Now What? - by Rachel Weiss (Paperback)

About the Book

A profound and affecting meditation on art and revolution

Book Synopsis

Now What? is an innovative exploration of artworks and films that return to radical histories subject to erasure or otherwise lost or occluded over time. The moments returned to--the Cuban Revolution, Chile's 1973 coup d'état, the ambiguous 1989 "revolution" in Romania, and the mayhem surrounding the Red Army Faction in 1970s West Germany--stand as historical watersheds, foundational and precipitate moments in the history of radical politics. Delving into these key historical moments by way of Tania Bruguera's 2009 performance Tatlin's Whisper in Havana, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's decades-long cycle of returns to Allende's Chile, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution, Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, the film Germany in Autumn, and Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 suite of paintings, Rachel Weiss convincingly threads these works together through subtle and illuminating reflections on the complex dynamics involved in historical trauma and memory, addressing key questions about the meanings and uses of the past.

Review Quotes

Casting her supremely intelligent eye on the simultaneous possibilities and limits of art, Rachel Weiss offers a far-reaching study of performance, painting, and film in the aftermath of societal convulsions and revolutions. She creatively rethinks how and why art comes to work in societies troubled by censorship, dictatorship, state violence, and trauma, on the one hand, and dreams of revolution, collectivism, and social justice on the other. Crucially, Weiss's impassioned account of the stories that art can offer about these extreme historical realities takes on a new relevance and urgency in our current world, where authoritarianism, fake news, and alternative facts increasingly appear to rule the day.---Saloni Mathur, University of California, Los Angeles

It is just as hard to face our hopes as our suffering, ' observes Rachel Weiss in this empathically argued account of living in the wake of once-promising, truncated social transformations. This redemptive poetics of history inhabits the imagination of the present moment radically altered by inherited traumas, idealisms, and messianic hopes. These encounters align the horizon under a night sky flashing with the stars of regardless and henceforward---Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

About the Author

Rachel Weiss is Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art.