Art in the City, the City in Art 9819960428, 9789819960422

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THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

Art in the City, the City in Art Elisha Masemann

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

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.

Elisha Masemann

Art in the City, the City in Art

Elisha Masemann Independent researcher Auckland, New Zealand

ISSN 2634-5463 ISSN 2634-5471 (electronic) The Contemporary City ISBN 978-981-99-6041-5 ISBN 978-981-99-6042-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6042-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Colors Hunter - Chasseur de Couleurs This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Mum and Dad, and Eli Masemann

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the generosity and support of key people. I gratefully acknowledge the following: My family—for the light-hearted interludes and hugs, especially Mum and Dad, for encouraging my academic pursuits, and my son Eli, who is obliging and patient, and a true source of happiness. Your love and support made this journey an unforgettable adventure, thank you. A post-doctoral fellowship in the WiRe programme at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, with the support of Ursula Frohne, that made the final version of this book an achievable goal. Elizabeth Rankin, for her motivating feedback and attention to detail during the editing process. Gregory Minissale, who supervised the original research as a Ph.D. at The University of Auckland and whose stimulating approach to art history pushed my ideas further when needed. The University of Auckland doctoral scholarship that afforded me the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D., and the Emeritus Professor Dame Charmian J O’Connor Postdoctoral Research Award from the Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust, New Zealand that assisted my start in post-doctoral research. The incredible friends and colleagues who have shared kindness and words of wisdom, and anyone else whom I have inadvertently missed here.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

And finally, the artists and theorists whose works have inspired and stimulated my research. While I have made every reasonable effort to acknowledge and cite the attributions of works in this book, any errors, omissions and oversights are entirely my own.

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

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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

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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

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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

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CONTENTS

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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

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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

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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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Part III Networks 9

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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

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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

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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

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CONTENTS

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Epilogue: An Ongoing Struggle Between ‘Art in the City, the City in Art’

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Bibliography

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Index

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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 Alada˘g, Traces, 2015, three-channel video with three sound tracks, each film 6 min, dimensions variable (Copyright and image credit: Nevin Alada˘g) Peter Burke, Whaleburger, Tokyo, 2014 (Photo: Saeko Ehara courtesy of the artist) Jason Eppink, Pixelator, New York City, 2007, installation view (Photo: Jason Eppink)

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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)

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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 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

PART I

Hardware

CHAPTER 2

A Rational City Programme

This chapter examines the ways rational order, and the technology of utopian modernism came to develop concrete expression in the city’s bricks and mortar. Three historical case studies show how architecture and urban planning were incrementally used as instruments for the controlled design and use of cities. In Paris, broad-ranging political and economic changes led to the urban transformations carried out under Baron Haussmann, underscored by Enlightenment principles of rationalism, control and the need to increase industrial productivity, sanitation and visibility. Le Corbusier’s tower city designs highlight an underlying rational-functional logic in modern urban planning and architecture at the outset of the twentieth century. Later, in the mid-twentieth century, the radical changes wrought by Robert Moses in New York razed entire neighbourhoods to build fast moving roadways as a matter of urgency. The sweeping rational-functional logic and top-down order of city planning activated a range of artistic responses from the mid-twentieth century on, to which the next chapters respond.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_2

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2.1 Rationality and Functionality in the Nineteenth-Century City City planning in Europe and the United States largely emerged as the result of extensive socio-cultural, territorial and technological revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A demise of monastic and ecclesiastic rule, coupled with the decline of the aristocracy brought a sharp rise in the influence of the bourgeois classes, together with new cultural ideologies and scientific discoveries. Rapid urban population growth and socio-political lobbying for improved living and working conditions put increasing demand on governments to invest in sanitation, safety and policies for housing and labour. Colonisation and the domination of foreign territories by traditional Western powers, meanwhile, extended the reach for capital production and trade, and provoked revolution and war. Technical advances in the industrial production of trains and ships expanded transport systems for the large-scale movement of people and goods. Architectural progress was largely measured by how it responded to the dramatic increase in urban populations. In the nineteenth century, the population of Manchester grew from 75,000 to 600,000, while Paris grew from 500,000 to 3 million, and London from 1 million to 6.5 million. Higher growth rates were recorded in the United States in the same timeframe: New York’s population mushroomed from 33,000 to 3.5 million, while Chicago’s small population of a few hundred rose astronomically to 2 million by 1900 (Frampton 1980, 21). An ideology of modern progress attended the growth of urban populations, demanding political stability, productivity, coherently organised cities, and, later, improved sanitation and working conditions. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 for Manhattan, for example, articulated order as a priority which was discernible in the clarity of New York’s grid layout. In post-Napoleonic Europe, universal building codes were developed on the principles of rationalism (reason) and functionalism (utility) in architecture. Economical and efficient building designs and street plans were disseminated as a new vocabulary for urban planning across European cities. New infrastructures of bureaucracy and financial administration were part of the modernisation of cities, coinciding with the advance of surplus-based economies and the expansion of market capitalism, colonialism and trade, and consumerism.

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In Europe, the design of cities aligned with Enlightenment principles that conflated natural order with techno-scientific advances in society. Architectural historian Barry Bergdoll (2000, 95) observes that architecture assumed the position of bringing order into the domains of social hierarchy after 1750, as part of an ideology to expand the new emphasis on human rationalism, scientific observation, and experimentation. The role of architecture to organise society is observed in the design of prisons and hospitals in particular where architects were increasingly called on to design buildings and spaces for the distribution of bodies according to the needs of the institution. This validated a link between the structural organisation of buildings and spaces, and top-down order. In Paris and London, the emphasis on structural rationalism in architecture continued into the early twentieth century. Frequently associated with French theorists Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Auguste Choisy, structural rationalism broadly rejected an aesthetic ideal in architecture, promoting instead the utility of a structure and the materials used for its construction. Structural rationalism contributed to rebuilding the bourgeois imperial state, for example, by replacing the maligned royal associations of the Baroque and Rococo styles of the Ancien Régime. Napoleon I demanded useful yet grand structures to enhance his authority, based on monumental form, an ideology of power and economic pragmatism (Frampton 1980, 15). The neoclassicist architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand proposed systematic rational gridded designs that adhered to an austere architectural vocabulary, while existing churches and buildings with religious or imperial links were redeployed under the auspices of public hero worship. Speculative architectures designed for commerce emerged to meet the needs of rising consumerism in Paris in the 1790s. In this context, an economic logic was displayed in the covered passages and archways of the Rue des Colonnes, the arcades that allowed easy strolling for the leisure classes, thereby encouraging consumerism and ensuring the commercial success for the ground floor shops (Bergdoll 2000, 129). In unison with economic shifts, architecture transformed the structural order of Paris and other European cities that followed as urban spaces morphed into places of rational order, readied for consumerism and social spectacle. A politico-economic power is evident in the architectural designs for London’s banks, hospitals and prisons. Classical banking halls removed the bureaucratic act of transactions to an elitist precinct, a public ritual performed in a dignified space beyond the busy city streets (Bergdoll 2000, 120). While in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Leroy’s hospital designs had

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advocated for an architecture of social reform, with the hospital becoming a systematic space for curing, Jeremy Bentham’s infamous prison design, the Panopticon, took this idea to new extremes. Based on the permanent, systematic registration of inmates, it exposed a rationalism of constant visibility for disciplinary control. Despite never being built, the design inspired penitentiaries such as Millbank Prison in London, opened in 1821. Bentham gained notoriety as a central focus in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and punish (1979), the broad implications of which are discussed in Chapter 6.

2.2 Three Case Studies: Haussmann, Le Corbusier and Moses Marshall Berman’s seminal text, All that is solid melts into air (1988) portrays a relationship between the modern transformations of Paris, New York and other cities and the impact on urban societies. His methodology moves between a theory of cultural and economic modernism, the vast destruction and renovation of the city’s bricks and mortar, and its effects, as he discerns them, in celebrated literary works by poets and writers. Berman (1988, 15) usefully positions the creative article as a conduit for translating what he refers to as a “paradoxical unity” to describe urban societies brought together through the unstoppable forces and contentions that underscore an ideology of modernism. Expanding his tripartite frame of reference in this chapter highlights a reciprocity of theory, the city and the artist. In the following chapters, I adapt Berman’s methodology to excavate interconnections in an art historical context to examine how contemporary art practices concretise or critique a similar paradoxical unity in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century. In developing the exemplar, a top-down urban plan is demonstrated by focussing on three case studies: Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. The list is necessarily non-exhaustive and could have included recent examples of urban transformation such as Shanghai’s modernisation into the most rapidly globalised city of the early twenty-first century (Chen and Zhou 2009). In his text, Berman illustrates how a rhetoric of destruction and renewal of cities in accordance with the principles of modern planning inspired literature and art from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Writers expressed vivid encounters with the physical and social upheaval wrought by modernisation, demonstrating how city

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dwellers were swept into a turbulent and rapidly changing maelstrom of modernity. The contradictions and tensions conveyed through literary works represent a paradoxical unity, Berman argues, inspired by a passage from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, from which the book takes its title. Here, as Berman (quoting Marx) sets out, all fixed relationships, ancient prejudices and opinions, are swept away and all newly formed relationships become outdated before they have a chance to solidify (Berman 1988, 21). A theme of paradoxical unity continues throughout Berman’s text, describing a duality of the creative destruction that accompanies modern development in cities. He argues that authors Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, or the literary modernists from St Petersburg, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolay Gogol, resisted or reconciled the contradictions of modernity through their writing. In turn, radical transformation is shown to amplify a paradoxical unity for urban societies pressured by the demands of modern capitalism and a constant reinvention, destruction, and innovation. A modern conundrum posed by the city is thus revealed, in Berman’s (1988, 15) words as a “a disunity of unity.” Dazzling and seductive in its outward display of progress, the city was expressed as a place of uncertainty through impressions immortalised in literature. Three figures dominate Berman’s account of modernism’s ceaseless drive for urban progress. Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses were influential master planners for whom the city was an archetypal symbol of modernism. It therefore needed to be overhauled to reflect the ideologies of progress in the modern era. Each figure looms large in the histories of Paris and New York. Their ambitious visions to transform crowded, congested cities redefined the built environment, including boulevards, bridges, and public and private spaces, into machines for living where human life was organised systematically and efficiently. Closer analysis of these key master planners, illuminated in Berman’s text, documents a historical struggle between top down and bottom-up cultural practices that establishes a foundation for artistic intervention in the city’s rational-functional order. 2.2.1

Baron Haussmann: Tearing Open Old Paris

Berman provides an overview of the tremendous physical and social upheaval instigated under Baron Georges Haussmann in Paris in the

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second half of the nineteenth century. As Prefect of the Seine (1853– 1870) under Napoleon III, Haussmann designed percements, or openings, to drive straight-line demolitions through entire neighbourhoods in Paris’ old quartiers to create entirely new boulevards that are still visible today. These arterial circuits served a two-pronged approach that opened up major thoroughfares for the fast movement of capital goods, while also aesthetically transforming the centre of Paris into a picturesque setting for the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. Haussmann’s cross-axial plan went together with a revolution in financial credit. Floating loans to private landholding and development firms facilitated the building of public works. Napoleon III cemented an alliance between state and market speculation for the remodelling of urban space in his decree that the movement of capital was paramount to the progress of public wealth in Paris (Bergdoll 2000, 249). Haussmann’s tenure therefore parallels a shift from Paris as a medieval city to a city unified by the ‘fever of capitalism’ (Frampton 1980, 24). Architecture was recruited as a major part of Haussmann’s radical new vision. He proposed and implemented the clearing of congested dwellings in a bid to cleanse the city of polluted air and poor sanitation. A secondary motive is also noted. Bergdoll (2000, 249) states that at the time Boulevard de Strasbourg opened, Haussmann is recorded as boasting that this new thoroughfare tore open the heart of old Paris with a wide thoroughfare, gutting the quartiers where riots and barricades had created an impenetrable labyrinth during the Revolution. The promise of transformation therefore doubled as the means to overcome any future threat of political insurrection. In addition, the clearing of bohemian neighbourhoods forced masses of workers from the city’s centre; an estimated 350,000 working class Parisians were evicted during the Prefect’s tenure. According to Berman, the societal impacts of modernisation in Paris are portrayed in the writings of artist and flaneur Charles Baudelaire. ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ an essay partly comprising his manifesto of modernity, was written in 1860 and published in parts in Le Figaro in 1863. Berman (1988, 134) argues that Baudelaire’s essay and his editorials for Paris Spleen, offer vignettes of the often violently opposing visions of modernity the writer grappled with in a rapidly changing city. These glimpses of shifting urban conditions and city dwellers coming to terms with what it means to be modern, highlight a mix of experiences of modernisation during Haussmann’s surgery of Paris. Berman (1988, 147) states that Baudelaire captured something other writers could not see:

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how the ‘modernisation of Paris both inspired and enforced a transformation of its citizen’s souls.’ Baudelaire (1964, 13) characterised modernity as ephemeral and contingent, and offset by its opposite qualities as shown in art: the transcendent and immutable. Baudelaire was a participant and protagonist in the innovations and upheavals occurring in Paris; in a sense his writing embodies the inner tensions as he moves from one who marvels at development, to one who seems cynical of it. In Baudelaire’s prose, the city is both the context and medium in which Berman’s ‘paradoxical unity’ of modernity plays out. Interactions between city dwellers divulge an inner conundrum as expressed in snippets of the everyday lives of Parisians who were suddenly brought face-to-face through the changes of modern industrial capitalism. Inner conflicts appear in Baudelaire’s notation of a tension between two young lovers whose experience of a new boulevard café is interrupted by a family in rags standing on the street looking in at them, and an artist who loses his halo on the boulevard; newly de-sanctified he discovers an authentic experience of life as an ordinary man. Baudelaire invokes the boulevard as the stage for a new set of exchanges. Berman observes that Haussmann’s plan to regulate and rationalise the blueprint of Paris evidently injected a radical new energy into the everyday life of the street, which one senses from Baudelaire, a striking unforeseen outcome was made possible by the invention of the boulevard with all its moving chaos. Berman argues Baudelaire’s writing style has the elusive, ephemeral and contingent qualities that characterise an archetype of modern life and that these vignettes concretise the effects of modernisation for a society confronted by radical transformation. For the purposes of this book, Berman’s assessment of Baudelaire as an observer, participant and protagonist is poignant. Baudelaire shows how a top-down modernisation of the city was internalised and articulated by the city dwellers who experienced it phenomenologically. Berman’s study focusses on literature in urban contexts where urban transformation was confronted and reconciled in writing. Echoing Berman’s earlier model, in subsequent chapters I examine non-literary art practices that, at times, express varied experiences of the city that share consonance with this model. A shift from the external structure of urban hardware to an internalised conditioning is contested and reworked by artists for the purposes of creative interlude, presence and self-actualisation.

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2.2.2

Le Corbusier: The Modern City as a Machine for Living

The turn of the twentieth century ushered in a new era of modern visions and utopian prototypes for the city. An avant-garde spirit generated a panoply of architectural and planning designs, some of which were realised, while many were not. Fresh visions to raze large sections of cities emerged alongside designs for ultramodern tower cities, along with concepts for garden cities and new towns, discussed in architectural histories written by Sigfried Giedion (1946), Kenneth Frampton (1980) and John R. Gold (1997). Notable among these designs were the functional layout of Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle (1917), echoing the geometric replication of the machine age and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Bauhaus inspired Hochhausstadt (1924), with a vertical plan of connected high-rises. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1935) was also notable because it had proposed rehousing Americans on small homestead plots based on an agrarian grid. While an emphasis on economic production and spatial rationality inherited from nineteenth-century designs remained, this new generation of visionaries took the tenets of architectural modernism to new extremes. Le Corbusier was foremost among them. Like his contemporaries, he sought a radical break from attempts in the previous century to bring the medieval city into order. Instead, he took the urban utopia envisaged by Haussmann and turned it into a modern machine for living. Haussmannian boulevards were outmoded next to Le Corbusier’s machines for traffic. Highways emerged as the new basis for city planning as emphasis shifted from a movement of people and goods to the well-organised flow of automobiles and larger transport systems. An avant-garde architectural vocabulary with strong rational-functional principles and new materials, including Béton brut and rough-cast concrete, stimulated his vivid imaginary for tower cities. Architecture’s primary function, however, continued as an instrument for urban planning and the ordering of space and society, as it had in nineteenth-century Paris. Le Corbusier dominated the early twentieth-century period of architecture, alongside advocates of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), New Objectivity, International Style and Bauhaus in the Euro-American sphere. Among these groups, key hallmarks of a modernist style emerged, including an emphasis on functional utility, mass production readiness, aesthetic simplicity and geometric repetition. These were promoted to boost an efficiency of building and productivity, and

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to create simple, practical housing designs based on principles of minimalism. Together, these groups reflected l’esprit nouveau, a new spirit for the modern city in the new century, and strongly influenced the design and rebuilding of cities in the interwar and post-war periods. With an emphasis on clarity, precision, regularity, abstracted elements and minimal ornamentation, l’esprit nouveau was central to Le Corbusier’s practice in the early twentieth century. In existence between 1928 and 1956, the primary goal of CIAM was to establish a methodology in architecture that made use of new technology and construction materials. As CIAM’s most influential figure, Le Corbusier championed functional order to harness chaotic street networks through zoning and a building code for high-rise residential dwellings. The widely influential La Sarraz Declaration, signed by 24 CIAM architects in 1928 pushed for a rationalisation and standardisation as a point of order in building production. The signatories were committed to realising functional architecture and economic efficiency in future-ready modern cities. The more controversial Athens Charter (signed at sea in 1933), based on analyses of 34 cities presented at a conference on functional city designs, had a profound influence on urban planning and housing policy in post-war Europe. However, the hallmark sterility of the CIAM’s projects was not without its critics; several architects broke away, including, notably, the brutalist architectural duo Alison and Peter Smithson in 1956. Ground-breaking ideas for future city planning emerged from the influential meetings of the CIAM and l’esprit nouveau. Although it was designed a few years before the formal grouping of CIAM, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and its original model, the Plan Voisin (1925), demonstrated Le Corbusier’s vision for tower cities based on functional and efficient design. It proposed to raze central Paris and reorganise it for the purposes of rapid movement of people and goods, mass production and an efficient organisation of living, working and leisure zones. It also offered, Gold (1997, 42) states, a potential sterility of both the natural and urban environments. Ville Contemporaine illustrates a modernist vocabulary that tended to categorise and separate zones of traffic, industry and commerce from living and leisure areas. A regular plan intersected by two superhighways formed the basis of a centralised plan, with 24 cruciform skyscrapers in steel and glass served by a six-level interchange for transport, with a platform as its hub. The 60-storey towers were allocated civic and commercial functions; raised on steel and concrete stilts, they

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accounted for just 15% of the available ground space. An open parkland and green belt below the buildings promised unobstructed views, and an impression of a park rather than city living. Such visions were born in a climate of advanced mechanical production and modern capitalism that strongly influenced concepts of regulated space. Le Corbusier envisaged improvement for all in his utopia, but his designs were criticised for driving social exclusion and class division. Where an efficiency of traffic and commerce improved in concept on one hand, city dwellers were divided or isolated on the other. Ville Contemporaine privileged white-collar workers, while the manufacturing and lower classes were assigned to residential zones beyond the green belt (Curtis 1986, 61). The city thus represented a class system in structural form with a capitalist, bureaucratic centre of control, while the cultural and domestic livelihood of a suburban proletariat was overseen by an urban elite of technocrats. As with many of Le Corbusier’s designs, Ville Contemporaine remained theoretical. However, it influenced directions in modern architecture and presents a turning point in the overall way in which cities were planned and built. Le Corbusier’s desire to incorporate a city structure into grand aesthetic vistas indicates his attempt to bridge past and present. Like a palimpsest, a rational-functional and productive nineteenth-century city envisaged by Haussmann is inscribed in the utopian visions of the early twentieth century. Gold (1997, 44) argues that Le Corbusier was simply following an established allegory of planning as the painful, yet necessary surgery needed to improve the overall health of the body. It was for precisely this sort of rationalisation that Max Weber had coined the term ‘iron cage,’ when he claimed that a desire to rationalise life in minute detail would form an iron cage of bureaucratic petrification, and eventually lead to degeneration and atrophy of subjective values and freedom (Kim 2022). However well-intentioned, the claim of the architectural avant-garde that modern principles would revolutionise the new century’s urban rationale, was problematic. A hyper-valorisation of control vis-à-vis rational-functional design and an emphasis on economic productivity, would potentially drive further social division and erode individual autonomy and creative freedom. Significant cracks had already begun to appear in the modernist utopian veneer by the 1950s when the Situationists began a fervent critique of the alienating dimensions of the modernist city. They embarked on a thorough revision of modernism with greater urgency, following in

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the footsteps of urban historians such as Lewis Mumford, who, since the 1920s, had strongly decried the technocratic superiority embedded in modernist planning and architecture (Sadler 1998, 9). The sterility and dull functionalism of the modern paradigm was later challenged by happenings artists, whose non-sensical works contradicted a dominant logic of cities built on principles of categorisation and mechanical efficiency. Their works, examined in detail in Chapter 4, present a critical rejoinder to the rational-functional model of modernism. 2.2.3

Robert Moses: Urban Planning as Surgery in New York

Robert Moses’ tenure as State Parks Commissioner and master planner for New York City signals a pivotal point in twentieth-century modernism. Fundamental changes wrought by the public works he instigated cover a lengthy period from the economic boom of the 1920s to the corruption that brought his system of municipal authorities into public disrepute in the 1960s. As a case study, Moses’ works reveal how the structure of mid-twentieth century New York was transformed through principles of rationality, functionality and productivity. While Le Corbusier forged new directions for city building in the early twentieth century conceptually, Moses had the ambition of Haussmann to get the job done, according to architecture critic, historian and staunch modernist Sigfried Giedion (1946, 831). However, Berman (1988, 294), writing four decades later, was far more critical of the surgery Moses performed on New York, claiming his tenure as the latest iteration of titanic building and destruction following in the wake of Haussmann and Le Corbusier. Some of the foremost public works in twentieth-century New York took shape under Moses’ term. From 1920 onwards, he expressed his vision of what modern urban life could be. His stature increased across four decades through large-scale projects including the Long Island Northern and Southern State parkways, Jones Beach State Park, Triborough Bridge, the West Side Highway, Kennedy Airport, Flushing Meadow Park, and the Cross-Bronx Expressway. These works capitalised on the New Deal, a series of laws and sanctions that provided incentives to reinflate the economy and increase socio-cultural participation in the commercial productivity of cities in the post-war era. But Moses was also shrewd, and he exploited the authority conferred to him by the state for the wholesale demolition of neighbourhoods. Berman (1988, 294) argues that it was a flair for cruelty, obsessive energy and megalomania that

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fuelled Moses’ ambitious vision and momentous rise in reputation. Moses used his authority to convince the public that he embodied a transcendent spirit of modernity; to resist his plans for bridges, tunnels, expressways, dams, sports stadiums and housing developments was to oppose ‘the very idea of progress and modernity itself’ (Berman 1988, 294). Berman’s account involves personal anecdotes of experiencing Moses’ modernisation of New York. He observed his home suburb of the Bronx being hacked through to make way for new expressways, highways and bridges. Berman (1988, 295) laments observing aesthetical traditional buildings being torn down and watching as modern boulevards were demolished to be replaced by the modern inter-state highway. The injection of his personal narrative is striking for the way it echoes the paradoxical unity he analyses in Baudelaire’s writing, bringing an experience of modern development closer to home. He clarifies a dialectical tension running through a history of literature and urban development, even in his own lifetime. Moses’ vision to separate leisure spaces from residential dwellings and workplaces is typified by his overhaul of Jones Beach State Park. Constructed over a swamp and lowland, the park comprised a vast rectangular carpark with straight roads running in both directions. This radical horizontal line was interrupted by a central landmark, an imposing water tower creating a solitary, vertical structure. Opened in 1929, on the surface Jones Beach advertised an idyllic playground beyond the city limits that promised holidays and fun. As Berman (1988, 299) argues, however, this modern leisure space carried with it a unique form of social screening because it could only be accessed and, therefore, experienced by car. The underpasses to access the park were constructed too low for buses to clear them, which restricted public transport from bringing bring masses of people out from the city. This was a subtle form of social screening for all those without independent cars of their own. Distinct leisure spaces such as Jones Beach State Park were a pillar of the modernist vocabulary. Politically and economically, they ensured society was routinely occupied and productive. Everyday life could be structured through categories of work, rest and leisure, neatly defining place and demarcating time. In the case of Jones Beach, this division extended to socio-economic concerns. For the purposes of this book, it provides a model for demonstrating how the bricks and mortar or structural assembly of place, also doubled for the structuring of urban lives.

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Jones Beach State Park anticipated Moses’ most ambitious projects. The Triborough Project was a complex network of bridges and highways that knitted together the metropolitan areas of Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester, with Queens and Long Island. Ambitious and costly, yet brilliant in its technical construction, these works transformed New York’s metro areas, giving the city clarity and coherence, and feeding a new generation of the urban imaginary (Berman 1988, 299). Vehicle and pedestrian traffic were separated as a matter of priority, confirming the movement of traffic, workers and commercial goods as fundamental for the modern city. With shades of Le Corbusier’s earlier claims, Giedion (1946, 832) wrote that the city street running between rows of houses no longer had means to exist. Berman (1988, 302) claims, Moses’ projects presented a new phase of modernisation in the city. This planner wrestled with the city’s parks, roads, buildings and its people until they were ordered coherently as one master plan. By the late 1950s, however, his vision showed signs of unravelling. According to Berman, Moses’ tyrannical fantasies, his contempt for people, as well as the scale of corruption that plagued him, were contributing factors. Wielding power, position and influence to enforce his comprehensive master plan in the name of modern progress also meant sweeping away the livelihoods, neighbourhoods, histories and traditions of thousands of city dwellers that he deemed incidental, collateral, or objects in the way. Berman (1988, 302) argues a growing unwieldiness of Moses’ destructive machine was reflected in the brutal style of architecture in the public works that emerged; designed to overwhelm and overawe, they displayed his ferocious disdain for anything human or natural. A growing divide between the conceptual scale at which the surgery of the city was planned and executed from the top down, and the impact or experience of it at street level, is highlighted here. Moses held the authority to dissect the city, carrying it out like an operation to implement a new super-urban reality. Grand-scale demolition and rebuilding continued unabated across four decades, working the city over as one rational-functional order. Although Moses’ urban surgery differs from the influence of Haussmann and Le Corbusier, they are connected in two major concerns. First, the ideology of modernism in city planning and design was based on the application of rationality or reason and the implementing of a logical structure to harness the disorder of the city, leading to architectural rationalism. In its extreme form, a rational approach led to urban

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planning being executed as painful yet necessary surgery in cities such as Paris and New York. Second, structural utility gradually displaced aesthetic concerns for architecture, leading to the adage: form follows function. These case studies demonstrate that the primary function for the city almost exclusively concerned the clarity of order and the efficient movement of commerce and goods, followed by a division of social and economic zones. The requisition of architectural design for the ordered distribution of the city’s bricks and mortar to meet rational-functional principles impacted the lives of city dwellers, sometimes in devastating ways, as Berman’s text demonstrates. A top-down order advanced through consecutive modernist visions for rebuilding cities in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set out to solve issues such as overcrowding, poor sanitation and traffic congestion. But at the same time, it created others. The excesses of a rational-functional order are tangible in a lack of individual autonomy to withstand the assault of modern transformation, the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, socio-economic divisions in planning strategies, with signs of alienation and despondency recorded by authors such as Berman, who experienced first-hand the forces of urban renewal. Such issues were passionately confronted by Jane Jacobs, whose major work on American cities is discussed in the next chapter. Before we turn to detailed analyses of how artists have complicated the city’s hardware, the next chapter outlines theoretical contestations that bring further context to art interventions in the city as a creative and moral necessity.

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The painter of modern life and other essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon. Bergdoll, Barry. 2000. European architecture 1750–1890. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1988. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Penguin. Chen, Xiangming, and Zhenhua Zhou, eds. 2009. Shanghai rising: State power and local transformations in a global megacity, NED-New edition, vol. 15. University of Minnesota Press. Curtis, William J. R. 1986. Le Corbusier: Ideas and forms. London: Phaidon Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

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Frampton, Kenneth. 1980. Modern architecture: A critical history. London: Thames & Hudson. Giedion, Sigfried. 1946. Space, time and architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gold, John R. 1997. The experience of modernism: Modern architects and the future city 1928–53. London: E & FN Spon. Kim, S. H. 2022. Max Weber. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2022 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/weber/. Accessed 30 May 2023. Sadler, Simon. 1998. The situationist city. Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press.

CHAPTER 3

Critical Responses to the City Plan

In this chapter, I focus on key theoretical responses to the excesses of rational-functional order in the modern city. The cornerstones of architectural modernism and twentieth-century urban planning—rationalism and functionalism—were challenged by Henri Lefebvre (1995), Jane Jacobs (1961), and the Situationists, who were active between 1957 and 1972. These writers and artists claimed that the city increasingly displayed an overt functionalism driven by planning and architecture that had severely reduced creative expression. As they problematised the modern visions of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, with an ascendency of capitalistfuelled consumerism, through their individual experiences they illustrated the tangible effects of twentieth-century urban transformations. Michel de Certeau (1984) provided a further rejoinder in his illustration of the concept city and the micro-scale resistances he argued were evident in everyday life, situating a means of escape from rational-functional order.

3.1

Henri Lefebvre: The Problem with Mourenx

Henri Lefebvre’s 1960 essay ‘Notes on the new town’ (1995), was written in response to the rational -functional plan of Mourenx, a purpose-built French town in the Département des Pyrénées Atlantiques. Built in 1957 to accommodate 15,000 workers at Lacq, a natural gas processing plant, aluminium smelter and chemical factory, Mourenx epitomised the French © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_3

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government’s post-war social housing. Known as les grands ensembles , these modern housing projects were distinguished by technical, financial, and administrative refinement in planning and efficiency of building. Similar to grands ensembles built at Sarcelles, Vernouillet and Épinay-surSeine, Mourenx projected a modernist architectural vision of the villes nouvelles and tower cities promoted by Le Corbusier and the CIAM. Mass housing shortages and depleted resources in the post-war period made these cost-effective, readily constructed high-rise projects an effective way to house labourers outside the main city centres near manufacturing sites. From a distance, Mourenx seemed tolerable to Lefebvre as he compared it to the rustic village of Navarrenx where he lived, a few kilometres away. The alternating vertical and horizontal lines of Mourenx’s tower blocks offered an attractive regularity. Moreover, the blocks of flats were planned well and provided comfortable, secure housing for the town’s residents. The architectural design and technical layout for these machines for living promised human-scale connection and greater fluidity between individuals, community and nature. Lefebvre (1995, 118) pondered the possibility of a new humanism emerging in a town like Mourenx, visualising residents in well-lit accommodation with purposefitted drying rooms, radios and televisions, contemplating the world from the comfort of their living rooms. But his enthusiasm was short-lived. The town’s rigid layout and explicit functionalism seemed to eschew social cohesion, community or natural impulse. Mourenx had a utilitarian purpose; its plan was a centralised design with three collective housing groups and three neighbourhoods for single-family dwellings. Its residential policies extended to minute details for the position of television antennas on housing units, the growing of vegetation, the drying of clothes, and the use of parking lots. Lefebvre objected to this explicit approach to the town’s function and layout. He argued that Mourenx replicated the hierarchy of nearby factories where its residents toiled. An organisational chart was made apparent through socio-spatial groupings: the workers were housed in concrete block flats, supervisors in towers, and management personnel in villas. This rationalisation of action and labour shares consonance with concepts of Fordism and Taylorism. A collaboration of systems of mass manufacturing pioneered by the Ford Motor Company with the techno-scientific management and efficiency of the Taylor system, captured an underlying rational-functional logic in modern town planning for the purposes of greater productivity. This is especially evident in les grandes ensembles.

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Lefebvre’s main concern was that the overbearing rational-functional design in Mourenx would stifle creative expression and individual autonomy. He (1995, 119) claimed that every object in the town had a specific function and wore this function like a set of social credentials, declaring its use to the neighbourhood and repeating the proclamation endlessly with every object in town. Lefebvre argued that such a tireless display of function ended up signifying itself and nothing else, a signalling system like a set of traffic lights that direct actions. This hypervalorisation of function left little scope for interpretation or spontaneity. Therefore, Lefebvre queried the extent to which residents of Mourenx could express themselves distinctly, given the excesses of a functional order. Would everyone follow the signal system for shopping in the designated shopping centre, or gaining advice from the assigned advice bureau? In other words, did Mourenx allow for creative expression and freedom in its public spaces, as was the promise of its modernist design? In raising this query, Lefebvre’s close study exposed a paradox in the modernist vision of machines for living. He concluded that Mourenx was so rigidly planned, with its utility so tightly wound and explicitly displayed, that there was no capacity for a unity of the natural and urban, or for the social cohesion of individual and community. Its fate, he lamented, was inevitable collapse. Afterall, how could diversity flourish where anything non-functional was already redundant? Lefebvre’s analysis laid down some of the groundwork that contextualises the Situationists’ fierce critique of modernism, discussed below. It also dovetails with Jane Jacobs’ diatribe of modern urban planning and the effects wrought on American cities, published one year after Lefebvre’s essay.

3.2 Jane Jacobs: Modern Urban Planning as the “Sacking of Cities” Jane Jacobs’ The death and life of great American cities (1961) is a benchmark study on urban design and planning in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Jacobs exposed the desperate state of construction and design, with a troubling obliviousness of the everyday experiences and social life of cities following decades of failed urban renewal schemes. The excesses of rational-functional order, spearheaded by developers and master planners such as Robert Moses who sought to maximise economies of space in public and private works in New York, had continuously razed

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apartments, demolished roads and buildings, and eroded neighbourhoods, communities and livelihoods. The modern urban transformation had promised improved productivity and efficiency in American cities. Jacobs (1961, 4) argued instead that a decline in the vibrancy of cities was evident; rather than saving cities, this was the “sacking of cities.” Like Lefebvre, Jacobs observed a dull functionality spreading in cities that she argued had its origins in modern utopian city planning. The influence of Le Corbusier’s tower cities, along with Ebenezer Howard’s concept for garden cities, was responsible for the urban dilemma of the 1950s. Conceived in England in the 1890s, Howard had proposed to move poor people out of heavily congested English cities into new towns. Jacobs’ (1961, 17) disapproval was palpable: “his aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.” Although novel in concept, the garden city plan was widely adopted in the early-twentieth century. Masses of city dwellers were relocated to new towns similar to Mourenx. Le Corbusier had reworked the garden city ideals into his 1930 design for Ville Radieuse, applying it to higher density living. Despite the design remaining unrealised, Jacobs (1961, 23) had offered a scathing review: Aside from making at least the superficial Garden City principles superficially practicable in a dense city, Le Corbusier’s dream contained other marvels…His city was like a wonderful mechanical toy. Furthermore, his conception, as an architectural work, had a dazzling clarity, simplicity and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand. It said everything in a flash…Like a great, visible ego it tells of someone’s achievement. But as to how the city works, it tells, like the Garden City, nothing but lies.

Jacobs’ main issue was the rigid functionality in both design and plan that was tirelessly promoted by garden and tower city advocates. By the 1950s, manifestations of concrete-slab constructions, known in the American context as the super-block and project neighbourhoods, had become synonymous with the failures of modernism, with dystopia rather than utopia. They were largely associated with poor socio-economic outcomes, and viewed as centres of crime, social fragmentation and alienation.

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Modern urban designs merged with economic incentive to drive urban development towards rational-functional order in American cities between 1945 and 1960. Jacobs criticised the way in which this marriage brought with it the ‘price-tag of the postcode,’ including newly created social barriers with inclusive and exclusive zones. This coincided with Victor Gruen’s vision of the ultimate consumer’s paradise, the shopping mall, which projected a new urban imaginary. Artificial lighting, modern architecture and marketing transported shoppers to an invented no-place disconnected from the city outside, while normalising rituals of buying, consuming and spectating. Jacobs (1961, 7) argued that the emergence of numerous developments were reducing both city and countryside to “a monotonous, unnourishing gruel.” Meanwhile, small and mediumsized businesses were forced to close in record numbers, with city dwellers increasingly dispersed in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. Jacobs identified a vulgarity of design, along with a dullness and standardisation in planning and building codes, as key contributors to the demise of American cities. In addition, the failure of public offices to deliver the funds promised to address urban problems, generated hopelessness. She (1961, 4) decried the unchecked demise of modern building projects, “worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace,” while middle-income projects, she labelled “marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life.” Jacobs shares Lefebvre’s disapproval of modernism’s machines for living, asserting that the vision of utopian city living had well and truly failed to deliver ‘the good life.’ Following Jacobs’ study, this recurring theme in urban planning became especially prominent from the 1980s. Rosalyn Deutsche’s book, Evictions: Art and spatial politics, published in 1996, highlights an alliance of urban planning and the economic imperatives set out by developers in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s as ‘uneven development.’ Through the work of key artists such as Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko, whose works confronted aspects of public corruption and social decline, Deutsche showed how the workings of uneven development routinely ignored groups of homeless people and low wage workers who were pushed out of central areas to make way for new offices and apartments for city bureaucrats. I return to Deutsche’s text in Chapter 8

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to discuss the influence of ideologies that ritualise social hierarchy as a normative standard in the city. For the purposes of this chapter, Jacobs’ critique of the affects of modern urban planning presents a rejoinder to the excesses of rational functionalism. She highlighted the empty promises and failures that followed modernism and clarified the contributing factors in a growing socio-economic disparity in American cities. Jacobs’ enduring claim was that the authentic life of the city thrived in its streets and neighbourhoods, fostered through local communities rather than implemented by modern construction. She implored urban planners to tap into the city’s ‘marvellous order’ to better grasp the possibilities for safe, supportive, creative and diverse cities that could avoid future planning disasters. In an oftenquoted passage, Jacobs (1961, 50) likened the diversity of the everyday city street to a dance: Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance…an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.

Jacobs was inspired by a vibrancy she experienced in in her Greenwich Village neighbourhood in New York where a ‘family of eyes’ safeguarded the community. Her pastoral vision is not without its critics too. A wellestablished criticism is the absence of any discussion of race in the context of the development in cities, with a lack of solutions offered to the many issues associated with top-down development that she presented. Jacobs’ study has nevertheless endured, stimulating ways to rethink the impact of the city’s bricks and mortar on a collective psyche and social vitality, or how the city’s physical structure, or hardware, directly impacts the lived experiences of the city. Her criticism of the issues emerging from the modernist approach to urban planning and design coincided with early Situationist theories in Europe in the late 1950s, intensifying a total reproach of modernism and bureaucratic society in the two decades following Jacobs’ text.

