Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City

Cecilie Sachs Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367634865
• eBook ISBN: 9780429799167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

What are the social functions of art in the age of neoliberal urbanism? This book discusses the potential of artistic practices to question the nature of city environments and the diverse productions of space, moving beyond the reduction of 'the urban' as a set of existing and static structures. Adopting a practice-led approach, each chapter discusses case studies from across the world, reflecting on personal experiences as well as the work of other artists. While exposing the increasingly limiting constraints placed on public and socially engaged art by the dominance of commercial funding and neoliberal frameworks, the author stays optimistic about the potential of artistic practices to transcend neoliberal logics through alternative productions of space. Drawing upon a Lefebvrian framework of spatial practice and using a structuralist approach to challenge neoliberal structures, the book draws links between art, resistance, criticism, democracy, and political change.

The book concludes by looking at how we might create a new course for socially engaged art within the neoliberal city. It will be of great interest to researchers in urban studies, urban geography, and architecture, as well as students who want to learn more about place-making, visual culture, performance theory, applied practice, and urban culture.

Part I

Problematizing socially engaged art

Challenging urban imaginaries

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

(Calvino 1979, 99–100)

Confident that imaginative literature could legitimately intervene in society, Italo Calvino positioned his book Invisible Cities (1979) to foster urban change on individual and social levels, and to advance a rethinking and revisioning of how cities are imagined, designed, and built (Modena 2011). Invisible Cities provides an important trajectory for this book as it illustrates how the production of urban imaginaries can be seen as interventions in social and material processes of city-making. In line with the human geographer David Harvey, Calvino emphasizes that if cities can be imagined and made, they can also be reimagined and remade. This claim calls for a critical reflection on how collective imaginations can be materialized in spatial forms. Hence, Calvino set out to investigate the nature of the city by thinking about urban forms in terms of meaning-making, or of the city as a signifying system.

Invisible Cities is framed as a conversation in the garden of the ageing emperor, Kublai Khan, to whom the merchant Marco Polo comes to tell about his travels. In short prose poems, Marco Polo describes 55 imaginary cities. Polo’s projections of these cities interrogate the structure of a vast array of microsocieties, unveiling the reasons for their forms and for the behaviours of their residents. For example, the city of Zaira contains all its own pasts like the lines on a hand, directing readers to the relationship between architectural space and the events of history. Clarice, the tormented city that has several times decayed and then burgeoned again, underlines how buildings and materials are adapted to different uses throughout the course of history. The trading city of Euphemia points to how cities are places of exchange not only in goods, but in words, desires, and memories. Perinthia, which on paper was envisioned as a paradise city, warns us against formal, abstract, and immobile perfection that on the ground is transformed to an unnatural, deforming experience.

These cities provide a defamiliarization that thwarts visual and cognitive automatism by dislodging the city from the usual habits of perception. The novel suggests that no city can be grasped in its present or past totality by any single person. Urban imaginaries differ depending on a multitude of perspectives and subject-positions. Polo observes the cities from inside or outside, from afar or close up, from the plains, desert, mountains, or sea. The gaze that readers follow is decentralized; it encourages us to see the city from unusual perspectives by focusing on small and marginal things (window sills, manhole covers, antennae, skylights, and so on) rather than focusing on the city’s monumental features. The readers are invited to engage with these multiple perspectives as a means to reflect on and reimagine the city outside of the novel and their relationships to it. Hence, the imaginary cities, like urban imaginaries in general, are more than representations or constructions of the world; ‘they are vitally implicated in a material, sensuous process of “worlding”’ (Gregory 2009, 282) in which the subject creates a whole world for itself. What is put to the fore here is the continual interaction between, first, the city as a multifaceted, dynamic system consisting in combinations of psychological elements such as desire, memory, subjectivity, and the passing of time; and, second, between the city’s layout, architectural look, functions, and its social aspects such as culture and history. Hence, Invisible Cities illustrates how urban imaginaries depend on a reciprocal process between the observer and her environment; the environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what she sees according to her own purposes and adaptability.

Invisible Cities challenges urban imaginaries that relate to taken-for-granted spatial orderings of the world and provides alternative urban imaginaries that place in bold relief the constructible and destructible nature of social habits and urban structures alike. The potential of artistic practice to question how the world is organized, and this way open the possibility for changing that same world, is recognized by a wide range of scholars. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004) argues, art can be seen to foster an autonomous experience that suspends the domination of the ‘system’. This is because the undecidability of the experience implies challenging familiar categorizations, such as established views, assigned usage, and the spatially constructed order – what Rancière terms ‘the distribution of the sensible’. The distribution of the sensible is here understood as that which ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to be seen and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and the possibilities of time’ (Rancière 2004, 12). This ‘distribution of the sensible’ is strongly linked to the distribution of spaces:

What are these places? How do they function? Why are they there? Who can occupy them? [. . .] It is always a matter of knowing who is qualified to say what a particular place is and what is done in it.

