The Role of the Arts in Developing Sustainable Cities
(extracted from Nicolas Whybrow, Art and the City, London and New York: IB Tauris,
2011)
For Rosalyn Deutsche urban space is not only socially-produced but agonistic. Thus, the
practices of urban societies – that which its various constituencies do or are allowed to
do – defines or creates the space of the city, and such space is dependent for its very
condition of existence on that which is produced by 'conflicting interests'. As Henri
Lefebvre puts it with regard to the abstract space of modernism and capital: 'Inasmuch
as [such space] tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing
differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it
accentuates differences' (1991: 52).
It follows that the function of art in relation to the city should be to evince rather than
efface socio-cultural contradictions. Moreover, Deutsche says, the 'spatial tactics
developed in postmodern art’, which include site-specificity, institutional critique, critiques
of representation, have provided the means by which artists can 'reveal the social
relations that constitute both aesthetic and urban spaces' (Deutsche 2002: xvii).
The points were set by Deutsche for a genuinely new negotiation of how public art and
space might be defined, then, and the tab picked up amongst others by her one-time
graduate student Miwon Kwon. In the introduction to her highly influential book on sitespecific art One Place After Another (2002), Kwon clearly indicates not only her desire to
shift the understanding of site as a fixed, physical location but also ‘to reframe site
specificity as the cultural mediation of broader social, economic, and political processes
that organise urban life and urban space' [my emphasis] (2002: 3).
Drawing on Deutsche's distinction between assimilative and integrated site-specific art –
in which the production of 'a unified "harmonious" space of wholeness and cohesion' is
paramount – and an interruptive model – 'in which the art work functions as a critical
intervention in the existing order [...] through some form of disruption' (170) – Kwon
develops the case for what might be called a 'radical new unsiting'. Paradoxically this
renders precisely the specificity of site – the necessity of its physical presence and
permanence to the emplaced artwork – questionable. Instead the relationship between
the artwork and its location is premised on 'the recognition of its fixed impermanence, to
be experienced as an unrepeatable and fleeting situation' (24). The language that
customarily defines the time-based conventions of performance is unmistakable here,
but this view also points towards the artist's new-found role as 'cultural-artistic service
provider' (rather than merely 'producer of aesthetic objects'), whose tendency is selfreflexively to perform criticality. In other words: through the artwork to 'trouble the
construction and commodification of urban identities' (4) in a way that implicitly or
explicitly draws in spectators as engaged participants and directs attention to the
mechanism or movement of its own 'labour' or ‘coming into being’.
Works cited
Deutsche, R. (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, London and Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.