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Now What?

Quandaries of Art and the Radical Past

By (author) Rachel Weiss

Pub Date: March 2, 2021

ISBN: 9780823293926

Page Count: 240

Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations

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Price: $27.00

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Description: Now What? is an innovative exploration of artworks and films that return to radical histories subject to erasure or otherwise lost or occluded over time. The moments returned to—the Cuban Revolution, Chile’s 1973 coup d’état, the ambiguous 1989 “revolution” in Romania, and the mayhem surrounding the Red Army Faction in 1970s West Germany—stand as historical watersheds, foundational and precipitate moments in the history of radical politics. Delving into these key historical moments by way of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper in Havana, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s decades-long cycle of returns to Allende’s Chile, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, the film Germany in Autumn, and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 suite of paintings, Rachel Weiss convincingly threads these works together through subtle and illuminating reflections on the complex dynamics involved in historical trauma and memory, addressing key questions about the meanings and uses of the past.
Reviews: It is just as hard to face our hopes as our suffering,’ observes Rachel Weiss in this empathically argued account of living in the wake of once-promising, truncated social transformations. This redemptive poetics of history inhabits the imagination of the present moment radically altered by inherited traumas, idealisms, and messianic hopes. These encounters align the horizon under a night sky flashing with the stars of regardless and henceforward---Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

Casting her supremely intelligent eye on the simultaneous possibilities and limits of art, Rachel Weiss offers a far-reaching study of performance, painting, and film in the aftermath of societal convulsions and revolutions. She creatively rethinks how and why art comes to work in societies troubled by censorship, dictatorship, state violence, and trauma, on the one hand, and dreams of revolution, collectivism, and social justice on the other. Crucially, Weiss’s impassioned account of the stories that art can offer about these extreme historical realities takes on a new relevance and urgency in our current world, where authoritarianism, fake news, and alternative facts increasingly appear to rule the day.---Saloni Mathur, University of California, Los Angeles
Table of Contents: Introduction: Being Afterward | 1

1 Lupe at the Mic
After January 1959, Havana, Cuba, in Tatlin’s Whisper #6 | 11

2 The Tenuous Moonlight of an Unrequited Past
After September 11, 1973, Santiago de Chile, in The Battle
of Chile, Chile: Obstinate Memory, and Nostalgia for the Light | 35

3 Something That Opens a Wish and Closes a Door
After December 1989, Romania, in Videograms of a Revolution,
Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, and 12:08 East of Bucharest | 63

4 Whoever Knows the Truth Lies
After October 1977, West Germany, in Germany in Autumn and October 18, 1977 | 123

Conclusion: The Undersong of Our Histories | 161

Acknowledgments | 183

Notes | 185
Details: ISBN-13 9780823293926
Published: 2021-03-02

Trim: 5.000in x 8.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: By (author) Rachel Weiss
Rachel Weiss is Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art.