Art in the Age of Fascist Production

Across the last two decades, across the globe, far right social movements have come into the mainstream and pushed their candidates into pivotal political offices. As part of their shared playbook, these right-wing politicians have blamed liberalism and globalism for the vast wealth disparities created by hyper-capitalism, and proffered an intense return to nationalism as their snake oil cure all. Central to many of these movements have been their coordinated efforts to dismantle, defund, erase, and silence progressive cultural production and academic discourse. In the United States alone, as just one horrifying example, a recent Executive Order (27 March 2005) aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history” attacked cultural institutions and public history projects for falling under the sway of what it terms of a “corrosive ideology” which dares to critique the state and its histories of oppression. The E.O. even goes so far as to insidiously insist that race is not a “social construct” but a “biological reality.” This missive works to lay the groundwork for the most retrograde attacks on federally funded cultural institutions and repositories, pledging to restrict all cultural funding to only those projects which highlight how the United States has an “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

This seminar uses this E.O. as a prompt to theorize and identify forms of association that resist and work around these restrictive invectives. For example, in universities, public/private partnerships have been used to privatize the profits of venture-funded companies while the public institution carries the cost of training and research. However, these structures also create hybrids that might be better able to resist direct federal pressure. Museums, nonprofits, publications, art collectives and all types of schools are under attack. What can we rescue or learn from imperfect hybrids, beyond any easy assumptions about independence or “selling out”? How can different groups and institutions work together to form new networks and chart a new course? We invite analysis and creative thought around models of production that draw on new or residual forms to build new solidarities. The relationship between content and funding is always potentially contentious, but at our current juncture the conditions of possibility for critical and creative expression face more restrictive limitations than ever before. Structure, independence, and collective position matter. How do we preserve and nurture necessary spaces in the face of amplifying calls for erasure and silencing? Whose examples in current artistic practice can we turn to? 

This seminar invites proposals for 15–20 minute papers which explore, fabulate, or manifest pathways of resistance to the increasingly draconian pressure on knowledge production and cultural expression.