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3.3 The Situationists: Drifting from the Rational The Situationists pioneered a radical reassessment of modernism’s rational-functional approach to the city through theoretical debates that emerged contemporaneously with the works of Lefebvre and Jacobs. Key agitators Guy Debord and Asger Jorn vigorously condemned two pillars of modernism: rationalism and functionalism. Rationalism, they argued, had restricted architecture to a structural technology producing hardedged geometric design, and thereby limited capacity for unconventional expression to emerge within the remit of urban life. Functionalism, on the other hand, in alliance with state enterprise and mass production, had reduced design to a banal utilitarianism geared for labour and industry, instead of creativity or spontaneity. The Situationists claimed that modern architecture had been corrupted when it merged design for the masses with commodity value. They opposed the modernist machine for living, which they claimed had generated passive submission, and in which individual life was sandwiched between the machine for working in and the machine for eating and sleeping in (Sadler 1998, 7). In the dystopia of prefabricated cities created by modernism they saw a superior machine that had absorbed city dwellers into a new totality, isolating them from each other, and reducing their lives to triviality and repetition. While they acknowledged that the modernists had set out to revolutionise cities and create a universal standard for clean living, the Situationists claimed that rationalism and functionalism were bound by the demands of state capitalism and therefore served the demands of a growing consumer society. Capitalist accumulation had come to dominate all relations, resulting in a society consumed by the spectacle, a term that for the Situationists denoted a particular “manufactured wonderment, a hype that concealed real processes of exploitation” (Sadler 1998, 17). Intervention in the city was needed and evolved with clarity in Debord’s text, The society of the spectacle, first published in 1967. Debord (1994, 12) argued that the seductive illusion of the spectacle asserted itself as a unified consciousness across all layers of society, imposing a false consensus that concealed a shift towards separation, alienating individuals from creative freedom and autonomy. As a social phenomenon, the spectacle signified a never-ending stream of news, media images, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and ready consumables that ensnared

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its audience, and, as a consequence, affirmed or justified consumer-based capitalism as the dominant mode of production. The Situationists set out to break through this hypnosis and shake society free of the spectacle. Their strategies evolved from the minimal and conceptual approaches established by the earlier Lettrist International in Paris; the expressionist, inventive unruliness proposed by the COBRA movement in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam; and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. The genealogies of these groups had merged with the formation of the Situationist International in 1957. The Situationists proposed a radical revival of modernism’s pioneering spirit with revolutionary concepts for intervention in the city. A priority, Sadler (1998, 11) states, was to “convert avant-garde interest in everyday space and mass culture into a revolution,” and the Situationists insisted that this “politico-artistic struggle be played out at the ultimate level: that of the city itself.” The city was seen as the entry-point for the seductive influence of capital and consumer activity, the backbone of the spectacle, and was therefore central to the Situationists’ attack. They asserted that urban society had grown complacent, controlled by the means of production rather than giving city dwellers the means to assert their own direction or creative expression. 3.3.1

Overcoming the Society of Spectacle: Three Situationist Strategies

In order to reverse the somnambulism created by an overbearing functionalism and seductive allure of the spectacle, the Situationists proposed a number of radical strategies to take charge of the city. The power of the spectacle was wielded through advertising in the form of billboards, magazines and radio commercials. Ideologies of consumerism were also integrated in popular public environments such as bars, restaurants and drive-in cinemas. The Situationists argued that when this layer of artifice that represented an illusory modernity was removed, one might discover an authenticity of the city moving beneath (Sadler 1998, 15). Therefore, it was on this terrain that the Situationists were to act. Their three major strategies evolved through theory and practice. These included détournement , a rerouting or hijacking of media, sites or monuments associated with the spectacle; the dérive, an experimental and playful drifting through streets, parks and spaces to discover different ambiences; and psychogéographie, a close study of the effects of a specific

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environment on one’s emotions and behaviours, without the interference of rational thinking, time or a planned route. Further strategies included situations , spontaneous moments initiated to interrupt the flow of commodity culture, and urbanisme unitaire, the vision of a new urban milieu in which culture would be united through active participation and connection to place. While my analysis here focusses on détournement , dérive and psychogéographie, the influence of Situationist strategies is broad ranging, as demonstrated by the art practices they inspired in the late twentieth-century, which are discussed in the next chapter. Détournement proposed a take-over and subversion of the physical emblems of the spectacle. Raids on official culture included attacks on political theory, popular literature and films, fashion magazines and advertising. By dismantling and reassembling the symbols of mass production, the Situationists aimed to expose the mechanics by which the spectacle entranced and disempowered modern society. Détourned phrases disrupted the messaging of posters, records, radio broadcasts and metagraphic writings to produce sardonic and non-sensical effects, and to express indifference to the original subliminal messaging of commodity culture. Articles and collage images exemplifying détournement often appeared in low-budget publications such as the Lettrist International bulletin Potlatch. Partly recalling Dada collage and assemblages, which frequently misquoted advertising, newspaper articles and advertising images, this tactic also anticipated practices of culture jamming in the 1970s and 80s that subverted and parodied advertising messages. Elsewhere, the Situationists removed street signs altogether, while the anarchic possibilities proposed for a détourned city included the addition of light switches on streetlamps to bring lighting under public control (Sadler 1998, 110). Such actions set in motion a politically charged and moral imperative for the radical disruption of the spectacle’s broadcast systems and the city’s top-down order. The strategy primarily negated the alienating effects of consumer-driven propaganda, which, according to the Situationists, had corrupted society and forced it into a subordinate, self-perpetuating spectacle. By contrast, the dérive involved spontaneous drifting through urban spaces guided by sensory effects and the element of chance. Dérive was a method by which Debord and the Situationists proposed to rediscover the poetic and political potential of the city. It was associated with psychogéographie as both strategies proposed to discover the unfamiliar by displacing the familiar to create playful and unexpected experiences in

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different urban environments. Through the dérive, the Situationists had an opportunity to analyse the effects of their unplanned journeys through urban surroundings, allowing subconscious feelings, intuitive senses, or emotions to guide their choice of route. But the dérive was not to be mistaken for the idealism of flânerie. In his 1958 essay, ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ Debord (in Knabb 2006b, 62) described the dérive as a rapid movement through diverse ambiances involving playful yet constructive behaviour and an awareness of the conscious effects of one’s surroundings. Encounters with contours and variations were to be navigated vis-à-vis psychogéographie, meaning the two strategies were co-dependent, with the latter ultimately shaping the outcome of dérive. The process of letting go and drifting nevertheless required some degree of cognitive or perceptive input to respond to changes and possibilities in each vicinity. Drifters could not after all completely set themselves adrift; the practice relied partly on chance, but also partly on the urban space in which the activity was contained. Despite its claim of spontaneity, the dérive was thus not without physical or cognitive limit. Ultimately, Sadler (1998, 78) explains, the dérive was indeed dependent on psychogéographie: The drift was a combination of chance and planning that reached various stages of equilibrium. In his concern that ‘letting go’ might collapse back into surrealist automatism, Debord overlooked the fact that drifters could not completely ‘let go’ even if they wanted to. Psychogeography was formed and validated by a situationist discourse and culture that couldn’t be just blanked out at will…The result – an organized spontaneity – was something of an oddity, and it certainly didn’t collate much real data.

In other words, the act of letting go and allowing chance to guide the movements of dérive was not easily reconciled with the cognition on which psychogéographie also depended. The Situationists resigned themselves to claiming that dérive was partly dependent on chance with a degree of letting go. In the early Situationist texts, Debord (in Knabb 2006a, 39) had defined psychogéographie as the study of ‘the laws and effects of geographical environment’ wittingly or unwittingly organised around the emotions and behaviour of the individual. This practice proposed to explore a new urban imaginary. Like the dérive, it offered subjective ways to rediscover the city suspended between the fluidity of experience and its objective

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concerns. Sadler (1998, 76) states that it was a reverie that directed the Situationists to obscure destinations without a fixed plan, drifting “from the ideal and the rational to the extraordinary and revolutionary.” The strategy layered perception onto dérive, theoretically at least. But Debord (in Knabb 2006a, 39) also specified that, depending on the methods of observation that were adopted and their findings, psychogéographie was an opportunity to intervene in concrete ways in urbanism, to actively observe architectural structures of the city and to prepare hypotheses for a future Situationist city. 3.3.2

Mapping Situationism in the City

The combined objectives of dérive, psychogéographie and détournement were given pictorial form in a series of alternative maps. In collaboration with Asger Jorn, Debord collaged together fragments of topographical maps of Paris, reassembling them to render the originals defunct in both format and function. The 1956 Guide psychogéographique de Paris and The naked city (Fig. 3.1), produced a year later, illustrate a disorientating yet striking bird’s eye view of the city. Both maps took sections from the 1956 Plan de Paris à vol d’oiseau by G. Peltier, and a street atlas, the 1951 Guide Taride de Paris, cutting them up and rearranging them (Wollen 1999, 32). The maps lend a visual tangibility that complements the dérive and psychogéographie, while a Cartesian logic of conventional mapping was displaced through an act of détournement . The situationist versions featured landmarks such as Gare de Lyon on the right-hand edge, the Palais Royal and Jardin du Luxembourg on the left. These are haphazardly silhouetted against a neutral background to appear like floating islands connected by red arrows that suggest movements between them. The Situationist maps are significant artefacts that convey a confrontation of modern urban planning in Paris during a period of renewed urban transformation. The maps not only display the possibilities for psychogéographie or an indifference to the culture of spectacle by drifting across Paris in pursuit of anarchic or playful interlude. They present a unique perspective on concurrent changes in the urban context. In some areas, they capture the remnants of bohemian neighbourhoods such as les Halles or Halles aux Vins, still intact before the post-war urban renewal programmes implemented by the de Gaulle government that were unprecedented since Haussmann’s urban surgery of Paris. At least one third of old Paris is estimated to have been razed during de Gaulle’s

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Fig. 3.1 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)

Fifth Republic to make way for transport hubs, shopping malls and universities built from béton brut in a neo-Corbusian style (Sadler 1998, 58). The Situationist maps can therefore be viewed as a poetic homage to a city on the brink of demolition and renewal, and recalls the ‘paradoxical unity’ that Marshall Berman (1988) discussed in the context of urban transformation, analysed in Chapter 2. In correspondence with fellow Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys in 1959, Debord had included an alternative version of The naked city that featured new text, postage stamps and pictures of soldiers entering the map at different points. Debord had tilted the map, Life continues to be free and easy, which appears inconsistent with the map’s palpable allusions to colonialism and war, and in light of the Situationists’ clashes with modern urbanism. Nevertheless, psychogeography and playfulness are readily apparent in the medium and technique used (Sadler 1998, frontispiece). This Situationist map, especially one with hand-coloured soldiers added, anticipates the peripatetic works of Francis Alÿs, analysed

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in the next chapter. The visual collateral from Alÿs’ Guards (2004–2005) walk in London features hand-drawn Coldstream guards on a map of London’s Square Mile with similar red arrows directing an alternative route. By design, the map is non-functional. Any sense of utility ordinarily found in a city map has been removed, articulating instead, in the Situationist spirit, a non-rational means to rediscover the city. The fleeting effects of dérive and non-rational dimensions of psychogéographie were activated as creative intrusions in everyday life to pierce the veil of the capitalist spectacle. A strategic assault on the senses was proposed to make the city strange and provoke revolution in urban life. Temporary, dynamic and imprecise situations could rupture the ubiquitous façade of valorised commercial culture which promoted novelty and a fetishising of new products in everyday life. Participation in situations and dérive would constitute a new urban dynamic and disrupt capital flows and bureaucracy, leading to unitary urbanism, envisaged as a social and artistic project in cities. Unitary urbanism was the final stage of the Situationist project; it proposed to end capitalism’s ordering of space for production and circulation to remake the city for the purpose of enriching everyday life (Sadler 1998, 117). Defined by its use of the arts to compose a new vitality in the modern milieu, unitary urbanism proposed a radical theory of a city joined by situations, détournement and dérive practices. This was an ambitious project that remained largely theoretical until the Situationists officially disbanded in 1972. Despite a widely held view that Situationism failed as a movement, its influence was broad-ranging and offered a set of powerful revolutionary concepts that came to represent a metaphor for a more creative life. Traces of the interrogative class-consciousness stirred up by the ‘last avant-garde’ can be detected in twentieth-century counter-cultural groups responsible for radical politics, union strikes and the student protests of 1968, to the beginnings of the punk era and provocative visual art practices in the 1970s. In turn, the Situationists prepared the ground for antagonistic art interventions in the bureaucratic and spatial order of the city, discussed in the chapter that follows. Situationist concepts are thus far from obsolete. Their legacy is not a seamless continuity, nor were their strategies adopted outright, however. While there are serious deviations from the polemical and theoretical foundations of Situationism in art, there are also substantial links within the trajectories of art history. These help to

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convey imaginative expression in an urban context to break with rationalfunctional order, bringing attention to the ephemeral and the power of spontaneity in everyday life.

3.4 Michel de Certeau: Critiquing the Concept City By the time the Situationists officially parted ways in 1972, a new field of critical theory had emerged in France. Post-structuralism had evolved in the late 1960s and 1970s, challenging and expanding the tenets of structuralism, a branch of intellectual enquiry and literary criticism that identified patterns in language and social arrangements. Characterised by an emphasis on the fluidity of meaning and a radical plurality of knowledge acquisition, post-structural theorists analysed the variations of social, political, cultural and economic variables in semiotics, phenomenology and epistemology. The works of post-structural theorists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard are discussed in later chapters. Michel de Certeau’s seminal text, The practice of everyday life (1984) also signalled a new direction in the philosophy of everyday life. De Certeau shifted focus from structuralism’s preoccupation with objective representations of culture to the misuses or appropriations of culture or representations of culture. The contingency or instability of meaning this introduced was theorised as vital to overcoming hardened or fixed mechanisms of control. 3.4.1

The Concept City

De Certeau’s notion of the concept city signals this shift. He identified a series of subtle, open-ended tactics that readily occur in everyday life that help to reimagine resistance in response to top-down order. Undetectable but potent, these tactics proliferate in the city, destabilising its assumed order or meaning. To contextualise how they operate, he expanded on the concept city using a metaphor of the Icarian bird’s eye view of Manhattan viewed from the top of the former World Trade Center. He (1984, 92) describes a simulacrum of order, or an “optical artifact” that is at odds with how the city is used or experienced below. From above, the city is suspended, much like a photograph; a complex, dense mobility is made legible to its beholder as one all-encompassing panorama. This is a simulated vision of cartographic space mapped elsewhere by urban planners

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and therefore has the appearance of rational-functional order. The viewer becomes the visionary, or voyeur, wielding a panoptical power as the city is easily surveyed and consumed in one sweeping glance. But this view exposes a binary logic. How is the city, in all its complexity, planned from above and simultaneously practised from below? Beyond the threshold of visibility there are masses of people, the ordinary practitioners of the city, who trace what De Certeau (1984, 97) calls “the chorus of idle footsteps.” Their micro-scale pedestrian movements are generally unremarkable, yet they actualise the possibilities of the city’s spatial order. The Icarian view therefore becomes contradictory or false, he argues. The city exists in concept to justify the need for top-down order, or to clarify the means of control, and, by extension, prioritise functionality to safeguard the means of production. The concept city is fixed in its plan and meaning, De Certeau (1984, 94) states, like ‘a proper noun,’ to provide a method of constructing space according to stable, divisible, and interconnected properties. The city concept needs this foundation to supress the details of unresolvable, stubborn resistances to arrive at a common subject: the city itself. Only by this top-down logic can the city perform as an apparatus of administration and discipline, or rational-functional order. 3.4.2

Contesting Rational Order: Ways of Operating and ‘Making Do’

De Certeau (1984, 97) elaborates on the anonymous walkers who author urban texts, or ‘pedestrian speech acts,’ by crossing, drifting, improvising or adopting different aspects of the city. The stories told by bodies in motion unfold through a fragmentation of the city’s spaces that are knitted together in new trajectories based on each author’s movements. From the meandering steps of pedestrians that deviate from the city’s concept, it is possible to anticipate subtle forms of resistance that appropriate the urban system in unpredictable or unknowable ways. Ways of operating and making do visualise the tactics De Certeau claims are readily apparent in everyday life at the grassroots level of the city. The metaphor of walking is expanded through De Certeau’s allegory of enunciation. A speaker who composes a speech uses the topography of language, just as a pedestrian adopts the topography of the city to act out place and space. Variations of tone, rhetoric or words that escape language categories used in speech, correspond with a pedestrian’s handling of the

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city’s constructed order. In this way, De Certeau (1984, 117) illuminates the link between pedestrian movements and speech acts; walking is an action of affirming, suspecting, transgressing or trying out the variable trajectories that are also offered in speaking. The turns of phrase and detours of speech are like the movements of pedestrians; both initiate symbolic forms of non-compliance. Similar to the Situationists’ drifts across the city, De Certeau says that walking can escape the totalitarian grasp of the abstract order of the city to remain indefinitely ‘other.’ As a space of movements, flows, routines and rhythms, the city at grassroots level is practised by its inhabitants: commuters, drivers, labourers and office workers, for example. The everyday activities performed in the ideology of the productive city include commuting, working, consuming, recycling and repeating familiar routines with regularity. In other words, the city order contains a catalogue of activities carried out by bodies on which its rational-functional operation depends. As a register for alienation and despondency, the city assumes a taken-for-granted position as the urban backdrop. The flows and rhythms, which appear fluid yet regular in the panoptic sense, take on a sedimentary basis as that which is most familiar—a drudgery of routine, or the accepted norm. Over time, De Certeau (1984, 95) writes, the city’s tendency towards systematic classification and transgression, “causes the condition of its own possibility—space itself—to be forgotten.” Everyday spaces become the blind spots where irregular practices proliferate. It is these appropriated uses of space that correspond with the practices of artists that infiltrate, hybridise or recode the city’s top-down operation performed everyday by industrious, productive bodies. Proliferating microbial practices unsettle the rational workings of the city. In their plurality, De Certeau (1984, 96) claims, they deviate within the urban system, destabilising the concept city and its rational-functional order: One can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting

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everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.

The concept city maintains a panoptic presence that orders and codes urban space. The unruly tactics of everyday life, however, appropriate and infiltrate existing systems and thereby escape category. Instead, they insinuate their presence within the existing administration of the city to pass as everyday activities. Thus, De Certeau theorises a series of deviations, operations and ruses that offer subtle complexity and moments of escape in everyday life. Everyday resistance is further illuminated in De Certeau’s concept of la perruque, or ‘the wig,’ which borrows from a French expression that implies borrowing or using company time or resources for non-work activities. He (1984, 25) explains that it can be as simple as an employee writing a personal letter during work hours or borrowing a tool for a project at home. From this popular culture analogy, De Certeau develops la perruque as a way of diverting time from the dominant order for creative free time that is without economic value. He expands this as the tactic of making do, and claims it is an ethical necessity for survival within an extractive labour system. De Certeau (1984, 36) writes that the space of a tactic is that of the other because it moves within the terrain of power that is imposed on it. While pedestrian speech acts borrow or act out an urban topography, la perruque empowers individuals to manoeuvre within top-down systems forced on them out of necessity for survival. The tactic is opportunistic and operates through isolated movements that take advantage of moments that arise within the established order. Here, De Certeau prefers the metaphor of the battlefield. The tactic performs chance raids using the element of surprise to strike where and when it is not expected. The tactic poaches territory from the enemy or dominant power, and manoeuvres within its field of vision, taking advantage of its inability to mobilise quickly at short range. The tactic, De Certeau (1984, 36) says, is calculated in its action, making it a ‘guileful ruse.’ Tactics carve out spaces within an imposed order, creating momentary flashes of resistance. Emphasis shifts from an imposed use of time, space or resources, for example, to a plurality of possible uses, which may or may not drastically differ from a prescribed utility. The tactic capitalises on the unexpected pockets within consumer culture, workplaces or the optical network of the dominant system.

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De Certeau’s theory of everyday life, including pedestrian speech acts and tactics has gained traction in contemporary art discourses. Urban geographer David Pinder (2011), for example, observes a politics of mobility in peripatetic artist movements through cities, framing their diverse routes taken as ways of moving within the everyday to sense, narrate and perform in city space. Walking is central to the practices of artists such as Francis Alÿs and Janet Cardiff, whose works are discussed in the next chapter. Revisiting De Certeau in this context provides a lens for looking at contemporary visual practices as intuitive resistances to the rational order of the concept city. This foregrounds analyses of minor intrusions that in varying ways actualise possibilities for embodying the city in non-rational and spontaneous ways. De Certeau’s theory anticipates a relationship between spatial practices and the city as contingent and fluid, rather than finite, isolatable or fixed. However, theory can only take us so far. While the writing of Lefebvre, Jacobs and De Certeau, with the combined theory and praxis of the Situationists, usefully highlight the excesses and limitations of a rationalfunctional order in the modern city, the next chapter analyses how this structural order has been confronted through non-rational, performative and experimental art practices since the early twentieth century. These practices are designed to show how deviation from top-down order has been expressed through art as ethically imperative in order to reinsert creativity and spontaneity into the city, disrupting a rational order. In doing so, they make the urban hardware evident in practical and concrete ways, issuing radical, intuitive, non-sensical challenges to its misanthropic design.

References Berman, Marshall. 1988. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Penguin. Debord, Guy. 1994. The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Debord, Guy. 2006a. “Report on the Construction of Situations” (1957). In Situationist international anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, 25–43. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Debord, Guy. 2006b. The theory of the dérive (Debord). In Situationist international anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, 62–66. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and spatial politics. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House. Lefebvre, Henri. 1995. Introduction to modernity: Twelve preludes September 1959–May 1960, trans. John Moore. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Pinder, David. 2011. Errant paths: The poetics and politics of walking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 672–692. Sadler, Simon. 1998. The situationist city. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Wollen, Peter. 1999. Mappings: Situationists and/or conceptualists. In Rewriting conceptual art, ed. Michael Newman and John Bird, 27–46. London: Reaktion.

CHAPTER 4

Art’s Non-rational Uses for the City

A range of art practices have disrupted the city’s rational-functional order using non-rational methods. Starting from around the mid twentiethcentury, artists displayed a tendency to overturn a coherent and logical reading of the city, to make the city strange, in the spirit of the Situationists discussed in the last chapter. The early twentieth century avant-garde, including the Futurists, Russian Constructivists and Dadaists, had already posed challenges to a ubiquitous urban order before and after WWI, leaving an enigmatic legacy that was emulated or built upon in later works. In this chapter, irreverent play, spontaneity, happenings, Situationist-inspired détournement or drifting through the city emerge as major themes that demonstrate active and passive resistance to the urban hardware and the efficient circulation of goods and labour. These practices, I argue, problematise the tenets of modernism’s grand narrative through direct or indirect responses to the city’s top-down structure and administration.

4.1 Early Disruptive Strategies: The Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Strategies of radical displacement, provocative theatre and deliberate dissonance were evident in the works of the early twentieth-century avantgarde. Futurists, Constructivists and Dadaists introduced strategies to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_4

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break with rational-functional order that emerge again in practices in the late twentieth century. Emphasis was placed on invention and anarchy; irrationality and absurdity; chance and play, as artists grappled with rapid socio-cultural, urban and economic modernisation, war and fiscal crisis. The Futurists proclaimed progress through modern technology, extolling speed, simultaneity and energy as matters of cultural urgency for the mechanisation of the urban environment. The Russian Constructivists, on the other hand, merged theatre and life in provocative performances that staged revolution in the aftermath of revolution. But it was the Dadaists who declared deliberate wrecking techniques, anarchy and nihilism to reject rational order and institutions of power, corruption and militarism with great intensity. In their challenge to an existing ubiquitous order, the Futurists held dissonant noise concerts that exemplified an anarchic ethos. An 11-point Futurist Manifesto and the writings of Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, the group’s outspoken protagonist, with the architectural designs of Antonio Sant’Elia, sought to imbue the city’s structure with a new raison d’être. In 1914, Sant’Elia (in Frampton 1980, 85) avowed to rebuild the modern city like an immense shipyard, active and dynamic, and the modern building as a gigantic machine. His radical vision to raze and rebuild echoes Le Corbusier’s ideas debated in Chapter 2. Yet, Futurism’s uses for simultaneity, mechanisation and speed were gestural, dynamic and fluid, setting them apart from the concrete tower cities envisioned by Le Corbusier. Marinetti envisaged a Futurist dance that integrated human and machine, in which performers would imitate the movements of wheels and pistons, in anticipation of a machine-age synthesis. Remnants of Futurist ideas surface in the ballet mécaniques of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, analysed further on, in which river barges at New York’s sanitation department were used for a machinery ballet on the Hudson River. The renowned 1920 staging of The storming of the winter palace in Uritzky Square, St Petersburg by the Russian Constructivists, marked a merging of theatre and life with a different intent. An estimated 8000 participants were watched by an audience of 100,000 in a collective display of resistance that re-enacted the subversion of top-down order to mark the third anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Claire Bishop (2012, 60) observes that this radical re-portrayal of revolution as theatre symbolised a politically precarious moment, given that it recreated the very same conditions that overturned the order of space preceding revolutionary action. The performance complicated the city’s rational order,

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perhaps presenting a salient reminder of the proximity of revolution to its theatrical revival in 1920. A suspension of public space and rational order in Uritzky Square facilitated the momentary effects of disorder and rupture. Four decades later, Fluxus artists Ben Vautier and Hi Red Center also used strategies of improvisation and parody to intervene in city spaces in Nice and Tokyo, but for different purposes, as discussed below. The uses of theatre occur in Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001), discussed in Chapter 10, that enlisted performers for a re-enactment of a moment of social crisis. Dada art deviated from rational order in different ways. Directly assembled within the terrain of modern life, the Dadaists advanced their radical critique of the city in its decrepit spaces and its circulation of commodities and social ideology. These were the materials and context with which Dadaists muddied the waters of coherent, logical structure. Irrational techniques of chance and play allowed the unpredictable to slip through the cracks of coherent modern life to disrupt a bourgeois normativity. The schedule for Dada Season in Paris in 1921 included artist-led excursions for the re-occupation of hackneyed and forgotten spaces in the city, such as the church grounds of Saint-Julien-le Pauvre. Promoted as a series of guided visits to places that had no reason to exist, the Dadaist intent was to parody the absurd social practices of the guided tour (Bishop 2012, 67–69). But the excursion did more than parody the tour; Dada’s tactical subversion of the city’s order deliberately undermined rational assumptions of art. Bishop (2012, 66) notes this differs from the ideological and confirmatory tone of Russian mass spectacle. Dada was, by contrast, anti-ideological and anarchist in its bearing. Tactics reminiscent of Dada emerge in recent art practices that undermine the rational-functional and socio-cultural order of the contemporary city.

4.2

Moments of Disorder: Fluxus and Happenings

The post-war movements of Fluxus and happenings reexplored avantgarde strategies, abandoning studio practices to author spontaneous responses to the city. The moments of disorder orchestrated by Fluxus art highlight an intent to work with ephemeral conditions that escaped a rational category or coherency. Although many artists eschewed an attempt to condense Fluxus ideals into formal manifestos, Dick Higgins (1998, 224) identified nine criteria that differentiated Fluxus from Dada. These were later expanded to 12 core issues of Fluxus by Ken Friedman

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(1998, 244–251). Higgins’ criteria included, but was not restricted to, a focus on experimentation, the use of multimedia, parody, absurdity, ephemerality, and simplicity, along with a desire to resolve a dichotomy of art and life. Transience, spontaneity, movement and entropy were also explored through events, performances and music. Happenings emerged concurrently with Fluxus in the late 1950s and 1960s in Europe, the United States and Japan. Radical new forms, materials and practices of art flourished through mobile festivals such as Festum Fluxorum that toured Europe in the early 1960s. A fluidity of spaces encouraged the playful experiments of artists and a cross-pollination of ideas. In addition, there was a distinct move away from exhibitions in enclosed studios and galleries to outdoor public settings. Allan Kaprow’s 18 happenings in 6 parts in 1958 in New York incorporated visits to public places, while in 1961, Wolf Vostell presented improvised street theatre in Paris streets, inviting audiences to respond to urban phenomena through gestures; his 26 public actions for Cityrama in Cologne followed in the same year. The Fluxus works and happenings analysed below highlight an interplay between nascent forms of urbanity and the artistic strategies of post-war collectives, debunking the functionality of urban planning, and developing alternative modes of visual communication and public engagement. 4.2.1

Fluxus: A ‘Production of Presence’ in Europe and Japan

Fluxus artist Ben Vautier’s street performances in Nice, along with the direct actions of post-war collective Hi Red Center (HRC) in Tokyo, demonstrate the Fluxus agenda. Their works established a ‘production of presence,’ Kristine Stiles (1993, 77) argues, that renewed a sense of discovery and release, the freedom to play or ‘goof off’ and abandon reason without concern for aesthetics or social norms. They were equally representative of a socio-cultural shift in the United States and Europe, as well as Japan. Political and cultural movements were established through mass protests in the 1960s, particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement, paralleled in art by a sense of non-conformity, giving rise to experimental art spaces and practices. New art spaces were a popular means by which artists escaped the rigidity of ‘high art’ organisations. Based in the south of France, Vautier performed during Fluxus festivals in London and Nice, using parody and ephemerality as tactics to disrupt the usual function of urban space. The events included Festival

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Mondial Fluxus et art total in Nice (July–August 1963) alongside George Maciunas, and Art total, which became the final leg of the pan-European Festum fluxorum, spotlighting Nice as a hub for Fluxus activity. Festum fluxorum was originally scheduled in Paris; due to low participation numbers Nice became an interim venue between the northern cities and Florence, but with the event’s success, Nice later became the centre for Fluxus multiples and publications in southern Europe. Vautier was instrumental in the expansion of art festivals to include city spaces for staging, rather than private theatres. This allowed him a new space to position his exploration of socio-political and artistic debates through intervention in everyday settings and venues around the city. Total art was a concept born from his experimental actions that brought banal day-to-day ephemera into public visibility. In his writing in Troupe d’Art total, for example, he explained his motive to, among other things, set up theatrical encounters based on moments of surprise between actor and spectator (O’Neill 2012, 143–144). His philosophy shared a genealogy with the gestural traces of Yves Klein and Nouveau Réalisme, and with Duchampian ready-mades. It also affirmed the Fluxus modus to resolve the art-life dichotomy, as expressed by the title of Vautier’s corpus, built on the premise that all of life (le tout ) constitutes art. Vautier’s actions involved a public display of domestic routines such as eating, brushing teeth and going to bed. Bedroom routines were launched as public rituals in a fifteen-day performance, Living sculpture at the Festival of misfits in London in 1961. He installed a bed, washstand and eating area in the compact window frontage of a gallery space, sharing his everyday domesticity with a passing audience. Drawing on a voyeuristic fascination with private life in this quasi-public space, the action experimented with self-display and exhibitionism, egotism and humour, that underscores Vautier’s work from this period. Moreover, it suggested a growing distance between the modern promise of rational order and systemic control and the realities of everyday life, as cities became more complex and as cultural differences became more prominent. By contrast, Vautier’s actions for Total art in Nice in 1963, demonstrate how parody was used as a strategy by which a coherency of public space was subverted. Vautier renamed Nice’s prominent seaside boardwalk, Promenade des Anglais, ‘Rue Fluxus’ for the event duration. This piqued the curiosity of locals, who gathered to watch the artist taking a swim in a tailcoat and bowler hat in the style of Charlie Chaplin as

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the inaugural event. Random bystanders were then labelled ‘living sculptures’ to close the distance between subject and object, and between art and life. Elsewhere in the city, the artist publicly challenged himself to eat the contents of unmarked tins while seated at a table on a footpath. Overturning expectations of rationality or social decorum, Vautier momentarily suspended the objective function of urban space. The process of ‘production of presence,’ therefore, counters the excesses of a rational-functional order, breaking with top-down systems and everyday norms in the city. Deployed critically, parody exposed the political potential for selfempowerment to reuse the city creatively, without rational constraint. Vautier’s practice provides both a stark contrast to the rigidity of rational systems and an imaginative deviation from the normative structures of urban life. Direct action in the city was a strategic part of HRC’s work in Japan. Principal members Jiro Takamatsu, Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi focussed on intangible actions that coincided with a dematerialisation of the art object in conceptual practices. HRC exemplify the rise of artist-agents who took performance and conceptualism out of galleries and studios, exploiting the medium and context of city spaces. Cleaning event anticipates the infiltration of public space and interventionist intent of HRC. It was performed to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, a seminal year in which Japan re-joined international nations following Allied military occupation after WWII. Japan projected an image of miraculous economic recovery, including the opening of the first high-speed bullet train, which demonstrated to the world that Japan’s post-war reconstruction was complete. Cleaning event suggested a different version of events. HRC exposed a hypocrisy behind the nation’s apparent success, directing a socio-political riposte at what they saw as a half-hearted political attempt to modernise and embellish Tokyo ahead of the Olympics. The collective and associates took to Ginza District streets with all manner of ineffective and out-ofplace cleaning utensils, including toothbrushes and dishcloths, which they used to scrub footpaths and street furniture. The action was carried out incognito; anonymity was assured by white lab coats and sunglasses, while also implying technical competence. The futility of the action made visible a power struggle between the outward projection of Tokyo’s spectacular transformation and the lived experiences of its citizens. Performing a fruitless cleaning task with everyday utensils overturned notions of functional order, not only for the utensils, but for the city space and street furniture.

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HRC temporarily undermined the city’s rational order using nonrational methods. The event usefully highlights the tensions that emerged between the discourses on the city that stressed its utility and functionality, and the creative misuses proposed by artists. Fluxus practices such as these revive a Situationist call to confront the guises of spectacle culture in the city’s public spaces, though there is also significant variation in the performative embodiment of resistance, as well as strategies of shock and engagement used. Vautier and HRC bring a tangibility to De Certeau’s unregulated tactical ruses that proliferate and manoeuvre within the city’s organising discourses and physical terrain to activate a series of resistant actions. Fluxus actions like these anticipate artist interventions and performative misuses of the city’s top-down order through momentary actions that reimagine resistance and critique in urban space, which is an ongoing theme in later chapters. 4.2.2

Happenings: Resistance to ‘Deadening Functionality’

During the early 1960s, artists associated with happenings in the United States forged new territories in which they interrogated the discourses that had captured the modern city, its spaces and urban life. Their actions in ad-hoc spaces such as parking lots experimented with physical forms that resisted modernism’s legacy of ‘deadening functionality,’ as Cecile Whiting (2006, 169) has argued. A large number of happenings, actions and performances took place in New York and Los Angeles, often in unconventional places such as carparks or private apartments. In contrast to static market-ready art objects, happenings eschewed rational coherence in favour of non-rational, ephemeral approaches. The city provided a set of immediate, visceral materials with which artists could rupture a smooth-flowing rational order. Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow created happenings in urban spaces to invert a rationalfunctional order and economic imperative. The banal urban infrastructure in modern cities built for the efficient circulation of cars was central to their critique and echoes Lefebvre’s concurrent observations of Mourenx, where every object declared its utilitarian purpose like social credentials, and where creativity and autonomy were seemingly stifled. Oldenburg’s first outdoor happening, Autobodys in 1963, was based on the car as a quintessential symbol of modern life. He used it to critique an American cultural pastime: the drive-in cinema. The work made use of a vacant carpark where cars and fellow artists mingled together, covered in milk,

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soapy bubbles and melting ice. A discordant soundscape of car speakers, horns and engines created an acoustic backdrop, while flashlights and flares punched light into the night sky. A related use of absurdity appeared in another action for which Oldenburg installed an oversized massproduced blue shirt and brown tie on a shopping trolley at a Mobil station as a parody of regulation in American petrol stations. Each unusual performance brought together a range of different car brands and styles for the misuse of automotive infrastructure. The outward absurdity of Autobodys was balanced by a nuanced critique. While it ridiculed a hyper-valorisation of automotive infrastructure and mass culture in the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis, Oldenburg also invited audiences to consider the car as a vehicle for theatre, not simply a mode of transportation (Whiting 2006, 171). This overturned the utilitarian use of the car as it had featured in the modern urban plan to increase the efficiency and productivity in the city. Echoes of Jacques Tati’s 1971 French comedy Trafic are discernible in Autobodys too. Tati lampooned modern society’s fixation on mechanical efficiency and progress through the experiences of one anti-hero, Monsieur Hulot. Trafic parodied car culture, ironically replacing the French term la circulation (traffic) in the title with the semi-anglicised word trafic, referring to commerce or an exchange of goods. To misuse the car as Oldenburg did, was to misuse the rational logic of the modern city. Kaprow, on the other hand, organised a set of happenings which revealed a banal uniformity of car use in the functional city. Self service was carried out across Boston, New York and Los Angeles in 1966. In Los Angeles, the diverse activities involved directives to drive cars into stations with white foam frothing from their windows, abandoning cars at night with their lights blinking and horns beeping, eating jam off a car bonnet, or counting 200 red cars in one period of time. These actions share the underlying critique of uniformity and sameness that appeared in Ed Ruscha’s photos of Los Angeles, including his inventories of cars, oil spots in carparks, street intersections, occasional lawns, and the buildings lining Sunset Boulevard. As an urban ‘census-taker,’ Ruscha recorded the ‘little nothings’ that plague the city, by recognising the anonymous qualities that create a rising tide of non-differentiation in the modern city (Bois and Krauss 1996, 88). The banal, repetitive features of urban space were also addressed in Kaprow’s 1967 Fluids . The artist assembled twenty structures made of ice in Pasadena and Los Angeles, leaving them to melt into the urban

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spaces, on sites that ranged from in-between spaces under a Pasadena bridge to vacant parking lots, real estate and commercial sites. Each structure consisted of 650 ice blocks soldered together using salt ice which recall Karl Andre’s minimalist rectangle brick surfaces, blank without openings. Moreover, the serial production of the structures was a direct reference to the mechanical repetition underlying modern industry, or Fordism and Taylorism, where mechanical efficiency was prioritised in work systems. The structures were intended to be mute and meaningless to introduce non-rational uses for urban space that countered a logic demanding purpose and economy. In an interview with Richard Schechner (1995, 222), Kaprow explained that if one was crossing the city and encountered one of these mute, meaningless structures that had been left to melt, the very act of registering the blankness of the structure and its rapid deterioration would declare the opposite of its significance. In addition to this subversion of use value, the structures also appear to parody façades of modern architecture, such as the cheaply constructed commercial warehouse (Whiting 2006, 183). The use of ice in a semitropical urban setting poignantly addressed the concept of entropy, a theory and method practiced by Robert Smithson in the 1960s. Entropy undermines the myth of permanence, a mainstay of the modernist narrative. As a non-sensical building material, ice can be neither owned nor preserved, as Schechner (1995, 223) notes. Ice is unpredictable when it melts; it creates its own pathway through a landscape. As the integrity of each structure diminishes in sunlight, so too does a linear progression of time. Unpredictability, along with an intentional impermanence surface as the strategies by which, Susan Sontag (1966, 266) noted, happenings ‘declare their freedom from time.’ Kaprow’s Fluids , with Oldenburg’s non-rational interventions, presented a double-layered critique through practices that were not efficient or productive, as demanded by the rational-functional order of the city, and imagined fallacies in modernism’s logic of permanence. Their happenings were useful metaphors for a decline of monuments of architectural modernism, a contention that Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice of anarchitecture rigorously interrogated in the 1970s.

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4.3

Gordon Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture: Cutting Through Rationality

An interrogation of the modern function of architecture took on new impetus in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. His anarchitecture practice, a blend of anarchy and architecture, developed in the 1970s, using a radical strategy to critique formal structure. He experimented with splitting buildings in half or cutting holes into walls and floors, rupturing their structural integrity and disrupting their surface, utility, commodity value and cohesion. These building cuts were not only physical, but conceptual. They provide striking examples of a critical distantiation between the discourses of the modern city that pledged unified wholeness and the status of rupture, exposure and critical imagination in art that looked outward without a nostalgia for unity. Matta-Clark was interested in reworking the whole city to find the ‘metaphoric voids’ and in-between spaces that were less developed, and his interventions were more than simple hacks through buildings or acts of deconstruction (Matta-Clark and Bear 1974, 34). Breaking down walls and chopping through floors and lintels to uncover unique perspectives allowed different layers of meaning to escape that disrupted a modernist normativity of rational order and deviated from the instrument of urban planning. Matta-Clark’s deliberate misuse of structures forged a new relationship with the city. In reworking its voids and liminal spaces he sought to expose a dysfunctional, precarious and entropic aspect and demonstrate how architecture could be excavated and questioned from within. He began grappling with this concept in Anarchitecture, a joint exhibition in 1974 in which he presented photographs that depicted the city’s disordered parts and juxtapositions of new architecture and older styles. One image showed the crumbling facade of an apartment building destroyed by a gas explosion with its internal spaces exposed, yet still displaying an ‘available’ sign. The image provides a serendipitous equivalent to Matta-Clark’s developing ideas on opening up buildings to scrutinise the internal structure. Other photographs were literal associations of architectural typologies in New York: layers of Greek ionic columns, industrial brick building façades, the neo-Gothic prow of the Woolworth Building, and the vertiginous twin towers dominating the city skyline. Rather than providing documentary evidence, these images were used as metaphors to introduce unique perspectives of the city.

