Art; revolt; micropolitics; war machine; Critical Art Ensemble.
This work is about contemporary art and politics. The object of analysis that will give privileged access to the current relations established between art and politics is the collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists and activists that for three decades has been dedicated to produce an art with strong political content. In this work, the CAE is considered one of the most complex and current examples of art-revolt, a concept that synthesizes Camus and Kristeva's approaches to revolt in a nomadology of contemporary art. According to the argument presented in this work, the art-revolt practiced by the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, by opposing the spectacle and the state, also built an artistic war machine that has consolidated a resistance to which art is political continued by others means. In its rich history, art-revolt has constructed several matrices of action that are offered to the new generations as strategies of creative intervention in the public sphere usually dominated by institutional political instances. In this sense, the Critical Art Ensemble operates a war machine that prolongs and updates the impetus of art-revolt in the field of cultural resistance that escapes the apparatuses of spectacle and state. Therefore, the research of the theoretical and practical production of the Critical Art Ensemble is done in order to understand the role of art-revolt in the present, its dilemmas, its strategies and possibilities of action.