Strategic Tactical Response

Description

Tactical Response explores the delicate relationship between representation and real life, particularly as regards art's effectiveness in articulating conditions of atrocity. Tactical Response investigates works by three artists to consider representation as a presence. In his "State of the Union," Hans Haacke unveils an encounter that reflects presence through confrontation ; Krzysztof Wodiczko's exhibit "If You See Something..." enunciates private conversations, rendering emphatically present within the gallery space what is routinely ignored outside; and in "Muxima," Alfredo Jaar exposes the daily consequences of a global economy with an immediacy that vibrates more strongly than our own lives. While these artists do not document war, terror, and atrocity, they speak to the conditions of its existence and the impact of its experience, offering a vantage point from which viewers can critically address causes, consequences, and representations of suffering. Viewed together, their work succeeds in exposing the legitimacy of their subjects? demand for attention. Haacke, Wodiczko, and Jaar affirm the value of representation by placing us face-to-face not with horror but with making a difference. By including lengthy interviews with the artists, the author forms a partnership between artistic intent and critical analysis, one that expands the potential of connections between artistic praxis, subjective experience, and political will. These three seminal figures of radical art whose works - while decidedly individual, feed off and respond to each other?s ? are presented here together in a single volume, creating through comparison a rare perspective, and one vital to any understanding of the development and relevance of artistic methodologies that form the basis of critical and ethical art practices today