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The same year, Matta-Clark’s Splitting the Humphrey Street building was pivotal in its illustration of anarchitecture as a physical building cut, overturning the structural language of modern design. He chose a condemned building in New Jersey that had been flagged for demolition to make way for modern housing; it was around seventy years old and located in a century-old community. The artist split the building in half, rupturing its physical integrity and utility. Matta-Clark wanted to break up the surface so that the layers and strata not usually visible were made evident, which, in turn, exposed elements of difference covered up by an external uniformity. As he stated in interview with Liza Bear (1974, 36), the cut turned the building into a manipulated object, and used a clear or given system to create a disorientation of what is known, giving the object an imposing presence. Cutting through a building offers multiple perspectives, also rendering the surface porous. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (1996, 60) likened the perforations to Swiss cheese, full of holes and opening and reflecting into one another in all directions. In concept and practice, anarchitecture eschewed functionality and radically displaced its authority. James Attlee (2007) makes specific connections between Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture practice and a vocabulary of modern architecture, which usefully consolidates themes discussed in Part I of this book. In Chapter 2, the major undercurrents of rational functionalism in modern urban planning and design were discussed, including how Le Corbusier and Moses planned to develop the city for greater efficiency and productivity. MattaClark was in direct contact with the ideas of both. He received his formal training in Le Corbusier’s machine-age aesthetics while studying at Cornell University. In 1972, as Matta-Clark was carrying out his building cuts in the Bronx, New York was undergoing urban surgery directed by Moses, when tenement slums were demolished to make way for modern high rises and cross-city expressways. An unprecedented scale of construction started to dismantle neighbourhoods and independent workshops. It was in this context too that Jane Jacobs’ critique had developed and gained traction. Matta-Clark understood her views on thriving high-density urban communities; he had lived in an apartment and spoke of encounters with neighbours from high-level bedroom windows (Matta-Clark and Bear 1974). Having grown up amid the metamorphosis of New York, Matta-Clark experienced first-hand the effects of community battles fought at grassroots level. A campaign to suppress one of Moses’ public works to carve

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an expressway through his childhood home of Greenwich Village is one such example (Matta-Clark and Bear 1974, 36). Following his university training, Matta-Clark returned to New York where he settled in a radicalised artist colony in SoHo that had successfully blocked Moses’ planned 10-lane expressway in Lower Manhattan, which would have wiped the abodes of bohemian loft-dwellers off the map. These conditions stimulated his enquiry of the city’s ever-changing face and provoked his revulsion for the repetition of modern design that echoed Le Corbusier’s tower cities. Matta-Clark’s formal training and life experiences were therefore uniquely situated to enable him to critique utopian visions of the rational-functional city order, as targeted through his style of anarchitecture. In interviews Matta-Clark criticised the adopted role of architecture as the caretaker or ‘janitor of civilisation,’ delivering a one-size-fits-all design for society. The anarchistic denial of architecture and the physical act of piercing structural walls of buildings bears a forceful kind of intensity. He explained in interview with Donald Wall (2006), that to cut through bricks, mortar, floorboards and steel was to undo the conditions that controlled the subjective experiences of the city. Matta-Clark (in Wall 2006, 57) stated, for example, that the action of undoing a building was equally an act of undoing social conditioning and to open up closed systems in suburban dwellings or ‘urban boxes,’ or isolated consumerism with its captive audience. He took issue with the functionalist mentality that had abandoned its responsibility to question or re-examine the quality of life it promoted or delivered. In its polemical dimensions the act of undoing the building was iconoclastic, bringing the ideology of functionalism to the point of its own precarity. Anarchitecture demonstrated that architecture itself is entropic, that is, always in a state of decline. There are shades of a Situationist denial of functionalism here too. A passage from the Internationale Situationniste in 1959 (in Sadler 1998, 6), slammed the ‘positive’ contributions of functionalism as life’s banalities, including the adaptation of form to practical function, technical innovation, comfort and the exclusion of superficial ornament. Situationist détournement targeted physical signs of the spectacle and a modern fixation on order, utility and novelty. Matta-Clark détourned houses with a similar radical conviction that evokes the polemical foundations of Situationism. At the same time, there are subtle but significant variations in anarchitecture. Matta-Clark’s works find a powerful voice in the tendency

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to uncover and expose ideological contradictions in modern architecture, rather than attacking them head-on as the denunciatory stance of the earlier avant-garde had proposed.

4.4

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Making Necessity Visible

Mierle Laderman Ukeles engages with the city’s rational-functional order in a different way. Much of her work has pivoted around her position as an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation New York (DSNY) since the late 1970s. Her projects have brought visibility to questions of necessity and maintenance, and they broaden awareness of urban infrastructure. She used the city’s industrial systems as a medium in performances such as Touch sanitation (1977–1980), including Handshake ritual (1979) and Follow in your footsteps (1979– 1980); a choreographed machine dance, Marrying the barges: A barge ballet (1984); and an installation: FLOW CITY (1983–1996) at the 59th Street Marine Transfer Station in New York. She has worked in numerous cities and towns, including her hometown New York, as well as Pittsburgh, Rotterdam, Givors and Tokamachi. An enquiry into the role of maintenance and sanitation in urban life is universally apparent, making her work well-suited to my analysis of art and the city because it relates to abstract properties in the urban system. Also evident is an analysis of visibility that is embedded in her work across three registers: a visibility of waste, a visibility of workers who manage waste, and a visibility of the mechanics, industry and manual labour that are integral to the city’s productivity. Endurance art performances Handshake ritual and Follow in your footsteps form a large part of Ukeles’ major project: Touch sanitation at DSNY. In 1979, the artist set out to personally shake hands with the entire DSNY staff, which numbered 8500 in total and was distributed across 59 city districts. Originally planned as a three-month performance, the work took eleven months to complete. She greeted each worker with the phrase: “Thank you for keeping New York City alive!” Follow in your footsteps involved the observation and physical imitation of the movements of workers as they lifted rubbish bags onto trucks in the city. In a letter sent to workers before the project, Ukeles (2016, 101) described it as a ‘living artwork’ and ‘public performance.’ The letter outlined her plan to enact ten sweeps of the sanitation districts to reach every corner of

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the city, face each worker and create a picture of the entire operation of sanitary maintenance in metropolitan New York. In her letter, Ukeles acknowledged the labour of each worker within an urban system where people did not want to face their own waste, but wanted sanitation trucks to whisk it away so they could get on with their lives. Handshake ritual was Ukeles’ vision of a chain of hands holding up the city like a web, weaving together the real New York City (Ukeles 2016, 101). On the surface, the gestural handshake restored dignity and visibility to a workforce that was constantly disregarded by locals and media as the face of the city’s refuse. Underlying the handshake was a symbolism that juxtaposed maintenance with necessity, seen through the lens of artistic intervention. Patricia C. Phillips (2016, 93) states that the handshake is both a sign of gratitude and a decoy or surrogate. It forges a moment of freedom shared between the artist and worker within a system of necessity. Ukeles’ handshakes echo De Certeau’s theory of la perruque in this sense, reimagining moments of freedom within a dominant order. The rhythmic sweeps of the performance illustrate a mobility that recalls the Situationists’ dérive across Paris. Handshake ritual and Follow in your footsteps created social interstices within categories of productive efficiency and top-down order. This initiated a new, critical imagination of engaging with the infrastructures of necessity in the city. Ukeles’ ballet mécaniques (work ballets) presented a contrast to the rigidity of urban maintenance systems and an eccentric way to reimagine the normative structures of urban life. Marrying the barges was one of seven large-scale ballets choreographed in different United States cities, France and Japan for which Ukeles contrasted the mechanics of manual labour with critical art performance. The New York iteration was staged at dramatically different locations: Ronald Feldman Gallery in Manhattan and the 59th Street Marine Transfer Station. The latter was one of eight DSNY stations that transferred New York’s waste to barges for transport along the Hudson River to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (now closed). The exhibition at both sites included an installation and performance. The transfer station was temporarily transformed into an art space: a fence and guardrail were installed along the tipping floor to provide a safe area for the public to watch the ballet and observe the cavernous facility where trucks dumped their cargo of city refuse. Ambient atmosphere was added to the tipping floor through the installation of flashing hazard lights and an audio soundtrack that played the voices of truck

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drivers and industrial sounds recorded by the artist. The audience was thereby immersed in the mechanical and rhythmic sounds of industry. On the Hudson, a performance took place in two movements; four tethered barges filled with refuse re-enacted an everyday motion of sanitation work; meanwhile a tugboat conductor led two ‘married’ barges, tethered as a pair, on a ballet dance that arced across the river before guiding them into the slip to await their next fill. The barge ballet demonstrated the unexpected rhythmic qualities in heavy machinery. But its underlying critique of a systematic, repetitive use of humans and machines is also discernible. Parallels can be drawn between Ukeles’ work ballets and the radical ideas of the Futurists who imagined melding machines and urban life. While this serves as an important reference, Ukeles (in Conte 2015, 225) has stated that a proximity of humans and machines needs to be regarded with caution, so they are not confused in a way that manipulates humans as machines of the state. Therefore, Marrying the barges deliberates on the idea of the avantgarde and critiques a discourse of modern industry in which a rationalised system extracts the labour required by the state machine. The ballet involved extensive collaboration with maintenance workers and barge conductors to avoid nostalgic depictions of industrial labour in modern society. Moreover, Ukeles borrowed productive time from the DSNY barge conductors and truck drivers for non-efficient and unproductive ends, to perform a conceptual and collaborative ‘barge ballet.’ Ukeles (2015, 221) has stated elsewhere that, along with the worker, her express interest is the city, which confirms her role as mediator. Ukeles’ unique relationship to the city creates an unprecedented dialogue about the city. Her works highlight how rational-functional systems that organise the city might be reimagined to reassert a humanist dignity and power.

4.5 Francis Aly¨ s: Mapping ‘Horizontal Narratives’ Conceptual artist Francis Alÿs reworks the city’s rational order through the activity of walking. The artist’s peripatetic activities, performed in such cities as Mexico City, Jerusalem and London, map ‘horizontal narratives’ (Cuauhtémoc Medina 2007, 78). Alÿs’ walks adapt the late nineteenthcentury past-time of flânerie and share synergies with the Situationist dérive, sharing a tendency to actualise new spatial possibilities through subtle deviations from rational-functional order. Alÿs’ work also delivers

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a tangible expression of De Certeau’s pedestrian speech acts and tactics, which borrow from and modify a top-down system, as discussed in the previous chapter. However, Alÿs reimagines new trajectories too, which break with avant-garde practices and theory. An overview of Alÿs’ walks highlights common themes within the context of the city. Many of these walks have been performed in the artist’s adopted Mexico City. Examples include The collector, for which the artist moved through the city with a magnetic toy dog, accumulating metallic debris from the street in 1990–1992, and The seven lives of garbage of 1995 that pivoted around flows of urban detritus and the plight of pepenadores (rubbish pickers). Other activities are more international in bearing and commentary. The loop saw Alÿs take a roundthe-world flight from Tijuana to San Diego in 1997 without crossing the US-Mexico border, highlighting the artist’s freedom of movement in contrast to the struggle of would-be migrants wanting to cross into the United States. A similar subtle engagement with geo-political issues surfaced in The green line, a 24-kilometre walk through Jerusalem in 2004 for which Alÿs dribbled a line of green paint along the symbolic 1948 ceasefire line. Walking, Alÿs (2005, 14) has stated, is part of an organic, immersive experience by which he pieces together fragments of the city. It can also provide opportunities to reflect critically on rational-functional order and how this impacts the lived experiences of city dwellers at grassroots level. The consonance between Alÿs’ walks and the Situationist dérive and psychogéographie outlined in the previous chapter is readily apparent. As a transient passage through urban space to discover its ambiences, the dérive was designed to foil the allure of spectacle, while psychogéographie involved a critical observation of the city’s spaces and intentional movement through the city without a formal plan. As there are no encoded paths for his performances, Alÿs’ walks embody a similar ‘organised spontaneity’ to the dérive. Medina (2007, 78) confirms that, much like Debord and the Situationists, Alÿs sets out to interrupt the homogenous or universally synchronised notions of urban space. On the other hand, Carlos Basualdo argues that Debord’s antiurban critique is not advanced with the same intensity in Alÿs’ walks. Rather, Basualdo (1999, 108) says that Alÿs blends a biting criticism with ‘flights of the imaginary’ in ways that complement each other, and without a situationist nostalgia for the uncontaminated and pure access to reality. When it comes to overt

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politicism, Alÿs’ works do not bear the same antagonistic quality as Situationist theory. The walks appear nuanced and open-ended in comparison. However, his non-rational paths do rework the rational order of the city. While they recall the mobile strategy of the Situationist dérive, the walks tend to problematise a non-critical acceptance of the city through subtle deviation, rather than a militant opposition. This point of difference confirms an evolution of practice from earlier avant-garde responses to the city. A politics and poetics of mobility is discernible according to David Pinder (2011, 683), who draws comparisons between Alÿs’ walks and other peripatetic and marginal figures in history such as the Parisian flaneur. However, these synergies should not overshadow the underlying tensions and transgressions that Alÿs’ practice teases out, nor reduce his walks to rehearsals of early figures and movements. Pinder asserts that Alÿs reinterprets flânerie with a critical distance from its romantic origins, not least because in its original idealism, flânerie would be particularly out of place in modern Mexico City. Pinder (2011, 676) states that Alÿs’ walks have a capacity to unsettle the smooth surface of urban life as they engage with social conditions and political anxieties. Attuned to contemporary transformations of public space, Alÿs’ practice illustrates the potential to bring political aspects into question through artistic projects. This is demonstrated in Alÿs’ deliberation on surveillance and social order in Guards , part of the artist’s Seven walks project for Artangel in London in 2004–2005. A regiment of 64 Coldstream guards was recruited and directed to enter the Square Mile of London at different entry-points. Instructed to wander the empty streets in isolation until they located another guard, the guards would then fall into marching formation together. When the entire regiment had reassembled, they marched to the nearest Thames River Bridge to disperse. The work was a ‘social allegory,’ Alÿs (2005, 30) has explained, that conveyed the necessity by which individuals form themselves into a group and a collective desire to reproduce the synchrony of the machine. As a rupture to the visual order of the army unit, Guards subverted a symbolism of order in critical ways. First, each guard traced a singular pathway through London’s oldest fortified financial centre; second, their on-duty time was borrowed for the purposes of a non-rational activity in a similar way to Ukeles’ DSNY works; finally, the bodies of the guards were cast in futile, sometimes vulnerable roles. A visual representation of unproductivity such as this exposed the possible disorder of the regiment as a moment of confusion.

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The performance was recorded using cameras set in bird’s-eye positions along street rooftops. Scenes of microbial movements filmed under a watchful panoptic eye were relayed back to the gallery space for audience viewing, and later compiled into a short film. Fleeting glimpses of guards spied on from behind buildings or from above, captured an outward transgression of duty and a visual disruption of the symbolic unit of the armed guard—as with footage of a guard who appeared to have abandoned his post, casually stopping to tie a shoelace before strolling on at a leisurely pace (Fig. 4.1). Despite its outward simplicity, Guards is layered with subtle transgressions. A disruption of the urban plan, along with its plexus of surveillance, productivity and functionalism, informs this performance. Alÿs created a new social interstice to ponder long after the event: uniformed guards who had abandoned their order and unit on their own errant journeys.

Fig. 4.1 Francis Alÿs, Guards , part of Seven Walks by Francis Alÿs, London, 2004, film still (Courtesy: Artangel UK)

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Alÿs’ walks, including Guards , adopt the agency of De Certeau’s pedestrian speech acts and tactics. Critics Medina (2007) and Pinder (2011) agree that the critical scope of Alÿs’ praxis complements De Certeau’s spatial practices. Medina (2007, 78) states that Alÿs’ horizontal narratives introduce new ‘parasites’ that disrupt the social grid in correspondence with De Certeau’s concept city. As the guards appear to manoeuvre errantly within a dominant urban system, a heterogeneous movement is inferred that recodes the city within its own concept or order. Through crossing, drifting, improvising, transforming, abandoning or adopting, they disrupt the concept city. Like De Certeau’s speech acts, the idle footsteps of the guards trace new trajectories of alterity that deviate from a top-down plan. The effect is a momentary dystopia. The city becomes a ‘universe of rented spaces’ in De Certeau’s (1984, 103) words, or a conditional zone where rational-functional structure is subtly rearticulated through the artist’s non-linear movements. Regimes of control, panoptic vision and rational coherence momentarily unravel as a series of new tactics materialise. In its resistance to disciplinary regulation, Guards , as a guileful ruse, establishes a tension that poaches space–time from the top-down order. Moreover, the unchallenged presence of surveillance is made tangible. Along with the structures that direct movement from one part of the city to another along rational routes, the urban hardware is thus made visible. As the guards appear defenceless in newly animated roles, the viewer, in turn, occupies a similar role, alert to the city subtle distortions of everyday surrounds as ordinary appearances shift, revealing strangely unsettling uses of urban space.

4.6

Janet Cardiff: Narrating Encounter

Subtle deviations from order that occur in Alÿs’ walks share synergies with the narrated encounters choreographed by Canadian sound-installation artist Janet Cardiff. Cardiff’s works, co-created with Georges Bures Miller, use binaural recordings for immersive audio experiences that guide audience participants on walks around selected cities. Her walks operate as aural guides that layer a fictional narrative with site-specific details, local histories and anecdotes. For Münster walk, Cardiff set out a route in the vicinity of the Westfälisches Landesmuseum for Sculpture Project 1997, tracing the steps and narratives of a man looking for his missing daughter. In 1999, The missing voice: Case study B began in a section of London’s

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Whitechapel Library, guiding participants through Spitalfields to the city’s bustling centre in the steps of a fictional detective tracking the case of a missing red-haired woman that ended at Liverpool Street Station. In New York in 2004, Her long black hair started at the entrance to Central Park and guided audiences through imaginary sightings of a mysterious blackhaired woman who the poet Baudelaire was pursuing, but who refused to be charmed by him. Cardiff’s walks have unfolded with the help of audio technology such as a Walkman or iPod touch. Participants follow the voices of Cardiff or other protagonists using headphones. The voices combine with street noises such as footsteps drawing closer or drifting away. The effect is a palimpsest of acoustic layers that draws in the physical, historical, sitespecific, phenomenological, cognitive and future-oriented aspects of the urban. Each walk carves out space within the city’s rational structure that suggests a nuanced flow against the frantic tempo and systematic routines of the city. Meanwhile, the conceptual dimensions of Cardiff’s walks reimagine the city as a space of endless encounters with strangers and open-ended possibilities. In this sense, Cardiff builds on a lineage of following practices that include Vito Acconci’s Following piece in 1969, for which he followed random pedestrians through Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, recording his daily meanderings in a diary and on a map. They also recall aspects of Sophie Calle’s 1988 Suite vénitienne where she followed a man she barely knew, Henri B., to Venice. She then tracked him down, shadowed and photographed him, diarising her progress before returning to Paris ahead of him to record his return. The act of following is dependent on the city of strangers as a context for imaginary encounter; activities closely resemble stalking and, equally provocatively, show disregard for unspoken rules of social proximity. Different types of encounter emerge in Cardiff’s walks. In addition, the city and its ambient spaces take on prominence, rather than the imagined lives of strangers who provide more of a collection of disembodied background voices. Curator Ulrike Groos (2005, 262) has noted that a striking feature of Münster walk was how the artist introduced sites in the city that were unfamiliar to residents by uncovering hidden paths or inaccessible areas for the first time (Fig. 4.2). Familiar sounds seemed out of place, piquing curiosity with disconcerting moments that brought the threat of alienation to the surface of an outwardly friendly city. The ambient binaural audio allows multiple layers of voices, background noises and footsteps to surface, creating an effect of the uncanny, as Gibbons

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(2007, 96) notes. Tom Eccles (2005, 47) observes a similar disorientation when removing the headset at the end of Her long black hair: the park felt different after it had been inhabited by the overlaid voices conjured by Cardiff. A momentary alienation thus occurs between the journey narrated through the audio guide, and the urban scape experienced by participants walking around a city, long after the disembodied presence of the voices is no longer present. This disjuncture is a key feature at play in Cardiff’s work, James Lingwood (2005, 282) states, creating a gap between what is heard and what is consequently experienced. There is a blurring of fiction and reality or the familiar and unfamiliar. Cardiff (1999) states, The missing voice: Case study B was partly a response to her experiences in London, for her a large foreign city where she felt lost amongst the masses. The walk dramatised her own life, making it cinematic and mysterious. The ambiguity of a fictional interlude told vis-à-vis realities of structural urban space, created different ways to experience the city, making each walk part-urban guide and

Fig. 4.2 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)

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part-imaginary intrigue. The playfully constructive surveys of the Situationists’ psychogéographie and dérive surface here, but Cardiff develops these concepts in a new direction, drawing participants to different terrains and encounters as they are guided by the artist’s voice, rather than urban ambience. The solitary walkers following Cardiff’s audio guides also recall De Certeau’s theory of microbe-like practices that deviate from the urban plan. For The city of forking paths in 2014 in Sydney, participants collected an iPod Touch from Sydney’s Custom House and followed audio and on-screen video. The walk journeyed from this starting point through Circular Quay into the historical area of the Rocks overlooking the harbour. Cardiff’s voice guided participants, advising them to pause and note certain urban phenomena and thereby imprinting her subjective memories and preoccupations into the experience. The art experience was both embodied and spatial as Cardiff’s unfolding narratives, fictional stories, memories and history lessons overlaid an immediate encounter with the urban space to introduce new layers of meaning. The encounter with unfamiliar spaces and voices was heightened by the prescribed time of the walk, which commenced between dusk and 9.30pm so that participants were more alert to the urban surroundings. A disjunction occured in the Sydney iteration when objects were displaced in the location of the participant, when a boat moored in the harbour to which Cardiff alluded in the audio, for example, was no longer there. The walk’s title, The city of forking paths , expands on this disjuncture in a cognitive realm. A lateral branching or the forking thought processes in an active mind is reflected in the infinite number of pathways that can often confuse city visitors, but it also illuminates the way the mind shifts between thoughts or sparks creative ways of thinking internally or perceiving an external reality. Participants in Cardiff’s walks are encouraged to abandon cognitive rationality to temporarily inhabit a different phenomenological paradigm, and perhaps embody a different experience of urban reality. There may be an emerging awareness of new paths, a new way of seeing, acting or moving in the city or in the mind. Like the choices posed by a fork in the road, this new kind of mind mapping interweaves an alternative pathway through city. It helps to reinscribe the urban hardware by way of technology and audio recording methods. This anticipates works I discuss in Part III on networks and technology in the city. Cardiff’s audio works weave together a novel experience of the structural spaces of the city and the use of digital technology to reimagine

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encounter and subjective experiences beyond rational-functional order. Responses to subjective and relational spaces in the city are a key focus in Part II: Software.

References Alÿs, Francis. 2005. Rumours: a conversation between Francis Alÿs and James Lingwood. In Francis Alÿs: Seven Walks: London 2004–5, Francis Alÿs, Robert Harbison, James Lingwood, and David Toop, 10–56. London: Artangel. Attlee, James. 2007. Towards anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier. Tate papers no.7; https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/ 07/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier. Accessed 15 February 2023. Basualdo, Carlos. 1999. Head to toes: Francis Alÿs’s paths of resistance. Artforum International 37 (8): 104–108. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. 1996. A user’s guide to entropy. October 78 (Autumn): 38–88. Cardiff, Janet. 1999. The missing voice. Artist website: https://cardiffmiller. com/walks/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/. Accessed 16 February 2023. Conte, Kari, ed. 2015. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven work ballets. Amsterdam: Kunstverein Publishing; Graz: Grazer Kunstverein. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eccles, Tom. 2005. Anatomy of a walk. In Janet Cardiff: The walk book, ed. Miriam Schaub, 46–47. Vienna: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Frampton, Kenneth. 1980. Modern architecture: A critical history. London: Thames & Hudson. Friedman, Ken. 1998. Fluxus and company (1989). In The Fluxus reader, ed. Ken Friedman, 237–253. Chichester: Academy Editions. Gibbons, Joan. 2007. Contemporary art and memory: Images of recollection and remembrance. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Groos, Ulrike. 2005. Münster walk. In Janet Cardiff: The walk book, ed. Miriam Schaub, 260–263. Vienna: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Higgins, Dick. 1998. Fluxus: Theory and reception (1982). In The Fluxus reader, ed. Ken Friedman, 217–236. Chichester: Academy Editions. Lingwood, James. 2005. The missing voice: Case study B. In Janet Cardiff: The walk book, ed. Miriam Schaub, 282. Vienna: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Matta-Clark, Gordon, and Liza Bear. 1974. Splitting the Humphrey Street building. Avalanche (December): 34–37.

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Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2007. Fable power. In Francis Alÿs, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina, Russell Ferguson, and Jean Fisher, 57–108. London: Phaidon Press. O’Neill, Rosemary. 2012. Art and visual culture on the French Riviera 1956– 1971: The ecole de Nice. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington: Ashgate. Phillips, Patricia C. 2016. Making necessity art: Collisions of maintenance and freedom. In Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance art, ed. Patricia C. Phillips et al, 22–193. New York: Queens Museum; Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books. Pinder, David. 2011. Errant paths: The poetics and politics of walking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 672–692. Sadler, Simon. 1998. The situationist city. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Schechner, Richard. 1995. Extensions in time and space: An interview with Allan Kaprow. In Happenings and other acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sandford, 221–229. London and New York: Routledge. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against interpretation. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Stiles, Kristine. 1993. Of water and stone. In In the spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, 62–99. Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre. Ukeles, Mierle Ladermann. 2015. Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Conversation with Tom Finkelpearl and Shannon Jackson, March 19, 2013. In Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven work ballets, ed. Kari Conte, 219–227. Amsterdam: Kunstverein Publishing; Graz: Grazer Kunstverein. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 2016. Dear Sanman: Letter to New York City sanitation workers (1979). In Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance art, ed. Patricia C. Phillips et al., 101. New York: Queens Museum; Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books. Wall, Donald. 2006. Gordon Matta-Clark’s building dissections (1976). In Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and collected writings, ed. Gloria Moure, 53– 71. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafia; Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Whiting, Cécile. 2006. Pop L.A.: Art and the city in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PART II

Software

CHAPTER 5

Ideology and the City

Part I of this book examined attempts to build the modern city according to a rational-functional order and showed how artists resisted this. Part II establishes a transition of the city’s top-down order from the urban hardware, or bricks and mortar, to software. Software is envisaged as a series of aesthetic conditions, everyday cycles, routines, rhythms, attitudes, cultural norms, and ideologies of normative order. I argue these circulate in the city’s spaces to cement economic productivity, complementing a topdown order. In this chapter I discuss theories of ideology by Manfredo Tafuri (1998) and Louis Althusser (2014), who analysed iterations of powerful ideologies at work in different socio-cultural apparatuses. Tafuri provides a foundational link between architecture and an ideological use of the city to maintain economic production, while Althusser demonstrates how the material realities of society are supported by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The chapter lays the foundations for a discussion of artists’ misuses of the city’s ideological order as they seek to expose latent hierarchies of power. Discourses on ideology are experiencing a renaissance of sorts in contemporary art and theory. In response to an increasingly repressive neoliberal logic, artists have sought ways to concretise the effects of influential ideologies and complicate a ‘soft’ transition of these in city spaces. This chapter and Chapters 6 and 7 take account of critical theories relating to ideology, the body, and everyday life consecutively. This is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_5

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designed to illustrate a cycle of urban software in the everyday conditions that routinely support the city’s normative use through behaviours such as consuming, spending or going to work. Software interacts with and depends on a formal organisation of hardware as well as the cooperation of bodies who use and consume the city. Together, the urban hardware and software promote a smooth functioning of the city for the purposes of rational-functional order and productivity. A discussion of how artists have exposed a soft transition of ideological conditions in city spaces is the subject of Chapter 8. Artists who ‘misuse’ the city’s everyday spaces and objects, or intervene in its systems and norms, temporarily rupture or displace a top-down orchestration of conformity.

5.1 Manfredo Tafuri: Exposing the ‘Correct Use’ of the City An ideology of architecture was first interrogated within a broad Marxist paradigm and strongly advanced by the Venice School of architects. One of the school’s principal theorists, Manfredo Tafuri wrote ‘Towards a critique of architectural ideology’ in 1969, a polemical text in which he argues that ideological messages embedded in nineteenth-century architecture normalised a ‘correct’ use of the city.1 Tafuri isolated tensions within the architecture discipline: on the one hand he acknowledged the autonomy and intellectual project of architecture, while on the other he criticised an ideological framework that reinforced ideals of efficiency and productivity in modern capitalism. Echoing the Situationists’ denial of the spectacle of modern society, Tafuri claimed that, by the mid-twentieth century, architecture had been seduced by capitalism. In the process, freethinking radical design had succumbed to rationality and functionality as part of the economic system that, in turn, supported a normative use of the productive city. Tafuri’s argument complements the analysis in Chapter 2 that examined the rational-functional order that developed through modern urban planning. He (1998, 8) distinguished an ideological screen that emerged as part of this development and a power captured by emerging systems of order. A top-down plan based on uniformity utilised the form and

1 Tafuri used the word ‘correct,’ whereas I employ ‘normative’ to establish a sense of standardisation of behaviour.

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function of architecture to bring order to the medieval disarray of cities. Giving concrete form to its newly defined role, architecture transformed the late nineteenth-century city, dissolving it into a uniformity ensured by existing typologies (Tafuri 1998, 9). Deprived of scope for invention and creativity, Tafuri’s (1998, 3) forecast was that architecture had collapsed into the system that would guarantee its demise as a preeminent field of aesthetics. He argued that architecture had been inscribed into an economically rationalised system. Tafuri saw this dominant ideology taking concrete form in the nineteenth century arcades and exhibition venues that appear in the vignettes of Paris in the writing of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. In Baudelaire’s anecdotes of Parisian crowds set against the morphology of the city carried out by Haussmann, Tafuri argued one could detect a nascent consumer ideology taking shape as the crowds used the city and were, in turn, unwittingly used by it. He (1998, 17) argued the crowd, “becoming its own spectacle, found a spatial and visual instrument for self-education from the point of view of capital.” The visual and spatial instrument referred to the arcades, department stores and universal expositions that represented the height of technical progress in architecture. Tafuri stated these forged a new relationship between formal structure and the early practices of consumerism that they promoted. The extraordinary new architectural typologies that emerged tended to dazzle and overwhelm the city’s leisure class, a category of consumers and spectators, forming conditions for the reception of architecture and, with it, an ideology of modern capitalism. With the emergence of modern consumerism, Tafuri (1998, 17) posited that the ideology of consumption, offered itself as an ideology of the city’s ‘correct use.’ Uniformity, control, rational and functional organisation, bureaucracy and administration, nested within the visual and spatial mechanisms provided by new architectural technology, served up an ideology of consumerism as the city’s normative use. A ‘universe of conventions’ paralleled the emergence of new spaces that supported economic activity, and, in the process, reorganised the city around interactions for commercial enterprise. 5.1.1

Responses to Tafuri: Postmodern Architecture

Tafuri’s critique was contested and debated in the postmodern era from the 1970s to the 1990s, suggesting the continued relevance of the ideas he raised. In reply to Tafuri’s relentless pursuit of capitalist

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agendas in architecture, Frederic Jameson (1998) sought to establish a rebuttal for postmodern architecture in the 1980s. His critique was influenced by then-emerging discourses in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972, and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York in 1978, which signalled new directions in postmodern architecture and departures from the rigidity of the International Style. Jameson (1998, 451) linked Tafuri’s sombre prediction for modern architecture with a Post-Liberation philosophy epitomised by Weber’s ‘iron cage’ and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ‘dialectic of enlightenment.’ For this group the new expansion of late capitalism had triggered a sense of pessimism and hopelessness in response to its total systems of control. Jameson (1998, 452) conceded that Tafuri had relayed the model of capital as powerful, all-encompassing and self-perpetuating, but conjured a sense of doom with little or no possibility for escape. In response, Jameson (1998, 443) imagined ‘enclaves of resistance’ emerging in cultural practices with possibilities for conceptualising new spaces not yet secured by political struggle. Jameson’s concept of postmodern architecture expressed an ideological double-bind: it was both nested within and dependent upon capitalist relations, yet it remained open to an expanding field of political possibility in which resistance might take shape. In contrast to Jameson’s vision of enclaves of resistance, Hal Foster’s critique of postmodern architecture exposes its own ideology. Foster (2002) updates Tafuri’s claim that architecture is the instrument for experiences of the city based on ideologies of consumption, which Tafuri claimed was peddled as the city’s normative use. This is exemplified in Foster’s dissection of the ideologies expressed in the monumental architecture of the Guggenheim, Bilbao. Foster (2002, 38) argues that the building, designed by master builder Frank Gehry, overwhelms and baffles its visitor, an effect he claims is mistaken for the ‘architectural sublime.’ The exterior is disconnected from the art it houses, appearing more like a mirage or spectacle in its arbitrary self-indulgence, a nascent order of imagistic design and ‘gestural aesthetics’ (Foster 2002, 35). As a building to be consumed by visitors, rather than an authentic social expression, the Bilbao is emblematic of a wider market logic underlying postmodern cultural centres. Sports stadiums, shopping malls and museums are called into question; architecture is recruited for a corporate revival, optimising the city for shopping, spectating, and non-critical consuming.

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The question is whether Tafuri’s argument holds relevance today. Consumer societies suggest that a utopia of consumption has superseded the utopian urban plan of the modernists. Victor Gruen’s mid-twentieth century vision of a shopping paradise expressed in the commercial mall, was intended to create spaces of retail and leisure. In a sense they updated the arcades described in Tafuri’s text. Adding to this, a New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that the shopping mall had replaced the traditional high street and town square as new sites for free speech, thus replacing the civic functions of traditional public spaces (Jameson 2003)@. The mall has since transformed into the immersive and disorientating hyperspaces today that project a fantasy of urbanism. Steven Miles (2010, 106), for example, has asserted that shopping no longer takes place within the city, but ‘the city within shopping.’ The commercial mall and consumer spaces manipulate architectural effects of light and space to create cocoons of escape that transport shoppers into an imaginary no-place disconnected from the cities in which they are situated. Urban theorist Sze Tsung Leong (2001) has observed that shopping is the medium by which the market economy shapes its urban surroundings and will ultimately shape the lives of those who dwell in them. As consumer trends operate as barometers for social change, Leong (2001, 135) argues that, eventually, ‘there will be nothing else to do but shop.’ An increasing presence of shopping malls and markets that accumulate data to manipulate consumer trends has started to reshape urban space and life beyond the mall. This resonates with Tafuri’s earlier argument in updated terms; the city is a giant shopping mall and consumerism its medium. Networks of online shopping, served by large distribution warehouses, are the latest manifestation in this development, and discussed in Part III. 5.1.2

Shaping an Artistic Response

Tafuri’s study thus poses relevant questions regarding urban spaces today. How do dominant consumer-driven ideologies infiltrate the daily lives of city dwellers and what can be done to avoid Leong’s prediction that, in the end, there will be nothing left to do but shop? Artists have interrogated discourses of consumer ideology in their own unique ways. Since the 1980s, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar and Barbara Kruger, for example, have critically intervened in a market logic of consumerism in urban life. These artists exploited culture jamming to interrupt the dominant

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messages of corporate advertising, which Jean Baudrillard (1983) argued had emerged as the only architecture of the moment. Originally employed as a method for altering the content of billboards, culture jamming involves a general hijacking and diversion of any signifiers of mass media or consumer culture towards radically different intent. Jenny Holzer’s Truisms were broadcast on an electronic billboard in Times Square between 1977 and 1979. The projected messages were oneliners that expressed different points of view designed to provoke a range of responses. They interrupted the usual positioning of commercial advertising and private corporate interests that capitalises on the concentration of pedestrians and consumers converging in New York’s centre. In 1984, Jaar targeted an ad campaign in New York subway cars for CBS News to realise his intervention: You and us. He replaced signs of the news motto: ‘If it concerns you, it concerns us,’ with the inverse statement: ‘If it concerns us, it concerns you.’ The subverted version had the same background image of a news anchor looking directly at the viewer, but with the subject relationship reversed, Jaar sought to expose the ideology of news media that controls the narrative. The subversion of language is a major part of Barbara Kruger’s works that were pasted on public walls and urban furniture in the late 1980s and 1990s. I shop therefore I am (1990) ruptured the seemingly innocuous strategy used in mass advertising by which commercial messages infiltrate daily life through media, exposing its ideology through unusual juxtapositions of images and text. Hal Foster (1985, 100) has argued that the artists working with subversive signs in the 1980s treated public space and representations of society or culture as a target and weapon, with the artist becoming a ‘modifier of signs’ rather than a creator of art objects. These strategies borrow from the Situationist handbook for hijacking images and spaces where the spectacle thrives: advertising and news media, commuter flows and workspaces. Artists have created obstacles to passive subject-consumer relations and the ideology of spectacle to render visible underlying circuits of commerce. As these are most commonly located in busy spaces such as commuter transport hubs, where advertising continues to be part of an everyday urban reality, their goal was to transform the viewer into an active interpreter of media, rather than a passive consumer of the city as a spectacle. Tafuri’s critique of the ideology of architecture is complemented in the light projection works of Krzysztof Wodiczko. Through his projections of images onto building facades of political or cultural significance,

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the artist scrutinises a relationship between architecture and ideologies of power to establish spaces for critical discourse in city spaces. Wodiczko has completed over seventy still-image and sound and motion public projections since 1980. In 1985, for example, he projected a Nazi swastika onto the pediment of the neoclassical façade of the South African Embassy in London. The unauthorised work protested apartheid law, momentarily disrupting the exterior autonomy imposed by the building. Wodiczko (2016, 192) argues that the journey-in-fiction created by the ideological ritual in architecture must be interrupted to return focus to unmasking that which is implicit about the building and challenging the hypnotic relationship between public audiences and architecture. Wodiczko’s comment proposes that architectural structures have a subliminal hypnotic effect on those who use the city. Art intervention exposes the power relations concealed in buildings, revealing and disrupting them to complicate a one-way flow between ideology and the city dweller. As sites of power, buildings project and replicate an institutional presence that disguises their patriarchal power, Wodiczko (2016, 191) argues. He (2016, 192) states that the building wields an undeclared power through which a series of hierarchical socio-political and symbolic biases concretise and are routinely practised without question. In consonance with Tafuri’s earlier claims, Wodiczko (2016, 190–192) asserts that the building is a ‘spatial medium’ where the general myth of power and an individual desire for power are symbolically reproduced, thus supporting the ritual of reflecting outwardly to the city a collective projection of power. While Tafuri grappled with architecture’s devolution into a role subservient to modern capitalism, Wodiczko targets politico-cultural power relations operating through building façades that tend to concretise projections of hierarchy. Chapter 8 expands on his work in more detail to examine how he has problematised cycles of ideology that marginalise groups of society within public urban discourses.

