Among the post-World War II artistic movements, the Situationist International stands out with its persistent, grandiloquent claim to transcend art in a revolutionary act. The critical commitment of the Situationists and their continued adherence to a Marxist revolutionary perspective resulted in their omission from art history. The Situationists eventually excluded more or less all practicing artists from the group in the hope of releasing a post-artistic revolutionary praxis from the confines of the art institution. The Situationists rejected the art institution with militant fervor, and argued that the isolated work of art no longer possessed critical potential. Therefore art had to die. The Situationists made short shrift of this: art was a thing of the past, and now it had to be realized in revolutionary praxis.

Key words: Situationist International, avant-garde, modernism, Marxism, capitalism, revolutionary movements, art movements, Guy Debord

Hunter argues that Rasmussen's reading of the Situationists and the text of their key theoretician, Guy Debord, is overly pessimistic. Rasmussen limits his discussion to Situationist practices unfolding between 1957 and 1962. This decision masks those moments of real success, which didn't emerge fully until the May 1968 movement in France and which were still under discussion by what remained of the group as late as 1972. The questions they raised spawned a plethora of related--if not directly connected--ideas and practices that, for a generation increasingly disconnected from the kind of power structures observed by Marx, would have been unthinkable without Debord's re-reading of Marxism at the level of the symbolic.

Key words: Situationists, Guy Debord, May 1968, Marxism, existentialism, avant-garde, art movements

Rasmussen responds to Hunter's critique by asserting that we are confronted with a widespread effort--visible in Hunter's reply--to turn the Situationist project into an art movement (creating objects to be seen and commodities to be sold), and thereby to minimize its role in the political and social movements of the sixties. The different art-world accounts of the Situationists that focus on the early phase of the group, where art played a role through the presence of artists like Asger Jorn and Pinot Gallizio, and neglect the later more political phase has to be corrected. The Situationist International sought to abolish the system that kept art and politics apart; that was why they refused to be identified as "artists" or "political activists."

Key words: Situationist International, post-modernity, Guy Debord, French Communist Party, art world, political and social movements

This article describes processes by which twentieth century modernist art became appropriated to the conventional sensibilities and the market interests of the art world by systematic obscurations of ideational content. From the 1940s until the mid 1960s, despite the published social and existential concerns of artists, the arts of the North American Abstract Expressionists and other modernists were subjected to formalist interpretations that ignored content and only considered form. Despite their roots in Romantic concerns, these arts were generally understood according to the concepts of aestheticism and art for art's sake. The discussion traces the process by which a contextual art critical approach, or an approach that considers art according to its social and ideational contexts, emerged and resisted the formalism that was in vogue at the time. By the late 1960s, contextual analyses overcame the former hegemony of formalism and art publics were offered more exposure to the meanings intended by artists. The discussion considers implications of formalist criticism in light of concepts of use and exchange value, Terry Eagleton's views on the functions of criticism, and Howard Becker's analysis of art worlds.

Key words: formalism, Clement Greenberg, abstract expressionism, Piet Mondrian, Romanticism, mass culture, commodification, art world, counterculture movements

Much political debate over public support for the arts in the United States has centered on issues of excellence versus access, as the role and value of the arts in society has been questioned in an environment of increasing social and cultural commodification. The authors focus on questions that look to unravel some of the most crucial underlying assumptions and processes attending such perspectives, including who decides and determines excellence and access (and for whom) and what are the related implications tied to who makes policy decisions, particularly in terms of aesthetic ideologies and the public role and responsibilities of artists?

Key words: art policy, culture wars, commodification, excellence-access debates, National Endowment for the Arts, democracy

The Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868, has been characterized in Western history books as an age of peace and tranquility when commoners, peasants, and even samurai were subservient to a powerful bakufu (military government). This article shows clearly that this perception of a docile population is mistaken and that the eighteenth century was rather a time of social upheaval. Writers of subversive, underground texts challenged the social hierarchy and the repressive government censorship of the arts and literature. Popular satirists exposed government officials as perpetrators of injustice against those on the fringes of society, such as the geisha.

Key words: Baba Bunkö, Tokugawa shogunate, Japan, satire, social protest, bakufu, military government, censorship, Confucianism, Buddhism, Shinto

This article explores the cultural legacies of late 20th century efforts to institutionalize democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The authors ask, how do histories of colonialism and resistance, if at all, shape the political cultural repertoire of a society after institutional markers of democracy are more or less in place? This question is a point of entrée into exploring how civil political discourse manifests in places deeply divided by historical and present power differentials. To develop theoretical tools for such inquiries, the authors take up W. E. B. DuBois' ideas about double consciousness and veils, as well as James Scott's description of "weapons of the weak", and elaborate on their relevance in the context of civil society. Rich, multivalent expressions of civil political discourse in the form of political cartoons are used as data.

Key words: Hong Kong, Taiwan, civil society, political discourse, democratization, political cartoons, colonialism

Based on the author's extensive work with youth of color in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article explores how youth use hip-hop music and culture in their activism on their high school campuses and youth empowerment organizations. The author also examines the larger social justice potential of hip-hop music for youth and explores how hip-hop music assists in the development of a political consciousness among youth activists. The author argues that music can enable youth, disenfranchised from electoral politics, to engage in the practice of democracy.

Key words: hip-hop, youth of color, political consciousness, youth organizing, popular culture, social movements, identity formation

This essay explores the landscape of homelessness, as it is photographed by its inhabitants, and the ways in which the act of rendering that landscape visible can foster social change. The author describes "Images from the Streets," a photography project in which all individuals who participate are among the unsheltered homeless, and examines the ways in which the photographers use the images they create as tools for exploring and communicating their experiences and identities, and creating a sense of belonging while living at the margins of the wider community.

Keywords: homelessness, photography, social change, identity, community, empowerment

Tandeciarz interrogates the power of images in the context of state repression by exploring the various uses of photography in post-dictatorship Argentina. The author traces the many ways in which photography has represented the trauma of dictatorship including a discussion of how mothers of the disappeared used images in their weekly marches on the Plaza de Mayo to publicly resist the repressive acts of disappearance. Tandeciarz then analyzes a series of photographic essays by Argentinean artist Marcelo Brodsky to further theorize the role of visual arts in shaping individual and collective identities in post-dictatorship societies.

Key words: Argentina, dictatorship, disappeared, photography, Marcelo Brodsky, identity, memory, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, democracy

McCaughan describes the work of several contemporary Mexican artists associated with social movements: Eloy Tarcisio, Francisco Toledo, Luis Zárate, Nicéforo Urbieta, and Marcela Vera. The author suggests that their role as social change agents is not well understood or appreciated by most scholars of social movements. Framing his analysis with Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of conocimiento, McCaughan argues that the work of these artists is, in one form or another, about the recovery and recreation of social memory and historical systems of thought and knowledge within contemporary conditions. And therein lay their contributions to movements for social change.

Key words: art, social movements, Mexico, Zapotec movement, 1968 student movement

Bustamante argues that the promotion of new ways of thinking through the visual and above all through transdisciplinarity could alter the ways of interpreting, reproducing, and constructing realities that are available to us as a species. After reviewing historical antecedents of her work in the area of transdisciplinary visualities in Latin America and Europe, the author proposes the development of new methodologies, based in semiotics, for collaboration between artists and scientists to create new visualities with the goal of provoking alternative, nonlinear, alogical modes of thought, perception, and communication.

Key words: transdisciplinarity, visual thinking, knowledge production, art and science