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THE CONTEMPORARY CITY
Art in the City,
the City in Art
Elisha Masemann
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The Contemporary City
Series Editors
Richard Ronald, Geography, Planning and International Development
Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Emma Baker, Centre for Housing, Urban and Regional Planning,
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
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In recent decades, cities have been variously impacted by neoliberalism, economic crises, climate change, industrialization and postindustrialization, and widening inequalities. So what is it like to live
in these contemporary cities? What are the key drivers shaping cities
and neighbourhoods? To what extent are people being bound together
or driven apart? How do these factors vary cross-culturally and cross
nationally? This book series aims to explore the various aspects of the
contemporary urban experience from a firmly interdisciplinary and international perspective. With editors based in Amsterdam and Adelaide, the
series is drawn on an axis between old and new cities in the West and
East.
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Elisha Masemann
Art in the City,
the City in Art
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For Mum and Dad,
and Eli Masemann
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Contents
1
Establishing the City’s ‘Ground Rules’
1.1
Facing the Urban Dilemma
1.2
Scope of the Research
1.3
Positioning an Artistic Response and Theoretical
Framework
1.3.1
Situating the Research in the Urban
Humanities
1.3.2
Literature Review
1.4
Methodology and Outline
References
1
5
6
8
9
10
12
14
Part I Hardware
2
A Rational City Programme
2.1
Rationality and Functionality
in the Nineteenth-Century City
2.2
Three Case Studies: Haussmann, Le Corbusier
and Moses
2.2.1
Baron Haussmann: Tearing Open Old Paris
2.2.2
Le Corbusier: The Modern City
as a Machine for Living
2.2.3
Robert Moses: Urban Planning as Surgery
in New York
References
17
18
20
21
24
27
30
ix
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x
3
4
CONTENTS
Critical Responses to the City Plan
3.1
Henri Lefebvre: The Problem with Mourenx
3.2
Jane Jacobs: Modern Urban Planning
as the “Sacking of Cities”
3.3
The Situationists: Drifting from the Rational
3.3.1
Overcoming the Society of Spectacle: Three
Situationist Strategies
3.3.2
Mapping Situationism in the City
3.4
Michel de Certeau: Critiquing the Concept City
3.4.1
The Concept City
3.4.2
Contesting Rational Order: Ways
of Operating and ‘Making Do’
References
33
33
Art’s Non-rational Uses for the City
4.1
Early Disruptive Strategies: The Twentieth-Century
Avant-Garde
4.2
Moments of Disorder: Fluxus and Happenings
4.2.1
Fluxus: A ‘Production of Presence’
in Europe and Japan
4.2.2
Happenings: Resistance to ‘Deadening
Functionality’
4.3
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture: Cutting
Through Rationality
4.4
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Making Necessity Visible
4.5
Francis Alÿs: Mapping ‘Horizontal Narratives’
4.6
Janet Cardiff: Narrating Encounter
References
53
35
39
40
43
46
46
47
50
53
55
56
59
62
65
67
71
75
Part II Software
5
Ideology and the City
5.1
Manfredo Tafuri: Exposing the ‘Correct Use’
of the City
5.1.1
Responses to Tafuri: Postmodern Architecture
5.1.2
Shaping an Artistic Response
5.2
Louis Althusser: Ideological State Apparatuses
5.2.1
The Ongoing Influence of Althusser
5.3
Neoliberal Ideology, the City and Art
References
79
80
81
83
85
89
90
95
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CONTENTS
6
The Body and the City
6.1
Michel Foucault: Disciplinary Observation
and Docile Bodies
6.2
Henri Lefebvre: The Body in Urban Space
6.3
Elizabeth Grosz: Bodies and Cities as ‘Mutually
Constitutive’
References
xi
97
98
101
103
108
7
The Everyday City
7.1
A Theory of the Everyday in Art
7.2
Life’s ‘Common Denominator’
7.3
The Everyday in an Urban Context
7.4
Resistance in Everyday Life
References
109
110
111
114
117
121
8
Disrupting the Everyday City Through Art
8.1
Rupturing Ideology: Hans Haacke and Krzysztof
Wodiczko
8.1.1
Hans Haacke: The Critique of Ideology
in Public Institutions
8.1.2
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Interrupting
the Ideology of Architecture
8.2
Non-compliant Bodies: (Mis)using the Artist Body
in the City
8.2.1
Embodied Resistance: Valie Export, Adrian
Piper and Regina José Galindo
8.2.2
William Pope.L: Critical Visibility Through
‘Existential Absurdity’
8.3
Disrupting the Everyday City
8.3.1
Urban Resonances: Altering the Everyday
Soundscape
8.3.2
Movements and Flows: Disrupting Everyday
Spaces of Commerce
8.3.3
Everyday Scenes: Interrupting Routine
Appearances of the City
References
123
124
124
126
131
131
136
140
140
143
148
150
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xii
CONTENTS
Part III Networks
9
10
11
