Interventions and Provocations

© Glenn Harper
A draft for an introduction to the volume of interviews published as Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, State University of New York, 1998. The published intro is quite different.

A number of artists have over the past two decades embraced a new relation to everyday life and public space. The work of these artists is political in its intentions or consequences, but they have adopted a different position with regard to political action than was the case with the historical avant-gardes in the first half of the 20th century. The political interventions and social provocations exemplified by the artists in this collection of interviews demonstrate an attitude toward art and form that can be characterized as "tactical," adopting a term used by Michel de Certeau, or "postutopian," a term used by Boris Groys to describe the unofficial art of the late Soviet Union.

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