...knowing. essays warn about the art of power, such as government and art world censorship, the co-optive ability of capitalism, and the blinding force of Western rationalization.

We begin with a fascinating exchange between Mikkel Rasmussen and Simeon Hunter about the legacy of the Situationists, a mid-20th century art movement committed to total revolution. According to Rasmussen, "the Situationist International tried to create a territory where art and politics were merged and transformed from specialized activities into a kind of holistic mega-text in which historical rationality expressed itself." The Situationists were extremely ambitious, impossibly ambitious in Rasmussen's view. "Unable to free themselves from history," he argues, the movement ultimately succumbed to capitalism's "counter-revolution." Hunter regards Rasmussen's assessment as overly pessimistic, arguing that "the legacy of this movement is still active, still providing a highly useable model for a transformative analysis of and through the visual world from which it is derived." The power of the Situationists, suggests Hunter, must be understood "at the level of the semantic instead of the programmatic." He asserts that the contributions of the Situationists and the art practices they inspired have been overlooked by those who "deny the poetic voice that may connote [social] change through form."

Yet, ironically, the focus on "form alone,"...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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