Gregory Sholette

Sholette co-founded several New York City based art collectives and group projects, including Political Art Documentation/Distribution or PAD/D (1980-1988)“[https://research.moma.org/padd-archive Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) Archive - 1983].” MoMA Archives, Library and Research Collections. with Jerry Kearns and Lucy R. Lippard; REPOhistory (1989-2000);Lampert, Nicolas. “Permission to Disrupt: REPOhistory and the Tactics of Visualizing Radical Social Movements in Public Space.” [https://www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Public-Pedagogy-Education-and-Learning-Beyond-Schooling/Sandlin-Schultz-Burdick/p/book/9780415801270 Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling.] Edited by Jennifer A. Sandlin, Brian D. Schultz, Jake Burdick. Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2009. Gulf Labor Coalition (2011-ongoing) with Naeem Mohaiemen, Andrew Ross and Walid Raad;Grant, Daniel. “[https://observer.com/2016/04/illegal-projections-on-guggenheim-museum-protest-labor-practices-in-the-middle-east/ Illegal Projections on Guggenheim Museum Protest Labor Practices in the Middle East.]” Observer, April 28, 2016. and co-organized the projects Imaginary Archive (2010-ongoing),Melcher, Henry. “[https://www.archpaper.com/2014/03/help-imagine-a-past-whose-future-never-arrived-with-imaginary-archive-in-kiev/ Help Imagine a "Past Whose Future Never Arrived" with Imaginary Archive in Kiev],” The Architect’s Newspaper, March 20, 2014. It's The Political Economy, Stupid! with Oliver Ressler (2012-2016);Štula, Vladimir Hunjak. “[https://politickamisao.com/review-gregory-sholette-and-oliver-ressler-its-the-political-economy-stupid-the-global-financial-crisis-in-art-and-theory/ Review: Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler. It’s the Political Economy, Stupid: The Global and Financial Crisis in Art and Theory].” Croatian Political Science Review, Vol. 52, No. 4-5, 2015, 230-232.Markus, David. “[https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/its-the-political-economy-stupid-61191/ It’s the Political Economy, Stupid.]" Art in America, March 27, 2012. and Dark Matter Supercollider Games (2015, S.a.L.E Docks cultural center, Venice, Italy).Baravalle, Marco. “[https://artsleaks.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/12_dark_matter_games_algazette4_2017_150dpi.pdf Dark Matter Games: An Interview with Gregory Sholette, Kuba Szreder and Noah Fischer.]” Art Leaks Gazette, September 2017, 103-116.

Sholette is also an author and editor and has written for journals such as e-flux, Afterimage, Artforum, CAA Art Journal, FIELD, Hyperallergic, Oxford Art Journal, Texte zur Künst, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, among others.

Sholette has curated several traveling exhibitions. While he was Curator of Education“Gregory Scholette.” New Museum Digital Archive. https://archive.newmuseum.org/. at the New Museum in 1998, he curated the “Urban Encounters” exhibit, which highlighted the work of six Manhattan activist art collectives “generating political ferment and a lot of good art.”Cotter, Holland. “[https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/14/arts/art-in-review-urban-encounters.html ART IN REVIEW; 'Urban Encounters'.]” The New York Times, August 14, 1998. His conceptual group project Imaginary Archive (2010-2015) consists of a collection of documents that suggest an alternative social reality, takes “the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be debated, explored and tested.”“[https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1006/S00075.htm Wellington Collaboratorium: An Imaginary Archive.]” Scoop Independent News. June 8, 2010. The installation project has traveled the cities of Kyiv, Graz, Galway, Philadelphia, Friedrichshafen, and Wellington in New Zealand.“[https://www.plausibleartworlds.org/book/export/html/94 Week 25: Dark Matter Archives & Imaginary Archive].” Plausible Art Worlds. June 22, 2010.

In 2017, Sholette’s solo exhibition Darker, a series of ink, pencil and acrylic wash drawings based on photographs of activist art and other political protests, was presented at Station Independent Projects. The project depicted “art activism in dark tones,” and examined “how dark matter is visualized and activated in mixed media works that explore recent moments of protest.”Larkin, Daniel. “[https://hyperallergic.com/353921/dark-matter-as-a-metaphor-for-arts-activism/ Dark Matter as a Metaphor for Arts Activism.” Hyperallergic]. January 25, 2017. In 2022, he contributed to traveling exhibition Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities with “Insurrection,” which featured “a short text repeatedly silkscreened on four adjacent panels that remain half-concealed under a lush thicket of synthetic flora native to Latin America.”Moalemi, Mahan. “[https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/art-for-future-tufts-university-art-galleries-1234626401/ Archived Opposition: “Art for the Future” at Tufts University Art Galleries.]” Art in America. April 25, 2022.

Although his work has been criticized for primarily focusing on the New York art scene,Triantafillou, Eric. “[https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/eric_triantafillou_reviews_delirium_and_resistance/ Eric Triantafillou reviews Delirium and Resistance].” Critical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press, December 6, 2017. Sholette has made three principal contributions in the field of art criticism and aesthetics.

