindness, and for being interested in what I have been working on the whole way through.