(Rancière 2003, 201)

According to Rancière (2009), art has the capability to contribute to what he calls ‘a new landscape of the possible’ by challenging this so-called ‘distribution of the sensible’ (p. 103). There is an egalitarian promise in this capacity of art as it relies on everyone’s ‘own political subjectivisation in the act of interpretation and reception’ (Roberts 2010, cited in Dawkins and Loftus 2013, 671). As Rancière argues, aesthetic experience is shared by all, regardless of their individual skills, dispositions, and education (Dikeç 2012). In this regard, art may facilitate a process of invention: of new collectives, new political objects, and new conditions of possibility (McFarlane 2011, 210).

In this part, I introduce a set of debates that constitute the theoretical framework of this book. Drawing on contemporary art theory and critical theory, I discuss: (1) how socially engaged art can make explicit the reciprocal relation between the production of urban imaginaries and the material environment; and (2) how this form of artistic practice can work back on our everyday spatial ordering principles to suggest other ways of thinking and doing. Central for this discussion is to problematize an approach to socially engaged art that predominantly focuses on the subject-centred relations produced within it. I argue that this focus risks neglecting the relation between social processes and their material manifestations, and thus fails to investigate the relation between urban imaginaries and the material environment.

In the first chapter, I address the potentials offered by geographical approaches for thinking about the making of places, spaces, and worlds in socially engaged art. I further point to how theories from performance studies may foreground an understanding of materiality as being constantly invented through social practices. Finally, I illustrate how mobilizing art practices in geographical investigations might enable self-conscious forms of place-based intervention, providing transformative insights in terms of personal engagements with the city. The critical potential of socially engaged art is here foregrounded. However, I argue that this critical potential may also be compromised through collaborative processes that focus on creating, rather than questioning, the coherence of urban space. These criticisms and potentials of artistic collaborations raise questions concerning the politics of participation and representation.

The second chapter discusses these questions. Issues concerning participatory approaches as well as how socially engaged art relates to particular notions of ‘politics’ will here be scrutinized. Finally, I return to Calvino and the hope for change that he is providing us with at the end of Invisible Cities.

Bibliography

Calvino, I. 1979. Invisible Cities, 2nd edition. London: Pan Books.

Dawkins, A. and Loftus, A. 2013. “The Senses as Direct Theoreticians in Practice.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38: 665–677.

Dikeç, M. 2012. “Politics Is Sublime.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (1): 262–279.

Gregory, D. 2009. “Geographical Imaginary.” In The Dicitonary of Human Geography, edited by D. Greogry, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. J. Watts, and S. Whatmore, 282–283. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons.

McFarlane, C. 2011. “Assemblage and Critical Urbanism.” City 15 (2): 204–224.

Modena, L. 2011. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness. New York: Routledge.

Rancière, J. 2003. “Politics and Aesthetics an Interview.” Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8 (2): 191–211.

———. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. (2013). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

———. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.

Roberts, J. 2010. “Philosophy, Culture, Image: Rancière’s ‘Constructivism.’” Philosophy of Photography 1: 69–79.

1 Criticisms, reimaginings, collaborations

A materialist critique

The importance and potential of socially engaged art for producing and expanding our urban imaginaries chimes with Lefebvre’s (2003) call for an approach to urban society as a ‘virtual object’. To Lefebvre, ‘the virtual’ relates to a dimension that has not yet been realized but is a horizon towards which we can move. This virtual dimension of urban society is important in order to interrogate the interplay between the imagined and the material in a way that encompasses the conditions of both the known world and the horizon of possible worlds. Taking the sensuous, embodied creativeness of mundane everyday social practice seriously in order to highlight how bodies are implicated in issues of social difference and power relations, and the ways space might articulate these, is central in this regard. New critical urban theories such as assemblage urbanism, as well as more-than-human geographies and the exploration of the non-representational, have pointed in this direction by valuing alternative forms of knowledge and understanding such as affect, sensation, and intuition. Debates here relate to how materiality accommodates the affective, the habitual, the technological, the excessive, and the processual (Farìas and Bendner 2011; Latham and McCormack 2004; Lorimer 2013; McFarlane 2011; Thrift 2008; Whatmore 2006).