Networks of Control in the City
9.1
The Global City and ‘Smart-City Mentality’
9.2
Manuel Castells: Issues in the Networked Society
9.3
Societies of Control
9.4
Cognitive Capitalism
9.5
The ‘Ecstasy of Communication’
and the ‘Overexposed City’
9.6
Neo-panopticism in the Transparency Society
References
155
156
159
162
165
Foundations for Cognitive Dissonance
10.1 A Social Turn in Contemporary Art
10.2 Social Practice and the ‘Terrain of Antagonism’
10.3 The Politics of Small Gestures
10.4 Participation and the Collective ‘Elaboration
of Meaning’
10.5 Jacques Rancière on Spectatorship and ‘the Encounter’
10.6 Agents of Change: The Minoritarian
and the Molecular in Art
10.7 Towards a Cognitive Dissonance in Art
References
177
178
180
182
Art’s Intervention in the Society of Control
11.1 Critical Network Interventions
11.1.1 The Yes Men: ‘Culture Jamming’
11.1.2 Hito Steyerl: ‘Robots Today’
11.1.3 PVI Collective: ‘Tactical Media
Interventions’
11.1.4 Hasan Elahi: ‘Performing Transparency’
11.2 Networked Participation Using Communications
Technology
11.2.1 Hello Lamp Post and Adventure 1
11.2.2 ‘Radioballett’ and ‘Deviator’
11.3 Beyond City Networks: Socially Engaged Projects
11.3.1 Thomas Hirschhorn: ‘Bataille Monument’
11.3.2 Assemble: ‘Granby Four Streets’
References
195
195
196
198
167
170
175
184
188
190
192
193
200
202
205
206
208
212
212
215
218
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CONTENTS
xiii
Epilogue: An Ongoing Struggle Between ‘Art in the City,
the City in Art’
221
Bibliography
231
Index
249
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List of Figures
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 4.1
Fig. 4.2
Fig. 7.1
Fig. 8.1
Fig. 8.2
Fig. 8.3
Fig. 9.1
Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, The Naked City:
illustration de l’hypothese des plaques tournantes en
psychogeographique, 1957, screenprint (Courtesy: RKD
Netherlands Institute for Art History)
Francis Alÿs, Guards, part of Seven Walks by Francis Alÿs,
London, 2004, film still (Courtesy: Artangel UK)
Janet Cardiff, Walk Münster, work in two parts,
consisting of an audio tour and a video installation,
Skulptur Projekte Münster 1997 (Photo: Roman
Mensing, artdoc.de)
Michael Asher, Trailer in changing locations, Skulptur
Projekte Münster 2007, parking position 4th week: Alter
Steinweg across from Kiffe-Pavillon (Photo: Roman
Mensing, artdoc.de)
Regina José Galindo, Presencia (Presence), Athens, 2017,
photo of performance for documenta 14 (Photo: Roberto
dell Orco courtesy of the artist)
Nevin Aladağ, Traces, 2015, three-channel video
with three sound tracks, each film 6 min, dimensions
variable (Copyright and image credit: Nevin Aladağ)
Peter Burke, Whaleburger, Tokyo, 2014 (Photo: Saeko
Ehara courtesy of the artist)
Jason Eppink, Pixelator, New York City, 2007,
installation view (Photo: Jason Eppink)
44
70
73
120
135
142
146
167
xv
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xvi
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 9.2
Fig. 11.1
Fig. 11.2
Simon Denny, Secret Power, Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana Venice, 2015. Installation view (Photo: Nick
Ash. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland)
PVI Collective, Panopticon: Brisbane— Renee goes
for a paddle, Brisbane, 2007. Street intervention
and exhibition. Raw Space Galleries, Brisbane, Australia
(Photo: Emma McLean, courtesy PVI Collective)
PVI Collective, Deviator, Perth 2014. Sack
race intervention. Presented at Perth Institute
of Contemporary Arts, Perth Australia (Photo: Bodan
Warchomij, courtesy PVI Collective)
173
201
211
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CHAPTER 1
Establishing the City’s ‘Ground Rules’
Today’s complex and fast-changing urban model creates vivid opportunities to analyse the interplay between art and the city. In this book I
examine modern and emerging forms of urbanity, and the artistic strategies of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, post-war movements and
contemporary practices to interrogate this relationship across different
layers of the city. A critical appraisal is made of the tensions that arise
between discourses on the city that stress rationality and functionality
on one hand, and a proliferation of creative ‘misuses’ proposed through
diverse forms of art intervention in urban space. Two principal questions
are posed to investigate this dialectical relationship. First, how or why do
the diverse strategies of art interrupt or problematise the city’s rational
order? Second, how do unpredictable encounters with art in urban spaces
broaden awareness of what the city is in terms of its lived experience? In
response, the following pages evaluate a series of artistic strategies that
respond to the city’s rational and functional operating model, its rules
and ideologies, or a series of faceless, repressive powers that organise its
spaces and, by extension, the lives of city dwellers.
