Tacking and a Tacktical Methodology

Moving towards a Different Politics for Art

Series: 

How can artists (and others) who find themselves in positions of privilege think differently about the way they do what they do in order to create the conditions for better, more just relations to flourish? Finding an answer to that question is at the heart of this book. After critiquing the relationship between contemporary art, race and privilege the author brings together First Nation and feminist philosophies of relationality, the game of string figuring, and her own history as an artist to propose an alternate methodology that puts relation at the centre of practice. She introduces the multivalent concept of “tacking”—a movement at an oblique angle to prevailing winds—in order to traverse the waters of contemporary art to challenge power and create a more just future.
Copyright Year:
2025
E-Book (PDF)
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-70695-8
Publication:
02 Oct 2024
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-70694-1
Publication:
10 Oct 2024
Cover Tacking and a Tacktical Methodology

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Louisa Bufardeci, Ph.D. (2022), University of Melbourne, where she teaches in the Critical and Theoretical Studies program at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. She is also a practising artist and a string figuring enthusiast.
preface
acknowledgements
illustrations
note to the reader

introduction
 1 The sea between A and I and the question of privilege
 2 privilege, art and contemporary art
 3 tacking
 4 outline of the chapters

1 “what to do?”
 1 “if you see yourself as part of me and I’m part of you …”
 2 making declarations
 3 moves to innocence
 4 subject position
 5 the double bind is, and as, a political field

2 relinquishing ‘contemporary art’?
 1 how do issues of race sit in contemporary art at the present moment?
 2 whiteness in contemporary art practice
 3 doing differently as a mode of contemporary art

3 the practice of tacking
 1 the seemingly impossible history of string figuring
 2 string figures in contemporary art
 3 the practice of tacking
 4 tacking in practice
 5 the conditions of tacking

4 tacking and tacktical
 1 the etymological relations of tacking
 2 ‘tacktical’ as a neologism

5 what tacking does
 1 techniques of relation
 2 tacking as a technique of relation thinking-with and making-with response-ability
 3 tacking in the borderspace
 4 touch
 5 play

6 tacking as a methodology: a tacktical methodology
This book is of interest to practicing contemporary artists, artistic researchers, art and cultural critics, undergraduate and graduate scholars in those fields as well as in areas of critical race theory, feminism, colonialism, art history and theory. Keywords: contemporary art, art theory, relationality, First Nations, Indigenous, feminism, race, whiteness, privilege, practice-led artistic research, research-creation, cat’s cradle, string figures, double bind, partial subjectivity, subject position, tack, tact, touch, play, flourishing, criticality, witnessing, deep listening, ante-factual, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sara Ahmed, Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, Donna Haraway
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