I certainly recognize the importance of these developments for encouraging greater attention to creative practice, to embodied ways of being, doing, and knowing, and to the interplay between the imagined and the material. McFarlane (2011), for example, links the assemblage idea with the virtual dimension of the urban and a critical ‘imaginary’ (p. 219) that, in line with Lefebvre’s critical theory, focuses on the relationship between the actual and the possible. However, I am concerned that there is a certain risk here of cutting out half the equation by sidelining the material conditions that are part of a city to begin with, as well as those produced through the encounters taking place within it. For example, Brenner et al. (2011) argue that certain orientations of assemblage theory, i.e. those that aim to work as an alternative ontology for the city (e.g. see Farìas 2011), has a tendency of focusing solely on the agency of the materials themselves, and thus leaving out the structuration of urban processes by, for example, capital, states, or social movements. As such, this new urban theory leaves unaddressed important questions regarding the broader contexts within which various actants are situated and operate, and regarding how, when, and why particular critical alternatives may be pursued under specific historical-geographical conditions, and why some visions and imaginaries are actualized over and against others. Accordingly, Brenner et al. point out that McFarlane’s understanding of the virtual dimension of the urban is significantly different from the dialectical neo-Marxist approach to the virtual as advocated by Lefebvre. In McFarlane’s account of the virtual, potentiality is seen as an exteriority that lies outside of the present assemblage, rather than being understood as historically specific or immanent to the material relations that are scrutinized. According to Brenner et al. (2011), this approach is problematic in that it does not offer a sustained account of the ‘context of context’ (p. 234). The need to engage with the political-economic structures and institutions in which materials are embedded is here foregrounded. Accordingly, Raco (2018) calls for a greater attention to the conditions that underpin the articulation of urban imaginaries, and how these are shaped by specific geographical contexts.

The critical planning and neo-Marxist spatial theories (e.g. Harvey 2000; Lefebvre 2003; Massey 2005; Soja 2000) that form the conceptual framework of this book help me scrutinize these conditions. Hence, the book is oriented around a cultural-materialist approach that offers an understanding of materiality as the expression of political and social commitment and practice, in which the materializing of an abstract idea is its observable instantiation in society. I here combine an attention to affective, sensuous, and embodied processes with considerations of symbolic and representational forms of meaning, as well as the material forces and relations of production that inform these processes. This cultural-materialist approach emphasizes the relation between subjective experience and its socio-material conditions. From this perspective, there is no ‘outside’ from which change, critique, resistance, or opposition can be articulated. Change is only enabled in relation to present structures and systems rather than as an escape from them. The potential field of political action in socially engaged art is here understood as not solely about mobilizing sites, representing various perspectives, and portraying multiple worlds in order to ensure an inclusive practice, but also about recognizing the opportunities and limits within these sites for enabling or constraining the creation of such multiple worlds.

Although taking into account the context of context, I am aware that the neo-Marxist and cultural-materialist approach provides a particular framing that focuses exclusively on the human constituents of the urban, and thus excludes the agency or proto-agency of other-than-human materialities in the city. In the current era of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2014; Lefebvre 2003; Merrifield 2013), it is clear that urban phenomena are always linked to and dependent upon places and entities that were previously imagined as the city’s ‘other’ (e.g. nature, animals, and other living and non-living entities) (Metzger 2016). The contemporary city is increasingly seen as a natural-cultural system, an ecology, foregrounding the entangled fates of humans and non-humans, culture and nature. Accordingly, urban theorists, such as Jonathan Metzger (2016), call for a broadening of the horizon in terms of what constitutes a democratic and political urban subject, and who or what should be taken into account in the consideration of possible urban futures. Metzger’s point is important, particularly today, as we are facing an ecological crisis that is very much caused by urban lifestyles. The need to dramatically rethink urbanism and its governance is needed more than ever. However, in focusing on how socially engaged art may play a role in reorienting the city away from being an engine of capital accumulation towards what Purcell (2014) terms ‘a constitutive element in the web of cooperative social relations among urban inhabitants’ (p. 149), the agency of humans is inevitably the focus of my discussion. While I do agree with Metzger’s call for a more inclusive approach to urbanism, I take responsibility for the exclusion of other-than-human entities in the framing of this book. This is not to say that I discharge these entities for being irrelevant or that I reduce them to an externality of urban life. On the contrary, I do acknowledge their imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Producing Urban Imaginaries in Socially Engaged Art
• Part I Problematizing Socially Engaged Art
• Part II Meaning-Making: The Reciprocal Relation Between the Material Environment and Social Practices
• Part III Participatory Processes: Critically Engaging with Urban Space in Socially Engaged Art
• Part IV Representative Frames: Constituting Identities and Issues in Socially Engaged Art
• Conclusion: Creating a New Course for Socially Engaged Art Within the Neoliberal City
• Index