Cultural Hijack
Rethinking Intervention
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
With Contributions by Sally Medlyn and Myriam Tahir
Working in cities from Liverpool and Glasgow to Paris and New York, the interventionist artist transforms ordinary urban spaces, disrupting everyday life in ways that reinvent the way we encounter and experience art and compelling people to act and think differently about the world around them. Providing incisive new insights into the work and life of the artist,Cultural Hijack examines how these artists use the city as a playground, a stage, or an instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, and political actions. Drawing on a series of essays, personal testimonies, and original interviews from artists such as Tatsuro Bashi, BGL, Gelitin, Michael Rakowitz, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, this illuminating work enlarges our understanding of the creative process and how artists are developing new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, both emancipating and expanding the spaces of artistic and cultural production.
Preface
1. Introduction: Rethinking Intervention
Ben Parry
2. An 'Other' Proposition—Situating Reciprocal Practice
Declan McGonagle
3. Not Untitled
Peter McCaughey
4. Spaces of Urgency
Michael Rakowitz
Essays on paraSITE and Return
Interview by Ben Parry
5. Hello, this is bg1
bg1
Interview by Audrey Careau
6. Third Party, Fire and Theft
Nina Edge
7. Squart
Yabon Paname
Interview by Myriam Tahir
8. Swapping Public and Private
Tatzu Nishi
9. War Veteran Vehicle
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Interview by Ben Parry
Interviews with war veterans by Carla McManus
10. From Bellgrove to Lime Street, Return
Alan Dunn
11. Earth between the Leaves
Gelitin
12. If that's Grassroots, then we're Mudlevel
Mudlevel
13. Getting Away With It
Jump Ship Rat
14. Afterword: But is it Life?
Pavel Büchler
Notes on Contributors
A–Z of Cultural Hijack
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