Reconfiguring activism: Inquiries into obligation, responsibility, and social relations in post 1960s art practices in the United States

This study examines the ethical and social implications of using art for activist purposes by engaging the philosophical ground of activism: responding to and for another. In the United States, contemporary art historical and activist discourses tend to reify 1960s and 1970s activism as the benchmark for activist art practices. This dissertation considers the ways such art practices serve the needs and concerns of others, challenge existing socio-political structures, and organize individuals and/or groups to take action in the realm of the social. Further, addressing notions of obligation and responsibility as the matrix within which art and activism operate, it analyzes the function and philosophical ground of activist art, querying the potential and limits of using art to respond to and for others.;Each chapter that follows focuses on a collaborative group who worked in the wake of this legacy, engaging in critical dialogues with activist methodologies to reconfigure the terms of using art to respond to and for others. The first chapter discusses Asco, a Chicano performance group, which formed in the early 1970s in East Los Angeles, California, in the context of the Chicano Civil Rights movement. It emphasizes Asco's examination of the artists' obligation and responsibility to adhere to the movement's guidelines for art, while also refiguring the movement's strategies of confronting racism, police brutality, and institutional power.;The second chapter considers projects by Group Material, a group of mostly visual artists in New York City in the early 1980s. It analyzes the group's curatorial processes as engendering questions about responding to and for others in relation to issues of democracy, aesthetics, and AIDS. The third chapter concentrates on Gran Fury, a group of AIDS activists working alongside the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in New York City in the late 1980s. It emphasizes Gran Fury's projects that prompted critical thinking about the concept of ethical obligation and of individual and collective responsibility in responding to the AIDS epidemic. The conclusion offers a reflection on how each group contended with the limits of its activist production by enacting a practice without reassurances.