Building upon the concept of tactical media, Sholette, along with Gene Ray, challenged the political relevance of tactical media and DIY creative strategies in the context of ongoing privatization and securitization in 2008. Sholette first addressed this topic in 2004 with The Interventionists: A Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, co-edited with Nato Thompson.Biles, Jeremy. “[https://www.academia.edu/7647506/Review%20of%20The%20Interventionists%20Users%20Manual%20for%20the%20Creative%20Disruption%20of%20Everyday%20Life%20eds%20Nato%20Thompson%20and%20Gregory%20Sholette Review of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, eds. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette.]” Chicago Artists News. 2004.

In Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination, Sholette and Blake Stimson argue that the true potential of artistic collectivism can only be understood if it is historicized. Sholette and Stimson both claim that collaborative collectively produced artwork emerges as a central tool in challenging capitalism’s thrive for individualism, but that its form has undergone a fundamental change in the contemporary period following the collapse of modernism. In collaboration with art critics and scholars such as Jelena Stojanović, Reiko Tomii, Okwui Enwezor, Alan Moore and Brian Holmes, the authors push for the periodization of collectivism after modernity (Futurism, Productivism, Constructivism, and Surrealism), and in the post-World War II era. In this way, the book attempts “to understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production.”Glahn, Philip. “[https://bombmagazine.org/articles/blake-stimson-and-gregory-sholettes-collectivism-after-modernism-the-art-of-social-imagination-after-1945/ Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette's Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945].” BOMB Magazine. April 1, 2007. While the book lacks “a systematic debate on the differences between the collaborative and the collectivist,” it is nevertheless “a very rich, but sometimes overdescriptive and overdetailed, survey of collectivist artistic action in all parts of the world (only China, the Islamic world and Australia are missing)."Baetens, Jan. “[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/238973 Review of Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945],” Leonardo, vol. 41 no. 3, 2008, p. 291-293. Project MUSE.

Sholette’s art focuses on the forgotten, repressed or speculative genealogies of redundant, politically invisible cultural labor that actually maintains and reproduces the mainstream high art world marketplace. Sholette uses “dark matter” as a metaphor for these artistic practices and institutions, arguing that the visible, institutional art world is actually dependent on what it marginalizes and overshadows. He further developed this concept in Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010). This book engages with the mainstream conditions of the art system through the definition of what Sholette later describes in Delirium and Resistance (2017) as “bare art.” Borrowing from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare lifeAgamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. “as the condition of bodies reduced to biological existence through being excluded from the category of political citizenship by the state,”Brynjolson, Noni. “[https://field-journal.com/issue-9/book-review-gregory-sholette-delirium-and-resistance-activist-art-and-the-crisis-of-capitalism-london-pluto-press-2017 Book Review: Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Kim Charnley; foreword by Lucy R. Lippard],” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 9, Winter 2018. Sholette defines bare art as art deprived of any socially transformative capacity and dedicated to financial management and the reproduction of the status quo.

Theorist Marc James Léger describes Sholette's concept of artistic dark matter as "the work of autonomous and participatory cultural production by amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist and non-institutional workers."Léger, Marc James. [https://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/revenge-of-the-surplus/ “Revenge of the Surplus.”] Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, vol. 63 no. 8, January 2012. Susan Ryan, Professor of Art History at Louisiana State University, interprets the term as involving art "so embedded in reality that it is off the art radar."Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. “[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/259898/pdf Social Fabrics: Wearable + Media + Interconnectivity.]” Leonardo, vol. 42 no. 2, 2009, p. 114-116. Project MUSE. doi:10.1162/leon.2009.42.2.114. Art Historian Kuba Szreder at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw writes that the “mock institutions” Sholette points to are "native to artistic dark matter—research institutes, informal universities, collectives of urban gardeners, tribes of survivalists, temporary service points—each of which tends to operate in an institutional landscape ravaged by hostile forces of late capitalism.”Szreder, Kuba. “[https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/168899/productive-withdrawals-art-strikes-art-worlds-and-art-as-a-practice-of-freedom/ Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom.]” e-flux Journal. No. 87. December 2017. Mockinstitutions mimic institutional structures as a form of critical reinvention, see for example the projects of artist Marina Naprushkina.

Artist David Beech at University of the Arts London writes that while Dark Matter “is an important and timely contribution,” Sholette’s economic arguments are flawed. For example, “there is a fundamental problem with” his “idea of an “art strike” because “[a]rt production is not wage labor.”Beech, Dave. “Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture Gregory Sholette,” The Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 5 no. 1, 115-118. Taylor and Francis Online doi:10.2752/174967812X13287914145712 Richard Lloyd, associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, observes that in Dark Matter “one strains…to find an alternative model for doing “art and politics in the age of enterprise culture,” as suggested by Sholette's investigations and lived experience as a politically conscious and apparently marginal artist (thus part of the dark matter).”Lloyd, Richard. “[http://www.jstor.org/stable/23279538. Into the Dark].” Art Journal, vol. 70, no. 4, 2011, pp. 123. JSTOR. Lloyd further states that Sholette’s depiction of his own projects “is impersonal—there is no first-person reflection on these projects or their efficacy, though one can glean ambivalence in his depictions of how easily these moments of aesthetic resistance are ultimately absorbed by the neoliberal system.”Lloyd, 2011, 123. Ultimately, Lloyd critically points out that “it becomes questionable whether the most prominent of these political interventions should be classed in the dark matter at all, or whether they form another sort of illuminated sphere among the art worlds.”Lloyd, 2011, 123.

