Living As Form ─ Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011

Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that useaesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of acommunity context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situationsranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with thetexture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers thefirst global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production--one that has virtuallyredefined contemporary art practice. Living as Form grew out of a majorexhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey ofmore than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project isdocumented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, whoempower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator ofsocially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion servicesand information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiago Cirugeda, anarchitect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.

Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists wholook at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes thisform.

Contributing authorsClaire Bishop, Carol Becker, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes,Shannon Jackson, Maria Lind, Anne Pasternak, Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is Chief Curator at the New York--based public arts institution Creative Time. He edited The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life and Becoming Animal (both published by the MIT Press) and curated the MASS MoCA exhibitions they accompanied.