5.2 Louis Althusser: Ideological State Apparatuses Tafuri’s criticism focussed on the implications of modern capitalism in architecture, showing how a symbiosis of physical structure and consumer-driven ideologies influenced a normative use of the city. Louis Althusser pursued a different aspect of ideology. His 1970 text ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’ posited that ideology is first internalised

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then practised by subjects in capitalist societies. Althusser argued that ideology materialises in a series of socio-cultural conditions, intersubjectivities and cultural norms that circulate in everyday institutions and remain unquestioned, with groups unwittingly rehearsing a top-down order of society. Althusser challenged the Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’ that is detached from reality; he insisted instead that ideology has a material existence embedded in social formations that safeguard economic productivity. Marx had demonstrated how the conditions of exploitation in society were justified to satisfy ongoing conditions for capitalist production. In 1932 in The German ideology, Marx and Engels established a materialist conception of history with two fundamental principles by which these conditions were maintained. First, they argued that the forces and relations of production determined the material lives of men and women. Second, a summation of forces and relations of production in society comprised a base or infrastructure, the underlying economic basis for society’s reality. Out of an economic base the superstructure developed: political and legal institutions structure society through constitutions, governments, legal and defence systems, and the judiciary. It also invoked a terrain of consciousness in which members of a capitalist society related to each other and to themselves. This set of relations formed an accepted ideological relationship to these conditions of existence. Marx and Engels claimed that ideology was therefore a false consciousness, that is, an illusion of accepted reality that maintains the base and superstructure through the state apparatus. By contrast, Althusser argued that Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) ritualise ideologies from within society to maintain this material existence and established relations. He separated the state apparatus into two distinct, mutually reinforcing areas: Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) that function by direct force or the imminent threat of force by law enforcement, the judiciary and military, and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that function by ideological means. The socio-cultural ISAs include popular literature, mass media, advertising, political parties, galleries and museums, schools, universities, and religious groups. Social relations are a driving factor in maintaining the conditions of production and function vis-à-vis ISAs. Thus, Althusser revised Marx’s notion of base and superstructure. Althusser (2014, 232) scrutinised everyday life because, he claimed, a ‘tenacious obviousness’ of production is so entrenched in everyday consciousness that it is extremely difficult to reach the point

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of view of reproduction. Interrogating the socio-cultural practices that circulate relations of production in everyday life may therefore facilitate a broader understanding of how ISAs reaffirm power divisions in cities and production-based societies. Although RSAs and ISAs are distinct, there is an interplay between. The operating basis for each is a unifying ruling class ideology. RSAs are the final means to secure the reproduction of the conditions of production; these conditions are maintained primarily through ideological influence or conditioning, the role of ISAs. Althusser (2014, 248) asserted that the ISAs secure the continuity of the relations of production and are shielded by the RSAs. It is within the ISAs, however, that the ruling ideology is concentrated and continues to secure the conditions to hold state power. ISAs are vital to the superstructure as they function alongside state apparatuses to exercise and secure state power through ideological conditions. Althusser (2014, 248–249) argued that pre-capitalist historical societies were dominated by the ISA of the church, with the ISA of the family playing a supporting role. Churches performed religious rites, dominated politics, education and culture, and disseminated ideologies powerful enough to bring them into material existence as a representation of an imagined relationship of individuals to their accepted conditions of existence. Althusser (2014, 256) claimed that priests and despots forged a religious belief system in which the ideology of obeying God was replaced by a subservience to mortal men who were aligned in their deception. In other words, ideology functioned through religious ISAs as a means of control and through practised belief. The anti-religious and anti-clerical struggles during the Reformation and French Revolution from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, wrestled state power from the church and landed aristocracies and transferred it to the merchantcapitalist classes. The disciplinary apparatus was reinvented to uphold the new material conditions for society. The educational ISA then replaced the church ISA, wrapping dominant ideologies in a know-how that fed society with productive bodies to carry out the conditions of economic class dominance. Divisions of labour paralleled this shift. New categories of labour emerged, including technicians, white-collar workers, civil servants, capitalists and managers, along with agents of RSAs—police officers, judges and politicians. Emerging professional, academic and civic positions operated within new ISAs to support or legitimise the ruling

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class and reinforce social hierarchies to maintain the relations of power in capitalist societies (Althusser 2014, 241). ISAs, which are my concern here, are distinct, relatively autonomous, and frequently private or concealed. They illuminate what I refer to as the urban software, that is, the ideological supports, conditions or systems that influence subjective experiences within a material reality. Each ISA has a set of functions that rehearse social relations, Althusser argues; in effect, they safeguard and reinforce dominant systems of economic productivity. Althusser theorised that the primary role of ISAs is ‘ideological interpellation’ whereby an ideology is internalised by an individual subject; subjects then practise activities that maintain a familiar material reality in a cycle that sustains a set of conditions. This internalising and rehearsing of ideas serves the interests of dominant politico-economic systems and a ruling elite. Althusser claimed that these interests not only preserve the hierarchies of exploitation and exclusion in society, but that they are fully invested in normalising them as an unquestioned relationship to material existence. Arguing for the material existence of ideology, Althusser (2014, 264) maintained that ideology is given form through the individual who identifies as a subject and who functions as a subject within a dominant system of power. This is a double-action in which the power of ideology is wielded through the process of subject-making and occurs in settings where the ideology is reinforced. Althusser’s imaginary street scene demonstrates his point; when a police officer hails a citizen-subject, the person summoned obeys the command and turns around. Althusser (2014, 264) states that in the moment of turning, a physical conversion happens in which the person identifies as the subject who is hailed, and is therefore subject to the command. In this way, Althusser saw the interpellation of ideology as an always-already process. Ideology is concretised through common, accepted conditions that are embedded within a material reality and practised by subjects who actualise responses to authority to affirm subjecthood. Althusser (2014, 265) further argued that the always-already process of interpellation mutually reinforced all social relationships within dominant systems of power to secure the relations of production. Althusser’s theory helps to clarify an all-encompassing misanthropic paradigm in which individuals are subjects for the purpose of maintaining the conditions of production that serve a ruling elite. However, there is an important caveat that potentially disrupts this mise-en-scène. It is,

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in fact, the avenue by which, over time, the conditions of the ruling class shift along with the material conditions that dominate the use and functions of ISAs. Althusser conceded that his thesis did not exhaust the possibilities for class struggle within the ISAs. As a sidenote, he (2014, 245–246) clarified that class struggle is rooted in the infrastructure and relations of exploitation and expressed in ideological form first within ISAs, but extends beyond them. It is therefore within ISAs that resistance is exercised, before challenging the dominant power structure. Despite this perceived logic of a top-down imposition of ideology from dominant to dominated, the ISA is also a contested field. It follows that the ISA can be articulated as a battlefield where dominant ideologies might be complicated, interrogated and challenged by exploited social groups. In a sense, this caveat within ISAs marks the limits of Althusser’s structural logic because he tends to disregard a capacity for action and agency in order to focus on the relationships between structures that uphold the functioning of society (Gardner 2000, 348). As a site for recovery of action and agency, ISAs are spaces where oppositions meet and problematise the ideological circuits of information in socio-political and economic struggles. These aspects of ideology formation gain traction in various iterations of contemporary art, especially the institutional critique of Hans Haacke that is examined in Chapter 8. 5.2.1

The Ongoing Influence of Althusser

Althusser’s study is widely influential in cultural and literary studies and becoming more so in contemporary art theory. His theory maintains strong influence in the writing of political and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, while art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud (2016) has recently revived Althusser’s lessons in discussions of contemporary art practice. Yet, historically, Althusser is regarded as an embarrassing figure and was denounced by his former pupils, now recognised theorists, Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe.2 Bourriaud (2016, xiii) acknowledges that Althusser seems to represent the ‘elephant in the room’ in contemporary theory, an unorthodox philosopher permitted back into the ‘lounge’ of contemporary cultural debate after a sustained absence. The question therefore arises, why Althusser? And why now? What conditions have

2 Althusser was institutionalised in his final years of life for killing his partner.

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prompted a rereading of Althusser’s debates on ideology? Althusser’s theory continues to raise questions about the conditions of social, political and economic domination that are endlessly produced in societies that proclaim devotion to the ideas of freedom and equality, Jacques Bidet (2014, xviii) claims. Historical context charges Althusser’s theories with new significance in the context of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, mass demonstrations such as Occupy in 2011, Brexit in 2016, and a global lockdown of cities in 2020–2021. On a broad scale, the conditions of production that determine the relations to material existence are approaching critical mass. Althusser ‘s theory may stimulate an enquiry into how the ideological conditions of repression and exploitation are held in place. Nicolas Bourriaud has also hauled contemporary art into this dialogue. He (2016, xiv) asserts that revising Althusser’s theory in light of twentyfirst-century cultural debates provides a new lens for interpreting the complex entanglement between art and politics without reducing it to its basic formulations. A resurgence of Althusser may therefore reinvigorate discourses in art, especially where art questions the conditions that create exploitation and exclusion, or deeply rooted ideologies. A theory of ISAs has leverage at the level of politico-economic ideology to disrupt the existing material conditions or status quo in which inequality and social division is normalised. In this chapter, Althusser is employed to analyse the ideological software by which conditions of exploitation circulate in the everyday systems and relationships in cities. From this foundation, I argue, art brings visibility to the dominant ideologies that sustain a normative use of the city as a space of hyper consumerism and conformity.

5.3

Neoliberal Ideology, the City and Art

The powerful flows of globalisation and neoliberalism have wrought a new set of ideological conditions since the late twentieth century. Architectural theorists have documented how these shifts emerged in postmodern architecture and how they impact urban societies more broadly. According to Douglas Spencer (2016, 151), Frederic Jameson had captured the early signals of postmodern architecture in his motif of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Jameson (1984) characterised the structure as a postmodern hyperspace and an emblem of the incomprehensible in global economics. Designed by architect and developer John Portman, the Bonaventure Hotel introduced typologies of architecture

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and space that Jameson described as a bewildering, immersive spectacle. The plan comprised four symmetrical towers and a large central atrium with a grand colonnade and a miniature lake. Mirrored glazing, designed to repel the outside city, protected a miniature world inside. Meanwhile, a maze of escalators, elevators and images indoors added to a sense of disorientation. The hotel presented a dialectical placelessness: a gaping empty space offset by a peculiar busyness. According to Spencer (2016, 151), Jameson articulated the machinations of global capitalism at the time. This was seen primarily through a mutation of space that demanded a consequent mutation of the subject in order to accommodate itself within a new set of conditions. Jameson registered early signals of a tendency in architecture to break away from its urban context. The hotel visitor would struggle to orientate themselves due to the overwhelming dimensions, lack of spatial divisions and a complete immersion of the senses. Similar to the Guggenheim Bilbao example discussed earlier, the Bonaventure displayed an incomprehensibility in parallel with the growth of globalisation in the late twentieth century. Global connections of commerce and communications driven by the international trading of manufactured goods rapidly became so vast and complex that individuals struggled to comprehend their effects. Nothing, it seemed, was coherent beyond an immediate experience of overwhelm. Spencer judged that Jameson had tapped into a corresponding development in postmodern architecture, as observed in the Bonaventure example. Globalisation increased international economic relations and flows of products. Neoliberalism, by contrast, has signalled a shift towards free market principles. Spencer (2016, 2) states that a neoliberal ideology presents a new spin on economic fact: its fundamental claim is that full knowledge of the complexities of the world is best mediated by the economic market, which is positioned to calculate, process and order society in a superior way to the state. Competition between individuals is presented as a natural state, facilitated by equal access to the market and its conditions, to which each must adapt and respond and which the state should safeguard to sustain the operation of the market. There are traces of the incomprehensible here. Individuals are, in theory, overwhelmed by the complexity of the free-market and have little choice but to adapt to these conditions of existence. Philip Mirowski (in Spencer 2016, 3) echoes this when he claims that neoliberalism has embedded its roots deep into everyday life, to the point where it now passes as ‘the

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ideology of no ideology.’ This recalls Althusser’s claim that the conditions of production are asserted with a ‘tenacious obviousness’ so entrenched in everyday consciousness that they are difficult to identify or critique. The terrain of that which is economically viable has also shifted: purposebuilt shopping malls are supplemented by online shopping at home, for example. However, a neoliberal ideology cannot account for all the ways subjective experiences in the city are controlled, and to which artists respond. A neoliberal urban agenda endorses practices that comply with its agenda without complaint. The rise of popular night-time art festivals such as White night in various cities across the world is evidence of this logic. Non-critical, crowd-pleasing and readily digestible art-as-entertainment characterises the light artworks on display. Chantal Mouffe (2007) notes an increased coercion by commercial forces to merge art with the popular culture industries, restricting art’s capacity to challenge the status quo. Australian artist Peter Burke, whose work I discuss in Chapter 8, echoes this concern. He (2016, 6) states that art is invaded by a range of commercial, civic and curatorial interests, while the role of artists, audiences and commissioning bodies has become less clear. Art’s critique within a neoliberal framework of market-ready options is also significantly reduced. In The neoliberal city, Jason Hackworth (2007, 13) argues that documenting the influence of neoliberalism in cities in the United States can trace these shifts globally. As a container for neoliberal policies, the American city’s governance, real estate speculation and development signal the sites where neoliberal ideologies surface in concrete forms. A neoliberal agenda is no longer confined to the business spaces of corporate offices, but implemented in education systems, civic spaces, and logistics networks that transport consumer goods bought and sold online, with flexible working hours that extend leisure and domestic space into the economic cycles of the city. This constitutes the real of globalism according to Bourriaud (2016, viii), a ‘waging of war against anything not already at work, or in the process of becoming so.’ A neoliberal ideology treats all kinds of spacetime as potentially profitable. Global cloud-based companies Airbnb Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. have made immense returns by marketing the idea that individuals can profit from leasing personal domestic spaces or vehicles not in use that were once considered the domain of private leisure time. A concern

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arising from this trend, which updates Althusser’s theory, is that a neoliberal agenda embedded at this level initiates a restless search for innovative, therefore profitable, objects and uses of spacetime, and takes hold as a new novelty and ideological norm in today’s developed cities. Some of these concerns surface in AIRBNB pavilion by the Londonbased ÅYR Collective for Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. Organised by members, Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela and Octave Perrault, the project responded to a recent phenomenon of the sharing economy commercialised by Airbnb Inc. Established in 2008, Airbnb Inc. created a market for property owners to become microentrepreneurs who can potentially profit from a surplus of domestic living spaces by listing spare rooms or services on Airbnb Inc. The profits of private homeowners as would-be entrepreneurs are inevitably overshadowed by the profits of the Airbnb Inc. corporation that hosts these sharing networks. Airbnb’s projected profits for 2020 were, for example, estimated at 3.5 billion per year (Gallagher 2017). AIRBNB pavilion comprised an exhibition of twenty-five design pieces and artworks in three Venetian apartments rented through Airbnb Inc. for three days. Artists, architects and visitors were invited to participate in a dialogue on domestic symbolism as a currency in ‘post-Airbnb’ cities. The project aimed to situate a critique within the very spaces where a work-leisure divide had been blurred to highlight a neoliberal ideology in which every available space or body is put to work. The spatial impacts of the sharing economy were given a tangibility in domestic settings to interrogate a porous division between public and private boundaries of commercial activity. Online spaces were implicated as part of the new infrastructure for everyday living. ÅYR’s critique engaged with the advance of commodified domesticspace-made-public and a market logic that moves fluidly between everyday cloud-based networks and concrete spaces. AIRBNB pavilion questioned the reach of enterprise culture and archetypal neoliberalism that has changed architectural thinking on the city. ÅYR collective (2014) stated that the work was intended to highlight the challenge Airbnb had raised for architecture, demanding a redefinition of building categories with a radical arrangement of the city that had emerged from the internet. The city has become a ‘city of rooms,’ openly referenced online and superimposed onto the existing city, appearing or disappearing from the map at any time. The project also engaged with the meaning of corporate ownership of private, domestic identity which not only inserts a new

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infrastructure for everyday life, if one has a space, service or time to market, but redefines the private realm and private property. By extension, these shifts have tangible impacts on how cities are built and marketed. An ongoing corporate conflict between Airbnb Inc. and cities due to the impact of the sharing economy on the hotel industry, for example, is evidence of this. Althusser’s reading of ideology, updated for the conditions presented by neoliberalism and its impact in cities, supports my analysis of art practices that expose the ideologies of a corporate agenda in the urban system. Bourriaud has argued that the artwork is where ideology can be uncovered, offering a critical space in which the politics of today might be interrogated. He (2016, 73) states that art approaches ideology through its concrete effects and the ensemble of cultural and social norms and political conventions that structure daily life. Deviation from the norm or the creative obstacles presented through art tend to disrupt a logic of ‘obvious facts’ that organise daily routines or behaviours. While not all contemporary art is antagonistic or critical by design, the works discussed in this book share a tendency to question established conditions, often bringing to bear the workings of exploitation and repression that operate in city spaces. In this way, Bourriaud states, art can confront the ideologies of our times head on. An appraisal of how artists reveal everyday conditions supported by neoliberal ideologies in post-productive societies can lead us to question the ideologies that support a default market logic. He (2016, 43) contends, for example, that today’s ideological apparatuses declare the politico-economic framework to be absolute and conclusive, thereby reducing capacity to change or interrogate the situation. A central task of contemporary art is ‘to bring awareness to the power of precarity, to affirm the possibility for intervention in the world, and to stimulate creative potential in all areas of human existence’ (Bourriaud 2016, 43). Art practices can inspire the conditions for possibility, potential, dislocation, disassembly, disorder or poetic interlude. This includes art’s capacity to intervene in the ideological norms that filter interactions in urban space. Chapter 8 excavates these strategies in more detail to show how art exposes the ideologies that operate on a basis of exclusion and exploitation. First, however, the next chapter analyses theories of the body through which the city’s ideological use is orchestrated and performed in everyday cycles.

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References Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. ÅYR collective. 2014. The AIRBNB parasite of the Venice architecture biennale. 032c Magazine. https://032c.com/magazine/the-airbnb-parasite-of-the-ven ice-architecture-biennale. Accessed 6 June 2023. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. The ecstasy of communication. In The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture, ed. Hal Foster, 126–134. Washington: Bay Press. Bidet, Jacques. 2014. Introduction: An invitation to reread Althusser. In On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, xviii–xxviii. London and New York: Verso. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2016. The exform. London and New York: Verso. Burke, Peter. 2016. Pop-up art: Performing creative disruption in social space. PhD, RMIT University. Foster, Hal. 1985. Recodings: Art, spectacle, cultural politics. Seattle: Bay Press. Foster, Hal. 2002. Design and crime: And other diatribes. London: Verso. Gallagher, Leigh. 2017. Airbnb’s profits to top $30 billion by 2020. Fortune Magazine. http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/airbnb-profits/. Accessed 23 February 2023. Gardner, Roberta, ed. 2000. Social theory: Continuity and confrontation: A reader. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Hackworth, Jason. 2007. The neoliberal city. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Frederic. 1984. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review I 146 (July–August): 53–92. Jameson, Frederic. 1998. Architecture and the critique of ideology. Paper presented at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, 1982. Reprinted in Architecture theory since 1968, ed. Michael, K. Hays, 442–461. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Leong, Sze Tsung. 2001. The last remaining form of public life. In Project on the City 2: Guide to Shopping, ed. Rem Koolhaas, Judy Chung Chuihua, Jeffrey Inaba and Sze Tsung Leong, 128–155. Harvard Design School. London: Taschen. Miles, Steven. 2010. Spaces for consumption: Pleasure and placelessness in the postindustrial city. Los Angeles: Sage. Mouffe, Chantelle. 2007. Artistic activism and agonistic spaces. Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. 1 (2): 1–5. Spencer, Douglas. 2016. The architecture of neoliberalism: How contemporary architecture became an instrument of control and compliance. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

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Tafuri, Manfredo. 1998. Towards a critique of architectural ideology (1969). Reprinted in Architecture theory since 1968, ed. Michael K. Hays, 2–35. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 2016. Transformative avant-garde and other writings. London: Black Dog Publishing.

CHAPTER 6

The Body and the City

Since the late 1960s, critical performance art practices have demonstrated ways to creatively (mis)use the body, re-inhabiting urban spaces in noncompliant ways. To situate these practices in proximity to critical theory on the body and city, this chapter examines the tensions arising in the disciplinary apparatuses envisioned by Michel Foucault (1979). His thesis on the docile body has implications for the ideological or normative use of the city because, I argue, it is the bodies of city dwellers who, inadvertently or not, perform the everyday cycles and routines that cement economic productivity as the dominant modus operandi. A study of the body in relation to three spatial types by Henri Lefebvre (1991) grounds this Foucauldian reading in the city, while Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) feminist reading of the body raises questions of alterity and subjectivity in the city. An appraisal of these discourses helps to expose an urban software that conditions the body through cycles of self-regulating actions or behaviours. This establishes terrain through which non-compliant gestures made evident in art intervention contest a series of dominant forces acting on the body in the city’s relational spaces.

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6.1 Michel Foucault: Disciplinary Observation and Docile Bodies Foucault’s critique of Jeremy Bentham’s prison design for the Panopticon, introduces the idea that a physical structure can exercise power over the social body. Bentham envisaged his design as an instrument of discipline based on a system of permanent registration. In consonance with the tenets of structural rationalism, the panoptic apparatus induced in the subject the perception of constant surveillance that could regulate the behaviour of inmates. This was achieved using a central observation tower with radial cell blocks. Screens and lighting, cleverly positioned to avoid lines of sight, concealed the presence of prison guards so that inmates could be watched without knowing whether the wardens were present or not. Foucault argued the Panopticon had broader implications for modern societies because it introduced an automatic function of bio-power. A regime of permanent visibility had roots in the forced confinement of healthy bodies during periods of plague in seventeenth-century cities. In modern society, the dispositifs of power modified discipline through apparatuses such as hospitals and prisons. Rational order was this way internalised and mobilised by way of the body throughout the collective as a form of self-regulation. In both the prison and city, this power ensured the functioning of the perfect utopian city (Foucault 1979, 208). Grant Vetter (2012, 31) argues that, above all else, panopticism concerns the power of uncertain invisibility. The Panopticon represented an archio-disciplinary apparatus that wielded control over actions or behaviours through the suspected presence of surveillance, without revealing if an observer was physically present or not. Vetter (2012, 31) states that the force of panopticism actualises the power of domination without the presence of a qualifying counterpart, thereby naturalising interrogative relations without necessarily enacting them. Though it was proposed as a physical structure, Foucault discerned in the prison design a micro-physics of power that operated covertly through the relations induced by a non-physical power, or the absence of the observer on the observed. Panopticism has since become synonymous with automated self-regulation of the body, its actions and behaviours based on an abstract notion of surveillance. Vetter (2012, 20) goes further to identify the current mutations in neo-panopticism that build on Foucault’s thesis. He identifies three

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key forms of panopticism operating in societies today. ‘Synopticism,’ in which many are watching one; ‘Banopticism,’ in which many are watching many; and ‘Bio-opticism,’ in which the optical apparatus passes through membranes to observe the inside of bodies. Vetter (2012, 20) claims these are indicators of a ‘hyperbolic panopticism’ that charges the disciplinary apparatus of subject-making with new power. He (2012, 20– 21) argues that Synopticism, Banopticism and Bio-opticism are multiple regimes that comprise the circuitous panoptic gaze that accounts for and catalogues an entirety of public bodies, corporeal interactions and movements. Vetter’s argument expands Foucault’s exposition of the dispositif to a neo-panopticism of automatic self-regulation seen in the mutations of discipline today. He (2012, 26) states, for example, that universal panopticism underpins consumer ideology as a commercial power wielded through the observation and categorisation of trends or the use of emotive marketing, which invade and corral bodies into new assemblies of order. In Part III, I return to the mutations of panopticism, including Big Brother surveillance and data-tracking as well as a discussion on how artists have grappled with these technologies in public space. Along with the Panopticon, Foucault (1979, 135–141) wrote that the mass formation of obedient bodies was foundational to the function of discipline in society. He argued that powerful and coercive forces inscribed the body so that it responded to and complied with a dominant regime. Foucault’s discussion primarily examined the docile body in state institutions: the school, the army, the hospital. As a broader statement, however, he resituated an apparatus of power that regulated the body on varying scales, using different coercive techniques from mass cultural movements to the minutiae of everyday life. An appraisal of docile bodies in this context is therefore indispensable because it provides insights into the controls working over and through the body. This foregrounds an expanded discourse on how artists have made this evident or pushed back on embodied forms of control through the creative, unproductive or un-disciplined (mis)uses of the body in city spaces. From the eighteenth century on, the body was both the target and product of disciplinary power. Policies of coercion exercised by a machine of power, the disciplinary apparatus, transformed or improved the body by breaking it down, mastering and rearranging it until the obedient, mechanical docile body emerged. Foucault (1979, 137–138) argued the idea was to treat the body individually through subtle coercion to obtain

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holds on its movements, gestures and attitudes at the level of the corporeal order. This ensured a microscopic agency over the movements of the body. Scientists, philosophers and technocrats exploited the body across two registers: the anatomic-metaphysical and technico-political. One pushed the physical and emotional body to submit to disciplinary order, while the other conditioned the cognitive mind–body to respond to rational function. Connecting utility with the intelligible was the notion of docility, which fused the anatomical and manipulated body. For Foucault, disciplinary coercion forged a link between increased aptitude of the body along with its disciplined response to authority. This meticulous control was inscribed in terms of docility-utility; subtle adjustments could produce higher utility and diminish external forces that might encourage political disobedience. Foucault (1979, 135) explained the transition from unconditioned to conditioned docile body using the analogy of a soldier. The soldier is moulded from formless clay; starting as an inapt yet pliable body, it is subjected to posture correction, constraint and the automatism of habit until the soldier emerges, mastered by the machine under controlled conditions. The soldier’s body is attuned to authority and emerges compliant, disciplined and ready to obey commands. The army apparatus is where the docile body is manipulated, regimented, trained and regulated; the bodies it produces respond to a corrective order and increase their skill and force through habitual use (Foucault 1979, 136). From boundless to bounded, the body’s docility extends to obedient relations as it is subjected to further instruction and rules, routine conditioning and in exercising the orders it receives, creating a collective of compliant bodies (Foucault 1979, 138). This micro-physics of bio-power was foundational in state-administered institutions where it operated in a controlled environment, in turn moving to engulf the wider social body. Foucault’s dispositifs help to clarify my line of enquiry that differentiates a structural urban hardware from the ideological conditioning of software, which operates vis-à-vis the body, subjectivity and social relationships. Drawing on the docile body thesis, I argue that software provides a framework in which the bodies of city dwellers are routinely coerced, shaped or influenced to rehearse a normative use of the city. The practices of art that (mis)use the body tend to interrupt this flow of micro-capillary power through empowered resistance. Michael Feher (1987, 61) has argued that a double constitution may recover the body as the site where power is realised as well as where it is countered: there is

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a tension within the body that resists mechanisms of control and conceives strategies of resistance. Chapter 8 analyses body-centric art interventions and performances that both highlight how the city infiltrates, coerces and co-opts bodies into cycles of productivity and compliance, and challenge docility to reinstate the body as a contested field. These practices demonstrate that the body is an effective medium (or weapon) for exposing an urban software that orders movements, intersubjectivities, gestures and attitudes in urban spaces.

6.2

Henri Lefebvre: The Body in Urban Space

While Foucault provides foundations for a history of regulation and shows how discipline was embodied, Lefebvre brings the body into discussions on the production of space. Like Foucault, he grappled with questions of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, and passivity and assertiveness at the individual (micro) and mass culture (macro) levels. Lefebvre analysed the human body in relation to regimes of power in modern urban society to draw attention to the powerful forces that influence the ways bodies produce space. While there are consonances between their ideas, there are other important distinctions, too. Foucault’s theses on dispersed regimes of power rarely charted an embodied resistance to topdown control and surveillance. Richard Sennett (1994, 26) notes, it was not until his final years that Foucault began to loosen the knot of power that had immobilised the human body in his exegesis on disciplinary society. Foucault was arguably focussed on demonstrating power as an all-encompassing infiltration of corporeality at the expense of the body’s revival as a resistant being. Lefebvre (1991), however, treated the body as an active producer of space to provoke a return of human resilience in what he calls ‘differential spaces.’ His theory of space production is central to developments in the modern city and provides a foundation for later discussions of the everyday in the next chapter. Locating his theory in the material world was important to Lefebvre. To this end he identified three historical moments for the production of space: spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces. These reconcile abstract concepts within the concrete realities of modern everyday life and support Lefebvre’s argument on how ‘macro’ systems of power came to operate within the minutiae of the everyday vis-à-vis the body. ‘Spatial practices’ concern the way space is used and generated through subjective and bodily (inter)action; it is constant in the

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city’s social life. ‘Representations of space’ refer to captured or suspended spaces in the technical and rational savoir (knowledge) of maps, engineering diagrams or city plans. Finally, ‘representational spaces’ denote a production and modification that occurs over time through different spatial uses, along with symbolic meanings that are embedded within them. The latter can result from contingent uses of space and counterdiscourses that multiply in the city’s liminal spaces and peripheries. Lefebvre’s treatment of the body in relation to these spatial moments is usefully expanded by urban geographer Steve Pile (1996). He incorporates Lefebvre’s ‘spaces of monuments’ and ‘spaces of bodies’ within a discourse that connects the body and city through psychoanalysis. Pile says that Lefebvre’s threefold spatial schema—spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces—corresponds with registers of corporeal effect: the perceived, the conceived and the lived. These form the basis for a psychoanalytical study of subjective urban experience to reveal how top-down order in the city transitions into, or is layered on top of, lived experiences and everyday life. This goes partway to explaining how city dwellers might move and interact with, or sense the city. Pile (1996, 174) states, the body and city interweave intricate histories as demonstrated by three main connection points. First, bodies create space; second, space is orientated on the body; third, the spatial body is organised by gestures and bodily rhythms. The effect is therefore one of reciprocity: ‘spaces producing bodies producing spaces’ or ‘bodies producing spaces producing bodies.’ Lefebvre grounds a production of space in the concrete realities of the body. Meanwhile, he acknowledges that bodies are necessary to express different realities in the city’s spaces. In this way, his theory of the production of space is contingent on a co-productive relationship between bodies and cities. Lefebvre claimed that top-down technical and rational ‘representations of space’ increasingly repress grass-roots spatial practices. This anticipates his notion of abstract space, that is, spaces that are divested of individuality and creativity. On the other hand, differential space offers a response to the crushing technical and rational logic that organises the body in abstract space. Differential space, the antithesis of abstract space, is born from contradictions that are inherent to abstract space. The body is intrinsic to the multiplicity in differential spaces as Lynn Stewart (1995) observes, because the body expresses varied actions, gestures and subjective responses. According to Stewart (1995, 615), Lefebvre theorised that bodies pursue counter-spaces on the margins of homogenised space

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through actions such as resisting land development or top-down urban planning and through the production of heterotopias, or ‘other’ spaces that do not readily conform to a dominant or rational logic. Lefebvre claimed that heterogeneous groups of people must work together to speak up and debate space-related issues (Stewart 1995, 615). There are some striking correlations between theories related to the body and the early gestural performances in art from the late 1950s. Artists such as Carole Schneemann and Valie Export used their bodies in ways that were expressive, and sometimes aggressive or self-exploiting. The Fluxus practices and happenings discussed earlier used non-rational, spontaneous actions to respond to an overbearing urban rationality that demanded that bodies function efficiently for economic productivity, consumption and order. An increasingly activist use of the body in the late 1960s and 1970s disturbed a rational logic of Lefebvrian abstract space. According to Tracey Warr (2000, 21) the artist’s misuse of the body became increasingly frenzied or violent as the social mechanics of alienation were contested in performance art. Elsewhere, the body operated as a signifier of political engagement. The walking murals of the Los Angeles ASCO collective appropriated city streets to perform a counter spectacle that reembodied public space. The artist body was centralised as a signifier of resistance and difference, and a meeting point for externalising and contesting transpersonal forces operating in public, relational spaces. In art, as in theory, the body came to constitute a site and actualiser of resistance to the dominant machinations of power that treated the body as a controllable entity. The non-compliant body expresses individuality and creativity in response to homogenising processes of spatial order or disciplinary control.

6.3 Elizabeth Grosz: Bodies and Cities as ‘Mutually Constitutive’ Elizabeth Grosz extended Foucault’s discourse on the docile body in her 1992 essay ‘Bodies-cities.’ She analysed the relationship between the body and the city, offering an active role for docile bodies while expanding the differential qualities of Lefebvre’s body-space relationship. Grosz reclaimed a dynamic position for the body through its capacity for micro-political and social adjustments. She (1994, 146) stated that it is precisely because the body is unpredictable and able to be directed in potentially infinite ways that it is the object, target and instrument of

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power. This also suggests that the body is not entirely powerless beneath the panoptic eye. Grosz’s analysis focusses on the cultural processes that inscribe the body psychically, socially, sexually and representationally. In ‘Bodiescities,’ she argues that urban discourses assume a masculine corporeality to justify a hierarchical relationship of the body to the urban. Thus, she contends, urban discourses are propped up by binary oppositions that treat bodies and cities as monolithic entities. The body becomes a disembodied consciousness that makes cities, while the city itself represents the offspring of male activity. The natural body becomes obsolete as assumptions of (male) hierarchy are embedded in the city, while the female body becomes the already-assumed site of (passive) reproduction. Grosz argues this binary opposition assumes a naturalisation of ideal urban governance based on a masculine corporeality. The point, Grosz (1992, 247) claims, is to expose a dominant patriarchy inherent in the universal notion of the unspecified subject. In line with Foucault, Grosz states the body is subject to a cohesive totality organised by power structures that order and shape the body and its relationship to other bodies. The body is coded by ordered principles, sexual desires, and social meaning, and manipulated through discipline and ideology. Meanwhile, in its basic formulation, the city is taken as the dominant apparatus by which otherwise unrelated bodies are socially produced and regulated to ensure conformity. Grosz (1992, 250) argues that the city is the ‘most immediate concrete locus’ that produces and circulates power; social rules and attitudes are habituated in the context of the city’s form and structure to ensure conformity of the masses, contrived through a series of lateral or contingent relations between individuals and social groups. Here, the city acquires the characteristics of the disciplinary apparatus. It follows that the city is instrumental in regulating the body and ordering connections between bodies, geographically, architecturally, culturally, socially and spatially. Moreover, unrelated bodies are arranged into units and systems, automated attitudes and social relations. This adds a new dimension to the urban software. Grosz illustrates a model of power that administers and structures the city, implementing routines and everyday controls for the bodies who use it. However, in its resistance to the disciplinary apparatus, Grosz proposes that the body exists in a co-productive relationship with the city. The body is active in the transformation of the city: it can cross thresholds as part of the different flows, energies, events or spaces made possible

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by fleeting encounters and temporary alignments in the urban environment (Grosz 1992, 248–249). The body has a dynamic role in a mutually constitutive relationship with the city because its activity and unpredictability counter its abstract treatment in urban discourses and opens a window for female subjectivities of the city to emerge. In the mutually constitutive relationship, the female body gains equal purchase in citymaking. The body is no longer disembodied but embodied. Grosz states that the city and body are hinged together, as the body is re-examined or reinscribed. In turn, she (1992, 248) contends that, as a cultural product, the body transforms the urban space in accordance with its needs, which extends the limits of the city. A limitless array of corporeal habits, pleasures, norms, ideals and movements are the target of regulatory power, however the body operates as the hinge, a key tool that displaces that power between the collective and the individual. Grosz suggests that the governance, structure and terrain of the city influence the body, affecting its corporeal orientations, and influencing its physical and nutritional wellbeing. But the body is responsive. Positioned as a hinge between wider society and the city, corporeality is treated as an interface: bodies coexist and co-produce each other as assemblages in a feedback relation. The city is made over in the likeness of the body and the body is at the same time transformed or urbanised as a distinctive urban body (Grosz 1992, 249). This articulation of the hinge positions the body as an active and strategic connection in producing the city. In turn, it foregrounds an analysis of the artist’s (mis)use of the body in the city to interrogate the soft conditions operating in urban space. Grosz’s analysis emerged as part of a contemporary feminist reading of the city that reclaimed spaces for questions of embodiment in the context of lived experience. A central concern was the hierarchies that mapped material spaces and how women’s bodies could resist enclosure. To this end, Grosz recovered a resilient position for the body with its potential for subversive action. Grosz treats the body as a site of constant tension between mechanisms of power and tactics of resistance; the body is a contested field, a shifting political medium, and terrain of repossession. The exploitation and categorisation of the female body was confronted by artists such as Valie Export as a tool for critiquing ideologies that rehearse gender biases in public space. In 1968, Export used her own body as a medium for intervention in Touch cinema, for which she attached a miniature theatre to her bare chest and challenged members of the public to touch her body through the concealing stage curtains. She also used

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her body to mirror the contours of curbs and imitate the angles of steps and street corners in Vienna’s public spaces in Body configurations (1972– 1976). As her actions deviated from coded behaviour or social protocols, the body became a signifier of difference, contesting relations of power. Export’s gestures could be understood as both a conceptual adaptation of the city’s structure and an antagonistic challenge to the conditions that lead to corporeal invisibility. To this we can add body-centric works in public spaces from the late twentieth to early twenty-first century that challenge the politics of constantly productive bodies. Performative gestures of futility using the body reflect lop-sided labour-power relations and problematise a corporate agenda that demands maximum outputs by extending the workday around the clock. Examples include William Pope.L’s Tompkins Street crawl in 1991, for which the artist crawled along the streets of New York City dressed in a business suit while pushing a flowerpot, a work I discuss in more detail in Chapter 8. For his Ambulantes series between 1992 and 2006, Francis Alÿs photographed Mexico City’s poor as they trolleyed huge amounts of rubbish through the city’s streets. Using different methods, Pope.L and Alÿs each situated the body in a struggle for survival. Through a performance of unusual, ritualised tasks, the bodies demanded attention precisely because their actions lacked use value in a traditional economic logic, and therefore ran counter to ideologies of the productive or profitable body (O’Reilly 2009, 210). By way of introduction to works analysed in Chapter 8, these works show how errant uses of the body can interrupt the everyday city through subversive action. These artists position the body in ways that expose harsh material realities or hierarchies of the city as it is lived or experienced. They correspond with Feher (1987, 161), who posits that the body is engaged in a battle that shifts depending on the mechanisms of power, constantly devising strategies of resistance and escape. By (mis)using the body, the artists draw attention to the issues of displacement, dispossession and disenfranchisement in the context of top-down order. Perhaps a more radical shift that impacts bodies in cities today is the growing interdependence of bodies and technology to which artists have responded more recently. The body’s position in relation to the rapid transition to digital automation in urban societies, particularly in the early twenty-first century, has had broader implications, as Grosz had anticipated in her essay. As information and technology revolutionised urban

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development from the late 1980s, as it continues to do today, hyperreality and networked communications have transformed cities and the spaces of bodies. Grosz (1992, 251) expected this would have a major impact, affecting the social coding of bodies and the city. The growth of machine operations and the collapse of distance and speed through technology interfaces to provide instant gratification has impacts for the minutiae of everyday life, including corporeal existence, Grosz stated. She hypothesised that the meeting of body and machine would result in one of two outcomes: the machine resembling the body, or the body resembling the machine. Her concern was that the body would be gradually replaced by the machine in city spaces. In addition, mechanised labour systems have gradually rendered obsolete or invisible the body’s role as producer. Today, a connection between bodies and their mutual constitution of the city is not only mediated by face-to-face inter-relations, but increasingly by networked communications and screen interfaces, a central theme explored in Part III. Since the late 1980s, the gradual augmentation of the human body through artificial intelligence has been the subject of artistic critique. Artists have used their bodies in ways that reflect urban experiences of estrangement and simulation. Critics note a surge in practices that engage with fragmentation and technology in art, sometimes accompanied by a withdrawal into postmodern irony, rendering the body irrelevant, vulnerable or embarrassing (O’Reilly 2009, 7). Tracey Warr (2000, 37) states that the artist’s physical body is often replaced by a simulacrum, where an irony of disillusion deliberately supersedes authenticity. Artistic treatment of the body has increasing relevance for a critique of the city. Sometimes passive yet also resilient, the body is a terrain where tensions between the forces that act on or ‘possess’ the embodied subject can be destabilised or confronted. Lefebvre argued that embodied resistance was vital to an ongoing production of heterogeneous city spaces in which all bodies can participate. As the next chapter discusses, the terrain of everyday life is equally vital to understanding a struggle between the forces of alienation and economic production, and the restless details and activities of ordinary life. The everyday offers an alternative area of human experience for escape and resistance that artists make tangible to expose or work away from the city’s ideological software.

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References Feher, Michel. 1987. Of bodies and technologies. In Discussions in contemporary culture, ed. Hal Foster, 159–165. Seattle: Bay Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1992. Bodies-cities. In Sexuality and space, ed. Beatriz Colomina, 241–254. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. O’Reilly, Sally. 2009. The body in contemporary art. London: Thames and Hudson. Pile, Steve. 1996. The body and the city: Psychoanalysis, space and subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge. Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and stone: The body and the city in western civilization. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Stewart, Lynn. 1995. Bodies, visions, and spatial politics: A review essay on Henri Lefebvre’s The production of space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 609–618. Vetter, Grant. 2012. The architecture of control: A contribution to the critique of the science of apparatuses. Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books. Warr, Tracey. 2000. The artist’s body. London: Phaidon Press.

CHAPTER 7

The Everyday City

Part II has pursued an enquiry into the ways ideology and disciplinary order are inscribed in the urban software and actioned by the bodies of city dwellers. This chapter is concerned with how the repeated actions, cycles and rhythms of everyday life concretise dominant ideologies about the city’s normative use. How do the imperceptible, non-reflexive habits that produce everyday conditions of productivity and efficiency come to be embodied or cemented in day-to-day routines? How are they carried out seemingly unquestioned or without formal category, as a kind of rational hypnosis? Everyday life was written about extensively by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. While their works have been introduced in previous chapters, here they ground my enquiry into the repetition of routines and habitual appearances of the city. This is intended to expose an interdependent connection between ideology, the body and the everyday that ensures the smooth function of a top-down urban system. This foregrounds an analysis of art practices that directly or indirectly address the everyday, interrupting urban flows, rhythms and cycles to make the everyday, and by extension the city, less repetitive and alienating.

