Gail Day

This acute and overarching analysis of Allan Sekula's documentary poetics illuminates his critique of neoliberal capitalism through photography, film and prose. The authors trace surprising paths through his practice emphasising not merely the depicted topics but also his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the relations between aesthetics and politics, they consider Sekula's examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism. Day and Edwards show how Sekula's purview 'from below' allies motley proletarians with 'colour as comrade'. His project of radical documentary entwines allegorical reading with uneven and combined development. Horizontal montage is addressed through both Marxism's value-form and post-Freudian 'anal vision'. Serious subjects slide into sense of the absurd. Unexpectedly, the authors demonstrate how Sekula advances critical realism and 'critical irrealism'. Approaching Sekula's art afresh, they offer detailed interpretations of, among other works, Aerospace Folktales (1973), Fish Story (1995), Waiting for Tear Gas (1999-2000), and The Lottery of the Sea (2006).

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects--and with it critical distance-- and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.