Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition

Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new—if internally fraught—political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that

His writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Nation and Artforum. He is co-editor of the movement magazine Tidal, and the anthology Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism. Yates Mckee is a PhD candidate in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, and has worked with various post-Occupy groups including Strike Debt and Global Ultra Luxury Faction. . He lives in New York City

The art that McKee discusses is often transient by design, produced by collectives or anonymous bodies, and distributed freely or slyly entered into the circulation systems of the culture at large.” —Mark Kingwell, Harper's “A lucid and sure-footed guide to today’s renaissance of art radicalism. A participant as well as a critic, McKee knows exactly what he is talking about, and the result is red hot.” —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal “McKee’s elegant and illuminating book in

"Analyzing the "Artistic Ethos" of Contemporary Progressive Politics" according to G. Sholette. McKee’s exceptional book vividly transforms the events known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) into both an analytical lens, and a first-person narrative, all the while bringing into focus several urgent issues related to the intersection of contemporary art and progressive politics within a US context roughly between the mid- 1980s and today. But Strike Art also attempts something much more ambitious by proposing that an “artistic ethos,” runs like a red thread through the seemingly fragmented political landscape of the 21st Century Left, from Black Lives Matter and the Sanders coalition, to activists involved in i. CK said Five Stars. Fantastic book and a great buy.