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7.1

A Theory of the Everyday in Art

The concepts of the everyday and everyday life have been rigorously debated in socio-cultural theory, as they have in art theory. The selected theory discussed in this chapter provides insights into the everyday to better assess art practices that render the city’s everyday life tangible or to interrupt ordinary routines to broaden awareness of an urban material context. Cultural theorist Ben Highmore (2002, 23) sets out the dichotomy that underscores a theory of everyday life; while it remains unnoticed as a phenomenon, even while it is being transformed, the initial step in attending to it, is to make it known or noticeable. The concept of the everyday experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s, prompting exhibitions and anthologies on its manifestation in art praxis. Art theorists such as Helen Molesworth (1999), Stephen Johnstone (2008) and Nikos Papastergiadis (2010) have deployed theories of the everyday to assess happenings and Fluxus art, and conceptual and performance practices. A strategy of making the everyday noticeable or strange is a common trait in art that tends to render that which is most familiar, unfamiliar. Art practices that focus on the quotidian operate as barometers of incremental changes across space and time by drawing attention to otherwise undetectable or ordinary actions, habits and routines. A link between art and academic readings of the everyday has, in addition, generated debates about the problematic relationship between art and theory. Johnstone (2008, 16) argues that art readily expresses or discovers the ordinary without necessarily referencing theory. Artists tap into the elusive, complex and ambiguous aspects of everyday realism as it materialises in art’s enduring concern for simple gestures that connect with lived experiences. Papastergiadis (2010, 35) observes that the curatorial choices for the 1998 Sydney Biennale were largely devoid of academic references to the everyday as a field in sociology. This raises the question of why the quotidian had resurfaced as a category in art critique. What conditions prompted a return to the everyday in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century? Papastergiadis suggests that art and theory on the everyday are bound in such a way that one cannot proceed without the other, when one considers the radical changes wrought by tumultuous globalisation and its impact on everyday lives and experiences today. He (2010, 38) says that art is a forerunner or witness to changes not yet fully formed or included in wider collective discourses. Art thus has a capacity to stimulate one’s senses and heighten awareness of one’s proximity to

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that which is otherwise commonplace or unremarkable. Connecting to subtle signs and social nuances is the way that art ignites discussions and shares ground with debates in theory and politics. Art enriches the stream of everyday life by making it more closely known as a human experience. A theoretical framework that sketches the everyday supports analyses of a diverse range of contemporary art practices in terms of the critical awareness they may raise, rendering the ordinary appearance of the city both revelatory and political.

7.2

Life’s ‘Common Denominator’

Lefebvre and Levich (1987, 9) referred to the everyday as life’s ‘common denominator.’ Throughout his career, Lefebvre had sought new ways to theorise and define the everyday across three volumes of his opus, Critique of everyday life (2014), but decided that universal definitions tended to immobilise the subject. In short, Lefebvre argued, la vie quotidienne or everyday life could not be pinned down. He thus presented it as a practice of continual repetition, or a common denominator, encompassing everything from daily chores to routine pleasures that were anchored in habit and sameness. Everyday life was a condition that was profoundly connected across all activities, he (2014, 119) stated, and it encompassed everything from material differences to conflict because it was their mutual meeting point, their commonality and bond. The Critique of everyday life was Lefebvre’s influential contribution to post-war Marxism. In his early collaborations with Norbert Guterman, Lefebvre took his lead from Marxist concepts of alienation and detachment; like Althusser, he evolved these beyond rudimentary divisions of economic production and capitalism, or base and superstructure. Stuart Elden (2004, 111) notes that Lefebvre acknowledged the potential for analysis of the everyday offered by Marx but argued that Marxism did not satisfy a complete critique of the everyday. Lefebvre’s claim was that alienation was the result of the separation of the subjective and objective self through labour and production. In addition, it rendered the individual incapable of grasping and thinking ‘the other’ in all areas of life. Fundamentally, Lefebvre’s project situated a critique of alienation in everyday life in a way that rehabilitates a radical potential for change within the unassuming repetition and monotony of day-to-day experiences. At its heart, Critique posits revolutionary thinking and transformative political action as a source of profundity existing in everyday life.

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The everyday is where one lives, dwells or works, for rest and leisure, the places or conditions that typify one’s situation and day-to-day activities, ordinarily. Lefebvre and Levich (1987, 10) argued that the everyday was located at an intersection of two modes: the cyclical and the linear. One is inherent in nature, while the other is imposed from the realm of the rational. Cycles of day and night and the seasons, rest and action, hunger, desire and fulfilment, or life and death, comprise the natural modalities of the everyday. On the other hand, a contrived linear repetition of work routines or non-critical practices of consuming represents a mechanical or rational quotidian. Lefebvre believed that the structuring of modern life had eroded natural cycles of the everyday to impose an artificial and monotonous programme of ‘planned obsolescence.’ As a uniform basis that underscores the categories of society, Lefebvre lamented that everyday life was held captive by the onset of commercial consumerism, which manipulated the desires of consumers vis-à-vis television advertising and new products. This was the same situation that the Situationists had dubbed the society of the spectacle. While he closely observed and recorded details of everyday life, Lefebvre emphasised that it nevertheless continually escaped general definition. Everyday life is full of inconsistencies, ambiguities and subtle diversions that foil any attempts to resolve it in totality. He (2014, 335) wrote that while it surrounds us on all sides and besieges us from all angles, no single activity can be reduced to or divorced from it. This paradox characterises the restless and elusive qualities of la vie quotidienne. This incongruity, Lefebvre claimed, offered pockets of resistance where momentary revelations and creative flashes could surface or subside. Through such moments, everyday life is transformed from within its own insignificance and drudgery. Lefebvre studied the everyday as a series of ongoing tensions borne by the activities that escape the grasp of definition. He observed in modern society how private life, domestic living, work and leisure time, along with urban planning were organised into rational categories. Private and public spaces were increasingly colonised by a bureaucracy of controlled consumption and a relentless tide of advertising. Lefebvre (2014, 336– 337) cites a study for the French National Centre of Scientific Research in Volume II of Critique, lending insight into a series of repetitive domestic tasks he takes as an affirmation of the disempowering dimensions of everyday life. He describes thousands of women in households across France who sweep and dust away the grit that accumulates each day; preparing countless meal after meal; washing dishes, saucepans, sheets

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and clothes; darning socks; and restocking empty cupboards and refrigerators with dried food, fruit and vegetables. This inventory of daily activity exposes a microscopic level at which everyday life could be scrutinised. Modern life is laid bare in its pervasive uniformity. The activities of sweeping, cooking, washing, mending and shopping are presented as symptomatic of a functional everyday and a record of the mundane activities that comprise daily life. The repetitive tasks of domesticity, or maintenance, have been a rich source of engagement for artists since the 1960s. Feminist critiques have widely interrogated gendered domesticity and the ideology underlying women’s roles in society through art practice. The maintenance art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, introduced in Chapter 4, exemplified how the repetitive tasks of the city’s refuse systems could be made visible and create interest for art audiences. In the artist’s 1973 performance, Hartford wash: Washing, tracks, maintenance outside at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, the focus was more domestic: Ukeles washed the museum’s steps, while inside, she took on housework tasks such as cleaning display cases and scrubbing floors. Molesworth (1999, 115) notes that Ukeles shifted the value assigned to unremarkable cleaning processes as part of a broader project to bring visibility to maintenance in public spaces. The actions are reminiscent of Hi Red Centre’s Street cleaning event discussed in Chapter 4, with variations of political intent. Molesworth (1999) situates Ukeles’ work as institutional critique with reference to the public and private sphere of women’s domestic labour, taking the unpaid or unseen household chores and offering them up for public scrutiny. Performing maintenance, Molesworth (1999, 119) argues, is a deceptively simple act because it blurs the line between public and private spheres of conserving and preserving. This exposes the human involvement required in everyday tasks and routines, without which neither space would function properly. Ukeles’ maintenance art offers one mode of expression that makes the everyday tangible. The Wadsworth Atheneum held no records of the Hartford wash performances, in a sense, enacting with some irony Highmore’s statement that the first task in attending to the everyday is to make it noticeable. On one hand, the everyday points to the most immediate world, that is, the actions most repeated, the journeys most travelled and spaces most inhabited (Highmore 2002, 1). The measured and known elements of the day based in routines and habits that mark the value and quality of life, express that which is commonplace. On the other hand,

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in bringing attention to daily chores, as Ukeles does, the everyday is noticeable or suddenly seems out of place, offering potential to transform the mundane from within. Strategies of making the everyday unfamiliar were adopted by Situationist and Fluxus artists to bring awareness to the habitual routines that became fixed attitudes carried out in non-critical ways. Surprising juxtapositions in art rescue the everyday from conventional habits, often disturbing its smooth, ordinary exterior through momentary disturbances. Using parody, mimicry or futile gestures, artists situate their works within everyday urban settings too, drawing attention to a rational logic of daily drudgery and offering moments of surprise or revelation, which can revive a creative potential to make the city itself evident or tangible in unexpected ways.

7.3

The Everyday in an Urban Context

Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life took shape during a period of rapid change in post-war France. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, he began connecting la vie quotidienne with urbanism at a time when the city was a site of struggle and class consciousness had also shifted: the everyday life he observed had radically transformed. World War II had dramatically changed the ways in which day-to-day activities were carried out; the euphoria felt at its end brought with it a sense of unlimited possibility that made old everyday routines seem out of place. However, Kristin Ross (1996, 74) notes, the urban renewal in Paris and the urban centres in France more broadly, brought with it spatial contradictions and inequities that Lefebvre could not reconcile. A newly constructed périphérique cordoned off the centre of Paris, separating social groups of the urban poor, immigrants, and the elderly to the satellite banlieues of the city. In the centre, post-war renewal projects reinforced old power structures and state dominance, with a new influx of provincial workers brought in to assist with rebuilding initiatives. Supermarkets and factories for manufacturing commodities and processing agricultural products were built in the spaces between city and countryside, blurring urban boundaries. The rebuilding of Europe was dominated by rational-functional modern architecture. In France this manifested in the grands ensembles seen in the example of Mourenx discussed in Chapter 3. New political regimes snuffed out the optimism that had characterised the immediate years following liberation, and Lefebvre lamented what he observed as

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the demise of mythic origins, magic and surprises fostered in the everyday stories told by famous cities, including Paris. His recorded observations from 1956 (2014, 65–66) are particularly insightful. Describing the view of modern Paris from his window, Lefebvre describes turmoil, power, creation and luxury co-existing among the ruins of an immense historical past. Paris, where the majority of the Renault car factories were concentrated, was a breeding ground for what he described as a ‘terrifying mediocrity.’ Lefebvre (2014, 65) claimed the picturesque city was vanishing, supplanted by an impoverished version: a congealed mass of relics floating in a muddy ocean of destitution. The city’s spark of diversity, generosity, eccentricity and restless beauty was lost, in his view. The modern city planners were to blame for the fading picturesque as they developed the new city accordingly to a rational-functional plan. Aggressive manufacturing and mass production brought with it an ugliness, platitude and banality that fuelled an overwhelming increase in consumerism. Lefebvre’s critique of the everyday radically questioned the consumer society that emerged with industrial and technological advances. As the site of burgeoning consumption, the city featured as an underlying paradigm for his theory of the everyday. Lefebvre (2014, 65) reserved some reflexivity in his arguments, owning his judgement of platitude and mediocrity as inherently problematic; he conceded that most of society was not in a position to prevent the transformation of the domain around them. Nevertheless, he grappled with a dehumanising and encroaching emptiness in urban society. Lefebvre thus saw the quotidian in terms of dialectical oppositions: the drudgery of dull routine fuelled by a society collapsing into consumption, and inherently ambiguous in that it held the basis for creative potential and revival. While Lefebvre argued that the effects of modern technology and new functionality in private life had whittled down everyday life into organised and repeated gestures, he argued that the street was a site where a terrain of struggle might be rediscovered, a view he shared with the Situationists. Due to its volume of activity, the street, Lefebvre contended, captured everyday life in its entirety as a condensed version or microcosm of modern life (Ross 1996, 72). The street was paradoxical in that it represented the ordinary city yet was a place that was neither public or private, and was connected to other places and realities. Lefebvre (cited in Ross 1996, 72) wrote that the street offered choices, possibilities and invitations for encounters from all kinds of people. Temptations, seductions or solicitations were the foundational attractions that suggested a certain

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variety or intensity of life. Without these occasions for encounter, the street would become unbearable, and the city a ‘lunar desert.’ If the street was where Lefebvre saw the alienating effects of the everyday contested, the May ’68 worker protests added an urgency to this vision. May ’68 represented the largest mass movement of French workers in recorded history, and the single biggest social insurrection known in the developed world since World War II (Ross 2002, 3–4). Violent demonstrations in Paris universities were followed by general strike action, a rare collaboration of intellectuals and industrial workers against the reigning ideology. Unprecedented in scale, May ’68 affected all regions, cities and villages in France. It also shares some consonance with Lefebvre’s ideas as the street became a strategic site where a reigning political ideology was directly challenged. It follows that in French theory, the urban street was the ‘storehouse of anarchy,’ according to Maurice Blanchot (1987, 17). The street contains and divulges a secret potentiality as a state of perpetual becoming. The revolutionary potential for the street in the events of May ’68 also inspired the short-lived yet fruitful exchange between Lefebvre and the Situationists. Highmore (2002, 140) writes that Lefebvre shared with the avant-garde group an awareness of the impact of capitalist culture on society that nevertheless presented itself as standard. The Situationists demanded direct and immediate intervention to revolutionise everyday life, however, Lefebvre advocated for a steady liberation from alienation through raising conscious awareness of the structures of the everyday. In this sense, he ultimately differed from the group. Lefebvre’s meticulous theory reveals the minutiae of day-to-day activities housed within larger matrices. Ever-present yet imperceptible, the everyday underscores the internalised routines of economic oppression, consumer oblivion and moral apathy that play out on physical, emotional and socio-political levels of interaction. Lefebvre interrogated a dichotomy at the foundations of existence to expose sources of inauthenticity and alienation, and to revive a human capacity for works of creativity. His fundamental challenge was to show the quotidian as the place where a new potential could be unearthed, while suggesting that without this awareness, humanity would succumb to fragmented or disassociated mediocrity. This underlying tension helps to articulate the triviality of routine, as well as the immensity of the everyday, that underscores artist strategies to render the familiar city strange, the theme of the next chapter.

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Resistance in Everyday Life

Lefebvre’s critique of la vie quotidienne located the embers of a transformative potential in the drudgery of routine, but it was De Certeau who theorised the furtive tactics and strategies that could evade the structures of modern life. De Certeau’s concept city, ways of operating and the tactics of making do (la perruque) were discussed in Chapter 3. My focus here reiterates the subtle ways in which the city is altered through everyday movements, and the synergies that De Certeau and Lefebvre share. De Certeau’s discourse on spatial stories or pedestrian speech acts concerns a series of tactics and ruses that elude definition within a constructed order, using its basic elements to inscribe new meaning into a dominant system. The metaphor of walking visualises variable uses of space as the pedestrian crosses, drifts, improvises or adopts different aspects of an urban terrain to actualise unexpected possibilities. These ‘forests of gestures’ displace the analytical coherency of an urban order, diverting or animating the immobile plan or concept (De Certeau 1984, 102). The concept city asserts its mechanical operation to function efficiently according to a plan. De Certeau claimed that, by necessity, the plan makes allowances for infiltration and deviations to progress effectively; deviation is required in order to validate and implement its top-down order. Deviations therefore readily occur in city spaces to illustrate the rationale on which the city is based. A dichotomy of top-down and bottom up that leads to the actualisation of the city further demonstrates that urban life must permit the very elements that the concept city seeks to exclude or contain (De Certeau 1984, 95). Proliferating details, variances and so-called flaws function as part of the city’s classificatory modus and emerge to balance and expose the power structure. Because they cannot be eliminated completely, different uses of space, characterised as divergent practices, tend to reveal cracks in a system exploited by its own waste products. As waste products infiltrate the urban administrative categories, they initiate hybrid networks and spaces where waste is perpetually ousted, recycled or transformed. A cycle of production that creates waste products and issues expenditure to remove or police them, ensures the city’s operating system. De Certeau championed a self-determination of everyday users of the city to claim space within the power structures that govern urban life.

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The city operates by way of administrative systems that classify, redistribute and reject according to a predetermined acceptability or deficiency. However, the city is also a place of contradictory movements, as demonstrated by the ‘chorus of idle footsteps’ traced by pedestrians. Its ordinary users create microbe-like movements that elude legibility and poetically enliven and diversify urban spaces. In this way, the city dweller reclaims, consciously or not, a foothold in the city through everyday practices that rewrite an urban rhetoric. Their everyday movements weave together a heterogeneous identity distinct from the top-down order of the urban planner. The everyday city is thus a place of alterations, appropriations and various kinds of intrusions that nevertheless enrich it with new attributes that escape categorisation. Over time, the city concept and design fades. Variable or informal uses of space render the concept redundant since the condition of its own existence, space itself, is forgotten through myriad unofficial ways. In consonance with Lefebvre, De Certeau saw a radical heterogeneity such as this occurring in Paris, as much as it was haunted by its past. An urban plurality, he argued, should be unobstructed to encourage different practices to flourish in the foreground (Highmore 2006, 171). What remains to be debated are the kinds of unofficial practices in the city and what they look like. De Certeau worked across a range of cultural arenas including politics, history, ethnology and cultural policy. Yet his overarching methodology, Highmore (2006, 175) states, is united through his analyses of the structuring of power vis-à-vis social order. An assumed structural order that declares its own transparency, De Certeau argued, ignores the necessary ways that it allows alterity to proliferate; a heterogeneous and uncontrollable variety of discourses prevail within and beyond the scope of rational order. De Certeau provided an extensive theory of everyday life and practices that poach freedoms of time and space within its dominant systems, yet he provided only glimpses of what these microbe-like resistances and ruses looked like. In The practice of everyday life volume 2 (1998), De Certeau, with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol collected interviews, mostly with women, on their domestic jobs such as dwelling, cooking, homemaking and shopping, to document the varied ways they navigated the constraints of daily life and a drudgery of routine. Expanding the application of De Certeau’s theory has otherwise been taken up by theorists working in fields of sociology, history and cultural studies.

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Part of the issue, Highmore (2001, 2) explains, is that everyday life cannot meaningfully cover an endless array of activities. It comprises both the category itself and all the routine activities that are ascribed to it, making any attempt to apprehend it, futile. On the other hand, everyday life tends to conceal a range of social differences, while also making them more vivid if they are noticed. As a category of human experience, the everyday produces commonalities rather than differences. A tactical response to rational order must therefore require additional insights across varying terrains of struggle. De Certeau’s theory is not designed to be tied down in a negotiation of the structures of modern life, nor treated as an alienated category. His style is elusive, elliptical and tentative, much like the practices he describes. In other words, De Certeau issues a road map and allows others to fill in the blanks. Nevertheless, as Highmore (2006, 108) summarises, four major traits characterise De Certeau’s practices. First, they are generally hidden or elusive; second, they are usually heterogeneous or multiform; third, they are deviant or tactical; and fourth, they tend to be stubborn or obstinate. Broadly speaking, in line with a focus on art practices in this book, De Certeau’s theory of everyday practices helps to illuminate a body, object or subject that is at variance with the city’s everyday routine of top-down order. As Johnstone (2008, 12) states, there is a vast reservoir of references to the everyday in art. In the contemporary era, the widespread attention paid to the quotidian is largely seen as a way to bring visibility to overlooked or uneventful aspects of lived experience. This makes art a fitting mode for articulating the theoretical writings of Lefebvre and De Certeau. Since the 1970s, the histories of art are peppered with expressions of the mundane, ordinary or pedestrian elements of city’s spaces. Michael Asher’s Caravan project for Skulptur Projekte Münster between 1977 and 2007, began as an experiment in minimalism using a humble Eriba Familia wagon. During the weeks of each exhibition over consecutive decades, the caravan was dropped off at different sites and relocated every Monday (Fig. 7.1). There were up to nineteen selected locations; but access to each was reduced over time because the sites were developed in the years between exhibitions, and some were no longer suitable for parking the caravan. The photographs that documented the installation show that the ready-made object also functioned as a lens through which changes in urban spaces were recorded. Like a timelapse, Asher’s installation revealed the incremental and sometimes undetectable cycles of change that usually pass unnoticed. The artist’s interest in concepts of

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mobility and dislocation, which he explored through changing perspectives, provided by the caravan in everyday locations, inadvertently exposed a myth of permanence in which the city is treated city as definitive and transcendent. The caravan project can thus enhance awareness of everyday space by documenting shifts in the use and appearance of its surrounding urban environment over time. Shifts that often occur imperceptibly at the level of pedestrian movements echo De Certeau’s theory. Similar to works by other artists of his generation such as Alan Sonfist, Joseph Beuys and Agnes Denes, Asher’s caravan operates in proximity to the everyday, as witness to changes not yet fully noticed. Sonfist’s Time landscape (1965–ongoing) converted unused urban space in New York into a natural woodland that reflected the native trees once standing on the site. In 1982, Beuys began 7000 oaks , locating his practice of social sculpture in everyday public spaces

Fig. 7.1 Michael Asher, Trailer in changing locations, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007, parking position 4th week: Alter Steinweg across from KiffePavillon (Photo: Roman Mensing, artdoc.de)

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in Kassel. Around the same time, Denes planted, grew and harvested two acres of wheat in the Battery Park landfill in Manhattan. A stone’s throw from Wall Street, Wheatfield was a way to recognise the systems and processes of food production in the heart of Manhattan as a means to question the status quo and the contradictions inherent to a commercialisation of daily life. The recent practices of Bianca Hester, Nevin Alada˘g, Fabian Knecht and Andreas Greiner are discussed in the next chapter, showing how each brings a subtle complexity of the everyday city into awareness, including its routines, sounds and rhythms. As I discuss, the use of non-rational methods and juxtaposition in a sense reassemble the ordinary to make it known. These works bring clarity to an urban quotidian beyond the city’s established order. In a critical capacity, art locates creativity within the commonplace, while critiquing a rational urban plan. Connecting past and present, the role of art can make the everyday more vivid by attending to the ordinary appearances, attitudes, cycles and routines across different moments in space and time.

References Blanchot, Maurice. 1987. Everyday speech. Yale French Studies 73 (Special issue: Everyday Life): 12–20. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Certeau, Michel, L. Giard, P. Mayol, and T.J. Tomasik. 1998. Practice of everyday life: Volume 2: Living and cooking, ed. L. Giard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the possible. London and New York: Continuum. Highmore, Ben. 2001. Introduction: Questioning the everyday. In The everyday life reader, ed. Ben Highmore, 1–38. London: Routledge. Highmore, Ben. 2002. Everyday life and cultural theory: An introduction. London; New York: Routledge. Highmore, Ben, 2006. Michel de Certeau: Analysing culture. London and New York: Continuum. Johnstone, Stephen, ed. 2008. Documents of contemporary art: Everyday. London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2014. Critique of everyday life: The one volume edition. London and New York: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri, and Christine Levich. 1987. The everyday and everydayness. Yale French Studies 73: 7–11.

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Molesworth, Helen. 1999. Cleaning up in the 1970s: The work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In Rewriting conceptual art, ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird, 107–122. London: Reaktion Books. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2010. Spatial aesthetics: Art, place and the everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Ross, Kristin. 1996. Streetwise: The French invention of everyday life. Parallax 2 (1): 67–75. Ross, Kristin. 2002. May ’68 and its afterlives. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 8

Disrupting the Everyday City Through Art

This chapter interweaves major themes emerging in the previous three chapters—ideology, the body and the everyday—with art practices that problematise or antagonise an urban quotidian. Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko have exposed ideology formation in architecture, public institutions and civic spaces including hierarchies that conceal the impact of corporate urban development on local communities. Resistance is embodied in performances by Valie Export, Regina José Galindo and William Pope.L, who have employed strategies of shock and gestures of futility to undermine the relations of power that condition or coerce the body into compliance with dominant systems. Everyday resonances, movements, behaviours and natural rhythms are interrupted by artists such as Bianca Hester, Francis Alÿs, Nevin Alada˘g, Peter Burke, Banksy and Olafur Eliasson, making the urban everyday tangible in ways that are both subversive and poetic. I argue that these practices share a tendency to work against ideological norms while disrupting the oppressive effects of the urban software.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_8

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8.1 Rupturing Ideology: Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko have used conceptual practice to expose and interrogate powerful ideologies concealed in architectural structures, civic landmarks and public museums to bring visibility to a corporate agenda in urban development. Haacke has contested fraudulent real estate operations in New York, and queried conflicts of interest in the affiliations of trustees of the Guggenheim Museum. Although his works were intended for museum settings, I include them here because they reveal the surreptitious workings of ideology formation through public institutions and clarify Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). As Haacke has problematised ideology from within the museum, Wodiczko has questioned the ideological façade of architecture from without. His light projections have transformed the exterior walls of embassies and civic landmarks that are often considered symbols of collective identity. To contest an ideology of architecture, Wodiczko temporarily revives spaces of fearless speaking (parrhesia), or an agonistic discourse, introducing a process by which the voices of society’s excluded groups can be heard. 8.1.1

Hans Haacke: The Critique of Ideology in Public Institutions

In 1971, Haacke exposed a network of dubious real estate dealings in New York’s tenement housing areas in, Shapolsky et al . Manhattan real estate holdings, a real-time social system, as of May 1, 1971. The show was cancelled by Guggenheim trustees weeks before it opened and not exhibited until 1986. The work comprised a photographic catalogue that meticulously documented family ties and fake trust accounts set up for 146 tenement buildings and vacant lots in New York’s slum neighbourhoods. Records revealed the networks to be a false front for corporations used to obscure the identities of principal property owners. In a detailed analysis of the work, Deutsche (1996) discusses Haacke’s method of disclosing powerful interests that were embedded in these domestic structures of the city. He adapted the medium of aesthetic photography to a critique of property transactions, presenting a series of black and white images of building facades. Charts documenting real estate connections, ownership records, financial histories and data about each location, accompanied the images. An indifference to the needs of

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tenement residents was given prominent visibility, as the fraudulent interests of slumlords were clarified, exposing their influence over corporate urban development. Haacke challenged the autonomy of the museum in the process, implicating its institutional authority in a cyclical real time social system. Equally provocative was Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum board of trustees in 1974, where a radical interrogation of the ideological function of the museum continued. Haacke revealed the connections between museum trustees and politico-economic interests to query the origins of financial support for the museum’s displays. The work consisted of seven panels with brass frames composed in the format used for the acknowledgement of donations by trustees. The typeset panels detailed geopolitical and financial affiliations of the trustees, including links to mining operations in Angola, Malaysia and Brazil for American companies, and involvement in a political coup d’état in Chile. This institutional critique inverted the museum’s position of neutrality as the unquestioned guardian of cultural representation. Deutsche (1996, 117) argues that this provoked audiences to question the assumed idea that art is distinct from the social life beyond the museum’s walls. Haacke challenged the notion of the museum as the mainstay of impartial truth by revealing the less visible links between the economic power of institutions, and the individuals or groups that have stakes in the control of cultural power. These works bring a tangibility to Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Althusser (2014, 243) listed cultural institutions among his examples of ISAs that rehearse the ideologies that maintain society’s established relationship to its material existence. He claimed that the conditions of production were embedded in society with a persistent obviousness that normalised the status of domination by a ruling elite. As Haacke ruptured the ideology of the public institution and its relationship to a material reality, he brought attention to the powerful networks that uphold social hierarchies as the status quo. Haacke cast the museum as part of a system with its own ideology of investments, aside from the social and cultural representations or objects that it claims to preserve. His method is a striking elaboration of Althusser’s theory because it gives visibility to an otherwise latent screen or façade that conceals the workings of ideologies of power that lead to conditions of hierarchy and exclusion. Through this critique, Haacke gave audiences a view behind the veil that separates ideology and lived reality, showing the museum as an apparatus

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of ideological control. The symbolic site of art’s public display, along with its distribution of meaning in society, was contested in the process. 8.1.2

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Interrupting the Ideology of Architecture

Wodiczko’s interventions are no less provocative than Haacke’s institutional critique. Working primarily with the exterior of buildings, he addresses political ideology and a rhetoric of urban redevelopment, with the social processes that lead to marginalisation. His practice concretises the concept of parrhesia derived from Foucault, who in the 1970s wrote on fearless speaking in the Athenian democratic model (Wodiczko 2016, 20–25). In addition, Wodiczko (2016, 26–37), acknowledges a philosophy of agonism, which embraces the role of conflict in politics and was deployed in a review of democracy and pluralism in the late twentieth century. Chantal Mouffe (2007, 3) claims that democracy is best articulated through agonistic struggles in public spaces where different ideas and projects are debated without any expectancy of reconciliation. Wodiczko incorporates these ideas in his light interventions that reinvigorate building façades in ways that counter ideological norms and encourage public dialogue. In 1996, Wodiczko repurposed Kraków’s 14th-century city tower in Rynek Główny for a light projection work. Over three nights, The city hall tower projection displayed everyday scenes and symbolic hand gestures on the tower’s façade, accompanied by anonymous audible voices. The familiar images were relatable to evening audiences and showed hands peeling potatoes, grinding coffee beans, plucking flower petals and cupping a candle flame. The familiarity of the images was offset by the voices of citizens who spoke of marginalisation in late-twentieth century Polish society. Through a juxtaposition of the historical landmark, image and sound, the artist queried how the autonomous structure operated with an ideological screen. Wodiczko’s method touches on key themes in this chapter. The intervention reappropriated the landmark to rework meaning in public space. In this case, Wodiczko called attention to what he labels the journey-infiction of ideological ritual wielded through the ‘unconscious medium’ of architecture (Wodiczko 2016, 192). Through ideology, he argues, powerful socio-political norms are embedded in the city’s physical and relational spaces. Kathleen Macqueen (2014, 8) characterises his working method as one of ‘displacement and suture.’ As Wodiczko dislodges

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a regular appearance of monuments to expose the social realities of marginalisation, he creates spaces to stitch together a new awareness and participative agency. A strategy of ‘displacement and suture’ questions the discourses of power lodged in architecture, updating Tafuri’s earlier criticism of the ideology of architecture discussed in Chapter 5. Wodiczko (2016, 190–192) has stated that public buildings and monuments constitute an effective ideological instrument of power because they can instil an unquestioned perception about one’s relationship to the city. As buildings structure the formal layout and spaces of city, the ideologies they wield structure the gaze and organise unconscious relations of power behind aesthetic facades. In other words, the urban structure, or hardware, is both a physical and mental construct that can determine a noncritical or ‘normative’ use of the city. To interrupt this ideological process, Wodiczko draws on a creative process called ‘memorial therapy.’ In his works, monuments are temporarily revived as spaces of fearless speaking and agonistic discourse, as in The city hall tower projection. This strategy, the artist (2016, 214) states, produces a feeling of the uncanny or ‘strangely familiar.’ As viewers mentally project themselves onto the monument, someone else is layered into this projection so that the familiar unquestioned appearance of the monument becomes unsettled as a realm of ‘otherness’ comes to light. The secrets and fears of an urban collective not ordinarily vocalised are given presence in a shared social space. Further juxtapositions of the strange and familiar occurred within each projection. A layering of symbolic and everyday hand gestures, along with the spoken dialogue, tended to scramble relations between the hand that signifies corporeal presence, and the hand used to communicate. While Wodiczko frequently makes use of a symbolic repertoire, the hand gestures have an enduring quality that evokes human emotions and concerns, Macqueen (2014, 120) observes. In this way, Wodiczko disrupts any smooth reception of a normative order. A disruption of visual order was evident in Wodiczko’s early projects in New York. Homeless projection (1986) and Homeless vehicle project (1988– 1989) explicitly challenged the ideological power relations embedded in corporate land development in New York’s midtown areas in the late 1980. Homeless projection coincided with city plans to develop low-income areas around Union Square. Wodiczko temporarily altered the newly conserved historical marble statues in the square, projecting onto them visual signs of homelessness: a crutch, a wheelchair and a

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solvent can. Deutsche (1996, 38–39) argues that the work inverted the formal iconography of the traditional statues, undermining their outward authority, permanence and homogeneity, and thereby shifting meaning from within. This dislocation is crucial to exposing the instability of meaning between image and monument because it registers evidence of homelessness within the rhetoric of redevelopment, its vehicle of repression; thus, Deutsche (1996, 39) contends, the “evicting architecture becomes an architecture of the evicted.” This strategy countered an uncritical reception of the historical Union Square statues and problematised the reception of public monuments and dominant messages in the city’s iconography and planning. The upgrade of Union Square was presented as a hollow attempt to transcend the conditions produced by corporate real estate. In addition, the projections debunked the claim that urban renewal and corporate redevelopment restores social harmony. Homeless vehicle project presented a radically different strategy for intervention. Its unveiling coincided with the tenure of Mayor Koch in New York. In 1985, Koch had announced an edict giving metropolitan police the power to forcibly remove the homeless from the streets in winter to undergo psychiatric testing with the possibility of forced hospitalisation. Wodiczko designed a makeshift vehicle that resembled a crude trolley with a pod that could accommodate sleeping, and receptacles for collecting cans. Visually, however, it presented a strange obstacle that could not be easily avoided that was intended to question the ideology of the right to occupy public space. As it alleviated hostile conditions of life on city streets, so it heightened the visibility of bodies excluded from ideologies about who gets to use the city, and how. The Homeless vehicle project navigated this divide, providing the means by which the estranged might actively return to and participate in the city. Homeless projection and Homeless vehicle project disrupted an ideology of the normative use of the city. Wodiczko brought visibility to groups who are side-lined by corporate development schemes that broadly operate through economic rationality to deny the presence of the city’s homeless citizens. Users of the vehicle prototype participated in a new symbolic monument of forced eviction. Wodiczko (2016, 208–209) explains that the physical bodies excluded from discourses of urban redevelopment could thus return as nomadic buildings, adorned with the refuse of the city’s architecture as ‘mobile monuments’ of the city. In other words, the issue of homelessness was recontextualised as an architectural typology to displace the idea of stability and permanence

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embedded in architecture. As they moved about the city traipsing the remnants of commercial production, the city’s homeless became markers of a repressed architectural ‘unconscious.’ The immutable faces of timeless buildings disrupted by the return of homeless citizens would thus deny this ‘journey-in-fiction’ that might otherwise ignore this condition. Wodiczko (2016, 209) has stated that the cycle by which architecture represses the conditions of the marginalised in its own (political) unconscious, can be exposed. The projections and vehicle projects therefore heighten proximity to the contentions that underscore an ideology of normativity in urban space and attempt to liberate the voices and bodies that are excluded from this discourse. Following Wodiczko’s interventions since the late twentieth century, other artists have brought visibility to homelessness in urban spaces through prototypes and performative embodiment. In 2000, Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz created inflatable shelters for homeless people in Baltimore, Boston and New York. Plastic sheets and duct tape were used to attach the shelter, dubbed paraSITE, to an external air vent on a building to expand the space, draw warmth and provide protection from the elements. Swiss artist duo Fabian Hacken and Mischa Dublin who work under the title Thylacine, tackled this subject in a different way. On the floor in 2010 was a two-part conceptual and photographic work in which gallery visitors viewed aesthetically curated portraits of homeless people they passed, wittingly or not, when entering the gallery. The project was designed to collapse the division between an art context for discussing social conditions and an immediate encounter with homeless people in the adjacent city space. In New Zealand, Tongan-born performance artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila has confronted attitudes to homelessness through his endurance performances, Mo’ui tukuhausia. In 2012 and 2014, the artist lived a homeless existence around two galleries, Te Tuhi in the East Auckland suburb of Pakuranga, and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T¯amaki, in central Auckland. A two-week iteration at Te Tuhi (19 March–1 April 2012) formalised ‘Uhila’s visceral experiences of homelessness. Te Tuhi staff created a foodbank to receive donations during his time living inside and around the gallery precinct, to support him while he occupied the space as a disenfranchised body. His presence sparked visceral responses and gestures that highlighted the precarity of those living outside social norms. ‘Uhila was verbally abused, spat on and accused of ‘not smelling enough like a homeless person’ (Phillips and ‘Uhila 2012, 51). More upsetting, the artist

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said, was the judgment in peoples’ eyes, which he became aware of the moment he left his home with a few belongings and boarded the bus to Pakuranga. However, ‘Uhila was well-received by a local homeless man, an encounter that reinforced for the artist that homelessness often entails being unheard (Phillips and ‘Uhila 2012, 49). On the final evening of the 2012 iteration, ‘Uhila was confronted by police who had monitored his movements as an unusual suspect. Although he produced a document that explained the art project, the officers tore this up, confirming for the artist that the project was over (Phillips and ‘Uhila 2012, 50). In a longer duration performance as a finalist for the New Zealand Walters Prize in 2014, ‘Uhila lived in the surrounds of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T¯amaki in the central city. His actions included lingering in shadows and doorways, covering his face, and living on the margins, as reiterated in the work’s title, Mo’ui tukuhausia, which means ‘to set life aside.’ Although he had access to the gallery’s facilities and carried paperwork explaining the performance, ‘Uhila preferred to move in a nomadic way, echoing the movements of the homeless to find shelter, food, safety and a place to sleep. He discovered the arrhythmic activities of the homeless were often driven by the need to avoid public hostility, police questioning or violent drunks, in other words, to be invisible in public space (Herrick 2014). Phillips (2014) notes that the performance is striking for the way is interrupts a smooth veneer of social niceties through embodied passivity. Through art, the ideologies that exclude certain groups of society are made visible. To this can be added the implied levels of acceptable actions or attitudes in public space that the work challenges, illustrating the conditions of ideology in the process. Conventional concepts of productivity and non-productivity were also thrown into sharp relief. The actions of loitering, moving slowly and sitting idly, for example, contrast with the norms and routines of a productive and efficient society, including the socially constructed rationale that keeps bodies moving, while rejecting or avoiding those outside the mainstream. Finally, Mo’ui tukuhausia cast a spotlight on the gallery as an apparatus where ideologies and norms are routinely practised. The artist’s presence as a vagrant living in the gallery vicinity blurred the lines of visibility and invisibility, and acceptable and non-acceptable behaviour. On occasion ‘Uhila was escorted from the gallery by security personnel who were unaware of the work taking place. Finally, this critique spotlighted art’s role in contesting the alienating effects of ISAs lodged in the routines, cycles and behaviours of the city.

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Art intervention in the spaces of ideology formation may therefore bring critical glimpses into how conditions of exclusion might be confronted or mitigated.

