rt goes through cycles of engagement. Sometimes it presents as a fundamentally inward-looking practice, involved primarily with formal and technical innovation or with oblique theoretical arguments about its own histories and languages. The integrity of this approach is plain, but it comes freighted with a kind of decadence, a willingness to set aside the problems of the world at large. In other periods, art’s primary concern is with how to strengthen its bond with life, to forge a more robust and perceptible connection between the poetics of looking and making and the politics
