The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics

This book can be best understood with reference to the concept of “interanimating dialogics” developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, in dialogue, individuals “participate with their eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit,” and with their bodies and deeds. Artists have always abstracted from or distilled aspects of their social and political milieu. Most of the artists in this volume do this in different ways, using various forms of abstraction, figuration, phenomenology, and affect. This book suggests that the very relationship between art and politics must be thought of anew through an interanimation of dialogical exchanges. Artists: Anoushka Akel, Mark Bradford, Stella Corkery, James Cousins, Graham Fletcher, Vibha Galhotra, Ayesha Green, Julian Hooper, Simon Ingram, Jasper Johns, Helen Johnson, Richard Killeen, Emily Karaka, Patrick Lundberg, Hugo Koha Lindsay, Vivian Lynn, Colin McCahon, Julian McKinnon, Julie Mehretu, Shannon Novak, Jenna Packer, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, John Robinson, Robert Ryman, Glen Snow, Imogen Taylor, Tracey Tawhiao