T. J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics
By Francis Plagne
Issue 4, Summer 2025
From the beginning of his career, T. J. Clark has worried at the relationship between art and politics. In The Absolute Bourgeoisie: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 — one of a pair of books published in 1973 that made his reputation — Clark suggested that “actually effective political art” was so historically rare as to be almost non-existent. The twenty-two essays in Those Passions: On Art and Politics, written between 1997 and 2023, widen the scope considerably.
Exclusive to the Magazine
T. J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics by Francis Plagne is featured in full in Issue 4 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
Seriality animates Maria Kozic’s art in 1990s Melbourne. Her fleshly weapons and pin-up girls mutate across media, trace the tangled circuitry of sex, violence, and mass culture’s compulsive pulse.
Er ist wieder da. He is back again. During the harrowing June nail-biter standoff between Israel and Iran, an otherwise dissonant chorus of global diplomatic voices — for a moment — seemed to speak in unison. According to a bare-minimum international consensus, Hitler had to be defeated once more.