‘What happens when art is no longer understood as representing politics, but as one of the ways political possibility is composed? The essays gathered in Ultra-left aesthetics trace a remarkable array of experiments in revolutionary culture, collective creativity, and tactical imagination. Bringing together histories that are too often treated separately, this volume offers an indispensable contribution to understanding how aesthetic practice has helped invent forms of life beyond the limits of both capitalism and the orthodox Left.’
—Stevphen Shukaitis, author of The Wages of Dreamwork and editor of Minor Compositions

‘The ultra-left is historically bound to the global revolt of 1968 and the emancipatory movements that followed, signaling a political radicalism that rejected Cold War binaries and traditional party organization. In this context, the relationship between art and politics differed radically from classical modernism: art was reclaimed by collectives committed to direct action outside the market and institutional control. This volume makes a major contribution by historicizing aesthetic radicality within the broader intellectual emergence of the ultra-left. Offering an indispensable global panorama, it decisively resituates the debate on art and politics – an urgent task at a moment when the far-right increasingly weaponizes digital media and aesthetic form’
—Gabriel Zacarias, Professor of Art History at the University of Campinas (Brazil) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Hamburg University (Germany), coeditor of The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook

‘If the communist response to fascism’s “introduction of aesthetics into political life” is to politicize art, the radical rejoinder (to both, arguably) is to dissolve art into revolutionary life. How one and all might do this has long been at the heart of the reflection and actions of the ultra-left, that much-scorned, somewhat mysterious and eternally elusive field of people, ideas, groups and deeds lying by choice beyond the purview of reasonable politics. The authors in Murrieta Flores and Susik’s Ultra-left aesthetics sketch a map of the acts of creative praxis these reflections occasioned from South Korea to the United States by way of Pakistan, France and Botswana, from the likes of New Yorkers Black Mask and Valerie Solanas, Austrian Valie Export, the South Korean Fourth Group or the Mexican Mira, Germinal and Suma collectives, to name but a few. Analysis always has something of the post-mortem to it, fixating forever actions and deeds whose purpose was to be in the now. But Murrieta Flores and Susik’s volume hints at haruspicy rather than autopsy; these entrails tell us also of our present, and of unreasonable ways to conceive our future.’
—Grégory Pierrot, Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut and author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA press 2019), Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books 2021) and Fantômes de la révolution noire (Ròt-Bò-Krik 2026) (‘Ghosts of the Black Revolution’)

David AJ Murrieta Flores is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Abigail Susik is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Willamette University

Preface: Back to the future, ultra-left redux - Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Towards an ultra-left aesthetics - Abigail Susik and David AJ Murrieta Flores
1 From the faceless crowd to the black bloc (and back) the visual politics of Black Mask - Jacopo Galimberti
2 Hiding out in Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters - Sean Lovitt
3 On the art of shooting men: violence, misandry, and the feminist imaginary in the work of Valerie Solanas and VALIE EXPORT - Breanne Fahs
4 Pop-Che: the myth of the heroic guerrilla soldier in Argentinean art - Ana Longoni
5 Total art in disguise — the aesthetic of anarcho-Daoism: The Fourth Group in Cold War South Korea, 1970 - Sooran Choi
6 ‘In our own backyard’: DIY feminist aesthetics confront the authoritarian State in late Cold War Pakistan, 1977-88 - Kristin Plys
7 ‘Not the work… the worker’: Gordon Matta-Clark’s encounter with workerism - Joseph Sannicandro
8 Towards a materialist art of the encounter: Althusserian Marxism in Mira, Germinal and Suma (Mexico, 1978-81) - David AJ Murrieta Flores
9 A surrealist revolution against whiteness?: Considerations on the surrealist contributions to Race Traitor journal (1993-2005) - Abigail Susik
10 We need no Communist to tell us we are oppressed: anti-apartheid art, radical curating and the Left at the 1982 Culture and Resistance Festival - Polly Savage