From the outset, in this book I distinguish the city as a concept from
lived experiences of a particular city or cities. Using Michel de Certeau’s
(1984) notion of the concept city, detailed in Chapter 3, the city concept
is defined as a top-down rational order that wields a certain panoptical
power to organise and administer the urban space according to its ‘ground
1
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024
E. Masemann, Art in the City, the City in Art, The Contemporary
City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6042-2_1
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2
E. MASEMANN
rules.’ Making use of the city’s streets and squares, buildings and bridges,
artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have interrupted the
city’s rational and spatial order. Such works draw attention to a top-down
system that facilitates and maintains order, structurally or ideologically;
they suggest a struggle between top-down control and the often-fleeting
lapses of order that occur through art from the ‘bottom up.’ What is the
stimulus or provocation that inspires such practices? Art has demonstrated
a capacity to stimulate wonder and to create momentary deviations from
the alienating effects of the city, its everyday rhythms and routines, and
to reimagine pathways through rational order to instigate spontaneous
and subversive creativity. In relationship to the city’s top-down order and
ground rules, a principal objective of this book is to examine art’s potential role in transforming broader awareness of what the city is, or can
be.
Modern city designs inspired concrete monoliths and monuments in
bricks and mortar. In many parts of the world, these have been superseded by today’s spectacles of glass towers, public–private spaces, digitally
saturated pedestrian zones and designer shopping malls. Everyday cycles
of work, shopping and commuting, activated through dominant ideologies, are cemented as a series of norms and routine behaviours to which
artists respond. To participate in the city, as this book confirms, requires
one to conform within an established order and to play by the rules. City
living demands payment of taxes, rates and fines; it prioritises efficiency
through systems such as recycling and transport; it promises security
through large-scale policing, mass surveillance and fortifying homes with
private security systems; it urges compliance vis-à-vis cultural ideologies of
productivity (labour) and consumerism (accumulation). Today, city living
is increasingly impacted by public health policies and net carbon zero
schemes. These demands set a fast-paced urban tempo. To participate,
one must move quickly, efficiently, productively and obediently to avoid
being without space to live, eat or work within the urban system.
But there are groups, and indeed entire urban zones, that do not
participate in the ideal urban order. On the peripheries, the underclasses,
along with an emerging precariat class of temporary workers, eke out an
existence in a lopsided urban system. Unpacked in greater detail in the
next chapter, the city concept, which is rational and functional by design,
routinely ignores the circumstances of groups who huddle under bridges
or in carparks, sheltering in makeshift tents, living hand-to-mouth. In
the in-between spaces of flexible exploitation, temporary employment
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1
ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
3
or illegal activities that fall outside the security offered to compliant
and productive city dwellers, drug use, prostitution and crime routinely
arise. Yet the marginalised, too, are subject to an ideology of regulation:
homeless people are evicted from doorways by private security personnel;
meanwhile the plight of those living in extreme poverty is largely overlooked. Dramatic increases in the cost of living and greater controls on
the freedom of movement is a striking development today. Widespread
discontent, evidenced by large-scale protests in public spaces, suggests an
underlying anger and despair within different socio-cultural groups that
is exacerbated, in turn, by mainstream media.
In a globally connected world, it would seem the city concept needs
urgent review. The question of how to rationally organise the modern
city, which once preoccupied city planners and architects, has been
surpassed by a new urban dilemma. Global think-tanks and unelected
multi-national consortia focus on policies to contain and control population growth in burgeoning cities. In the meantime, media reports of
increasing scarcity—food shortages, environmental crises or property and
economic uncertainty—assail city dwellers from all angles. An unremitting tide of fiscal, climate, housing and food crises; threats to personal
security; increased privatisation and exploitation; job loss or home eviction; together with a perceived dwindling of resources on a global scale,
has resulted in a restless search for stability and order at the level of
the urban. Nevertheless, cities still flaunt an image of limitless possibilities amid competition for titles of ‘most liveable.’ The city is where ‘life
happens,’ where one can rebrand oneself numerous times over. All that is
needed is a laissez-faire attitude and a ‘Terms and Conditions’ waiver to
join in with the latest urban trends.
