This book examines how 'citizen art' practices perform new kinds of politics, as distinct from normative (status, participatory and cosmopolitan) models. It contends that at a time in which the conditions of citizenship have been radically altered (e.g., by the increased securitization and individuation of bodies etc.), there is an urgent drive for 'citizen art' to be enacted as a tool for assessing the 'hollowed out' conditions of citizenship. 'Citizen art', it shows, stands apart from other forms of Art by performing 'acts of citizenship' that reveal and transgress the limitations of state-centred citizenship regimes, whilst simultaneously enacting genuinely alternative modes of (non-statist) citizenship. This book explains how 'citizen art' can make citizenship manifest in ways that do not reify or valorize the nation-state, status rights, or cosmopolitan imaginaries. It shows instead that the outcomes of 'citizen art', such as the institutions of solidarity, assembly and interventions, reconfigure the 'tools' of politics in the act of 'doing politics' that, in turn, perform new and nascent modes of (non-statist) citizenship. This book offers a new formulation of 'citizen art' - one that is interrogated on both critical and material levels, and as such, that remodels the foundations on which citizenship is conceived, performed and instituted.
Fawn Daphne Plessner is a professional artist and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Canada. She holds a BA (Hons) Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom. She studied Fine Art at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Munich, Germany, under the artist Robin Page, an early member of the Fluxus movement. She has won numerous research grants and her art work has been exhibited in countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, USA and Canada. Since 2008, her work has focused on public art interventions under the banner of 'citizen artist'.
Introduction 1. Defining 'Citizen Art': Its Meaning and Challenge to Citizenship 2. The Problems of Status Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Imaginaries and the Value of 'Acts of Citizenship' for Performing 'Citizen Art' 3. Examining 'Citizen Art' Interventions as Tools for 'Doing' Politics and Structuring New Modes of (non-statist) Citizenship 4. Case Studies: Solidarity, Assemblies and the Newspaper: 'Citizen Art' Interventions and Enactments of New Modes of Citizenship 5. Case Study, part I: Citizen Artist News and Its Local Complexities 6. Case Study, part II: Shaping New Terrain: A Newspaper Troubles Colonial Assumptions of Belonging and Membership and Alters the 'Facts' on the Ground
