Social forms - Christian Viveros-Faune

In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics,
Social
Forms
illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance.
Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and
preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the
age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.

In
Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art , renowned critic, curator, and
writer Christian Viveros-Faun has picked fifty representative artworks- from Francisco de Goya's
The Disasters of War
(1810-1820) to David
Hammons's
In the Hood
(1993)-that give voice to some of modern art's
strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each
piece, Viveros-Faun paints a picture of the context in which each work
was created, the artist's background, and the historical impact of each
contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power
structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges
the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso's
Guernica
and its place at
the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer's
Truisms
(1977-1979), which still
stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most
important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real
worlds they engage with.

Never professing to be a definitive history of political art,
Social Forms
delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150
years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern
warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality
and racism, and the challenges of technology.