Contemporary Art and 'Exscribing'

Art Action UK provides a platform for artists who tackle political and philosophical questions relating to nuclear energy production. This chapter continues to explore the idea of power, and responds to Political theorist Carl Schmitt’s conceptualisation that ‘the state of exception’ is an opportunity to define a new norm. To question this idea, it interprets political power as something that is never ‘fixed’ but is contingent on the duality between emptying and regulating power. Schmitt understood the state of exception as a state of emergency declared by the sovereign. Here, the state of exception does not refer to the emergency itself, but to the theory of state that articulates a situation as ‘an emergency’. The chapter focuses on how an arts organisations might respond to the aftermath of a disaster and how this engagement is ‘political’. Organisations and collectives often have to articulate how they provide tangible relief, or to show how they function towards a particular end.