To render visible the systems of order that control the city: authoritarian or politico-ideological and bureaucratic, there must be an operating
system or set of ‘ground rules’ to which art responds. In this book, I
examine two significant underlying principles that routinely hold the city’s
system of rules in place; the first is a rational-functional order premised on
economic efficiency and productivity; the second is a system of ideological supports that maintain an uncritical, automatic drift into compliance
and consumerism. The first principle is a top-down modus operandi that
is sold as the logical principle and determined through democratic or
authoritarian decree. Order is maintained through the judiciary and law
enforcement that operate by way of disciplinary action, or the threat
thereof, as discussed in Chapter 5. The second principle operates more
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E. MASEMANN
subtly, blinding people to their own lack of agency, as well as that of
the impoverished. An ideology of the city’s normative use, I argue, instils
a habitual necessity to shop, work, consume and update. In short, city
dwellers participate in the city—wittingly or unwittingly—by ‘playing by
its rules.’
Artists have challenged these rules, implicitly or explicitly, at least
since the twentieth century. Their actions identify a series of political,
economic and ideological forces underlying the city’s order that tend
to stifle creative freedom and individual expression. The avant-garde
Situationist International, hereafter Situationists, claimed that modern
capitalism and a nascent bureaucratic consumer society were beginning
to shape their own environment in the mid-twentieth century. Principal
theorist Guy Debord (1961) argued that the modern architectural avantgarde had valorised rationalism and functionalism to the point that it
merged design for the masses with commodity value, removing unconventional or creative approaches to urban life. The Situationists proposed
radical ways to rediscover the ‘pioneering spirit of modernism’ by way of
intervention in the city, as discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
It could be argued that the Situationists’ predictions have in many ways
come full circle. A series of ideological forces that support the idea of
the city as a consumer’s paradise wield power to organise urban realities in accordance with similar principles. Monuments to consumerism
and globalisation include shopping malls and showrooms, advertising
and media firms, distribution warehouses and logistics networks, global
headquarters, banks and corporate towers. Cities are made and remade
as the optimised settings for capitalism’s uninterrupted flow, translated
into spatial terms through the organisation of urban life, conditions of
alienation, and conformity.
What can be done, then, to avoid an uncritical drift into the rational
hypnosis of consumerism in the city? How might we uncover new
meaning in the city’s spaces beyond its utility or coherent order? Are
there ways to expose or rework the city as a place of creative interaction
or spontaneity in addition to its functioning as a system of circulating
people, products and labour? In this book, I scrutinise the discourses by
which a set of rational principles became embedded as the city’s ground
rules, and how artists have responded. A consistent theme that emerges in
the analyses that follow is a resounding conviction that art is not rational
or functional in its essence, and therefore sits at odds with the top-down
urban order. Through its direct or indirect methods, art can challenge an
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1
ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
5
uncritical drift into hyper-consumerism. I aim to examine art’s potential
to work away from the top-down system of the city. Using strategies of
shock and engagement, performative embodiment, playful interludes and
non-sensical installations, art risks irrational breaks from the urban system
that interrupt a perceived seamless reality.
1.1
Facing the Urban Dilemma
Cities today are at a critical point in their evolution. Reports on the effects
of mass urbanisation in the twenty-first century show that more than half
the world’s population live in urban areas (UN-Habitat 2008). By 2030,
it is estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in large
urban agglomerations. As the metropolis morphs into the megalopolis,
demands for cities to respond to this growth have intensified. Sanitation and health care, education and housing, environmental protection
and sustainable energy solutions are pressing issues for city governance.
The need for infrastructure, communication and community services,
employment and waste management remains foundational in the interim.
Urban think-tanks and liveability indices, place-making schemes, corporate consulting and investment firms influence discourses on how cities
can maximise productivity and profitability. The existing meta-narratives
of how cities should perform competitively within a fluctuating global
market are amplified in this context.
Today’s urban discourses are underscored by economic regimes that
influence urban governance: the advance of neoliberalism and, more
recently, stakeholder capitalism. In Europe and the United States, a
neoliberal rhetoric has coincided with the withdrawal of government
responsibility from addressing issues of unemployment and housing crises.
