Guerrilla aesthetics : art, memory, and the West German urban guerrilla

Summary: "Guerrilla Aesthetics confronts the legacy of the urban guerrilla movement active in West Germany since the 1970s. It draws from archival source materials, giving particular attention to West Germany's Red Decade of 1967 to 1977. The decade was characterized by not only the 'terrorist' actions and police brutality, but also countercultural aesthetics that favoured self-displacement over instrumental goals. As the author, Kimberly Mair, writes, "the guerrillas were known for violent operations, which had a spectacular, even staged characteristic; as if it was more important that the event produce its own phantasmagorical mise en sc©·ne than be successful in any standard instrumental sense." To again quote Mair, "the core argument of the manuscript is that West German urban guerrillas grew out of an aesthetic ethos that encouraged individuals to break free from modern liberal subjectivity and instrumental rationality, and led to the public illegibility of their actions." From hunger strikes to textual work, Mair's work looks at the movement's reverberations through artistic and memorial practices."--