ARTMargins (2021) Volume 10 Issue 3

October 2021 What is radical? Anniversary Issue

What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

For the central roundtable of the anniversary issue, ARTMargins invited a diverse group of scholars, critics, artists, and theorists to reflect on the role and possibilities for radical art historical scholarship and artistic production under the conditions of crisis and social upheaval that characterise our times. The issue asks what it means today to be, or to act, “radical” and to rearticulate scholarship, knowledge, pedagogy, and art in order to address the excesses of late capitalism, amplified by the inequalities and uncertainties of a global pandemic; the accelerating threat to the environment caused by climate change; and the rise of right-wing nationalism, racism, and xenophobia all over the world. At a time when neoliberal ideologies have instrumentalized knowledge, the hope is to encourage a critical renewal of the radical practices of humanistic thought, and reinvigorate attention to the many ways in which a renewed commitment to radicalness might change our relationship to the past.

The editors asked the following questions: What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future? The wide-ranging responses to these questions are presented in the pages that follow.