John Jordan has a litany of descriptors: co-director of Platform, co-founder of Reclaim the Streets, founder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), author, lecturer, artist, radical, filmmaker, and so on. His work consistently and successfully merges imagination with social engagement, and with In the Footnotes of Library Angels: A Bi(bli)ography of Insurrectionary Imagination [PDF], he’s scripted a penultimate introduction to thinkers who combine their creative capacities with radical politics.
The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army for the 2008 Taipei Biennial. Photo credit.
Written for the Live Art Development Agency’s Study Room, a free, open access research facility by and for artists, students, curators, academics and other arts professionals interested in Live Art, the piece
addresses performance and activism, and the strategies that artists have engaged with to address radical cultural, social and political agendas over the last 20 years.
From Beuys to Provo, stopping off to visit Wendell Berry, Herbert Marcuse, and the Zapatistas on the way, Jordan crams a rich genealogy into fifteen short pages – a must read for anyone wishing to understand and engage contemporary activist art.
Thanks, Andi!
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