“Into the Radical Imaginary,” a free lecture series co-sponsored by the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena explores philosophical questions about art and culture starting on Friday, Sept 16.
This first installment of the series, “Contemporary Perspectives on Art and Struggle,” features scholars Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill. The series is co-sponsored by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) MA in Aesthetics and Politics Program.
“We would like attendees to have a wider understanding of why and how art and culture are key sites of political struggle that are used by the ruling class against us, but which can also serve the purposes of liberation when they are part of a broader movement and strategy,” Ponce de Leon and Rockhill said.
The scholars will deal with how wave after wave of struggle over the last decade has cracked open the radical social imaginary, aiming for the roots of systems of domination and creating space for liberatory formations to emerge.
They will discuss the impact of autonomous political traditions, such as the Black liberation movement, feminism, Zapatismo, and other anti-colonial and emancipatory movements, on those liberatory formations, and talk about the relationship between individual and collective creativity, as well as how the autonomy of art and its capacity to create new aesthetic forms relate to political and social practices.
Ponce de Leon is an Interdisciplinary scholar in the Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS) at Penn Arts and Sciences, and Rockhill is with the Department of Philosophy at Villanova University.
They state that the assumption of the autonomy of art obscures the class – and often colonial – character of the dominant practices and ideologies of the fine arts, including its labor practices.
“It seeks to separate art from the political world and thereby camouflage its own character as a political project of the bourgeoisie, which elevates its own chosen cultural products as ‘free from politics,’ when they are actually politically motivated through and through,” Ponce de Leon and Rockhill said.
The speakers are co-directors of the Critical Theory Workshop, an international educational platform that offers a summer school in Paris and online, as well as courses and symposiums. They’re doing research for a book on art and revolutionary politics that they are co-authoring, and saw “Into the Radical Imaginary” as a unique opportunity to share and receive feedback.
In their view, art influencing the modern political setting depends on the circumstances.
“Art can serve as a site of investment, counter-revolutionary propaganda, disinformation and diversion, but it can also function as a powerful force to bring people into the global socialist movement, provide them with an adequate depiction of reality and practically connect them with a collective process of world-making,” they said.
Friday’s lecture will be at the Armory Center for the Arts, at 145 N. Raymond Ave. in Pasadena, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
To register for the free lecture, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/into-the-radical-imaginary-1-jennifer-ponce-de-leon-gabriel-rockhill-tickets-411529895997
