| My study of radical practices in sixties conceptual art and civil rights movements documents changes in the relationship of art to racial politics over five years from 1965 to 1970 through a single case study. The case at the centre of this thesis is Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the civil rights movement, through the Nova Scotia Project (NSP) was closely aligned with the radical southern United States organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the same time the conceptual art experiments at the Nova Scotia College of Art (NSCAD) gained international recognition.;I argue that in the early sixties the relationship between the avant-garde, including conceptual art, and civil rights movements was characterized by mutually reflected absences. The overdetermination of race and the absence of art in one movement's history are matched only by the overdetermination of art and the absence of race in the other. However, over the five years covered by this study, the nature of that pattern of familiar visibilities and absences changed. By the beginning of the seventies there was strong evidence of convergence. Given this change, the question driving my enquiry is: What was going on in those preceding five years? Rather than accept that these two movements had nothing to do with one another, my intention in this dissertation is to make the substance of the spaces between them representable. I will argue that the vocabularies available of the disciplines best equipped to speak for art and civil rights, the disciplines of Art History and Sociology, and the multidisciplinary field of Black Studies, are inadequate. It is this inadequacy that this dissertation seeks to expose and redress.;One of my contributions is to develop conceptual and methodological tools for thinking differently about representability. Artifacts from each of the movements comprise an archive made up of documentary, ethnographic, popular, and fine art texts. Concept metaphors, such as visibility and representability, and the historical avant-garde's practice of bricolage allow me to read the histories of sixties race-based activism and conceptual art productively together. |