Neoliberalism has reframed urban citizens as consumers and helped
to cement a market logic in city policymaking. Since 2010, austerity
measures introduced by governments, with a growing precarity that incrementally erodes individual security and access to services, have sparked
waves of public unrest. Protests have taken on urgency and provoked
governmental response as demonstrated by the Occupy movement
(2011–2012) and Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (2014). As a squeeze
on urban resources and populations increases, the grip of city governance
seems to tighten. In 2015, the People’s Party in Spain outlawed public
protests near vital infrastructure, such as parliament buildings, transport
hubs, power plants and communication facilities. Penalties were sought
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6
E. MASEMANN
to increase security when proposed austerity measures met fierce public
opposition (Kassam 2015). Such events and legislation demonstrate that
socio-economic tensions are staged and contested in the city’s public
spaces. As cities play a pivotal role in global currents, so do public spaces.
Here, social and political movements continue to emerge to shape their
counter-response to a top-down system and politico-economic policies.
Perhaps the most radical shift today is the impact of Covid-19, which
wrought changes on all levels of society from the individual to the collective. The closing of national borders, lockdowns, enforced sanitation
measures, the restriction of individual rights to move and meet freely, the
monitoring of streets and online content, and a radical shift in the deployment of emergency powers by governments worldwide, presents a new
series of contentious issues that require ongoing meaningful dialogue. In
future, further debate is needed to question government overreach on
one hand, with the perceived threat of a novel contagion for the general
public. Although they fall beyond the remit of the research carried out for
this book, the extreme limitations of access to and use of public space and
the ongoing impacts of long-term isolation, social anxiety and collective
fear, along with the uses of online spaces and responses to public health
policies, dovetail with other ‘big picture’ issues arising in cities today.1
1.2
Scope of the Research
This book is structured by an underlying concern for urban issues that
result from the broad, powerful flows of globalisation, urbanisation,
neoliberalism, consumer culture and surveillance. Emphasis is placed on
what the city’s rules demand from city dwellers in today’s urban Anthropocene and how artists respond. Central to this discursivity are the ways
economic rationalities become embedded and practised as the everyday
reality and ideology of a productive city, which adds new conditions to the
top-down order of the city concept. However, each city deploys its rules
in fundamentally different ways to the next. To account for a vast diversity
1 The restrictions presented in the wake of Covid-19 highlight the issues of governance
that I discuss in this book. Due to the period of research falling prior to Covid-19, the
bulk of art examples analysed here are pre-2020; travel restrictions limited the possibility
of extending the research in 2020 through 2022. Examples of works that made use of
online platforms as a new realm for public art in response to lockdown conditions include:
PluginHUMAN, [i miss your touch], 2020, Victoria Australia and online; and Komunidad
X, KXMOBA, 2020, Manila and online.
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1
ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
7
of geographic, socio-political, cultural or economic specificities, this book
gives a broad account of diverse art practices ranging from the mid-to-late
twentieth century to today. The research draws on art in cities in Europe,
the United Kingdom, North America, Asia and Australasia, avoiding as
far as possible rudimentary divisions of Western and non-Western, Global
North and Global South, developed or undeveloped or Third World.2 I
include a global approach where possible to highlight a degree of consonance between otherwise disconnected artists and practices. Whilst they
are not part of a formal network, the practices can be imagined like a
rhizome, emerging in different parts of the world, yet sharing a synergistic response to comparable concerns. In keeping with the project’s
global aims and scope, a range of cities are incorporated from Mexico
City to New York, Bangalore to London, Guatemala City to Melbourne,
to demonstrate how artists engage with the city in different geo-political
locations for socio-cultural expression. Finally, Hito Steyerl’s Robots today
(2017) discussed in Chapter 11, both indicts remote combat technology
that has destroyed the ancient Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in Turkey and
serves as a reminder that in some parts of the world, cities have been
reduced to rubble in recent years.
Taking account of the different urban dynamics in various global
regions helps to elucidate a series of common issues affecting urban
populations with which artists grapple. An analysis of how cities have
been structured historically in terms of their brute physicality, architecture and urban planning, with the powerful ideologies that disseminate a
programme of normative use of the city, is developed through this study.
In short, the city is not simply a ‘concrete jungle’ into which a heterogeneous mix of art is thrown, but a complex, multi-layered concept that
has evolved across space and time. To decode the city and to expose
the discourses that organise its spaces, provides the foundation from
which art’s relationship with the city can be assessed, both politically and
creatively.
2 This decision was partly influenced by accessibility to art criticism in the English
language and partly due to the art activity encountered through primary research in these
locations.
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8
E. MASEMANN
1.3 Positioning an Artistic
Response and Theoretical Framework
A critical appraisal of the ways artists shape their response to the city’s
rational order and urban issues requires a synthesis of historical perspectives and an assessment of commonalities and differences. I use a multidisciplinary approach to link three areas to assess the rational order in
cities and identify the myriad ways that art challenges this. First, the
historical development of the city through modern urbanisation and the
instrumental functionality of urban planning shows a development of
top-down order. Second, the writing of critical theorists is positioned to
critique top-down approaches to urban organisation. Third, the histories of art practice are situated and debated to actively problematise the
implementation of rational-functional order, using art’s direct or indirect
responses.
