Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson Author

Cover art by Theresa Rose

When their cruel master Marty McGuinn heads off to the Muddy Carnival, two peculiar nocturnal children, Fennel and Isabella, seize the opportunity to explore the city of Barrenwood. Horse drawn carriages, neon lights, the forces of gentrification, and the industrial revolution provide the outside-of-time backdrop as Isabella searches for like minded supernatural creatures and her malicious brother crafts the ultimate disaster.

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“Culture As Weapon is a brilliant and scathing take no prisoners critique of contemporary culture. Spanning military occupation, capitalism masquerading as charity, and personal computing, Nato Thompson shows us the dark side of how culture is deployed to fortify power.” —Laura Poitras, filmmaker, Citizenfour

“Explores the ways in which the tools of culture are deployed to do everything from sell iPhones to wage war…The book’s landing during the early days of the Trump administration couldn’t have been more impeccable…Culture as Weapon provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins.”—Los Angeles Times

“Art has played a huge role in shaping modern society…But In Culture as Weapon, Nato Thompson argues that art—or more specifically, the criticism of art—can also be an invaluable way to score political points.”—TIME 

The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising, and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless.

In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent — and shows us that there are alternatives. An eye-opening account of the way advertising, media, and politics work today, Culture as Weapon offers a radically new way of looking at our world.

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“Like an updated version of John Berger’s groundbreaking Ways of Seeing, Nato Thompson’s Seeing Power delivers a smart, accessible introduction to the prevailing artistic predicaments of our time. Written by one of our leading public intellectuals, it covers a wide range of key issues from the cultural politics of Occupy Wall Street; to the use and abuse of accumulated social capital; to the perennial antagonism between sophisticated cultural ambiguity and didactic, artistic impact. Seeing Power is a twenty-first-century user’s manual for the social responsible artist, critic, and curator.” —Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

A significant meditation on political art and the politics of art by the country’s most celebrated young curator

A fog of information and images has flooded the world: from advertising, television, radio, and film to the information glut produced by the new economy. With the rise of social networking, even our contemporaries, peers, and friends are all suddenly selling us the ultimate product: themselves.

Here curator and critic Nato Thompson interrogates the implications of these developments for those dedicated to socially engaged art and activism. How can anyone find a voice and make change when the world is flooded with images and information? And what is one to make of the endless machine of consumer capitalism, which has appropriated much from the history of art and, in recent years, the methods of grassroots political organizing and social networking?

Highlighting the work of some of the most innovative and interesting artists and activists working today, Thompson reads and praises sites and institutions that empower their communities to see power and re-imagine it. From cooperative housing to anarchist infoshops to alternative art venues, Thompson shows that many of today’s most innovative spaces operate as sites of dramatic personal transformation.

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Nato Thompson, editor

A monumental, lavishly illustrated book that offers the first global portrait of a complex and definition-defying genre of cultural production.

Over the past twenty years, an abundance of art forms have emerged that use aesthetics to affect social dynamics. These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production—one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice.

Living as Form grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.

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

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

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Nato Thompson: Editor

A Guide to Democracy in America gathers more than 100 artists, cultural critics, and activists to reflect on the historical roots and current manifestations of democracy in the United States. This essential document includes: writing and artwork by Liam Gillick, Sharon Hayes, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Matt Keegan, Jon Kessler, Rodney McMillian & Olga Koumoundouros, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Steve Powers, Mark Tribe, and many others; comprehensive essays by Yates McKee, Doug Ashford of Group Material, and Nato Thompson; and interviews with Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz, Rene Gabri & Ayreen Anastas, and Trevor Paglen; as well as a series town hall–style conversations with artists and activists from five cities across the country.

Editor Nato Thompson

“What could be more delightful–and unsettling–than turning loose a group of contemporary surrealists, disguised as vagabonds and artists, in the ripe fields of the hyper-real? Experimental Geography isn’t about space; it is about terminal strangeness.” –Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear

A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. An artificial reef fabricated from 500 tons of industrial waste. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreakingcollection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years.

Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

The collection is framed by essays by bestselling author Trevor Paglen, Jeffrey Kastner, and editor Nato Thompson.

Nato Thompson, Editor

The catalog to accompany MASS MoCA's 2006-2007 exhibition Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History, which explored the growing interest in historic reenactment and revision in contemporary art. The show consisted of over 30 works ranging from video to sculpture to photography, by artists Paul Chan, Jeremy Deller, Felix Gmelin, Kerry James Marshall, Trevor Paglen, Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Yinka Shonibare and Allison Smith, plus a new site-specific commission by Peggy Diggs. 120 pages. Paperback.

Editor Nato Thompson

Contemporary artists investigate the boundaries between animal and human in a world of transgenics and dissolving distinctions; with 65 color images of new works.

In an age when scientists say they can no longer specify the exact difference between human and animal, living and dead, many contemporary artists have chosen to use animals in their work—as the ultimate "other," as metaphor, as reflection. The attempt to discover what is animal, not surprisingly, leads to a greater understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Animal, 12 internationally known artists investigate the shifting boundaries between animal and human. Their explorations may be a barometer of things to come. The works included in Becoming Animal—which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA—range from the aviary and cabinet of curiosities of Mark Dion to the gun-toting bird collages of Michael Oatman. Nicolas Lampert's machine-animal collages and Jane Alexander's corpse-like humanoids suggest a new landscape of alienation. Rachel Berwick's investigation of the last Galapagos tortoise from the island of Pinto and Brian Conley's humanized mating call of the Tungara frog question the divide between human and animal communication. Patricia Piccinini imagines a bodyguard for a bird on the edge of extinction and Ann-Sofi Siden recreates the bedroom—and paranoia—of psychologist Alice Fabian. Natalie Jeremijenko presents another installment in her ongoing Ooz, reverse-engineering the zoo, and Kathy High's installation of "trans-animals" remembers lab rats who have given their lives for science. Sam Easterson's videos allow us to see from the viewpoint of an aardvark, a tarantula, a tumbleweed; Motohiko Odani's films show a surrealistic genetically modified bestiary. Becoming Animal documents these works with eye-popping full-color images, taking us on a visual journey through an unknown world.

Editor Nato Thompson

Art that is exciting, politically provocative, unexpected, inspiring, and fun, by artists including William Pope.L, Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Biotic Baking Brigade, and others.

Art made to attach to buildings or to be given away? Wearable art for street demonstrations or art that sets up a booth at a trade show? This is the art of the interventionists, who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems. These artists don't preach or proselytize; they give us the tools to form our own opinions and create our own political actions. The Interventionists, which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA, serves as a handbook to this new and varied work. It's a user's guide to art that is exciting, provocative, unexpected, inspiring (artistically and politically), and fun. From Michael Rakowitz's inflatable homeless shelter and William Pope. L's "Black Factory" truck with pulverizer, gift shop, and giant inflatable igloo to the Biotic Baking Brigade's political pie-throwing, the art of The Interventionists surveys a growing genre and offers a guide for radical social action. The book classifies the artists according to their choice of tactics: the Nomads, who create mobile projects; Reclaim the Streets, artists who act in public places; Tools for Resistance: Ready to Wear, artists who produce fashion for political action; and the Experimental University, artists whose work engages pedagogy and theory. The accompanying text includes essays by noted scholars putting the work in a broader cultural and social context as well as texts by the artists themselves.

Nato Thompson, Contributing Writer

WHAT WE DO NOW

STANDING UP FOR YOUR VALUES IN TRUMP'S AMERICA

EDITED BY DENNIS JOHNSON AND VALERIE MERIANS

Short, powerful essays on what we can do now to cope with Trump’s election, and how, moving forward, we can protect our values, our politics, and our country.

