Call for papers REBEL STREETS: URBAN SPACE, ART, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, 28-29 May 2019, University of Tours. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
Routledge Research in Art and Politics, 2021
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.
Public artistic practices in favour and against gentrification
Post-industrial practices have led to the homogenization of the city, not only in its aesthetic but also in its population. Cities nowadays marginalise ethnic groups and working-class people, traditional inhabitants of those territories, while at the same time attract transitional population as managerial workers, students and tourists; people who can afford to live in these new paradises of consumption. In this new capitalist age, the role of art and cultural practices is vital as a tool for the regeneration of these areas. From galleries and museums to art in the public spaces, culture, in general, has had an increment in government and private support, not for the anti-utilitarian art for the art´s sake, but because art is a tested tool that generates both economic profit and social control. In this paper, I will address how art practices especially those in the public realm are used as tools for capitalist power, to redevelop spaces that can lead to gentrification processes, but also how art also can be a resource to resist and fight this devastating process.
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, 2017
The practice of repurposing resources that already exist—versus innovating or engineering new ones—is an area of significant overlap between contemporary art and twenty-first-century capitalism. Low-risk and relatively low-cost, the process of creative reuse generates fantastic value-adding possibilities. Or so it seems. For even as real estate speculators and city planners discover the value of high culture for upgrading urban infrastructures, so too have a growing number of contemporary artists learned to mimic and perhaps intentionally mistranslate neoliberal enterprise culture's urban strategies into a repertoire of exonomic tools and “art+realty” hybrids that game the system against itself. Whether post-Fordist capitalism now resembles art or vice versa, virtually everything we thought we knew about “serious” culture has been peeled away with astonishing force, leaving behind a raw, and in some ways vulnerable thing: a bare art world, fully congruent with the political and economic emergency that marks our contemporaneous present.
2020
Gentrification processes are one of today’s most critical social issues hitting metropolises around the globe. The role that artists play in these processes by upgrading neighborhoods and making them attractive for further commodification is undisputed. At the same time, independent artist-run project spaces in neighborhoods provide spaces for debate and initiate collective processes. Not only small independent actors and collectives interfere in the political debates, but also large public art institutions that respond to current social and political issues and public demands. Artistic interventions in urban transformation processes are also political interventions, expressing the permeability of the line between art and politics. Indeed, thinking along the political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, such a line does not exist; rather, every cultural and artistic project must be thought of politically. Drawing on theoretical approaches on hegemony, this article aims at examining the cri...
Special Issue: Art and Urban Social Struggles
User Experience and Urban Creativity Journal , 2020
Rebellious artists have always engaged with issues of oppression and exploitation–by-products of colonialist and capitalist systems–throughout history from slavery and resource extraction; to exploitative labor practices and the environmental consequences of industrialization; and human rights movements and climate change anxieties of the past century. Arts that take place in urban struggles are not about igniting a change but are about creating unmediated spaces and instances of emancipated subjects. The authors in this issue analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for more just cities. Perhaps now it is more pressing than ever to acknowledge, examine, and re ect upon both historic and perpetuating inequalities in urban social life. It is imperative to talk about art and its involvement with urban struggles as pertaining to the re-creation rather than the consumption of the city. Therefore, this special issue’s contributors engage in key areas of the socio-political relationships with new urban poetry--what the reconfiguration of di erence, equality, and equity entails at present moment in the urban space for art and artists. . This issue further aims to construct bridges between the contemporary practices of art for the urban public and the critiques of the city generated in disciplines such as urban sociology and human geography, informed by critical theories of urbanism, society, and culture. The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space. Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics. Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.
Special Issue: Street Art's Politics and Discontents
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies , 2020
Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.
Speculating on (the) urban (of) art: (un)siting street art in the age of neoliberal urbanisation
Horizontes Antropologicos, 2019
This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.