The first step in this approach defines a working concept of the city that
visualises how the modern city developed as a rational-functional mechanism of order and control. Eminent urban sociologists Robert Park and
Lewis Mumford both grappled with specific terms to define the city. Park
(1925, 1) defined the city as a state of mind and a product of human
nature that incorporates customs, traditions, attitudes and sentiments that
comprise the ‘vital processes’ of its population, rather than a physical
mechanism or an artificial construction. Mumford (2011), in his 1937
essay, ‘What is a City?’ defined the city as an organisation of geographic,
economic and institutional processes, and a theatre of social action and
collective drama that aesthetically symbolises the conflicts and alliances
created within an urban framework. While both are illuminating, these
definitions are also prescriptive, largely because the linear mode of writing
cannot adequately convey how the city functions in a material reality as
a default entity or construct through which lives and possibilities are
defined. A principal concern of this book conveys the all-encompassing
panoptic concept of the city using theory, while providing a response
through the histories of non-linear or non-literal modes of art practice. I
aim to establish a relationship between art and the city in which tensions
emerge to show how one affects or transforms the other, and vice versa.
The second step is to assemble a range of artistic examples that
broaden the field of enquiry from different genres and periods in art
history. The avant-garde tactics of the Situationists, Fluxus and happenings from the 1960s onward are discussed along with detailed studies
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ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
9
on Gordon Matta-Clark, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Francis Alÿs, Janet
Cardiff, Hans Haacke, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Valie Export, Regina José
Galindo, William Pope.L, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jeremy Deller, Assemble,
Simon Denny and PVI Collective. Tactical responses to political ideologies that exclude disenfranchised social groups are examined in works
from the 1990s, as well as interventions that situate the body in ways
that rupture expectations of coherent normative behaviour. Relational
and socially engaged art practices, and participatory works using digital
networks from the early twenty-first century examine conditions such as
alterity, alienation, exploitation, digital communications and surveillance.
As well as comparing early examples to more recent works, this range of
genres and mediums aims to show the diversity of ways art has disrupted
straightforward readings of the city.
An appraisal of how art relates to the critique of the city requires
considerable synthesis. This includes how art supplements theory with
phenomenal richness, unpredictability and ruptures, and how art renders
the city visible in practical ways. A review of existing critiques about the
city as a place to live is followed by an assessment of how art is situated or discussed within urban discourses. I use a theoretical framework
that brings together different commentaries on the city, positioning art’s
responses in relationship to it. This provides substantial insight into the
mutual constitution of ‘art in the city, the city in art,’ in addition to the
critique art offers about the city.
1.3.1
Situating the Research in the Urban Humanities
This project aims to fill a gap in the current discourse in the subject area
of art history, with reference to an emerging field, the urban humanities.
Urban humanities: New practices for reimagining the city (2020) provides
a theoretical orientation and practical application for the urban humanities in research and teaching. The urban humanities offer a new approach
to the study of cities in a changing global context, including novel ways to
intervene in them, understand their histories, engage with current conditions and speculate about urban futures (Cuff et al. 2020, 2). As a new
methodology for approaching cities, the urban humanities can engage
with wide-ranging practices and applications for research. The field is
yet to include a study incorporating the approaches of contemporary art.
With a singular emphasis on how art intervenes in urban discourses, past
and present, this book speculates on a new perspective that situates art as
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10
E. MASEMANN
a method to delineate how the city is translated in practice. The remit of
the present study is to examine how artists use the city and its spaces as a
medium to problematise its rational-functional concept and how the city
might be practised or contested in ways that reaffirm creativity.
A recent drive to initiate multidisciplinary institutes of architecture,
urbanism and the humanities suggests a broad momentum for the urban
humanities and a strong interest in studies of the collective spaces of urban
life. In the United States, 14 institutes were established with funding from
the Mellon Foundation in 2012. They included the Princeton Mellon
Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities; Global Urban
Humanities Initiative at the University of California at Berkeley; Urban
Humanities Initiative at the University of California at Los Angeles;
and the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and
the Humanities at Cornell University. Meanwhile, at RMIT University
in Melbourne, Australia, the Centre for Contemporary Art and Social
Transformation (CAST) and the Centre for Urban Research study the
intersections of art, socio-cultural and urban dynamics, indicating that
a multidisciplinary approach has wide-ranging interactions with current
academic scholarship.