8.2 Non-compliant Bodies: (Mis)using the Artist Body in the City ‘Uhila’s embodiment of homelessness introduces the position of the body as an interlocutor of meaning and resistance. Here, I examine how the (mis)used or non-compliant body can register or contest the ideologies that structure or prescribe a normative appearance of urban space. The artists discussed use strategies of shock and performative engagement, unusual movements and gestures of futility to position the body in opposition to dominant ideas about the city’s use or its conditions. Performative (mis)uses of the body can highlight the economic imperatives that discipline or coerce bodies into a seamless flow in the labourconsumption system. The body takes on renewed visibility as an obstacle that resists this programme, asserting a new corporeal presence. Visually and phenomenologically, these practices elaborate Foucault’s theory of the docile body, and the exploitation of otherwise invisible, productive bodies. I argue that these practices highlight how an art-driven critique that (mis)uses the body can provide an effective medium to expose less visible conditions that support the city’s top-down rational logic. 8.2.1

Embodied Resistance: Valie Export, Adrian Piper and Regina José Galindo

Valie Export’s provocative performances, Touch cinema (1968–1971) and Body configurations (1976) were briefly introduced in Chapter 6 to highlight how the body has been deployed as a radical medium for intervention. For Touch cinema, Export confronted the traditional protocols of behaviour in ten European cities by moving through crowded public spaces and challenging passers-by to touch her body through a miniature cinema or theatre with curtains attached to her chest. Export tackled the position of women as sexualised objects by acknowledging the signs and symbols associated with female bodies in society. Export (in MacDonald 1988, 255) stated that she wanted to position the female body as a bearer of signs and symbols outside of a conventional art environment. The work’s visceral impact correlated with the explicit sexual politics in

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Export’s even more notorious work, Action pants: Genital panic (1969), an equally defiant socio-political exploration of the position of women in society. In both works, Export sought to undermine the use of media to capture or frame the female body. Export’s strategy of (mis)using her own body for performance interventions provides an early example of how gender bias could be interrogated in public space. Her confrontational method confirms a paradigm shift in the way artists understood and declared the body in performance art in the 1960s and 1970s. Charles LaBelle (2001) writes that artists moved from relatively tame gestures to aggressive acts with the body becoming an all-out battleground. By positioning her body as a weapon and confronting spectator gazes, Export’s strategy denied an objectification of the body. A symbolic use of a cinematic device in Touch cinema, challenged the voyeuristic intent in films and advertising where women were typically presented as passive homemakers. Export reversed the usual cinematic experience of consuming bodies at a distance by bringing the enclosed space, and voyeurism, into the open. This was necessary, MacDonald (1988, 254) argues, to liberate the female body from the artificial social and cultural constructions that had become its conventional place. Less has been made, however, of the dimensions of public space in which the performance was contextualised. The radical action presented by Touch cinema can not only be assessed in terms of the artist’s position outside the gallery space, or in relation to an emerging feminism. The performance can be articulated in the context of the city’s ideology to support an argument that the (mis)used artist body brings to light an unspoken normativity about the city’s codes uses of space and social behaviours. Breaking with the rational or expected order revives Lefebvre’s notion of differential space to inject creativity and potential, and to resist the abstraction of the body into an anonymous exchange value. A performative embodiment of space confronts the forces that lead to a ‘decorporealisation’ in abstract space using the body as a tool for critique. Positioning her body as a provocative obstacle, Export momentarily recoded the urban space, igniting differential trajectories that worked against its normative use. Export contested the forces that target female bodies and exposed the ideologies that not only order the gaze but also expected uses of the city. This clarifies Grosz’s criticism of a masculine corporeality deeply embedded in the city’s structure. As discussed in Chapter 6, Grosz argued

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that the city inscribes bodies psychically, socially, and sexually in hierarchical relationships. The body is treated as a disembodied consciousness that makes cities. If a natural order of the city, Grosz argued, is based on male order, the female body (or the ‘other’) becomes the site of passive reproduction or marginalisation. Export’s work both illustrates and confronts this logic. Touch cinema reinscribed space by interrupting the patriarchal basis for the body’s movement, forging ground for female subjectivities to emerge in the city. Export performed, reflexively, an interface where the forces that determine the docile body’s normative use could be contested and transformed, creating a new presence for the female body. Following Touch cinema, experiences of estrangement and limitation for the female body in public space have been the subject of several provocations. Adrian Piper’s Catalysis project in 1970–1971 and Mythic being in 1973–1975 used advertising spaces and relational zones, such as the subway, to contest an ideological positioning of women’s bodies in society and to confront gender and ethnic stereotypes. Her performances in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, like Touch cinema, deliberated on a subject-object relationship in city spaces. However, Piper addressed racial prejudice and alienation that resonated with her identity as a young African American woman, which affected her social relationships. Cherise Smith (2007, 46–58) has observed that during this period, Piper’s concern was to disengage with an art world public and the gallery as a frame of reference to experiment with alternative strategies to distribute her art. Working in public spaces facilitated a new proximity to engage with presence and perception beyond the mediated framework of the gallery. Catalysis comprised a series of actions for which Piper adopted eccentric guises. Her radical appearances ranged from covering her hands in concrete; walking the streets of New York City wearing a shirt covered in white emulsion with the words “WET PAINT”; and stuffing a bath towel in her mouth while performing activities such as perusing a book stand, shopping, or taking the subway. In Mythic being , Piper adopted the profile of an African American male alter ego from the period, sporting a curly wig, moustache and large sunglasses. As part of this projection, she appeared in a series of advertisements running in The Village Voice newspaper over two years, juxtaposed with offbeat speech bubbles with extracts from Piper’s own teenage diary. The fake persona, Piper (1996, 21) said, allowed her to enter uncontrolled environments, a condition

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that affected sensory perception. In this way, her body was positioned to covertly disrupt a normative use of different spaces in the city. Piper’s embodied performances situate strategies of shock and noncompliance that contest the cycles of production that condition bodies in the city’s operational system. Following Foucault, for example, Piper’s work interrupts the regimes that discipline the body into a responsive city dweller. In Foucault’s reading, the body is regulated by subtle forces that influence movements, gestures and attitudes in order to control its utility and response to authority. Piper’s absurd gestures show a noncompliance with this type of regulation: the body instead blocked the one-way flow of disciplinary order. Taken as a symbol of productive presence and subject-hood, the body becomes the site where such forces are exposed or contested; the docile body and its display as a regulated and exploitable subject is fragmented into the parodic or sardonic body, dramatising processes of alienation and disconnection. The persona Piper inhabits intervenes in dominant processes that attempt to normalise the city as a place of conformity and passivity. By contrast, Regina José Galindo’s public performances have given visceral form and visibility to a rampant femicide and the struggles of indigenous communities in her native Guatemala. Using Guatemala as a case study, Galindo examines the political and local relations of power and the impacts of its distortions. She frequently employs nakedness as a transgressive medium that conveys vulnerability while confronting the distress experienced by women and minority groups. In an act of voluntary suffering in 2000, the artist spent two hours, sedated, and lying immobile in a foetal position, tied in a plastic bag at a municipal rubbish tip in Guatemala City. The documenting photographs depict the workers who discovered the body with little reaction, showing a reality in which such deposits have become commonplace. For Who can erase the traces in 2003, Galindo walked barefoot from the Constitutional Court to the National Palace of Guatemala. Every few steps, the artist stopped to dip her feet in a basin of human blood carried with her, leaving a trail of bloody footprints as she walked, in memory of Guatemala’s civil war victims and in protest against the presidential candidacy of Ríos Montt. Elsewhere, Galindo has brought visibility to violence against women and victims of femicide. In Hamburg in 2016, she was submerged in a pile of bricks in public space while women were invited to remove the bricks until she could escape. Galindo performed Presencia (Presence) over 13 days at public sites in Guatemala City in 2017. For each iteration she

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wore dresses that had belonged to 13 murdered Guatemalan woman, remaining still for two hours to invoke the presence of these victims. The work was presented in Athens for documenta 14 (Fig. 8.1). Here, Galindo wore a white dress belonging to another murdered Guatemalan woman and occupied what she defined as a site of suffering, in this case a street lined with brothels, immersing her body in the clothing and street spaces where energies of violence and torture lingered. The project drew from the energy of the silenced women, Galindo (2017) states, claiming space for them and to honour their lives. In 2021, with other performers, Galindo temporarily occupied public spaces in Mallorca, Milan, and sites in the Ruhr in Germany veiled in flowing sheets of fabric to appear as phantom-like reminders of the frequency of violent attacks against women. In each presentation, the position and action of the artist’s body is incongruent with normative uses of public space, serving different critical social and political ends. Removed from regular routine, the body is recoded as the site where the presence and memory of women’s lives is

Fig. 8.1 Regina José Galindo, Presencia (Presence), Athens, 2017, photo of performance for documenta 14 (Photo: Roberto dell Orco courtesy of the artist)

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silently acknowledged. As demonstrated by Export, Piper and Galindo, the divergent, non-compliant female body is a critical medium through which oppressive ideologies, and socio-cultural and political injustices are first embodied, then challenged. Significantly, these women artists activated a female presence in urban space, countering a patriarchal ideology of control. When this ideological space is embodied by the artist, the visible and tangible body becomes an interstitial site where resistance and corporeality converge. The non-compliant body, in turn, creates new subjectivities and differential spaces for reflexive engagement and revives a female corporeality of urban space. 8.2.2

William Pope.L: Critical Visibility Through ‘Existential Absurdity’

American artist William Pope.L’s performs gestures of futility to bring critical visibility and presence to issues that commonly exist in cities, yet often remain unaddressed or unchallenged. His endurance performances include his celebrated crawl series that embodies experiences of alienation and exploitation. His works have challenged the minimising of racial difference and the cultural constructions of African American masculinity in consumer ideology. Pathos and tragic farce are frequently employed to exaggerate ordinary tropes and situations in morbidly absurd ways, going well beyond the limits of satire or irony. Kristine Stiles (2002, 36) refers to this strategy as ‘existential absurdity.’ In the 1990s, Pope.L investigated ways to render visible the ideologies that designated the body of the ‘other.’ As part of a larger enterprise at Franklin Furnace, Brooklyn, Pope.L carried out radical interventions that included peddling aspirin and mayonnaise on the streets at inflated prices; consuming strips torn from The Wall Street Journal while sitting on an American flag; and, in his closing piece, occupying a window space in the gallery wearing white underwear and smothering his body in mayonnaise, briefly becoming white, before the spread turned transparent and rancid. In 1993, Pope.L strolled around downtown Manhattan with a ‘roach motel’ attached to his head, periodically removing ‘roach bait’ traps and putting them on cars, buildings and his body. In 1996, he performed Member (a.k.a. “schlong journey”) in Harlem, which incorporated signifiers of ‘white culture’: a white cardboard tube attached to his crotch supported by the wheelbase of an office chair, a white egg, a white soft

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toy bunny, and a white latex glove which he wore on his head in the style of a cockscomb. Pope.L’s Tompkins Square crawl prominently displays his strategy of existential absurdity. In 1991, the artist crawled along a city block in New York dressed in a business suit while pushing a small flowerpot. The performance addressed issues of class struggle through the horizontal positioning of the body, the clothing and the absurd task. Martha Wilson (2002, 45–46) argues that a symbolic shift from the upright businessman to crawling position removed a posturing of power, forcing viewers to confront bodies usually overlooked. The artist (1996) gave further insight into his motivations for the work, stating that avoiding the homeless issue in New York had become commonplace by the 1990s, with people devising strategies to avoid encounters with the destitute. Pope.L had wanted to remind people that the issue had not disappeared. The horizontal position of the body enacted the invisibility that occurs through homelessness, while the visual discord of the effort exerted to perform an absurd task made his presence unmissable. The pathos stimulated by the crawl was intended to be uncomfortable in order to confront the issue of homelessness head-on. The business suit reworked another aspect of class struggle. As a metaphor for Western notions of financial success or gentlemanly decorum, the business suit has come to represent corporate America’s ideology of economic opportunism. In New York, it had symbolic connotations of the Wall St banker; typically white, upper middle class American men with a regular ‘9 to 5’ job who chased the traditional American dream of wealth, power and affluence. Deployed here and worn by Pope.L, the suit had added implications for a class struggle with reference to the humility and aspiration of African American middle class belonging. The visual dichotomy of Pope.L’s actions in a suit subverted the visual association with corporate white America, while positioning his own body in ways that were volatile and susceptible to ridicule. Ultimately, the physical exertion of crawling on asphalt in a suit demanded attention because it upset normative conditions of social decorum. This attention was also not devoid of conflict. A heated exchange between Pope.L’s cameraman and a local black man occurred during Tompkins Square crawl. Upset by what he encountered, the passer-by, who also wore a suit, demanded an explanation for the scene and criticised its contrived struggle. The hostility ended with the man exclaiming: “You make me look like a jerk!” (Carr 2002, 48). The performance therefore touched on historically, socially or

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culturally embedded mechanics of power, allowing layers of oppositions to surface. Business attire was also central to Pope.L’s earlier performance, Thunderbird immolation in 1978. For this site-specific endurance piece, the artist sat cross-legged on a square yellow mat on a footpath in New York’s West Broadway near high-end commercial galleries Sonnabend and Castelli. He wore a pressed white shirt and black bow tie; however, this outwardly dignified appearance was unsettled by the unusual gestures he began performing. Beside him a range of objects were assembled: a bottle of Thunderbird wine, a ring of matches, and a can of Coca-Cola. The highly alcoholic fortified wine, with which Pope.L intermittently doused himself, had exploited the lucrative markets generated by a combination of poverty, social disorder and racism experienced by inner-city black Americans. The matches, along with the wine’s extreme volatility were visual counterparts for the social precarity of lop-sided labour-power relations, racial prejudice and oppressive conditions in New York at the time. Pope.L used the matches to scratch words onto the mat, while a crowd of onlookers waited to see if they would ignite, and the situation would end in flames. Stiles (2002, 39) argues Pope.L’s strategy of existential absurdity and tragic farce, shown here, exaggerates situations in ways that transgress normal satirical irony. A unique blend of shock, absurdity and precarity brings with it a new kind of embodied space with insights into the powerful forces that inscribe bodies in social spaces. Occupying a space in-between, Pope.L demonstrates radical ways to reinhabit public space and the body as a ‘locus of possibility,’ in the words of C. Carr (2002, 52). Thunderbird immolation was set against a backdrop of intense economic uncertainty in the US. The dilemma in New York was summarised by the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” that ran in The Daily News in October 1975. The city was verging on fiscal collapse, and widespread looting and disorder followed large-scale blackouts in the city in 1977. Economic recession led to increased poverty along with violent crime and police corruption. Race riots had escalated, and record numbers of African American men were incarcerated in overcrowded prisons. Using his body as a fixed object in the middle of the footpath, performing futile gestures demonstrated the double standard of corporate America. Pope.L contested the position of high-end galleries as part of the economic precarity at the time. The performance drew attention to

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the oppressive and exploitative aspects of both artistic and social conditions. Located near the gallery precinct, it tested a series of ideologies that critically hinged on Pope.L’s African American identity, masculinity, and position as an artist, through a radical (mis)use of the body situated within the ‘white international art trade.’ He centralised his role as artist, while turning the spotlight on the subliminal socio-economic forces that disenfranchise and exploit. Pope.L’s self-declared copyrighted title, ‘The Friendliest Black Artist in America’ developed consequently as part of an ongoing challenge to socio-cultural ideologies of the role of the African American artist. In 1997, Pope.L performed the short-lived ATM piece by attaching himself with a string of Italian sausages to the entrance of a 24-hour banking facility near Grand Central Station. Before he was arrested by police, he readied himself to open the door for customers, mimicking the actions of street people hoping for handouts, but in this case distributing dollar bills from a makeshift skirt. In 1999, Pope.L performed endurance crawls in Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Madrid wearing assorted mismatching sports outfits; these were designed to draw attention to the marketing of sportsmen in Europe as idealised and superhuman. These preceded his best-known endurance crawl, The great white way, which began in 2001 and was completed over nine years at different times. For the crawl he wore a Superman costume, gardening gloves, and a skateboard strapped to his back to help him navigate or roll through intersections. Pope.L’s performances have confronted ideologies of corporatisation, marginalisation and disenfranchisement in radical ways. Alongside his use of existential absurdity and tragic farce, he situates the non-compliant body as a site where ideologies are worked over or through before being taken to the explosive point of their own precarity. The content moves between extreme polarities of embodiment: those who rehearse conditions of racism, separation, inequality or disconnection by ignoring them, and those who experience their humiliating effects below a line of visibility. In this sense, his works supplement discourses about the body as the subject of power relations or the site of contest. Rather than the body being alienated or disconnected, Pope.L treats it as a shifting field or site of resistance. Here, the social body and social space are renegotiated. The body or self is reconfigured as a new form of social space. It follows that casting the body in absurd, tragic or futile gestures, as Pope.L does, demonstrates new kinds of ‘enfleshed’ and embodied spaces,

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offering radical ways to re-inhabit the body and by extension, the city and its spaces.

8.3

Disrupting the Everyday City

In addition to (mis)using the body to situate difference in urban space, artists have interrupted everyday spaces to draw attention to the imperceptible rhythms and routines through which an urban software takes effect. Beyond the body’s routine actions, the urban quotidian surfaces through familiar sounds and tempos, echoes and smells, the flows of commerce and logistics, commuter transport, vehicular traffic and pedestrian movements, or the unremarkable social norms, behaviours and attitudes that pass by undetected. This section analyses how art ruptures the everyday to suggest imaginative diversions from the normative structures of everyday life, to stimulate capacity for wonder, to approach the quotidian with curiosity, and to demonstrate the power of spontaneity through moments of creative potential. The categories of the everyday made visible by artists are discussed in three parts: urban resonances, movements and flows, and everyday scenes. 8.3.1

Urban Resonances: Altering the Everyday Soundscape

Kristen Sharp (2013) has analysed how artists draw attention to the everyday urban soundscape by revving engines and using audio equipment to create a kinaesthetic experience of travelling by car. As specific sounds are amplified, and others muffled, the acoustics of the everyday city become evident. In an immersive sound work, Gasoline music and cruising by the Japanese collective Rogues’ Gallery, to which Sharp refers, the artists play on multi-sensory dimensions of urban space, showing how art transforms perceptions of everyday activities such as driving (Sharp 2013, 89). To this category can be added artists such as Bianca Hester, Francis Alÿs, Nevin Alada˘g, Fabian Knecht and Andreas Greiner, who have engaged with rhythmic qualities and acoustic resonances of urban spaces in Melbourne, Sydney, London, Stuttgart and Berlin. Their interventions play with sound, hums and echoes to highlight everyday ambiences or bring a new awareness to urban surroundings. In 2011–2013, Australian artist Bianca Hester created rhythmic sound interventions using steel rings in public spaces in Melbourne and Sydney. Her project, Hoops: sound tests, performances used four hoops made of

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welded steel in powder-coated blue. The rings were spun on concrete surfaces to create sonic intrusions into the surrounding space. Video documents of the actions capture the acoustic changes as the sound of spinning rims reverberates spatially in the material terrain. The sound and motion intensify as each hoop yields to gravity, then clangs loudly on the rough surface of an asphalt court, echoing off its concrete surrounds. In another iteration, hoops are rolled down an urban street, clanging over utility covers and cavities in the footpath. The street scene features muffled noises such car engines, footsteps and the voices of passers-by. Curator Bree Richards (2016) notes that Hester aims to heighten an awareness of the space with sonic alterations that are variable yet distinctive, generating cross-rhythms that transform each site through chance openings and hypnotic rotations. This disruption of space shares synergies with Francis Alÿs’ acoustic play in Railings of 2004, for which he trailed a wooden drumstick across the ubiquitous Regency-style iron railings in London’s Georgian squares and streets, creating an irregular tap-tapping sound. The physical and social barrier presented by the railings was temporarily transformed into a found instrument existing in architecture. By contrast, Hester uses a purpose-made instrument to introduce new resonances into the urban space through performative actions, and uses sound to explore the rhythmic possibilities of the city. The simple lyricism of the hoops, spinning singly or together, introduces a subtle yet distinctive sound, that both draws attention to and disrupts the everyday soundscape. Berlin-based artist Nevin Alada˘g uses a different approach in Traces , a three-channel video installation filmed in 2015 in Stuttgart, where the artist spent most of her youth. An assortment of musical instruments is attached to children’s playground equipment to compose an audio-visual portrait of the city. Rhythms of idling, drifting and melancholic resonances surface in Alada˘g’s composition, disturbing a sense of uniformity in the city at the same time as it draws attention to it. The compositions are composed in playgrounds and pedestrian spaces. A cello fastened to a merry-go-round cyclically strikes a bow fixed to an adjacent post: each strum is fleeting and uneasy, and gradually drawn-out as the carousel’s momentum slows. In another place, a tambourine is vigorously shaken back and forth by the movement of a rocking horse and a pan flute attached to a car window whistles chaotically. In another setting an accordion, suspended between a lamppost and seesaw, ruptures the everyday in its peculiar placement and exhales long haunting chords as its body

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succumbs to gravity. Meanwhile a cornet, suspended from a balloon, bounces across an open space (Fig. 8.2). The unpredictable movement of the balloon recalls Francis Alÿs’ If you are a typical spectator, what you are really doing is waiting for the accident to happen in 1996, for which he filmed the haphazard movements of an empty plastic bottle blown by the breeze as it rolled across the open space of Zócalo square in Mexico City. Alada˘g’s audio-visual work creates an unsettling soundtrack that avoids any logical or controlled rhythm or melody, activating the spaces in theatrical ways. At the Venice Biennale, where Traces was exhibited, the videos played concurrently, blending different visual sites and urban resonances together in an untuned ensemble. A sense of melancholy surfaces through the palpable absence of human players without whom the musical instruments are almost redundant. The city’s streets and playgrounds are deserted, the instruments played only by the elements or movement of the street furniture, activated by someone who does not appear in the scene. A creeping eeriness, along with the overcast wintry day, is heightened by the conflicting, irregular noises coming from the instruments. The work appears be an allegory for solitude, displacement or vulnerability in one’s surroundings. On

Fig. 8.2 Nevin Alada˘g, Traces , 2015, three-channel video with three sound tracks, each film 6 min, dimensions variable (Copyright and image credit: Nevin Alada˘g)

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closer inspection, Andreas Schlaegel (2015) argues, it skilfully weaves the theatrical with the sardonic, a composition of continuity and rupture that resists a simple reading. The would-be city of productivity and functionalism is also displaced by a subtle and moody resonance of the city playing itself. Traces is an anomalous presence that does not fit within habitual routines or a rational use of the city. Through a parody that subverts the use of playground furniture and the discordant sounds of instruments, Alada˘g complicates the predictable flow of urban order. A strategic rupturing of the everyday is taken to new extremes by Fabian Knecht and Andreas Greiner in their work titled Entladung , meaning explosion or discharge. Actioned as part of the Festival of Future Nows and commissioned by the Institute für Raumexperimente at the Berlin University of the Arts, the project comprised three controlled explosions in urban sites around Berlin between 2012 and 2014. The sites included the abandoned Tempelhof airport runway, the rooftop of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin and a building on Friedrichstrasse. Conceived in the decade of hyper-security that followed 9/11, the detonations were designed to rupture a spatio-temporal configuration of Berlin to highlight political volatility, cultural fear and suspicion of impending terror attacks. The simulation of an explosion is particularly provocative given that it can potentially trigger panic and disorientation. A wider implication considers the crisis of fear about terrorism that has dramatically shifted a perceived sense of threat in cities. Entladung disrupted the everyday city in a perceivably hostile manner, highlighting an immediacy of the ‘here and now.’ The discordant sound or visual image of an explosion in the city momentarily triggered the unknown, provocatively raising awareness about one’s urban surroundings. 8.3.2

Movements and Flows: Disrupting Everyday Spaces of Commerce

Francis Alÿs’ Guards walk, analysed in Chapter 4, presented a peripatetic activity that worked away from concepts of productivity and rationality in the everyday city. The action of walking, when appropriated by artists to unproductive or disruptive ends, raises a key question: is it a radical act of non-compliance to wander aimlessly or without logical reason in today’s hyper-productive city? Artists at the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), an experimental research and education project led by Olafur Eliasson at the Berlin University of the Arts in

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2009–2014, developed strategies of psychogéographie that share synergies with some of the works discussed in Chapter 4. One of the principal areas of investigation in Berlin involved nonstructured walking activities in public spaces. These were grouped into individual walks, group walks, walks using objects and walks guided by sensorial effects. Individual walks included walking backwards for fifteen minutes through the city; the midwinter barefoot walk; a diagonal walk, which moved in one direction for a kilometre; and the ‘ever walking walk’ towards a pre-selected place. The group-based ‘net walk’ was a collaborative movement through space as participants moved with their arms outstretched touching fingertips for ten minutes, while for ‘lay down line walk’ they were arranged head-to-toe with the person at the top of the line moving to the end for a set duration. Walks using objects included a blindfolded walk and ‘see walk,’ for which someone negotiated a set journey using only a mirror for guidance. The ‘map walk’ employed a foreign city guide to navigate Berlin’s streets, while the sensory walks followed sights and smells as participants would ‘ride on a smell’ towards a destination, swapping to another smell when one trail ended. Such strategies recalled the Situationist strategy of psychogéographie, actively observing the effects of urban space through sensory exploration. As interruptions to the everyday movements and flows of the productive city, these activities also express De Certeau’s concern for a stubborn insistence of bodies at variance with the city’s top-down order, discussed in Chapter 7. De Certeau theorised everyday practices as a range of imperceptible ruses within the concept city, both subversively creative and tactical in form. As a form of resistance to a pervasive rationality and functionality, non-linear walking practices extend De Certeau’s theory of diverting productive time, or la perruque, through tactics that borrow from within the rationale of everyday socio-cultural systems. Significantly, la perruque requires corporeal resistance to support itself against everyday repetition and nothingness. The body activates the space of the tactic so it can seize moments of opportunity for non-productive, sometimes creative expressions. In each case, whether explicitly or not, the walks described above operate within the reach of the proprietary powers of the concept city. However, they work in opposition to its ideology of rational control and flows of productive labour. Errant walkers disrupt the everyday conditions rehearsed by the dominant market logic in productive societies in which everything that is not already at work—people, cars or property—is in

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the process of becoming so. The movements of wayward, unpredictable bodies in city spaces simultaneously reveals and destabilises the apparatuses that hold this logic in place through everyday rhythms and routines. They instead provoke momentary resistances and antagonisms towards the status quo. The non-sensical interludes created by Melbourne artist Peter Burke highlight and expand this idea. His site-specific projects for Pop-up art devised performance and participatory strategies that disrupted everyday routines and appearances of commercial and civic spaces in cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, New Delhi and Melbourne. Humour and parody were used to dramatise fictional encounters, with public audiences responding to the unexpected actions differently, exposing embedded social and cultural norms about proximity. For example, The Standard special: Lift out (2012), MMM whaleburger (2013) and Please love me: Whaleburger (2014) engaged with commercial whaling by inserting the issue into everyday pedestrian and media circuits. The earliest iteration took the form of a newspaper editorial that Burke posted in The Standard advertising a new whaleburger; the second involved Burke wearing a signage board while distributing coupons for a fictitious whaleburger in central Melbourne; while for the third Burke carried out a street promotion for whaleburgers in Tokyo wearing a kawaii costume commonly seen in Japanese cities where commercial whaling barely makes headline news (Fig. 8.3). These performances were embedded in everyday economic realities as a critique of the commercial activity built around habitual or unquestioned consumer practices. Situated within the spaces of consumer culture, Burke uses parody and intervention to subvert an uncritical drift into consumerism, or to counter its operation in everyday spaces. Elsewhere, he has instigated experimental disruptions in bustling pedestrian and commuter areas as part of an ongoing socially engaged performance titled Mishap (2013–). Dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase, Burke strides through crowded areas in cities such as Shanghai, Tokyo, New Delhi and Bloemfontein; as intended, the briefcase suddenly opens, spilling papers onto the ground and creating momentary confusion. The fictional mishap is designed to disrupt the everyday routine in social spaces using intervention. Burke (2018) explains that the work aims to highlight variations of social behaviour and cultural norms in commercialised public spaces. Awareness is drawn to the archetype performed by the artist as foreign businessman wearing the conventional symbols of financial success. With

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Fig. 8.3 Peter Burke, Whaleburger, Tokyo, 2014 (Photo: Saeko Ehara courtesy of the artist)

the suit and briefcase displaying the role outwardly, corresponding with expectations of encounter of this type in an international city, the commotion that follows as the briefcase spills open, creates a momentary break or a parody of this convention. In some cities, passers-by rushed to assist Burke as he collected the papers, while in others, he was simply observed as he gathered them alone. A subtle disturbance in the routine order revealed different levels of reaction or concern. Whatever the response, the performances drew attention to the structures that regulate urban life. Burke’s practice inserts art into the dispersed spaces of commercial profit that are embedded in public and pedestrian spaces. Theorist Miwon Kwon (2004) has argued that commercialised public space poses new challenges for art that engages with everyday sites and ideologies. Kwon’s theory of site-specificity illuminates practices like Burke’s that have relocated critique from studio-based practices to city spaces where social,

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economic, and political processes are worked over and through. Artists have abandoned place-bound practices to embrace nomadic conditions, Kwon (2004, 159) writes, advancing a different reading of site as interconnected, multiple and discursive. One of these discursive fields incorporates the everyday city. Burke’s momentary interventions into routine appearances and behaviours demonstrates the theories of the everyday provided by Lefebvre and De Certeau, and highlights a continued interest in the quotidian as a medium to activate the political dimensions of the everyday in contemporary art. A strategy of rupture, interruption, resistance and exposure evident in Burke’s minor incursions into the everyday scene also exposes new imaginative expressions in the relationship between the city and art. Burke’s pop-up works render visible the ideologies that interpellate bodies through cycles of shopping or commuting. He borrows associations with lo-fi commercial sales strategies considered low-brow or unsophisticated, such as door-to-door sales, street vending or hawking. The artist (2016, 48) observes that lo-fi activities like pop-up shops are now part of today’s fast-paced, high-end marketing strategies, which seek to put unprofitable city spaces to work. A lo-fi aesthetic is tied to enterprise culture in which a logic of profitability merges across public life, a condition exacerbated by high rents and inflated economies in neoliberal cities. As Burke performs in everyday commercial spaces, he exposes the settings of economic productivity, rendering profitability uncertain. This is an important break from earlier avant-garde practices and confirms that the relationship between art and the city is not a seamless continuation or expression of practices since the mid-twentieth century. Different trajectories attempt to question dominant structures embedded in a current everyday consciousness. Artists who attempt to break the hypnosis of the everyday by intervening in the familiar spaces and routines of the city practise what Nikos Papastergiadis (2010, 37) refers to as making art from ‘that which is close at hand.’ Art’s spatial aesthetics, he argues, allow some of the biggest philosophical ideas to be processed from the perspective of that which is most familiar: the everyday. Artists demonstrate ways to reframe recognisable experiences, repeated actions or travelled journeys in ways that pique curiosity, providing a stark contrast to the rigidity of top-down rational systems. Papastergiadis states that the concept of the everyday could facilitate a rethinking between that which is foreign or familiar, kitsch or refined, mass produced or one-of-a-kind, all of which have been

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part of artistic discourses since the avant-garde. But art does not claim to reconcile the different extremes or positions. Rather, it is part of a dialogic process in which the individual and the social are inextricably linked. The relationship between art and the city demonstrates this, establishing a space for non-literal and non-rational expressions to surface in response to larger socio-political dynamics that are grasped theoretically, but which can also be made manifest in alternative visual practices. 8.3.3

Everyday Scenes: Interrupting Routine Appearances of the City

In 2006, the street artist Banksy deposited a reconfigured British telephone box into a side street in London’s Westminster district. The phone box was presented as anthropomorphic, as if lying on its side after being recently attacked, and bleeding red paint from a pickaxe wound. Polished and calculated, the intervention carried the biting commentary critics have come to expect from Banksy’s irreverent street stencils. Vandalised phone box was a tongue-in-cheek statement about the redundancy of public telephones in a media-scape of mobile technology; more literally it dramatised ‘the death of phone boxes.’ However, the unauthorised intrusion in Westminster, a district of London with heavy security surveillance, was an act of rebellion with its own message. Like most street art, the phone box was considered an unlawful disturbance of public space and swiftly removed a few hours after it was set down. Banksy’s intervention repurposed one of the city’s everyday objects as a medium to highlight issues or changes in urban space that may ordinarily go unnoticed. Physical materials that make up the ubiquitous street furniture or cityscape are displaced or reinvented to make them more obvious to a public audience, emphasised by Banksy’s mise-en-scène. The personification of a static object produced a parody of the decline of this iconic symbol in the United Kingdom and commented on the unremarked adoption of mobile phone technology. Moreover, sited in a district of heavy surveillance, it drew attention to the city’s extensive networks of capture. Vandalised phone box expressed one method for overturning passive experiences of the city. By commandeering an icon of British history and culture, repurposing or misusing it in a busy pedestrian area, Banksy drew attention to a public discourse on changes in urban spaces. An unwitting audience encountered the work and created a flurry of interest before it was removed. News of the event reached the media, prompting

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British Telecommunications to issue a public relations statement in which they affirmed it as a comment on the company’s transformation from an old-fashioned service into a modern telco. The object provoked interest among a range of social groups, for example, the pedestrians who stumbled across the work and posted photos of it online. Speculation continued about the act as a publicity stunt, while the corporations responsible for the ‘welfare’ of phone boxes fuelled news stories that reported on the incident from various angles. Having gained notoriety, the phone box resurfaced two years later at a Sotheby’s auction in New York where it generated strong interest among collectors, selling for USD$550,000. These unpredictable trajectories stemming from the original action not only draw attention to the city’s everyday spaces, but demonstrate the unforeseen responses that art can generate when it deviates from the normative structures of urban life. Whereas Banksy’s intervention took place in a pedestrian space, Olafur Eliasson’s earlier series of interventions between 1997 and 2001 traced time-based changes in the natural environment. In cities such as Bremen, Stockholm and Tokyo, Eliasson used Uranine, a compound employed to test ocean currents, to transform the colour of urban rivers into an iridescent green. The idea was to highlight the fluidity and dynamic element of the river and water supply, rather than it being a static backdrop that is routinely seen as aesthetic. The dye, Eliasson (2009, 135) stated, added depth and a sense of temporality. Green river also generated interest from members of the public who phoned the water authorities and were told the colour was the result of a spill from a heating plant, while the media published a story on it in the local news (Eliasson 2009, 134). In Johannesburg in 1997, Eliasson emptied a water reservoir into the street, creating an instant river which pedestrians were forced to navigate. A decade later in 2008 for The New York City waterfalls , the artist used scaffolding and pumps to channel water from the East River into four large torrents. These works amplified the water’s physicality, highlighting the forces of gravity, to engage people in the city’s spaces and shift the routine focus away from the city’s structure. Eliasson (2009, 129) explained that the visual friction created by the urban waterfalls was designed to exercise criticality and open possibilities for experiences of natural forms in an urban setting, which would encourage people to reconsider their relationship with nature. This, he argued, required a re-examination of how one engaged with the everyday city.

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Eliasson’s interest in coproducing reality through interventions that highlight natural spaces in the urban setting reveals a dichotomy between superficial experience and a critical awareness of everyday objects, dimensions and perceptions. The momentary rupture of urban order and appearance can heighten public awareness of proximity to a sense of normalcy in the city. The dynamic material of water as a medium helps to renegotiate an uncritical acceptance of the city as a static image, while the transformation of its colour in Green river enlivens the water source within the banal sequences of the everyday city. Art introduces to the city moments of chance or change, flow and entropy, recalling and updating Kaprow’s Fluids work from 1963. In these works, art introduces a sense of spontaneity and wonder that works away from routine cycles of consumer culture. Without this expression, the city may remain a flat representation of order. This chapter began by analysing art practices that sought to problematise the rational ideology of corporate power in public spaces and institutions. A range of art practices brought visibility to the conditions of dominant ideologies as they are performed by the bodies who use the urban systems resulting in everyday routines, productive relations and behaviours. Art ruptures these quotidian perceptions and challenges the coded inscription of the body by (mis)using it in ways that do not comply with the rule of a disciplinary apparatus or dominant consumer ideology. In Part III: Networks, my focus turns to art’s engagement with the ubiquitous communications networks of social media and surveillance that supplement the urban hardware and software of top-down order with a new infrastructure. This draws attention to emerging tensions generated by the impact of networked media technology that is changing the foundations for urban design, intersubjective relations, surveillance and consumer practices.

References Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. Burke, Peter. 2016. Pop-up art: Performing creative disruption in social space. PhD, RMIT University. Burke, Peter. 2018. Mishap. Unlikely: Journal for the Creative Arts. 03. https:// unlikely.net.au/issue-03/mishap. Accessed 20 June 2023.

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Carr, C. 2002. In the discomfort zone. In William Pope.L: The friendliest black artist in America, ed. Mark H. C. Bessire, 48–53. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and spatial politics. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Eliasson, Olafur. 2009. Frictional encounters. In Paradoxes of appearing, ed. Michael Asgaard Andersen and Henrik Oxvig, 129–147. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers. Galindo, R. J. 2017. Presencia (Presence), Karen Lissette Fuentes. Documenta 14. https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/16471/presencia-presencekaren-lissette-fuentes. Accessed 20 June 2023. Herrick, L. 2014. The invisible man: Kalisolaite Uhila. The New Zealand Herald, 25 October. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/the-invisibleman-kalisolaite-uhila/XKHRZASPXRKT4UHFS7IOGIGIVQ/. Accessed 20 June 2023. Kwon, Miwon. 2004. One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. LaBelle, C. 2001. Valie Export. Frieze 60. https://www.frieze.com/article/valieexport. Accessed 20 June 2023. MacDonald, Scott. 1988. Valie Export. In A critical cinema: Interview with independent filmmakers, vol. 3, ed. S. MacDonald, 253–261. Berkeley: University of California Press. Macqueen, Kathleen. 2014. Tactical response: Art in an age of terror. New York: AGON Press. Mouffe, C. 2007. Artistic activism and agonistic spaces. Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (2): 1–5. http://www.artandres earch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html. Accessed 20 June 2023. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2010. Spatial aesthetics: Art, place and the everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Phillips, Bruce E. 2014. Curator’s response: Kalisolaite ’Uhila’s Mo’ui Tukuhausia. Presentation 10 August 2014, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T¯amaki. https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/article/curator-s-responsekalisolaite-uhila-s-mo-ui-tukuhausia. Accessed 20 June 2023. Phillips, Bruce E., and Kalisolaite ‘Uhila. 2012. Discussing Mo’ui Tukuhausia. In What do you mean “we”? Exhibition catalogue. Auckland: Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts. Piper, Adrian. 1996. Out of order, out of sight: Selected writings in meta-Art 1968–1992, vol. I. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Pope.L, William, and Martha Wilson. 1996. William Pope.L by Martha Wilson. BOMB—Artists in Conversation 55 (Spring). https://bombmagazine.org/art icles/william-pope-l/. Accessed 30 May 2022.

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Richards, Bree. 2016. Bianca Hester. Monash University Museum of Art. https://www.monash.edu/muma/collection/100-works-of-the-monash-uni versity-collection/100-works/bianca-hester. Accessed 20 June 2023. Schlaegel, Andreas. 2015. Nevin Alada˘g: The city plays itself. Frieze. https:// www.frieze.com/article/focus-nevin-alada˘g. Accessed 20 June 2023. Sharp, Kristen. 2013. Driving the sonic city. In Re-Imagining the city: Art, globalization and urban spaces, ed. Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp, 73–91. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Smith, Cherise. 2007. Re-member the audience: Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being advertisement. Art Journal 66 (1): 46–58. Stiles, Kristine. 2002. Thunderbird immolation: Burning racism. In William Pope.L: The friendliest black artist in America, ed. Mark H.C Bessire, 36–42. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Wilson, Martha. 2002. Limited warranty. In William Pope.L: The friendliest black artist in America, ed. Mark H.C Bessire, 45–46. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 2016. Transformative avant-garde and other writings. London: Black Dog Publishing.

PART III

Networks

CHAPTER 9

Networks of Control in the City

A new infrastructure has taken shape in cities since the late twentieth century. Part III assesses the impacts of networks of technology, communications and surveillance on urban spaces, and how artists have responded. This chapter opens an inquiry into the growing ubiquity of networks in global cities and the new conditions for information exchange these have established. Gilles Deleuze (1992), Manuel Castells (2009), Maurizio Lazzarato (2006, 2017) Jean Baudrillard (1983), Paul Virilio (1991) and Byung-Chul Han (2015a, 2015b) have critiqued the issues emerging in networked societies including the mutations of panopticism and the influence of instantaneity, simulation, ‘cognitive capitalism’ and transparency on intersubjective relationships. There is a growing sense in which technology is not located in the city, but the city in the technology, given the time, communication and economic activity that increasingly depends on technology. I argue that these networks are embedded in the urban hardware and software, operating as an infrastructure of control that co-produces less visible assemblies of order. In 2015, The Guardian reported that today, there are two cities coexisting as one: the city of people and cars, and the city of ones and zeros. The city of people and cars referred to a physical or material reality in which one moves from A to B, which correlates with an urban hardware that I have discussed. The city of ones and zeros is less tangible. It takes shape in ‘the cloud,’ a term that implies the processing and storing of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_9

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data on a network of remote servers, rather than on local systems. The city of ones and zeros, which I refer to as the data-driven city, has arguably become as ubiquitous as the first. An imperceptible data harvesting operation, data-driven cities surge each time someone logs on, checks in online, takes an Uber ride, or posts on X (formerly Twitter). The datadriven city is part of the big data revolution occurring globally in which instrumentation, datafication and computation have increasingly permeated through the fabric of cities (Bibri and Krogstie 2020). As I expand below, data-driven and ‘smart’ technology have been readily adopted by technologists, urbanists, businesses, and policy makers in response to narratives of crisis concerning the implosion of urban populations globally and the pressure this places on sustainable resources. However, they elicit a spectrum of issues such as the reshaping of social interaction and human intersubjectivity through demands for the technologisation of society. Part III examines how digitised networks and communications technology have co-produced the conditions for a state of constant connectivity in urban societies globally. It responds to key questions on the data-driven city that emerge as a consequence of artistic responses to the issues this raises. These include: How has a surge in digital technology use impacted the conditions for how cities are lived in or experienced? In what ways have artists intervened in or worked away from virtual modes for thinking the urban? As regimes of constant visibility and virtual productivity that inscribe the data-driven city are contested in art, this chapter expands on key theorists who have debated the social impacts of networks of technology, communications and surveillance. This lays the foundation for analyses of art that expose the conditions wrought by big data technology in the city, which are discussed in the chapters that follow.

