How to Make Art at the End of the World

“In this beautifully argued, eminently readable book, stories are the center of attention. Morphing art and knowledge in the neoliberal university situates thinking and pedagogy. Curiosity-driven transdisciplinary practice is both motor and object of analysis. Natalie Loveless asks how stories craft worlds in politically and sensually attuned modes. I treasure the extensive knowledge of modernist performance art and art activism broadly, as well as rich semiotic and psychoanalytic readings of stories and performance. This book is itself a loving act of research-creation.” - Donna J. Haraway, author of (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) “In her evocative book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless has captured the most urgent and far-reaching question concerning our cultural environment, that is, how to inhabit it in an era of geopolitical uncertainty. This is a daunting task; her ambitious answer, grounded in examples of alternative critical pedagogies, aims to reduce the toxic colonial footprint in arts education by developing a sustainable research-creation model based on differential multiplicities. And that gives us hope.” - Mary Kelly, Judge Widney Professor, USC Roski School of Art and Design “In this succinct book, Natalie Loveless explores the claim that art-making practices are well situated to challenge and change existing knowledge-making practices in the contemporary research university…. Her primary audience, researchers in art and fine art, will find the manifesto gives a sophisticated form to an emerging desire-an eros and ‘attunement’-to not just study the world, but to have an impact on it.” - David Theodore (RACAR)

“A necessary read for artists and scholars who are drawn to, or already working with, artistically driven methods of teaching and researching…. Through the text, readers will gain a deeper understanding of how research-creation, beyond doing artistic research, is about creatively intervening in feminist and anti-racist research practices.”

Natalie Loveless is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Alberta and editor of New Maternalisms Redux and Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation.