Books | Artists Remake the World, A Contemporary Art Manifesto, by Vid Simoniti

In this ambitious new title, Vid Simoniti makes a case for the role of contemporary art as “an experimental form of politics”. Simoniti, senior lecturer in philosophy of art at the University of Liverpool, discusses the political form, function and intentions of art, deploying a variety of contemporary case studies across operational and thematic frameworks.

The book is divided into consideration of artworks that spark political discourse, an example being the evidence-driven projects of multidisciplinary art and research group Forensic Architecture; or prompt political action, such as Katerˇina Šedá’s participatory work There Is Nothing There (2003), presented as a film involving the entire Czech village of Poneˇtovice.

A third category, Simoniti asserts, is shaped by those artworks involved in the task of “world-making”, an open description that denotes the way an artist might “reorganise her audience’s way of perceiving the world” to spotlight a political issue.

Works by Mexican artist Naomi Rincón Gallard or British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor, for instance, utilise specific cultural histories and folkloric symbolism to create richly detailed immersive environments that, in Simoniti’s words, “articulate an emancipatory way of seeing” the world.

Simoniti covers expansive and interconnected themes on socially engaged work, the internet and climate crisis.

In the introduction, he describes some of the paradoxes of contemporary political art – the first being that art is frequently thought of as elitist or marginal but that political art aims to have impacts that are, if not apparent on a mass scale, at least broad-reaching; and the second being that contemporary art prides itself on its inconclusiveness, ambiguities and its capacity for interpretation, whereas politics purports to deal in hard facts. Art is a “careful kind of thinking”, he states.

The artworks selected are predominantly from the 21st century, contextualised through brief art historical recaps from the 1960s onwards, when the public prominence of feminism, civil rights and anti-war activism was heightened. His examples are largely manifest through exhibition-based practice and include heavyweights Ai Weiwei, Hito Steyerl, Tania Bruguera and Olafur Eliasson.

Ai Weiwei’s F. Lotus (2016), shown at Schloss Belvedere, Vienna, composed of 1,500 refugee lifejackets, and Straight (2008-12), a sculpture made from hand-straightened buckled rebar from schools in Sichuan, commemorating the 2008 earthquake that killed 85,000 people, for example, are critically analysed in terms of their aims, research and development.

Simoniti considers the implications of these and other works in aesthetic, moral and political terms in his first chapter, noting the “extreme fluidity” of media and the relationship to forms such as journalism or social work.

Other examples include hugely impactful and insightful works by lesser known artists, among them Ebony G Patterson and Wangechi Mutu. Simoniti’s examples are well selected and suitably reflective of global art practice. In fact, the unfamiliarity of some of these names sets this title apart from other academic texts on similar subjects.

The penultimate chapter outlines the most pressing political issue – the climate crisis and climate injustices that harm communities across the world to vastly differing degrees. This section is the bleakest and most challenging to read. It is also where the task of art seems most impossibly effective.

This chapter is dense with philosophy, but it is brought to life, as is the publication overall, by the artworks. Sociétés secretes (2015), a skilful and unsettling work by Sammy Baloji, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, comprises scarification bas relief markings on copper plates.

It places focus on the repercussions of colonialism and of the climate crisis, via mineral extraction, on human bodies and the land.

The book concludes on an uplifting note. Artists and artworks are utilised across the chapters to support and illuminate Simoniti’s arguments on art’s potentially transformational capabilities.

Ultimately, the “remaking [of] the world’s hinges”, namely “the fundamentals by which we perceive, interact with [and] think through our environment” is urged and advocated for, via the crucial role of art.