9.1

The Global City and ‘Smart-City Mentality’

Global digital networks have radically changed the geo-political landscape that once connected cities. In 1968, urban planner Melvin Webber theorised a Post-City Age in which once-spatially defined cities would be increasingly dispersed and connected through technological revolution. Developments in science and knowledge would lead to irreversible shifts in employment from production lines to services, with a dissolution of geospatial borders into global networks of communications. Webber expected urban societies to emerge independently of fixed locations, marking the end of the city. He was not exclusive in his thinking. A

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short time later, in The urban revolution (1970), Henri Lefebvre predicted a global fabric or web of urban societies readied for the unfettered flow of capital, on which humanity would depend. Predictions such as these are no longer theoretical. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil (2014, 3) argue that Lefebvre offers an accurate starting point for an inquiry into today’s global urban reality. Since the 1980s, globalisation has requisitioned key cities for the ongoing transformations of capitalism. London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney and Hong Kong are among an elite network of global cities that Saskia Sassen (1991) refers to as nodes in a global service-economy, expanding and driving consumer behaviour and trends. No longer independent urban entities, global cities have morphed into politico-economic powerhouses on the world stage. They cultivate populations of workers, and accrue immense financial wealth and political influence as part of a global economic order. More recently, Sassen (2015, 263) argues, global cities have developed into ‘corporate services complexes,’ where networks of highly mobile accountants, financiers, lawyers and advertising professionals are clustered around the services they provide to major international corporations. An ascendance of digitised, globally dispersed economic activities and dematerialised sectors, such as banking, finance and legal services, have given rise to a supra-network of cities. Sassen (2015, 658) states that the zone of influence of information technologies in globalised cities is farreaching given the shift towards the dematerialisation and digitalisation of large portions of economies that now transact at near instantaneous speeds through some of these networks. As a result, global financial activities interweave two kinds of spaces: physical and digital. Today, the infrastructure that supports digitised finance and information technology is paralleled by booms in construction. In Dublin, for example, the international headquarters for internet-based companies Google LLC, Facebook Inc. and Airbnb Inc. have driven construction in the city, while in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley, Google LLC and the Microsoft Corporation have assumed dominance of the urban centres. Technology-focussed Stanford University in adjacent Berkeley has become a feeder institution for innovation and tech start-up companies. Silicon Valley and the tech start-up industry have driven demand for higher end housing, exacerbating a housing crisis and homelessness in San Francisco (La Ganga 2016). Alongside globalisation, digital technology and internet businesses have contributed a formidable force that is shaping the organisation of the city’s structure, with broader implications for the fabric of urban society.

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The expanding influence of digital technology networks has not only started to reorganise the city’s bricks and mortar, but everyday activities too: online shopping, communication, work, politics and entertainment take place in a digital matrix. However, issues still arise in the ways a digital economy is supported: the vast warehouses from which Amazon Inc. fulfils online orders is one example of how physical space is adapted to support activities taking place in virtual networks. Thus, there is a growing sense in which technology is shaping the city to meet the demands of time, communication, economic and cultural activity that now operates through technology, increasingly even more so than in traditional or analogue space. In addition to the physical and socio-economic changes wrought by an expanding global city network, recent urban discourses have identified issues with an emerging smart city concept. Alberto Vanolo (2014, 884) states that the smart city slogan markets efficiency, technological advancement, sustainability and socially inclusivity, but the concept is ill-defined, making it adaptable for different agendas. Emerging rationalities of hyper technology introduce a new measure of power that can redefine the role and meaning of cities and reduce possibilities for agonism or antagonism in favour of disciplined cities (Vanolo 2014, 883). In theory, the smart city proposes to increase self-generating flows of capital, entrepreneurial activity, city branding and tax incentives, while civic administration devises strategies of homogenous culture-making and innovation for organising and managing the city’s spaces. Offering a new economic order, the smart mentality depends on access to technology and an adoption of networks embedded in the city (Vanolo 2014, 884). Meanwhile, maintenance and administration are outsourced to technicians and consultants so that the city is readied for innovative capital circulation. In response to the data-driven city, several artists have problematised the broader implications of nascent virtual or digitally augmented topdown controls for urban populations. While they are not explicit in their reassessment of the smart city concept, their projects often highlight a misanthropic agenda that permeates the imperceptible networks in everyday spaces. Dynamic methods of art are situated to provide a cathartic reimagining of this paradigm, breaking with a hyper-valorisation of top-down order. Art makes the new order visible as an oppressive field, which has potential to stifle radical thought on how lived experiences are coerced or co-opted by data networks. As I argue in Chapter 11, art lends

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itself to a deeper scrutiny of the issues emerging in the data-driven city and networked societies more broadly.

9.2 Manuel Castells: Issues in the Networked Society Social theorist Manuel Castells’ extensive writing on the networked society and the processes at work in the Information Age has brought clarity to the impact of the technological revolution occurring in cities. Castells (2009) analysed the relationship between technology, the economy, society and culture to demonstrate how technology began reshaping the material base of society from the late-twentieth century. Information technology provided the foundations for greater connectivity, which changed advanced capitalist economies into globally networked societies. Writing during the first decades of the internet, Castells had in the 1990s established an enquiry into the relationship between the nascent Net-based socio-cultural interactions and economic, social and political shifts at both the global and local level. The exchange of information goes hand-in-hand with this shift. Communications systems and networks speak a universal, digital language, coded and decoded, which transforms how words, sounds and images are produced and distributed. Interactive new media communications shape contemporary life via a global matrix of information circulating in an open-ended expanse. A polar opposition between the Net and the self, Castells (2009, 3) argues, increasingly structures societies. This means that to ‘log out’ of the network society or to fail to participate to avoid structural domination, is to switch off the productive self and construct meaning without global reference. There is a reciprocal effect which results in social exclusion (Castells 2009, 24). The unremitting productive forces swallow up and suppress life’s varied functions, transforming them into monocultural products in categories and systems. Castells (2009, 2) states that here, ‘black holes of human misery’ open where there is social exclusion from the information society: those who are not valued as producers or consumers do not fit within its logic and are therefore outside the network, non-participants and obsolete. Informational black holes can be used to describe cities, countries or continents devoid of the technological infrastructure needed to participate in a globally networked information society. Powerful dominant forces exploit the

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network logic by controlling access to information technology to maintain political control and keep a monopoly on resources and productivity. For Castells, an upsurge in information technology and networked communication shares a co-dependent relationship with a global restructuring of economies that transforms the material structure and spatiotemporal processes of modern life. In its decentralised, highly mobile and proliferating form, capitalism continuously restructures competitive markets and diversifies its own application in everyday production (private and public). This shift has resulted in uneven development, not only along the former geo-economic divide of north and south, but in cities already colonised by a global economic logic. Castell’s concern is echoed by cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996) who argues that technology and media ‘recolonise’ nations through a remote lens that creates imaginary communities in a global village of placeless communities. Appadurai (1996, 29) states that an electronic proximity to ‘the other’ produces a rhizomic or schizophrenic world with a rootless, alienating, and psychological distance wrought between people and groups on one hand, and fantasies or nightmares on the other. A global village of placeless communities is a central problem in cultural processes, characterised by displacement and disjuncture. In a recent keynote lecture, Castells (2021) identifies a new ascendant force emerging through the rise of social media networks. While these have provided a platform for communication, internet-based social media networks have had three consequences. First, they demonstrate that the logic of the network has yielded to a dominant economic logic through data capitalism: the more people who adopt the platform to communicate, the more data currency they provide to be traded in the marketplace to boost revenues for global corporations. This shift is attended by a second consequence, a new formation of interconnected global surveillance bureaucracies. Castells (2021) states that while capital infiltrates the logic of the network on one hand, on the other the State, the traditional system that restrains liberty, co-opts the mass use of social media networks as a new terrain for surveillance, eliminating the possibility for escape through larger matrices of optics. Castells says a third consequence is that free communications networks have become spaces where both creative and imaginative ideals are shared, but also destructive or divisive ideas of conflict and discrimination. Social media networks are bound by dominant ideologies; some voices or ideas are amplified while others are diminished. Castells’ concern is that some counter positions represent an

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assault on the idea of truth and scientific reasoning. He does not discuss the possibility of a middle ground, however, or the larger proportion who do not use the platforms for this purpose, nor the societal conditions that create such divisions. While Castells’ theory largely concerns a coercion of information networks by capital and the state, it can be supplemented by art practices that infiltrate or work away from the spaces of networks and technology to draw attention to a pervasive control system. Strategies of artists, provocateurs and agitators have exposed spaces of digital commerce that affect cities in direct and indirect ways. The collective of digital artists and programmers known as ® ™ark or ‘art mark,’ engages in ‘hacktivism,’ a neologism for hacking and activist practice: communications networks, online shopping and media are hijacked to draw attention to exploitative commerce activities in the digital space. ® ™ark’s online intervention, FloodNet, resulted from a clash with an online toy corporation, eToys™ in 1998. This followed legal action by the corporation to prevent ® ™ark from owning the domain name www.Etoy. com, which had been purchased by the collective. eToys claimed their concern was that potential customers would link their company to the radical activities of the art organisation. After eToys had failed to reach a settlement with ® ™ark, the company successfully managed to remove ® ™ark from the domain, accusing them of illicit activities that were damaging to the company’s public image. In retaliation, ® ™ark launched a tactical response using an applet called FloodNet, which allowed a network of hacktivists to flood the eToys site by logging in from different sites, crashing the company’s online trading platform. The action took the form of a multi-player game using Lego figures in military uniforms in a mock battle between eToys shareholders and the ® ™ark team. FloodNet enabled users to coordinate useless requests sent to a server to slow down the website and create error logs. Intervening in more recent social media networks, street artist Banksy began a month-long self-produced ‘artist residency’ in New York in October 2013, titled Better out than in. Each day the location of a new work was revealed through social media platform Instagram, along with satirical and provocative soundbites. The works varied in theme and location, making reference to airstrikes in Iraq, globalisation, the Syrian conflict and 9/11, at sites in the South Bronx, Chelsea, Willets Point, Brooklyn and elsewhere. Banksy’s typical socio-political stencils formed a majority of the pieces; multimedia installations also appeared, however.

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The mobile act, Sirens of the lambs in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, featured a cargo truck packed with soft toy animal puppets squeaking at stunned pedestrians. In a performance in the Bronx, a young boy sat shining the monstrous red shoes of a caricature Ronald McDonald. Another installation included an exhibition opening under a bridge, featuring works by the Brazilian street-art duo Os Gemeos. In Greenpoint, a defaced car was set up in a street space, featuring rearing horses in night-vision goggles, accompanied by a WikiLeaks audio of an airstrike in Baghdad. Finally, at a street stall outside Central Park, an older civilian was tasked with selling original Banksy works to the public at bargain prices. Despite extensive media coverage of Banksy’s residency, little has been made of the project’s networked dimensions. The project was mediated by social media networks and an online exchange of location data. Radical cartography was a significant feature of Better out than in, when conventional ideas of spatial or geographic order of the city were temporarily displaced as crowds of fans, journalists, police, gallerists, business owners and passers-by descended onto the ‘scene of the crime’ each day. The unpredictable commotion that resulted at some sites was orchestrated remotely by the artist, whose identity remains anonymous to the public. Individuals in pursuit of works, such as a dog-walking couple who ‘followed the breadcrumbs,’ performed their own independent journeys on YouTube, extending each event from physical city space to the virtual network, and further to online audiences around the globe. A stampede of photos and tweets consequently swamped newsfeeds on X (Twitter), Instagram and Facebook, dispersing the works globally and generating dialogue in the cloud. In its hybrid exploitation of physical and virtual spaces of the city, the project exposed a subversive use of the network in contrast to the dominant use for data capitalism and state surveillance that Castells claims.

9.3

Societies of Control

Deleuze’s (1992) essay on societies of control describes a new disciplinary control emerging in the late twentieth century. He builds on Foucault’s disciplinary apparatuses but replaces his logic of modern enclosure and registration in disciplinary societies with its dispersed form in the society of control. Deleuze (1992, 3) writes that the dispositifs — prison, hospital, factory, school, family—were subject to repetitive reforms

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following World War II. Foucault acknowledged control was the underlying force for these dispositifs , however he had largely focussed on their origin and operation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Deleuze and others, such as Paul Virilio, whose theory I discuss below, observed a rise of ‘ultrarapid forms of free-floating control’ that had replaced the former enclosures in the twentieth century (Deleuze 1992, 4). Enclosures no longer enforced discipline in captured areas of society, such as the factory with its closed systematic hierarchy. Deleuze (1992, 4–5) states that the old factory was constituted by individuals making up a single mass and disciplined by the factory boss and the unions who mobilised resistance when it was needed. The corporation, on the other hand, positions rivalry as a natural situation and capitalises on it as a motivational force that pits individuals against one another, dividing them from within the group. As corporations replaced the factory model, workers’ rewards were distributed based on competition amongst themselves, according to a salary of merit. Whereas in disciplinary societies, worker training was contained in the school, the army and the factory, in societies of control, perpetual training means that continuous forms of control replace the qualifying examination. Rather than a disciplined producer of energy, individuals in control societies ride within a network in constant modulation. Deleuze saw the economic operation of control societies linked to mutations of capitalism. A mass production of objects backed by a gold standard had been replaced in control societies by a higher-order capitalism, which operates through technology, markets, and floating exchange rates. Stripped of individuality in relation to the mass, workers are subject to multiple passwords to gain access, or otherwise excluded. As the control society disperses, a new system of domination isolates, divides and codes workers within a larger virtual disciplinary matrix ‘beyond’ the enclosure. Maurizio Lazzarato (2006) expands Deleuze’s analysis of the society of control. He elaborates on the disciplinary controls that facilitated a shift from the coercion of bodies to the coercion of minds. Lazzarato (2006, 171) states that this shift is best understood in terms of multiplicity, Deleuze’s concept in which individuals and classes are captured, integrated and differentiated. A Marxist theory of the superstructure seized the dynamics of capitalism into one inescapable totality that assumed power to extract labour and exploit workers. Lazzarato contends this is overly reductive; he argues that the concept of multiplicity usefully articulates the presence of infinite singularities within this totality to better

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understand how discipline is disseminated as a management system of diverse relations and forces. Foucault described enclosed apparatuses in which the relations of power were endorsed to regulate and control the individual. Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity posited a scenario in which discipline was not only exercised on bodies in the school, army, or factory, but beyond this, outside. Today, Lazzarato (2006, 177–178) writes, power seeks to confine the outside through modulation: it is a matter of modulating in an open, rather than closed space. Control is thus overlaid onto discipline, with the ‘public’ representing the new target for disciplinary control. The question remains: how does discipline capture ‘the outside’? Deleuze suggested that power relations operate as multiplicity; they are virtual, unstable and dynamic. Lazzarato (2006, 179) proposes that the start of the twentieth century marked a shift from social nuclei such as the individual worker, soldier or union, to broader social groupings or ‘publics.’ These were made up of dispersed parts but came to be constituted as publics of the newspaper or media, for example. As different publics formed throughout the twentieth century, a new cooperation was possible due to broader networks and connections, amplified by the telegraph, telephone, new media and, finally, the internet. The target of disciplinary control is to diminish freedom, variation, creative expression or resistance. With a broadening of technologies and publics, the subjectivities of large groups of society could be modulated. Lazzarato (2006, 180) writes that as a result, expressions of power have come to be expressed as one mind influencing another across distance, rather than directly. Long-range technologies allow discipline to act on a dispersed public to influence perception and action in the society of control. This new disciplinary control is embedded in society as ‘noo-politics,’ a concept Lazzarato adapts from the Aristotelian term ‘noos,’ meaning cognition, or the highest part of the soul. An interlocking of the biopower of Foucault’s disciplinary dispositifs and the power relations of noo-politics gives rise to a dispersed discipline that infiltrates society and relations between individuals. It is through this logic that Lazzarato perceives the modulation of flows of desires operating vis-à-vis one mind to another at distance. If the society of control comprises coercive forces that infiltrate the minds of publics to discipline the movements, ideologies, subjectivities of a broad section of society, this has implications

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for the city, as a place of multiple publics where a range of technologies, processes and agendas compete for the attention of individuals and groups.

9.4

Cognitive Capitalism

A repetition of intense stimuli is normalised in city spaces, capturing the attention of different publics within a system of commodity and profit. Referred to as ‘cognitive capitalism,’ this is an ‘information distribution and production system’ that controls subjectivities of normalcy to coproduce systematic, homogenised thinking (Neidich 2010, 550). Warren Neidich illustrates this with a PepsiCo advertising campaign in New York. Launched simultaneously on multiple sites, billboards, television and the internet, many minds are reached at the same time (Neidich 2010, 560). Cognitive capitalism is the process by which dominant ideologies are internalised, exploiting the spaces of routine activities such as driving, commuting or shopping. Neidich (2010, 540) states that this neuropower can infiltrate the mind/body, bending and readying it for consumer practice. As these networks are concentrated in cities, it follows that the city is where artists commonly intervene in ‘cognitive capitalism.’ Cognitive capitalism is linked to the concept of ‘immaterial labour.’ Lazzarato (2017) explains this as a shift from the production of objects in factories, to intellectual labour that produces content that feeds into virtual, immaterial systems such as banking or finance. A worker’s input in technology-mediated fields of communication and data brings new consequences. Lazzarato (2017, 31) claims that subjectivity is susceptible to organisation and command because there is a growing expectation that workers participate in diverse modes of production, instead of responding to simple commands. Participation management in workplace activities measures competence in communication, keeping workers in line with the conditions of production for production’s sake. Dematerialised labour results, feeding the cultural-information commodity complex and reaffirming conditions of control as a natural state without resistance or question. Neidich and Lazzarato demonstrate that the imperatives of connectivity in today’s societies are mediated by dispersed discipline that orchestrates the influence of one mind on another. This is not to say there is a straightforward acceptance or integration of these methods. Both theorists convey a neo-totality in which all of society is subject to long-range

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influence, disciplinary control and cognitive capitalism, risking a tendency towards a Cartesian dualism that treats the body and mind as separate ontological entities. From a phenomenological point of view, labour and the workings of discipline are immaterial, formed by data transmissions or abstract interactions. However, the material traces are still evident, supported by bricks and mortar in the form of distribution warehouses, offices, delivery and logistics. Most importantly, bodies still activate the cognitive functions discussed by Neidich and Lazzarato, and therefore cannot be excluded. Nevertheless, Neidich and Lazzarato establish the workings of cognitive control through the subliminal messages that operate in public and workspaces. My argument is that artists draw attention to the abstraction of labour or social experience that attempts to herd society into dematerialised spaces. The non-compliant body operates in tandem with the non-compliant mind, activating resistance through a post-digital relational aesthetics, discussed in Chapter 10. Art activates bodies and invigorates social relations and intersubjectivities, presenting a counter position to the forces of cognitive control and experience. Media artist Jason Eppink provides examples of how the networks of cognitive capitalism can be exposed or ‘jammed’ through art intervention. Pixelator (2003–) is Eppink’s ongoing series of interventions using LED advertising screens at subway entrances (Fig. 9.1). He calls these ‘anonymous collaborations’ with the New York Metro Transit Authority. Eppink fixes to the LED screen a custom-made foam board, which is divided into grids with a diffuser screen that converts the advertising content into a lightwork of flickering squares. Using this strategy, he counters an ever-increasing privatisation of urban space, and the pervasive use of consumer messaging in built-up pedestrian zones. The work destabilises the marketing channel through which cognitive capitalism is orchestrated: the conditions are temporarily recoded in a creative, non-commercial way. Art’s intervention in the networked infrastructure of advertising creates a social interstice, a gap in the usual relations operating in consumer and pedestrian spaces, where possibilities for new kinds of exchange might surface.

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Fig. 9.1 Jason Eppink, Pixelator, New York City, 2007, installation view (Photo: Jason Eppink)

9.5

The ‘Ecstasy of Communication’ and the ‘Overexposed City’

The disciplinary assets of the society of control have manifested in radical ways in the cities of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. A multiplicity of ‘ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control’ were analysed by theorists Jean Baudrillard (1983) and Paul Virilio (1991) in response to the ascendance of instant communication and the transmission of real and digital spaces vis-à-vis screen interfaces. Their concepts provide critical foundations for analyses of art practices that expose or work away from conditions that modulate or control urban life via networked communication and a hyperreality of consumer culture in city spaces. Baudrillard (1983, 130) observed that a new medium of consumer culture and advertising had emerged as ‘our only architecture today.’ The

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digital screen and network had ushered in a new ‘ecstasy of communication,’ which reduced the spatiotemporal field of messages to an instant timescale, ushering in new simulations of reality. Baudrillard (1983, 129) stated that corporate advertising in public spaces had come to monopolise urban life in its omnipresent visibility of enterprise culture including brands, celebrities and the social virtues of communication. In the city of instant information and simulated reality, advertising and screen interfaces replaced physical structures, producing spaces of commodity circulation and transient connections. Screen interfaces and network technology established the conditions by which never-ending communication and broadcasting simulated reality. Individuals were abstracted and displaced, floating in the flux of electronica, as interlocutors for networks of influence (Baudrillard 1983, 133). Television screens collapsed reality into miniaturisation, for example, which had effects for the body. Baudrillard (1983, 129) explains that the introduction of television into homes had altered the traditions of human relations with the body becoming subject to a telecommand, often appearing superfluous in its function. As the screen replaced the time, spaces, processes or pleasures of the real, extroversion, instantaneity and transparency supplanted traditional values: privacy, interiority and intimacy. This paradigm of overexposure runs over and through bodies without limit, thus causing confusion and estrangement from a material reality. Virilio shared Baudrillard’s concern that screen interfaces had gradually replaced architectural structures. New architecture technology itself, such as steel skeleton construction, meant that the opacity of buildings built in traditional materials, concrete, bricks or stone, was reduced to nothing, supplanted by buildings made of light and glass. Equally, the screen interface was a permeable membrane; no longer defining the limits of physical space, as Virilio (1991, 12–13) explains, with the screen interfaces of computers and televisions, a new kind of field was created that was devoid of spatial dimensions and instead inscribed as a singular temporality and characterised by instantaneous diffusion. Virilio’s analysis of the screen interface and the consequences for physical space are revealing. He claimed that physical space was no longer occupied in terms of chronological time or spatial traditions, but rather the instant, synchronous time of the digital communication in which, without the viewer leaving, everything ‘arrives.’

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The result is an overexposure to the technology-augmented reality of instantaneous, transparent space, unbounded and timeless (Virilio 1991, 15). Virilio problematises this overexposure on a psychological level. The city dweller becomes an anxious fugitive wanting to escape this new paradigm of oppressive technological capture only to discover that escape is impossible. The concept of overexposure reflects the dematerialisation of private and urban space, and modern boundaries of time and space as electronic screens and optics increasingly infiltrate the physical spaces of cities. The physical city is occupied by and overlaid with digitised spaces, drawing city dwellers, wittingly or unwittingly, into new assemblies of order that are often mediated through screen technology. Networked technologies of communication, images and objects of desire can be called up instantly, without the movement of the physical body. This constitutes a new form of alienation and control. A recent global urban phenomenon facilitated by the mobile gaming app, Pokémon Go, aptly describes a cognitive power enacted through the screen interface. Released in July 2016 and downloaded over 500 million times, this augmented reality game is designed for mobile phones using a player’s GPS city location. The app links players to virtual creatures from the Pokémon series with whom they ‘battle’ as they appear on their mobile screen with the option to pay for upgrades through in-app purchases. Although the game is said to promote mobility in the city by drawing players into public spaces, it is a lucrative business model that draws large crowds into popular ‘battle zones’ where their focus is primarily directed towards screen interfaces. Here, Virilio’s statement comes full circle: without leaving, everything arrives. A different approach to reengaging the physical spaces of the city was taken by the collective Improv Everywhere. Their parody Seeing eye people in New York responded to an epidemic of pedestrians who walk along the city’s footpaths while face-to-face with their mobiles, often blocking pedestrian flows. Dressed in high-visibility vests emblazoned with the title ‘Seeing Eye Person,’ Improv collective guides directed willing participants and lunchtime pedestrians through busy pedestrian traffic so they could text and walk unencumbered. The act effectively dramatised the ‘ecstasy of communication’ using a humorous response to the ubiquitous use of communications technology as part of the everyday. On a more critical level the intervention highlighted a new phenomenon of dependency on mobile technology which leads to a lack of engagement with urban space. As communication shifts from live face-to-face contact toward the screen

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interface, virtual and media networks increasingly dominate the way the city is used.

9.6

Neo-panopticism in the Transparency Society

An inescapable technology paradigm is rapidly changing how city dwellers move and live in cities. Grant Vetter’s mutations of panopticism discussed in Chapter 6 introduced some of the ways self-surveillance and autocorrective behaviours have merged with the society of control. A postFoucauldian neo-panopticism operates by naturalising the social physics of surveillance with powerful effect. Vetter states these mutations can affect forms of self-corrective behaviour in society where there is an awareness of being watched. Neo-panopticism, which operates as a control method over the sentient being, is weighted towards desire rather than discipline, emotional subjectivity rather than rational interpellation. The forms of neo-panopticism include Synopticism, Banopticism and Bio-opticism. A fourth mutation is the Acousticon, which is not strictly an optical dispositif . However, Vetter (2012, 97) claims that new technology such as smart phones and audio-visual messaging have given acoustic surveillance new optics and can therefore be included as part of neo-panopticism. Sound waves can be represented in graphics and informatics to amplify their use in surveillance technology and noise analysis filters. Synopticism is an optics of many watching one, which, Vetter (2012, 70) states, derives directly from Foucault because it is associated with a micro-physics of power. It is possibly envisaged as the domain of celebrity culture and brand worshipping that sets trends for certain utterances, fashions, brands, attitudes and representations of the body that are emulated by a collective, feeding a desire for identification. A synoptic effect is exemplified by watching and imitating trends and fads as social pleasure on social media apps, for example, to promote and replicate one’s image in the world. App users produce content that feeds into regimes of commercial marketing and consumerism, which are, in turn, devoured as the content that promotes new trends (Vetter 2012, 70). Banopticism, by contrast, is a delocalised and strategic mode of surveillance in which many are watching many (Vetter 2012, 79). It consists of public and private tracking systems that provide social information in the name of protectionism to justify pre-emptive actions such as policing efforts. The origins of banoptic surveillance stem from a rhetoric of insecurity and the post-9/11 climate of counter terrorism; a preventative need

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qualifies efforts to scrutinise many and store data on the population that surveillance is, ideologically, proclaimed to protect. This effect is acknowledged as the result of the US Patriot Act, which justified the surveillance of citizens of the United States in their private homes and businesses. Banopticism feeds into a global network of information exchange, Vetter (2012, 84) argues, as a nexus of commercial interests with expanded government influence. Here, the alleged necessity of overturning civil rights is achieved through a rhetoric of national security and an extension of technological capacity for greater optics. Privatised surveillance is big business, combining corporate and government interests in the international exchange of information and data. Bio-opticism, on the other hand, is panopticism without biological limit. Whereas Banopticism operates externally to the body, Vetter (2012, 85) says that bio-opticism is ‘information made of flesh.’ Bio-opticism passes through the body’s membranes to harvest biological information and create a profile of the body and its aptitudes for the activity of governance. It closely aligns with Bentham’s original Panopticon prison design, discussed in Chapter 6, in its whole-body orientation of optics. However, the Panopticon was designed to correct the body, whereas bioopticism is based on infiltrating flesh and colonising the subject internally. Bio-opticism carries out an invasive documentation of bodies through iris scans, facial recognition technologies, x-rays, fluid samples, voice analysis, DNA verifications and body measurements (Vetter 2012, 85). Bio-opticism is increasingly embedded in airports, workplaces, hospitals, and corrections facilities where potential public health risks also qualify the deployment of neo-panoptic power in the social field as a form of pre-emptive surveillance. A number of artists investigate the effects of invasive technologies on how we communicate, behave or connect using digitised content. New Zealand artist Simon Denny has dissected and reassembled the visual order of surveillance strategies in his work All you need is data–the DLD 2012 conference (2014). Denny often works by tearing data from its original context and deliberately presenting it as inconclusive, possibly even deceptive, which is intended to expose the tools intelligence systems use to gather and exchange information. Connections between diverse events, news threads, bits of information stumbled across during internet searches, and manifestos form a large part Denny’s self-styled data collection. All you need is data presented a compressed timeline of the events at a Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich in 2012, attended

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by notables from the tech start-up world. As the viewer shuffled along inside a cordon resembling that of airport passport control areas, he or she was drawn into the highly specialised world of innovation and opportunism that permeates the DLD iterations. Denny (2017, 20) has stated that the significance of what the tech start ups are building and why is important and needs to be unpacked in terms of what it means for culture more broadly. The data from DLD archives is deconstructed and put back together in revealing and provocative ways so that the artist becomes a translator of cultural systems, giving material form to previously unnoticed evidence. This working method of plucking information from different sources mirrors the intelligence systems that can manipulate or hack data. Thus, Denny shows that representations of data can be selected to fill certain criteria and therefore cannot always be trusted, including the machinations of power underlying the display of art (Barton 2015). In his installation for Venice Biennale 2015, the dual-sited Secret power, Denny targeted the imagery used by the intelligence community. Using the National Security Agency PowerPoints leaked by its former and most infamous employee, Edward Snowden, the installation revealed that New Zealand was implicated in the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence network. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who was an adviser for Denny’s exhibition, had exposed the country’s involvement in Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance between the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. At the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Denny installed vitrines made from internet server racks alongside graphics, logos, maps and diagrams showing a global expanse of data collection and icons used for top-secret data interceptions, bringing a physical presence to the infrastructure of the internet and networks normally only visible in 2D formats (Fig. 9.2). At Marco Polo International Airport, Denny drew attention to the terminal as a physical site of routine data collection. The airport functions as an architecture where bodies are intensively scrutinised. Denny (in Proctor 2015, 341) explains that similar to the internet, two outwardly irreconcilable politico-economic realities converge in airport architecture in a rational staging of opacity and transparency: the neoliberal ideal of movement and circulation, and the security apparatus that controls and tracks movements. In this way, Denny highlighted the airport as a gateway that functions similarly to online spaces. A large-scale reproduction of the ceiling of the Biblioteca that he

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adhered to the floor and baggage claim in the customs area of the airport, metaphorically connected international and national zones of surveillance. The thematic analysis of transparency, screening, circulation and movement in Denny’s work shares consonance with Byung-Chul Han’s (2015b) writing on the transparency society. Han has noted that sciencefiction author David Brin called for a transparent society in his 1998 text during the rapid onset of the digital age and networked societies of control. Brin proposed a utopian ideal to curb the power and domination in the existing panoptic model of visibility where the few observe and control the masses. The transparent society illuminates both above and below with equal visibility and panoptic power. However, Han (2017, 47) states that total surveillance reduces transparent society to an ‘inhuman society of control’ because everyone controls everyone. More to the point, power and transparency are an unlikely pair since power cloaks itself

Fig. 9.2 Simon Denny, Secret Power, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venice, 2015. Installation view (Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland)

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in secrecy, without building trust in society. Han (2017, 48) argues that the demand for transparency grows even as trust in its ideal no longer prevails. Nevertheless, Brin’s radical concept raises the question of transparency for the early twentieth century. It dovetails with my enquiry into the extent to which neo-panopticism has mutated to control or discipline urban societies. Rather than isolated and enclosed in separate disciplinary apparatuses, today’s societies are in constant communication and networked by default through access to different media, wittingly and unwittingly feeding the data machine. Han (2017, 46) argues that today, hyper communication states guarantee transparency as the inhabitants of the digital panopticon coproduce its constructions by exhibiting themselves in a continuous self display. A society of control achieves its zenith through subjects who bare themselves without restraint. In other words, the realisation of neo-panopticism is not delivered through force but through an ideology that coerces bodies through technologies of access to participate in the digital or virtual space, operating as a transparency society. This version of transparency differs from Brin’s vision, but brings us closer to an awareness of the forces operating in the networks of the city. Han refers to this form of transparency optics as aperspectival panopticism. Transparency is the most effective means for control because it involves the total illumination of everyone from all angles (Han 2015b, 45). The hallmarks of transparency society are voluntary exhibitionism and voyeurism, with masses willingly surrendering to a global panoptic gaze. Han (2015b, 49) summarises today’s scenario as the entire globe coproducing its own panopticon without any division between inside or outside. Google Inc. and social networks have assumed panoptic status, he says. Meanwhile the inhabitant of the digital panopticon perpetrates his or her own imprisonment through self exhibition, while also being the victim of capture; this represents today’s ‘dialectic of freedom,’ Han (2015b, 49) argues. An all-encompassing totality of networked data accumulation and surveillance, together with the ideology of transparency, has clear implications for the city and urban societies globally. It also creates an opportunity for art’s intervention to expose, mitigate or work against the forces and ideologies of simulated realities and the mutations of panopticism. The next chapter turns to contemporary theories that engage with social art practices that have critiqued the conditions wrought by the

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socio-cultural shifts in digitally networked cities. A strong tendency to abandon regimes of visibility and networked technology demonstrates a post-digital relational aesthetics that may forge new communities, remodelling possibilities for exchange in the physical and virtual realms of the city.

References Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barton, Christina. 2015. New Zealand at Venice: Simon Denny’s ‘Secret Power.’ Art Monthly Australia 285 (November): 18–19. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. The ecstasy of communication. In The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture, ed. H. Foster, 126–134. Washington: Bay Press. Bibri, S.E., and J. Krogstie. 2020. The emerging data–driven Smart City and its innovative applied solutions for sustainability: The cases of London and Barcelona. Energy Informatics 3: 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42162-02000108-6. Brenner, N., and R. Keil. 2014. From global cities to globalized urbanization. Glocalism: Journal of Culture Politics and Innovation 3: 1–17. https://doi. org/10.12893/gjcpi.2014.3.3. Byrt, Anthony, and Simon Denny. 2017. Building the future. Paperboy Magazine (November): 20–24. Reproduced in Simon Denny. Exhibition catalogue; Simon Lett Gallery, Auckland 2018. Castells, Manuel. 2009. The rise of network society. Oxford: Wily-Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 2021. The network society in the age of pandemics. Keynote lecture for the network society today: (Revisiting) the information age trilogy. https://youtu.be/07KPiVpymAM. Accessed 23 June 2023. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the societies of control. October 59 (April): 3–7. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015a. The burnout society, trans. Erik Butler. Berkeley: Stanford University Press. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015b. The transparency society, trans. Erik Butler. Berkeley: Stanford University Press. La Ganga, Maria L. 2016. Ordinary people can’t afford a home in San Francisco. How did it come to this? The Guardian, August 5. https://www.thegua rdian.com/business/2016/aug/05/high-house-prices-san-francisco-techboom-inequality. Accessed 23 June 2023. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006. The concepts of life and the living in societies of control. In Deleuze and the Social, ed. M. Fuglsang and Meier Sorensen, 171–190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2017. Immaterial labour. In Work: Documents in contemporary art, ed. Frederike Sigler, 30–32. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1970. The urban revolution, trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McMullen, Thomas. 2015. How art is making the data-driven city more liveable. The Guardian, June 11. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/ jun/10/art-data-digital-city. Accessed 23 June 2023. Neidich, Warren. 2010. From noopower to neuropower: How mind becomes matter. In Cognitive architecture: From biopolitics to noopolitics; Architecture and mind in the age of communication and information, ed. Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, 538–581. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Net Art Anthology. 1998. FloodNet: Electronic disturbance theater. https://ant hology.rhizome.org/floodnet. Accessed 23 June 2023. Proctor, Jacob. 2015. Simon Denny talks about secret power. Artforum International 53 (9): 338–341. Sassen, Saskia. 2015. The impact of the new technologies and globalization on cities. In The city reader, 6th ed., ed. Richard T. Le Gates and Frederic Stout, 650–658. London: Routledge. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The global city: New York. London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vanolo, Alberto. 2014. Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies 51 (5): 883–898. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801349 4427. Vetter, Grant. 2012. The architecture of control: A contribution to the critique of the science of apparatuses. Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books. Virilio, Paul. 1991. The lost dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg. New York: Semiotext(e). Webber, Melvin M. 1968. The post-city age. Daedalus 97 (4) (Fall): 1091–1110.

CHAPTER 10

Foundations for Cognitive Dissonance

The last chapter established how the infrastructures of technology that developed from the late twentieth century became all surrounding in societies of control and the transparency society of today. This chapter assesses how social and relational art practices problematise a growing ubiquity of networks of big data from a different vantage point. With a focus on community engagement, empowered action and open-ended interaction, these practices share a tendency to work away from hyperconnected communication and the mutations of panopticism. Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), Claire Bishop (2006), Mika Hannula (2006) and Jacques Rancière (2009) discuss the emergence of contingent, ameliorative or antagonistic forms of participation in art. Collectively, their ideas demonstrate possibilities for raising ‘conscious agents’ in those who experience art’s subversive qualities. I argue that, as acts of non-compliance in the networked city, participatory art can break with contrived systems of information exchange or cognitive control, exposing their impact on urban communities, and may instigate moments of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ as theorised in psychology in the late twentieth century.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_10

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10.1

A Social Turn in Contemporary Art

Beginning in the late 1990s, discourse on the social turn in art demonstrated a shift towards collaborative practices located outside the gallery or museum, with a focus on participation at grass-roots level. Claire Bishop (2006) coined the idiom ‘social art,’ however a list of labels had expanded at the time to critique emerging practices based on participation or engagement, and dialogue or community intervention. Bishop argued that social art produced collaborative situations that were dematerialised and removed from the art market as a qualifier for exchange, while continuing the call of the modernist avant-garde to blur the divisions of art and life. An underlying synergy, Bishop (2006) noted, was a resolve to revitalise societies fragmented by the influence of neoliberalism. Social art was characterised by shifts and resistances, surges in activism and direct audience engagement. Art’s renewed co-authorship with communities led to the formation of commissioning bodies such as Artangel UK, which offered platforms for artists addressing shifting social conditions and issues of public concern. However, Bishop argued the field was hindered by a lack of critical reception. The emergence of social practice globally demanded a standard of aesthetics by which individual works could be assessed, but a series of initial responses by critics had appraised social practices without sufficient analysis. Bishop argued that this approach risked kowtowing to government decrees that art needed to meet targets for profit and statistical indicators of socio-cultural inclusion. Artists such as Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Phil Collins, Artur Zmijewski, and Carsten Höller, Bishop (2006) stated, employed eccentric methods of shock, disruption, frustration, confusion, and pleasure to engage audiences with a unique proximity to socio-political realities. Artistic perspectives could generate powerful discourses through which a series of contradictions and artificial constructions of culture could be brought into sharp relief. A criticism of social art’s antagonistic qualities was needed to resist glossing over the opportunities they provoked for a rigorous critique and meaningful analysis of broader societal issues. Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2002) critique of relational aesthetics is equally well-known among the early engagements with a shift in art towards moments of exchange or encounter. Relational aesthetics affirmed art as a social interstice, taking the realm of human encounter and its social context as its theoretical horizon, rather than asserting a symbolic

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space for art’s reception (Bourriaud 2002, 4). The emergence of relational aesthetics was entangled with an exponential rise in urbanism in the late twentieth century, and with a corresponding emphasis on the immediacy of information exchange, the ‘communication superhighways’ that plunged human contact into newly divided areas. Relational art mirrored the fleeting encounters in the fast-paced city, Bourriaud argued, attempting to repair weaknesses in the social bond that resulted from routinised paradigms of consumer interaction. Artists began initiating moments of encounter, beyond the ordinarily alienating artifice of commerce. Relational art returned focus to grassroots, organic and slower-paced community activities such as cooking and sharing a meal, or discussing a philosophy. Relational aesthetics is underscored by a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’ through which strangers encounter each other and diffuse unspoken social boundaries. Examples of art based on encounter included Sophie Calle’s accounts of interactions with strangers: following an acquaintance to Venice in Suite vénitienne in 1980, or rifling through the luggage of hotel guests in L’hôtel, chambre 47 in 1981. Braco Dimitrijevic’s Casual passer-by series of photographs was another example, with the images of anonymous pedestrians projected onto billboards around Paris in 1971. These practices highlighted the fleeting moments shared by strangers while blending with an ebb and flow of the city as these moments appeared and disappeared with a provisional status. The relational principle underlying these early examples is slightly tenuous, given the one-sided nature of each shared encounter that was carried out by the artist anonymously. However, Bourriaud (2002, 30) claimed they illustrated a free-ranging encounter with random elements, situations or strangers that was expressed through relational aesthetics. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s food stations and relaxation zones set up in galleries and exhibitions during the 1990s exemplified the social aspect of relational aesthetics. Characterised by audience involvement and the artist as service provider, they highlighted an erosion of boundaries within the institutional art space. Bourriaud (2002, 26) wrote that such practices transcended the fleeting interactions forged by the rise of the networked society, offering momentary respite and a slower pace beyond the hyperreality of communication. Relational aesthetics initiated micro-territories that encouraged new forms of awareness and an invitation to participate in a shared world. As Bourriaud (2002, 22) stated, relational art involved a bundle of new relations between people, giving rise to endless

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other relations. Bourriaud proposed that relational art stimulated an interconnective agency that had an unknown impact on future relations of consciousness.