In 2017 Sholette published Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, in which he argues that art has become simultaneously part of the increasing financialization of everything under neoliberal capitalism and a valuable resource for civic mobilization and progressive social transformation. A key concept that ties Dark Matter to Delirium and Resistance is Sholette’s suggestion that society has entered a world of Bare Art. Social and cultural anthropologist Gretchen Coombs asserts that Sholette uses the terms “art and activism,” “social practice,” and “socially engaged” interchangeably, and while he “works out these differences through his case studies…these terms often function on different registers, specifically as they are understood in our globalized world.”Coombs, Gretchen. “[https://brooklynrail.org/2017/10/art%20books/Delirium-and-Resistance-Activist-Art-and-the-Crisis-of-Capitalism Gregory Sholette: Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism],” The Brooklyn Rail, 2017. The book’s focus on New York also “casts a specter across the book’s historical arc, effectively provincializing what needs to be deprovincialized.”Triantafillou, 2017.

Sholette has sought to expand his scope of practice and study outside of New York. In 2019, he guest edited a special double issue of FIELD titled Art, Anti-Globalism, and the Neo-Authoritarian turn, which reports on the rise of ultra-nationalism/authoritarianism from 30 different nations. His most recent book, The Activism of Art and the Art of Activism (2022), covers South America, Serbia, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Syria and other locations in addition to the US and Europe in a brief overview of protest aesthetics, and made it into the list of The Art Newspaper's top art books of 2022.Riding, Jacqueline, Harris, Gareth and da Silva, José.

“[https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/12/06/the-top-art-books-of-2022-as-chosen-by-us The top art books of 2022—chosen by The Art Newspaper's books team]," The Art Newspaper, December 6, 2022. However, art critic and editor J.J. Charlesworth at ArtReview writes that the book does not address “the ambiguities of demanding that ‘high culture’ be abolished while its institutions remain, and in effect get taken over by progressive artists-as-activists.”Charlesworth, J.J. “[https://artreview.com/paradox-art-as-activism-and-the-battle-for-museums/ The Paradox of Art-as-Activisim],” ArtReview, December 16, 2022.

The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (London: Lund Humphries, 2022).

Art As Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles & Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (co-edited with Chloë Bass, Skyworth/Allworth Press, 2018).

Merciless Aesthetic/Nemilosrdna estetika (WHW Press, Croatia, 2016).

It's the Political Economy, Stupid (co-edited with Oliver Ressler, Pluto Press, 2012).

“Precarious Workers Pageant,” a collaborative performance intervention carried out during the Venice Biennial on the evening of August 7, 2015 that consisted of a public procession staged in solidarity with migrant laborers working on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi where a Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum will soon be under construction.{{Cite journal |date=February 10, 2015 |title=Migrant Workers' Rights on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates |url=https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/02/10/migrant-workers-rights-saadiyat-island-united-arab-emirates/2015-progress-report |journal=Human Rights Watch |language=en}} Venice, Italy with Queens College Social Practice Students/Alumni, 2015.Cruzeiro, Cristina Pratas, Douglas, Anne, Madeira, Cláudia and Elias, Helena, "[https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/11/1/18 An Interview with Gregory Sholette about the Precarious Workers Pageant Project]", Arts vol. 11 no.1, January 17, 2022, p. 18. doi:10.3390/arts11010018

“Our Barricades,” Station Independent Projects, a series of stark black and white bas-relief pieces graphically linking the oily materiality of street barricades to global petro-politics, the war on terror, and the need for an aesthetics of resistance, 2014.Vartanian, Hrag. [https://hyperallergic.com/153673/artrx-nyc-15/ "ArtRx NYC,"] Hyperallergic, October 7, 2014.

“15 Islands for Robert Moses,” a site-specific project in the Panorama of the City of New York, which was originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair by urban planner Robert Moses. The project placed new islands around the Panorama’s waterways based on proposals by Larry Bogad, Marc Fischer, Aaron Gach/Center for Tactical Magic, Ann Messner, Ted Purves, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott, Libertad Guerra, Dara Greenwald, Marisa Jahn, and several others who Sholette invited to respond to the prompt, “If you could add an island to New York City, what would that new landmass be like?” Queens Museum, 2012.Maria Fitzsimons, “[https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/imaginary-islands-fully-realized/article_0bb0b37e-7e01-544a-9f25-212f54ae6a08.html Imaginary islands fully realized ‘Greg Sholette: Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses].’” Queens Chronicle, April 5, 2012

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