Contributors:

Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club

Rea Carey, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force

David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Dave Eggers, author and publisher, McSweeney’s

Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America

Cristina Jimenez, co-founder and managing director of United We Dream

M. Dove Kent, executive director of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice

Mara Keisling, founder and executive director of National Center for Transgender Equality 

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, spiritual leader of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for The New York Times

George Lakoff, cognitive linguist

Allan Lichtman, American political historian, American University

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine

Bill McKibben, environmentalist, co-founder and senior advisor of 350.org

Ilhan Omar, Member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and the first Somali-American legislator

Brittany Packnett, co-founder of Campaign Zero and vice president of national community alliances for Teach for America

Robert B. Reich, served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton 

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Bernie Sanders, United States Senator from Vermont

George Saunders, author

Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York

Gloria Steinem, feminist

Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation

Nato Thompson, art activist and artistic director of Creative Time

Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation

Elizabeth Warren, United States Senator from Massachusetts

Robert Blackson: Editor

eForm documents the creative process of artist Pepón Osorio as he translates the closure of Fairhill Elementary School, Philadelphia into a moving installation that honours the history of this school through collaborations with the many generations of students who were taught there.

This beautiful artist’s book is a limited edition letter-pressed facsimile of Osorio’s sensitively created, hand-written homage to the school pupils’ classroom exercise books.

Fairhill Elementary was one of 23 schools that the Philadelphia Public School District closed in 2013. These closures follow a pattern of systemic disinvestment in low-income communities of colour across the United States.

Osorio’s multi-media immersive installation was built with objects salvaged from the closed school including books, furniture, and fixtures such as trophy cases that signify the shared history of this proud Latino community in North Philadelphia.

Featuring new writings from authors including revered American artist, Martha Rosler, and Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at the New York-based public arts institution Creative Time.

reForm was commissioned by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, USA and was published on the occasion of the exhibition reform which was installed at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, USA from August 30, 2015 – May 20 2016.

Nato Thompson, Contributing Writer

The first major and in-depth retrospective monograph on JR, the enigmatic and anonymous Parisian photographer/street artist/activist behind some of the world's most provocative large-scale public photography projects.

Created in close collaboration with JR, this book includes all bodies of his work, his collaborations with other artists and institutions such as the New York Ballet and previously unpublished behind-the-scenes documentation of his studios in Paris and New York, where he and his creative collaborators live and work.

Introducing JR 's story is a specially commissioned graphic novel by comic artist Joseph Remnant, which charts his rise from graffiti roots and his decision to become a full-time artist.

Features a survey essay by Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of Creative Time, New York.

Nato Thompson Contributing writer

As electrifying and colorful as the “Soundsuits” it features, this survey of the renowned artist Nick Cave also features his latest performance work, public installations, and sculptural assemblages. Anyone who’s ever encountered one of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits―whether in a gallery or on the street―can’t help but be fascinated with these brightly hued, provocative constructions that function as both costume and sculpture. The most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, this large-format volume compiles the fantastic Soundsuits, for which the artist is best known, together with his other sculptural work and related projects in video and live performance. The book chronicles the artist’s ingenious use of materials, which began with a Soundsuit constructed entirely from twigs and has since ranged from secondhand rugs and other thrift-store finds to feathers, buttons, beading, and rainbow-dyed synthetic hair. Dazzling images of Cave’s Soundsuits are presented alongside video stills and performance views that capture the current of joyful energy that runs throughout the work. Essays by Elvira Dyangani Ose and Nato Thompson provide an illuminating critical context for the artist’s practice, and an interview by Andrew Bolton explores the artist’s working process and inspirations. Beautiful, insightful, and exciting, this volume will be a must-have for Cave’s ever-growing audience.

Nato Thompson (Contributing Writer)

It Is What It Is began at the New Museum in New York with an installation featuring the remnants of a car destroyed in a 2007 bombing on Baghdad’s Al-Mutanabbi Street, and continued on a three-week road trip across the country. The project—commissioned by The Three M Project, a consortium developed by the New Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles—used the car, now on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum in London, to ground conversations in the facts, figures, and eyewitness descriptions that were lacking in most accounts of the Iraq war and also served as a visual aid to prompt open dialogue and civil conversation. On the road trip, Deller recorded each conversation, saved drawings and notes, and photographed each participant in the project. These documents, including the transcribed conversations, have been collected into this deluxe 180-page book, edited by the artist.