1.3.2
Literature Review
A range of publications also map out a discursive field that helps to situate
this study. In her seminal study, Evictions: Art and spatial politics (1996),
Rosalyn Deutsche scrutinised the politico-economic ideologies behind
planning and urban development in the United States in the 1980s.
Using critical urban and aesthetic theory on the social production of art,
Deutsche exposed an unspoken agenda in top-down urban planning that
circumvented equitable production of social urban space. She discerned
an association of artists and scholars who used spatial theory and radical
art interventions to challenge a rhetoric of exclusion that had resulted.
Among them, conceptual artists Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko
activated counter-ideologies to resist a politico-economic agenda behind
corporate urban development. Evictions thus provides useful insight into
how economically rationalised urban space has been contested through
art praxis.
Malcom Miles’ Art, space and the city (1997) with Jane Rendell’s text
Art and architecture: A place between (2006), analysed expanded practices of public art in the late twentieth century, clarifying intersections of
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ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
11
public art, architecture, urban design and planning. Miles studied an interaction between lateral urban infrastructure networks and social processes
in art, using a framework that drew on the social sciences, humanities,
architecture and urban design. Rendell’s tripartite framework focussed on
the spatial, the temporal, and the social to analyse the places between art
and architecture. Rendell helped to affirm Miles’ earlier text, proposing
that tensions in public art are inextricable from socio-economic processes,
context and audience. The present book examines art’s relationship to
the city by introducing a different set of criteria: the structural hardware,
relational software, and digital and virtual networks, outlined in the next
section.
In the last two decades, an upward trend in multidisciplinary studies
on art in public space and broader discourses in urbanism is noticeable. Edited anthologies such as The everyday practice of public art:
Art, space, and social inclusion (2015) tested traditional definitions of
public art alongside an evolution of diverse art practices in public spaces.
As an evolving practice in everyday public life, particularly through the
field of social art practice, the book examined pedagogies of public
art in the community, temporary and performance practices. A recent
anthology, The Routledge companion to art in the public realm (2020),
examined new topical approaches in public works between 2008 and
2018. Themes such as activation, social justice, memory and identity, and
ecology, were spotlighted in significant global practices. The complexities of multidisciplinary practices, audience engagement and reception,
with variable geo-political and cultural nuances, emphasised a diversity of
praxis occurring beyond the scope of an existing art world.
Edited anthologies such as Re-imagining the city: Art, globalization
and urban spaces (2013) and Transformations: Art and the city (2017)
focussed on artist-driven exchanges between art and urban studies within
broader processes of globalisation. These volumes contributed significant scholarship to the nascent urban humanities field and provide fertile
ground from which this book broadens an enquiry. Situated at an opening
in the current discourse, the following chapters analyse art practices
at a similar intersection of the arts and humanities, architecture and
global urban studies. On the other hand, Cecile Sachs Olsen’s Socially
engaged art and the neoliberal city (2019) affirms the ready traction
gained through studies of artistic engagement with the city. A practiceled enquiry of socially engaged art that responded to the neoliberal
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E. MASEMANN
city, Olsen’s text offers highly useful insights from within the artist-asproducer dynamic. The book proposed a series of ‘urban imaginaries’
in art against a neoliberal logic that determines the use of urban space.
A central argument is advanced in which art challenges the forces that
diminish funding for art practices, which are not considered in line
with this logic. A Lefebvrian framework of critical spatial practice challenges a neoliberal logic, creating a push–pull dynamic between neoliberal
urbanism and resistance through socially engaged art.
To analyse the complexities of urbanism and intersections with art,
both historically and in today’s Anthropocene, a theoretical frame of reference drawn from different disciplinary fields is needed. In addition to the
works outlined above, a range of art and social theory is recruited for the
discussions that follow. This includes, for example, art theorists such as
Nicolas Bourriaud, Nikos Papastergiadis, Mika Hannula, Jacques Rancière
and Claire Bishop. These voices are complemented by social theory from
Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz. My aim is to implement theory to
highlight or problematise the rational-functional principles by which the
city is organised and expand the possibilities for demonstrating how art
breaks with excesses of rational order and the city’s ground rules.
1.4
Methodology and Outline
The book is divided into three parts to examine the processes and
discourses that link art, theory and the city. Part I: Hardware, Part
II: Software and Part III: Networks correspond with a different ‘layer’
of the city. Hardware focusses on modalities of art that grapple with
the brute physicality of urban structures and a rational-functional plan.
Software focusses on art strategies that interrupt the ‘soft’ structuring
that programmes the city through ideology, the body, and the everyday
in relational spaces such as commuter or pedestrian zones. Networks
focusses on art’s intervention in digital, virtual or surveillance networks.
