The Politics of Interventionist Art: The Situationist International, Artist Placement Group, and Art Workers’ Coalition

Abstract

This essay offers an analysis of three art projects from the 1960s—the Situationist International, Artist Placement Group, and CitationArt Workers’ Coalition—that all tried to mobilize avant-garde art as a political tool to address social issues and bring about social transformation. The Situationists tried to leave behind the art world and turned toward ultraleft politics. Artist Placement Group sought to use the creativity of art in contexts outside the traditional barriers of the institution of art. Art Workers’ Coalition put pressure on the art establishment in New York, trying to force it into implementing a more open and less exclusive exhibition policy as well as taking a moral stance on the Vietnam War. The three projects present us with different models of how art can be engaged in politics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.