Hell S Quest

Exactly how Collingwood had been built, how she had assumed a completely new identity and personality, just what frightening, sinister debts had been incurred in the process I didn't yet know. The final piece of the puzzle was coming whenever I was ready to listen, but I already dearly loved the person incurring the debts and I already understood why they had been incurred. Nancy was fleeing from a first degree murder charge, a case no doubt still open on the books of the Hoboken Police Department. I had followed those Waterfront Commission hearings Warren brought up with some interest back in 1966. When he mentioned them this morning, I vaguely recalled a murdered federal informant by the name of Deluca being mentioned by several witnesses. It may not have been the same guy. I may have remembered the name wrong. But if he was, the case was open with the FBI as well.

Argues that the academy's obsession with language, and in particular with narrative, has become a sort of disease.

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.