Each part is designed to reassess the top-down order of the city as
a controlled paradigm that is functional and economically rationalised,
therefore, misanthropic. Dynamic methods of art are situated to provide
a cathartic reimagining of the city, breaking with this hyper-valorisation
of top-down order, while making order visible as an oppressive field that
stifles radical thought about how one might live or dwell in the city.
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ESTABLISHING THE CITY’S ‘GROUND RULES’
13
In Part I: Hardware, Chapters 2–4 establish a history of urban design
to show how a rational-functional order, along with the technologies
of utopian modernism, came to develop concrete expression in the
city’s bricks and mortar. Three case studies are discussed in Chapter 2,
analysing the similarities in the modern transformations of Paris and New
York under master planners Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses. Le
Corbusier’s approach to modern utopian city design is also discussed.
Chapter 3 assembles responses to the excesses of rational-functional order
in the writing of Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacobs, the avant-garde strategies
proposed by the Situationists, and the post-structural theory of Michel
de Certeau. A range of artist strategies from the early twentieth-century
avant-garde, post-war movements to contemporary visual practices is analysed in Chapter 4 to demonstrate provocative strategies that complicate a
rational-functional urban order.
In Part II: Software, Chapters 5–8 theorise a series aesthetic conditions related to ideology and the everyday cycles, routines and rhythms
performed by bodies that cement economic productivity and a normative
use of the city. Software operates in symbiosis with hardware through an
ideological framework that normalises top-down order and is rehearsed
by industrious docile bodies, the subject of Chapter 6, to create everyday
urban appearances, habits and uses of the city, discussed in Chapter 7. The
relational spaces of the city, in which city dwellers go to work, take the
train, shop, recycle and consume, are complicated by art interventions
that radically problematise an ideology of useful bodies and a normative use of city. Chapter 8 analyses art’s strategies of shock, engagement,
rupture, performative embodiment, creative play and moments of surprise
that interrupt the urban software, exposing the everyday as a category of
alienation and despondency in the city.
In Part III: Networks, Chapters 9–11 introduce a nascent infrastructure of digital networks that are layered into the urban hardware. Networks of communication, media, advertising, surveillance, data
harvesting and consumer profiling induce a constant need for city dwellers
to be logged on or plugged in. Chapter 9 assesses theories on the growing
impact of hyper-technology use in cities, including Big Brother surveillance and big data networks. Chapter 10 discusses theories of relational
aesthetics and social art that works away from networked technology
towards social interaction and community-led practices. Chapter 11
assembles a range of art interventions in digitally mediated networks,
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14
E. MASEMANN
forms of networked participation using social media and mobile phone
apps, and practices that expose the invasive optics of neo-panopticism.
References
Cartiere, Cameron, and Leon Tan, eds. 2020. The Routledge companion to art
in the public realm. London and New York: Routledge.
Cartiere, Cameron, and Martin Zebracki, eds. 2015. The everyday practice of
public art: Art, space, and social inclusion. London and New York: Routledge.
Cuff, Dana, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, Maite Zubiaurre, and
Jonathan Jae-An. Crisman. 2020. Urban humanities: New practices for
reimagining the city. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Debord, Guy. 1961. Editorial notes: Critique of urbanism, trans. John Shepley.
International Situationniste 6 (August): 3–11.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and spatial politics. Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press.
Grierson, Elizabeth, ed. 2017. Transformations: Art and the city. Bristol and
Chicago: Intellect.
Grierson, Elizabeth, and Kristen Sharp, eds. 2013. Re-imagining the city: Art,
globalization and urban spaces. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect.
Kassam, Ashifa. 2015. Spain puts ‘gag’ on freedom of expression as senate
approves security law. The Guardian, March 12. https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2015/mar/12/spain-security-law-protesters-freedom-expres
sion. Accessed 30 June 2023.
Miles, Malcolm. 1997. Art, space and the city: Public art and urban futures.
London and New York: Routledge.
Mumford, Lewis. 2011. What is a city? Architectural record (1937). In The city
reader, 5th ed., ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 91–95. London:
Routledge.
Park, Robert. 1925. The city: Suggestions for the investigation of human
behavior in the urban environment. In The city, ed. Robert E. Park, Ernest
W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, 1–46. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Rendell, Jane. 2006. Art and architecture: A place between. London: I.B. Tauris.
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie. 2019. Socially engaged art and the neoliberal city. Abingdon
and New York: Routledge.
UN-Habitat. 2008. State of the world’s cities 2008/2009: Harmonious
cities. London: Earthscan. https://unhabitat.org/state-of-the-worlds-cities20082009-harmonious-cities-2. Accessed 30 June 2023.
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PART I
Hardware
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