10.2 Social Practice and the ‘Terrain of Antagonism’ Claire Bishop’s (2004) criticism of Bourriaud’s theory is widely established in art scholarship. Her broad argument is that relational aesthetics, as a platform for dialogic exchange, does not adequately convey the contradictions, antagonisms and conflicts that demonstrate plurality in wider society. The examples proposed by Bourriaud, Bishop (2004, 67– 68) contends, imply an ideal of subjectivity and of a public community that is without conflict, and therefore utopian, based on the exclusion of those who may disrupt or deny its realisation. Moreover, she asserts, Bourriaud champions the ‘laboratory’ exhibitions that opened during his tenure as co-director at the Palais de Tokyo. His concepts are symptomatic of wider tendencies in contemporary art to reinvent the white cube of the gallery and implement an ‘experience economy’ comprising open-ended projects that stage-manage encounters within the exhibition format. Bishop asserts that these tendencies situate art within the parameters of crowd-pleasing neoliberal exhibition formats. The convivial relations inspired by Tiravanija’s communal eating and relaxation spaces that Bourriaud used to demonstrate relational aesthetics, are brought to task by Bishop (2004, 68–69). She sees them as a rehearsal of the ideals of globalisation without critical intervention in its controlling logic, and only loosely political in the sense that they encourage dialogue over monologue. Tiravanija’s Utopia station (2003) lacks rigorous political engagement, operating instead on a basis of exclusivity common to experimental art spaces, Bishop (2004, 68) states, despite its rhetoric of open-endedness and liberation. Without antagonism, the work falls into routine manifestations of the convivial relations of commerce, rather than encouraging spaces of agonism or democratic pluralism, as advocated by artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko. Bishop proposes that a critical balance is struck in works by Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra. While both artists engage audiences in relational encounters comparable to Tiravanija’s, there is more provocation than in the practices advocated by Bourriaud. Bishop (2004, 77) asserts they offer a more disruptive approach that adequately reflects

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the divided, incomplete subject of relations today. Scrutinising harsh socio-cultural realities, these artists epitomise Bishop’s (Bishop 2004, 79) advocacy for a relational antagonism that is predicated on exposing repressed issues or conditions of a material reality, rather than an artifice of social harmony. Relational antagonism surfaces in politically charged works such as Sierra’s 133 persons paid to have their hair dyed blonde in Zurich in 2001 and 250cm line tattooed on 6 paid people in Havana in 1999 in which the artist interrogates the conflicting relations of street commerce, trafficking, homelessness and exploitation. These works balance a tension between imagined spaces of emancipatory interaction and visceral social realities. Provocative yet open-ended, Sierra does not offer resolution to the issues presented, but a ‘terrain of antagonism’ and a new horizon for relational art that is grittier, more provocative and responsive (Bishop 2004, 72). The terrain of antagonism is intended to provoke controversy and debate. This raises a question: what degree of antagonism is required to convey socio-relational realities? Sierra’s La fila (The line) in Milan in 2017 presents one such conundrum. Hundreds of the city’s homeless were recruited to stand in line in front of the exhibition space in return for ten Euros, forming a visceral immediacy of the effects of exploitative relations. However, a series of controversies ensued. La fila paid hundreds of vagrants for their idle time to wait in a line for no profitable, and therefore no logical reason. The work heightened the visibility of homelessness, in contrast to the invisibility associated with issues of homelessness. Hence, it could be claimed that the artist, while documenting or rendering visible the exploitative logic of neoliberalism, became the exploiter. In response to accusations that he rehearses the inequalities of capitalism in such works, Sierra (in Margolles 2004) has asserted that the relations of extreme labour need to be excavated to shed light on how the labour system functions. The antagonism that underscores La fila highlighted the effects of an economic rationality that contributes to underlying causes of homelessness or forces people to into humiliating tasks such as waiting in line for cash. In this reflexive manner, Sierra exposes the systems of power that create socio-cultural disparities in a globalised world. Commercialised art is implicated in the process since art is also a product of a global flow of commodities and its unfolding relations. The inequitable and invisible relations of globalism are laid bare in Sierra’s work in antagonistic, disruptive ways.

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Bourriaud’s discourse on relational aesthetics has served as a catalyst for art scholarship that grapples with the invention of ‘relations between consciousness.’ The tension between Bishop and Bourriaud usefully demonstrates a reasoned debate; however, it can distract from different practices of resistance or antagonism that demonstrate altogether different trajectories for art in the present moment. Relational aesthetics highlighted art practices that detached from the conditions of homogenous, mechanised thinking in a globally connected world, and continues to supplement responses to participatory and collaborative art, particularly in the hyper-connected spaces of the city. At its core, Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchen serving food exemplified art as a moment of exchange. This contrasts with the conditions that prioritise commercial exchange and a simulated reality mediated by screen interfaces as part of an instant encounter with the world. Here, Bourriaud’s theory remains indispensable: an open-ended or reflexive practice is premised on relational aesthetics. Theoretically at least, relational aesthetics expresses a moment in which meaning is transferred; a new insight, or a sense of unease or absurdity are the outcomes of many participatory projects. Antagonism is not, by necessity, always obvious or overt. Social or relational art that offers respite from the valorisation of instant communication, and the forces of cognitive capitalism and consumerism, can be politically critical in its own way.

10.3

The Politics of Small Gestures

Art theorist Mika Hannula offers a useful rejoinder to the discursive opposition of Bourriaud and Bishop in his text on the politics of small gestures in art. Hannula (2006) addresses many of the issues raised in relational aesthetics and relational antagonism from the perspective of a subtle politics of everyday experiences. A politics of small gestures contributes to the processes that shape knowledge production by operating within sight or reach rather than from ‘on high.’ Hannula (2006, 7) defines the small gesture as a political act that is visible or embedded in a work of art that makes the work moving in its own way, something special and relatable that resonates beyond its form or format. The gestures are not the work in its totality, nor the issue addressed by the artist, but significant, distinctive acts that capture the audience, stimulating wonder, imagination or curiosity as they are experienced in a particular site or situation.

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The small gesture creates its own space for meaning to emerge without resorting to dichotomies of ‘us versus them’ or ‘inside and outside.’ Hannula (2006, 8) expands: Instead of pre-set hierarchies, a small gesture stands for a plurality of means of expression, a plurality of competing life worlds, but at the same time it emphasizes that both of these are only possible if there is enough room for something called reasonable disagreement and loving conflict.

This plurality of meaning is inspired by ‘the third space,’ a concept first theorised by Homi K. Bhabha. Hannula identifies four key elements in art that supports a politics of small gestures: availability, accessibility, self-reflection and self-criticism. A small gesture is readily available and accessible to a diverse range of audiences; it is self-reflective, engaging with contemporary issues in a reflexive way that maintains awareness of both the producer and the meaning of the work produced. A resulting self-criticism has the potential to introduce chance and challenge through the vehicle of contemporary art. Hannula argues that small gesture politics are expressed in The world won’t listen (2004–2007) by British artist Phil Collins. This three-part video consists of film footage shot in Bogota and Istanbul featuring karaoke-style songs of the indie-rock band, The Smiths, from the band’s 1987 album, performed by local fans. Collins spent months in each city to visit dance clubs, interview and recruit performers and build the stage sets for each film. He posted ads inviting undiscovered would-be superstars to sing karaoke in front of a camera. The result is a tender, amusing and touching portrayal of humanity that meditates on the influence of popular culture on different global cultures. The struggle for individual expression is laid out poignantly as a subtle, bittersweet agony that captures the aspiration and limitation of each participant. Hannula (2006, 28) states that beyond its unassuming simplicity, the work strikes a delicate balance between accessibility, enjoyability and challenge for the viewer. The performance of karaoke songs is a relatable subject overlaid with familiar references to contemporary life and the emotions it can induce, such as melancholy, hope or a fear of singing in public. The earnest qualities of the work mean it can be enjoyed with little reference to broader theories of art, yet it provides elements of confrontation that cannot be dismissed either, such as the teenagers who aspire to celebrity status despite a harsh material reality that is likely to deny them

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that future. The work is not steeped in self-references to contemporary art. Instead, a subtle gesture takes shape within the everyday social realities of each singer. Audiences are invited to locate their own proximity to contemporary media as something alluring or something to regard cautiously, or the ways the media structures everyday lives. The world won’t listen is therefore symbolic and symptomatic of the contemporary world and its capacity to preoccupy or shape the terrains of consciousness. However, the work touches audiences in an honest and appealing way. Its agency is activated between political connection and social hope. Hannula (2006, 31) states, it is political because it realises an alternative way to be oneself in one’s surroundings, bringing something to light that was not there before, which is attainable. As inexperienced performers expose themselves to mockery and cruel judgement, the fear of ridicule gives way to a different kind of imaginary: a small gesture of courage to make things possible. Political agency can also piggyback on comedic gestures. Ahmet Ögüt’s Somebody else’s car in Istanbul in 2005 momentarily transformed ordinary cars in a parking lot into a yellow taxi or police car using readymade paper cut-outs. A Chaplin-esque intervention like this highlights the minute and mundane details of everyday life, simply and effectively, inviting us, Hannula (2006, 101) states to find amusement with ourselves and our surroundings. This momentary diversion appears ridiculous, and, crucially, opens the door for opportunity to focus on social hope and a small political gesture. Ögüt’s parody recalls the outwardly pointless and comedic tasks adopted by other artists in Fluxus performances and happenings discussed in Chapter 4, some of which also lampooned a car infrastructure. In its disguised political dimensions, Ögüt’s gesture can be compared with the outward futility of tasks in Alÿs’ peripatetic works that float between a poetic and political parody of structure, making forces that control the city visible through non-antagonising methods.

10.4

Participation and the Collective ‘Elaboration of Meaning’

The theoretical positions discussed thus far have critiqued a strong tendency in art towards co-producing subtle resistances and conscious relations between bodies, or a desire to reconnect or repair social bonds. The emergence of social practice, relational aesthetics and small gesture politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries parallels

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the growth of networks of information exchange in cities. Experiences of this are mediated in relation to the digitisation of communication, the growing simulation of reality through screen interfaces, the modulation of behaviour through consumerism and neo-panoptic forms of self-exhibition, and cognitive capitalism that treats knowledge and neuro-power (the capability to influence thinking across distance) as a commodity. An argument can be made that art has capacity to make these shifts and changes evident to expose the imperceptible mechanics of micro-immersive worlds within which networked technology takes hold and tends to seduce city dwellers into an updated version of the spectacle. A decorporealisation of the city occurs through the experience of urban spaces and everyday realities that are increasingly arbitrated by new media, smart technology and data-driven imperatives. In response, social art practices embed themselves in local settings and create works, through participation within communities, that bring a tangible dimension to otherwise unnoticeable changes and new assemblies of order and control. Through relational or social art practices, particularly those that encourage participation, art expresses a tendency to re-realise the body, community and intersubjectivity in physical form. To do this, the political bearing in art can be expressed antagonistically, as Bishop has clarified, or nested within small gestures with no less poignancy, as Hannula has set out. Participatory art, by extension, values the invisibility of the agency it engenders, be that a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, or raised consciousness, as Bishop points out in her text, Artificial hells (2012). She states that participation art concerns the broader social paradigms in which it is situated, as part of a larger desire to contravene passive spectatorship and negate the spectacle that holds audiences in a trance of consumption. Bishop (2012, 275) also observes that the desire to stimulate audiences of participatory art is driven by a perceived need to break away from the illusions of a dominant ideological order brought about through capital relations, totalitarian socialism or military dictatorship, and to restore a collective effort to realise shared spaces of connectivity and social engagement. The desired outcome of participatory art is to realise a space protected from gentrification, which will encourage activation, authorship and community. The first step, activation, creates empowered or symbolic forms of participation that continue beyond the initial encounter with the artist or work. Authorship cedes individual ownership or control so that a communal gesture is possible, while the

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community that forms as the third outcome, affirms its collective responsibility to restore the social bonds through a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’ (Bishop 2012, 10–17). A mutual resolution between relational aesthetics and participation emerges in the activities of the Gezi Park Fiction St. Pauli collective in Hamburg. Their lengthy struggle to overturn the corporate development of a harbour-side park in central Hamburg was realised in 2015. The park is in the port area of St Pauli, which was historically where sailors arriving into port sought entertainment, later evolving into the city’s redlight district. Starting in 2003, artists Christof Schäfer and Cathy Skene visited hundreds of homes to recruit participants to preserve public access to the park that the Government had proposed to sell off to investors. Operating as the Harbour Edge Association, they organised film screenings, performances and exhibitions to occupy the space so that residents could participate in their own collective vision for the site. Participation by locals subverted conventional urban planning and put a whimsical spin on the consultation process. Instead of a planning office, a ‘planning container’ was set up in a shipping container with an after-hours service for anyone with late night inspirations for future initiatives. This range of participatory activities mobilised the community in a way that resisted imperatives of development. Grant Kester (2011, 205) notes the collective’s strategy was to work between outright activism and formal public protocols. Using Bishop’s frame of reference—activation, authorship and community—participants began to co-author their socio-political reality. The right to maintain the park as a public space, rather than residential development, was measured, and challenged, by the collective actions of residents and artists, and, ultimately, led to the successful preservation of the park. Whereas Park Fiction’s strategy demonstrated the political efficacy of co-authorship, Jeremy Deller’s the Battle of Orgreave adopts a participation strategy to awaken collective memory. In 2001, Deller organised the re-enactment of a violent miner’s strike from seventeen years earlier in the town of Orgreave, Yorkshire. The original clash took place in 1984 outside the British Steel Corporation plant near Sheffield and involved around 8,000 riot police and 5,000 miners. Thatcher’s Conservative government had introduced police control of operational mines as part of a policy to deregulate and privatise outputs, and undermine the power of trade unions, a move that had divided families and communities. In Deller’s version, former miners from the 1984 conflict participated

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alongside historical re-enactment societies, creating an ambiguous mix of English social history, political grievance and leisure activities. Adding to the uncertainty was the festivity surrounding the event; brass bands and food stalls made it resemble a village fete. Yet this ‘uneasy hovering’ between threatening violence and family entertainment avoided a straightforward reception, instead remaining open-ended, contradictory and contingent (Bishop 2012, 32). Orgreave balances a complex series of issues, including the spectacle of re-enactment, a history of social conflict, cultural memory, the collation of subjective oral histories, and the political deregulation of mining with reference to current neoliberal politics. Deller (2017) has given his personal account of watching news footage of the original strike on television when he was younger and being struck by the image of thousands of men pursued through a field by mounted police. His interest led him to excavate the underlying causes of the event as an adult, including the dismantling of labour unions and a polarisation of arguments enflamed by news media, with the consequent division of loyalties at community and family level. Deller’s intent was not a redress of social history, but to indirectly narrate the implications of historic political actions. He wanted to excavate the event in terms of the oxymoron, a ‘living history,’ grouping together re-enactment societies and veterans of the strike to embody the dimensions of the term. In addition, Deller (2017, 206) exposed the incongruity of representation, stating his staging recreated something that was akin to chaos. Bishop (2012, 35) argues that Orgreave expresses a political potential in participatory art to return popular consciousness to an unresolved messy history in which the state crumpled the working class and turned it against itself. At the same time, the work staged a universal history of oppression, without reducing the worker to the unproblematic hero trope (Bishop 2012, 36). The work therefore escapes definition, formally and conceptually. Rather, it assembles grass-roots activism including the actors and scars caused by the original strike for miners and police, with the community coming together in co-production, yet it allows for an organic evolution of actions beyond the scripts handed out to participants. This initiates a ‘terrain of antagonism,’ that Bishop has called for, with the implications mirroring the discrepancies in political agency and a lack of rigorous interrogation of social injustices occurring today. It also breaks through a rational programme that diverts attention away from these issues, by activating participants in ‘networks of future consciousness.’

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Orgreave may present different ways to think about how the city is controlled in its present ‘living history.’ In its re-enactment of an ideological and industrial battle in public space near the site of the original strike, the work balances several factors to counter the forced compliance required of miners seventeen years earlier. Momentary resistance to the controlled experience of public space generated new relations of consciousness to emerge in proximity to the site’s history as a social space. Its provocation danced between enactment and historical fact, creating conditions for non-rational expressions to produce a new awareness of normative behaviour. Orgreave responded to the ways in which the controls embedded in political relations regulated the behaviour of workers, while enforced economic decrees issued elsewhere impacted their lives at grass-roots level. As urban societies increasingly move towards immaterial labour and digital network use, Orgreave foregrounds a new predicament. Dematerialisation is met with a mobilisation of resources that demonstrates how meaning and resistance might be realised through corporeality and enacting post-digital relations between spontaneous and disruptive bodies in tangible situations. A sense of corporeal agency is central to securing the collective elaboration of meaning. This point also hinges on the politics of spectatorship, a major thrust in Bishop’s theory that draws from theorist, Jacques Rancière.

10.5 Jacques Rancière on Spectatorship and ‘the Encounter’ Jacques Rancière’s theories on the encounter in art and emancipated spectatorship have sought to reconcile oppositions of viewing and knowing, appearance and reality, and activity and passivity. He (2006) draws attention to ‘the encounter’ as one of four major themes in art today. In his exploration of critical art, he analyses the effects of raising ‘conscious agents’ through provocative, heterogeneous assemblages in sites of connective possibility. Writing in the same period as Bishop’s theory on social art, Rancière (2006, 90) argued that polemical art generated critical encounters because art no longer wanted to respond to the excesses of commodities, but to a lack of connections. At the time of the social turn, artists had begun producing spaces for contingent encounters to occur by moving their practices away from accepted exhibition venues. In cities, artists engaged passers-by in chance exchanges. Freed from the constraints

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of the private gallery space and its relationships, artists could create opportunities for unexpected interactions. These situated art beyond rationality, conformity, productivity and consumerism, developing a critical position for artistic encounters in city space. In his treatise on spectatorship, Rancière (2009) argues that each spectator or participant in art inevitably invents his or her own translation as an active interpreter. This theory has significant implications for questions of the effect or efficacy of participatory and relational art because it allows for a contingency of meaning to emerge through social practice. If, as Bourriaud states, art can give rise to social relations ad infinitum, the same applies to the unknowable cognitive effects of witnessing art. An indirect approach taken by artists, in which opposing issues are left unresolved has greater nuance than most politically activist art, Bishop (2006) claims. Inter-subjective relations generated by the artist are not conclusive in themselves. Instead, they bring to light a complexity of conventions of social interaction. Following Rancière’s assertion that aesthetics is the ability to think in terms of contradiction, Bishop (2006) argues that art has a productive relationship to social change because it is characterised by contradiction and tension that plays on its own autonomy and a broader social belief that art is bound to the promise of utopian ideals. Art engages with social issues and tensions in ways that provoke new discourses through a series of outwardly bewildering juxtapositions, including unexpected encounters and spectatorship, that are an underlying basis for art’s critical capacity in this case. Recent changes in public art highlight an experimental approach to creating new encounters in cities. Jasmeen Patheja’s site-specific street intervention in Bangalore, Talk to me in 2012, was designed to set up safe zones in a public street for women to engage in a conversation with a male stranger over tea and samosas. The intervention was part of a larger project called Blank noise, which Patheja started in 2003 as a citizen-led community arts collective that responds to the harassment of women in public spaces in India. The chosen street for Talk to me was previously nicknamed Rapist Lane by locals due to the sexual harassment women encountered there. For the month-long work, it was renamed ‘Safest Lane.’ The street became the site for encounters based on trust, where women could confront their fears of being alone in the city, demonstrating ways to reoccupy city spaces through encounters based on a regeneration of site. Patheja recruited ‘action heroes’ for her work, women who sign up to participate with the artist to collectively occupy

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urban spaces not typically used by women after dark because of fears of harassment, which she (2017) says is endemic in the subcontinent. Talk to me intervenes in this social space and cuts across patriarchal social conditions and public apathy towards harassment that restricts women in India from pursuing public life freely and without fear. Whereas Talk to me generated new encounters on the street, Dawn Weleski and John Rubin’s Conflict kitchen (2013–2017) was based on encounters in Pittsburgh’s vacant commercial lots. The artists set up a restaurant for locals to share a meal and engage in conversation over cuisine cooked by chefs from United States conflict zones such as Iraq and Iran. The social relations forged over a meal and economic exchange were designed to engage the public in discussions about the countries, cultures and people from each country whose cuisine was featured. They also had opportunities to discuss the role played by the government and mainstream media in polarising public opinion about foreign conflicts where the United States was involved. Events held at the restaurant established zones of encounter with political issues and highlighted how socially embedded participatory art brings people face-to-face for meaningful discourse.

10.6 Agents of Change: The Minoritarian and the Molecular in Art The theories assembled in this chapter include the social turn, relational aesthetics, the terrains of antagonism and encounter, and the politics of small gestures and spectatorship. Collectively, they share consonance with the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari concerning the ‘minoritarian’ and the ‘molecular,’ both of which give rise to the state of ‘becoming.’ The minoritarian involves variable elements in opposition to a major dialect that is comprised of a series of constants. Minoritarian presences are masses or multiplicities that escape category and hold the seeds of becoming that may trigger uncontainable fluctuations (Parr 2005, 165). Participatory and socially engaged practices drive alternative spatial possibilities into the realm of conscious relations, like the minoritarian multiplicities that escape the dominant programme or system to author new variations of meaning. Deleuze’s theory of deterritorialisation provides a useful model for understanding the movement of practices away from institutional spaces of reception into the city of fleeting encounters. Here, deterritorialisation suggests the movement that

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produces change, freeing up fixed relations and exposing them to new assemblages (Parr 2005, 67). A process of decoding and recoding shares intrinsic links with De Certeau’s critique of official systems from within using creative tactics (la perruque), as discussed in Chapter 3. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the molecular is a useful metaphor for the catalytic agency of art. Molecular activity envisages particles in variable states of flux, or exchange. Objects are considered as unfolding bodies rather than static fixtures, implying a perpetual state of change or becoming (Parr 2005, 175–178). A theory of relational aesthetics unfolds with comparable fluidity. The process of becoming resists closed meaning and is collectively produced, and therefore contingent. The molecular theory continually fragments habitual or static states of being, releasing new powers in the capacities of those bodies to act and respond (Parr 2005, 147). In art, this infers particle collision, energy transfer, tangibles or intangibles flowing in unpredictable ways. Art opens molecular flows similar to agents of change and operates like particles: agitating in positive or polemical ways. A site of transfer, art produces unpredictable bodies and outcomes, a catalyst for breaking up congealed matter and blocks, and a facilitator of new movements of variable dynamisms including the urban, relational or social. Deleuze saw a molecular sensibility transferred via microscopic things, tiny perceptions or inclinations that could destabilise perception as a whole (Parr 2005, 178). Characterised by their inherent unpredictability, singularity and an agency to effect change on a micro-scale, relational art creates a set of unpredictable encounters. These operate within the pre-conceived logic, routines, top-down hierarchical, authoritarian, or structured aggregates of order that exist on a macro scale, as in the city. Relational and participatory encounters with art interrupt the daily routines and movements of an unsuspecting public audience in the city. This may unlock insights into an unknown micro-universe that lies beyond the perceptible, rational, or understandable city. Often this is a grass-roots style of interaction in which the city is exploited as both the site and medium for critique. Manifestations of encounter in urban space vary in style, material, and format, as demonstrated by the theory, and works discussed in this chapter. Symbolically, they determine multiple ways to understand, visualise or materialise molecular flows. As instances of molecular change, art that intervenes in the city’s networks and everyday logic of commerce and productivity might be considered ‘agents of change,’ operating subversively in stubborn or resistant

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ways, and continually destabilising tangible, fixed and known perceptions of city spaces. Provocative and fleeting, these practices introduce new patterns and vibrations, different flows and processes, and hybridity across and beneath surveillance (re)presenting a positive force of freedom and change. They also pre-empt, as I discuss in the final section, conditions of cognitive dissonance in the hyper-connected, virtual layers of the city.

10.7

Towards a Cognitive Dissonance in Art

The theoretical discussion in this chapter has highlighted a criticality of indirect references and narratives, with the power of collaboration to enact change through social practice. Bourriaud and Bishop’s oppositional positions caused theoretical division in the approach, and in debates of the efficacy of participatory art. An assessment of whether an artwork achieves a level of political rigour, or whether it activates spectators as agents of change, or agitators in their daily lives beyond the direct experience of art, is impossible to measure or quantify. Such questions linger beyond the event. Rather than just thinking of social art as ‘terrains of antagonism,’ it is equally useful to consider what is offered by artistic gestures in relationship to the city. A theory of cognitive dissonance provides a broad connection point that is useful for discussing art that responds to the city’s digital networks in the city and complements the theory of Bishop, Bourriaud, Hannula and Rancière. Originally theorised by Leon Festinger in 1957, cognitive dissonance concerns pairs of cognitions (elements of knowledge) that operate discordantly, as opposed to harmoniously. A theory of cognitive dissonance describes being ‘psychologically uncomfortable’ as the result of two opposing cognitions coming into the same conscious realm. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills (2019, 3) state that two cognitions that follow each other can be consonant or dissonant. If dissonance occurs, the person may be motivated to reduce discomfort by avoiding information that leads to dissonance. A higher degree of dissonance will effect greater pressure to reduce dissonance. Dissonance psychology is exemplified by the example of a smoker who, knowing that smoking may affect health outcomes, can choose to reduce dissonance by quitting, thereby bringing cognitions back into resonance, or change the cognitions associated with smoking to reduce the tension experienced. Resistance to changing behaviour depends on the pleasure-pain boundary; the extent

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of pain or loss that needs to be endured, with the satisfaction gained from the behaviour (Harmon-Jones and Mills 2019, 4). The application of cognitive dissonance theory is broad. It has use in a wide variety of situations relating to individual or group behaviour, responses, attitudes or perceptions about encounters or phenomena in the environment. For example, cognitive dissonance is created through forced compliance when an individual is coerced to act in a certain way that counters their intuitive reaction. Literary theorist Morse Peckham (1965) developed a theory of cognitive dissonance in art. Referring to art as the ‘wild card,’ inferring its tendency towards disunity and unordered experience, he situated art as the site where psychological discomfort and pre-existing patterns of thought could be worked through. As a space where cognitive dissonance emerges, art has the potential to rupture the perception of neatly ordered experiences or rational thought: artistic practices of cognitive dissonance can cause discomfort but may also uncover the mechanics of forced compliance in the city. As the next, final chapter discusses, art interventions in city spaces may offer opportunities to ‘check out’ of a prescribed cognitive rationality. Through the site of encounter, audiences can inhabit an alternative cognitive moment or experience of urban reality to that assigned through the digitally networked city or the transparency society.

References Bishop, Claire. 2004. Antagonism and relational aesthetics. October 110 (Autumn): 51–79. Bishop, Claire. 2006. The social turn and its discontents. Artforum International 44 (6) (February): 178–183. https://www.artforum.com/print/200602/ the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274. Accessed 26 June 2023. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002 [1998]. Relational aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les presses du reel. Conflict Kitchen official website. 2023. http://conflictkitchen.org/about/. Accessed 26 June 2023. Deller, Jeremy. 2017. On The battle of Orgreave. In Documents in contemporary art: Work, ed. Friederike Sigler, 206–207. London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Hannula, Mika. 2006. The politics of small gestures: Chances and challenges for contemporary art. Istanbul: art-ist. Harmon-Jones, E., and J. Mills. 2019. An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology, ed. E. HarmonJones, 3–24. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0000135-001. Kester, Grant. 2011. The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Margolles, Theresa. 2004. Santiago Sierra. BOMB Magazine, 84. https://bom bmagazine.org/articles/santiago-sierra. Accessed 26 June 2023. Patheja, Jasmeen. Everyone deserves to be safe. TED Talk India 2017. https:// www.ted.com/talks/jasmeen_patheja_everyone_deserves_to_be_safe?langua ge=en. Accessed 5 July 2023. Parr, Adrian, ed. 2005. The Deleuze dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Peckham, Morse. 1965. Man’s rage for chaos: Biology, behaviour and the arts. Philadelphia: Chilton Books. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Problems and Transformations in Critical Art, trans. Claire Bishop. In Documents of contemporary art: Participation, ed. Claire Bishop, 83–93. London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Rancière, J. 2009. The emancipated spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso.

CHAPTER 11

Art’s Intervention in the Society of Control

This final chapter demonstrates how art practices can displace dominant networks and systems of control. It is divided into three parts: critical network interventions; networked participation using communications technology; and socially engaged and participatory art practice. Critical network interventions undermine or contest a normal use of media or surveillance networks. Networked participation demonstrates critical agency in art that reworks the possibilities of mobile phones to creatively reengage with public audiences or the urban surrounds. Socially engaged art, on the other hand, establishes tangible ways to work away from virtual and hyper-connected spaces to create heterogeneous spaces of relational connection and encounter. Here, I focus on art that creates new foundations for reinscribing the city, for reimagining how one might move within or sense the city, and, ultimately, return to my overarching query of how the city can be practised through experiences of art beyond its own rationally defined concept.

11.1

Critical Network Interventions

In 2013, while under house arrest in Beijing, artist-activist Ai Weiwei stated on his website that he would place a bouquet of fresh flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his studio each morning until he regained his freedom to travel. His daily gesture was documented on the social media © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 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_11

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app Instagram. Each day a bunch of vibrant florals was photographed from above, from a position similar to a surveillance camera. The photos document the passage of time during which Wei was in home detention, but they also make a covert political statement. The benign scene of flowers in a bicycle basket disguises the resistance occurring beneath the optics of political scrutiny. The title for the action, With flowers , implies a peaceful gesture; here it is charged with a comment on the apparatus of surveillance enforced by the Chinese government. With Flowers introduces a strategy used by artists to agitate or deviate within digital networks. Artists often use subversive methods to expose a top-down order of networks that may be less visible than the structural urban hardware, but is nevertheless embedded in, and supportive of, the controlled order of the city or place. Chapter 9 discussed the rise of digitised and globally networked economic activities of finance, media, consumerism, communications and surveillance, and how these have impacted urban society, driving consumer behaviour and trends as part of a global service economy. Castells’ networked society, Lazzarato’s noo-politics, Baudrillard’s ecstasy of communication, Virilio’s overexposed city, Vetter’s mutations of panopticism and Han’s transparency society all drew attention to a series of issues emerging in networked societies, for example, the hyperattention state and conditions for cognitive capitalism. The networks of cities, including the transmission of news media or latent data collection through online networks and surveillance embedded in the city, have been targeted by artist interventions. Using different strategies, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, PVI Collective and Hasan Elahi jam transmissions in networks of technology and expose stealthy operations of control within public spaces. 11.1.1

The Yes Men: ‘Culture Jamming’

The Yes Men are a duo of digital artists, Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, who go by the aliases Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. They provoke responses to economic and political issues by intervening in news media networks, government and banking websites, and impersonating officials from non-governmental organisations to gain access to closed-door meetings. Their self-styled shock tactics fall under a broad category of culture jamming—the subversive misuse of popular culture media such as advertising to expose commercial intent. The Yes Men have evolved a

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series of sub-categories: ‘identity correction,’ in which corporate or political entities are impersonated using fake names to publicly expose their unspoken interests or intentions; and ‘laughtivism,’ a form of activism in which corporate and political abuses of power are satirised through audacious comic stunts. Through elaborate hoaxes and campaigns, The Yes Men have intervened in discourses on global systems of control and exploitation by infiltrating the networks they typically use to disseminate information. In 2001, The Yes Men were contacted via a fake website that mimicked the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a pre-runner to the World Trade Organisation, for an interview opposite anti-globalisation lobbyist, Barry Coates, during the G8 summit in Genoa. Producers at CNBC television had mistaken their website for an official one. Assuming a false identity for the live feed, Servin took advantage of this fortuitous opportunity to make a bold, bogus claim that a privatised education sector was the only way future generations would celebrate the virtues of global commerce. Elsewhere, Servin posed as a representative for Dow Chemical Company, the company responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster that killed over 8,000 people and maimed hundreds of thousands in 1984. In an interview with BBC World News on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, acting under his alias Andy Bichlbaum, Servin stated that the company was finally accepting responsibility for the disaster and outlined plans for a multi-billion-dollar recompense package for victims of the disaster and for environmental restoration. These campaigns recall the Situationist détournement , which called for combative strategies to be deployed against popular culture because, they claimed, the spectacle could only be defeated on its own terrain. The intervention Roskilde 2016 data policy demonstrates The Yes Men’s intervention strategy in digital spaces of data collection and surveillance, disrupting physical and networked spaces at a public event. For the Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark in 2016, The Yes Men designed a series of posters that were attached to the festival’s temporary wire fencing. Organised in collaboration with the festival organisers, the posters announced that all texts and phone calls made while on festival grounds, as well as internet meta data, would be collected and shared with third parties. Visitors were encouraged to leave feedback on the data policy in a listening booth, where their reactions were recorded to gather personal information on complainants (The Yes Men 2016).

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An outcry amongst festival goers ensued. Frustrations were vented on social media with news media announcing a Twitterstorm from the sudden spike in online activity. The act continued as festival organisers declared that the outcry had reached political exile Edward Snowden in Russia. A Snowden lookalike appeared at the festival unannounced, shocking festival goers, before it was revealed the next day that he was not in fact the infamous whistle-blower. The hoax was exposed to amused crowds when the real Snowden addressed them via satellite, the largest audience he has addressed directly. The Yes Men (2016) stated that in adopting the surveillance tactics commonly used by many governments, the action heightened awareness of the extent of the surveillance networks in Denmark and other European countries, and their collusion with the United States national intelligence. The masquerade of infiltrating media networks was aimed at drawing attention to critical issues affecting the use and exchange of personal data in spaces where the boundaries between public and private are blurred. 11.1.2

Hito Steyerl: ‘Robots Today’

In contrast to the culture jamming employed by The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl’s multimedia work Robots today for Skulptur Projekte, Münster 2017, confronted the impact of long-range weapon technology in the war-ravaged Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in south-east Turkey. The work was part of a larger installation, HELLYEAHWEFUCKDIE, titled using the five most frequently used words in the English language music charts in the last decade. Robots today presented video screens on different sized boxes in one of the Skulptur Projekte city sites, featuring image stills of the city centre destroyed by military forces in 2016. Images of destruction included bullet-ridden walls and mangled window coverings, and were juxtaposed with questions posed to Siri, the artificial intelligence virtual assistant on Apple software: ‘Siri, who destroyed this city?’ Two technologies of digital capture are brought together to highlight the spaces of global conflict: graphic images of violence that circulate in mass culture, showing abuses of power and violence, and the effects of war on the city’s residents who have abandoned the building. Siri, who represents the capture of data and knowledge dissemination by artificial intelligence, responds by saying ‘she’ does not understand the question. A wider sequence of images traces the places once lived in by renowned Kurdish scientist and engineer Al-Jazar¯ı. His text, Automata, written

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in 1205 foretold a time of ingenious mechanical apparatuses. Al-Jazar¯ı created robotic instruments that played music in addition to hydraulic machines and encrypted locks and safes. An illustrious Kurdish history is thus contrasted with contemporary scenes of makeshift housing and displaced residents, the results of technology and remotely operated weapons. In her synthesis of digital and artistic imagery, Steyerl queries the role of technology and the exclusion of entire populations and their histories in the context of globally networked communications technology. In addition, Robots today is a reminder that in some parts of the world, cities in have been reduced to rubble in recent years. Steyerl pays close attention to the apparatuses that routinely order networked communications and controls. She critiques these using the same medium: bitmap images, digital texts, videos, and film. Like Simon Denny’s assemblies of data and digital mapping, discussed in Chapter 9, Steyerl’s works show how mediums of visual capture, consumption and communication can be experienced as form. In How not to be seen: A fucking didactic educational .MOV file (2013), the artist performs an imitation how-to video for feigning invisibility using unusual camouflage techniques. Some of these are practicable, such as painting one’s face the same colour as a green screen, while others are impossible: becoming as small as a pixel or wearing an invisibility cloak. These strategies unfold over five phases and are narrated by a mechanised voice who repeats key phrases (Steyerl 2013). The images feature aerial views of a decommissioned United Stated Airforce base in the California desert, a resolution target once used to calibrate aerial photography equipment, a site that has been left to deteriorate in the landscape. Today’s targets use a new resolution chart, the narrator tells us, that can shoot pixels to within one foot of the target. The unsettling implication of this kind of data relates to the development of Unmanned Armoured Vehicles (known as drones) which can now hit distant targets with precision while being controlled remotely. Images of the airbase are spliced with images of up-market architectural renderings where white cut-out figures move and perform tasks in a pseudo reality, gradually beginning to misbehave as high-resolution figures enter the digital space from the ‘real’ world. These are, according to the narrator, ‘rogue pixels’ hiding in the cracks of the old resolution. The figures then wander off screen and out of visual range into the airbase field where they throw off their cloaks to reveal green screen suits.

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In a complex play on visibility and invisibility, How not to be seen situates the divergent body as a form of resistance within the dominant programme or matrix, acting against and defying visibility for digital consumption or control. The duality of being seen, versus how not to be seen, emerges throughout as a tactical necessity, suggested through the ways invisibility can be embodied. The digital essay moves between technological and real images, but these are, in turn, layered. The viewer observes the two layers unfold, the intervening layer revealing the process of image-making like an intervention in its own method. In the unfolding and revealing, there is a comedic undertone, hinted at in the work’s title, taken from a Monty Python sketch in which actors performed ways not to be seen in a landscape before being blown up in ever more ridiculous ways. In this sense, Steyerl seems to indicate the farcical logic of living in a regime of visibility in which one can perform not being seen as a reality. While not directly located in a city space, these works indicate how art has become digitised to a large extent and critiques the impacts of this new mode of operation on human intersubjectivity. 11.1.3

PVI Collective: ‘Tactical Media Interventions’

The Australian PVI (Performance, Video, Intervention) collective refers to their investigations of surveillance networks in city spaces as ‘tactical media interventions.’ Their interventions focus on a growing awareness of a post-Foucauldian and neo-Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ social physics that have been naturalised with powerful effect in today’s cities. An outwardly playful ruse and deliberate use of irony often characterises PVI’s projects. This belies a more critical intention to subvert socially coded norms in virtual and physical urban spaces. The insinuation of eccentric performative elements, or a misuse of the city’s spaces and networks for radically different actions outside the norm, highlights the effects of surveillance on public behaviour. Their radical performances counter self-corrected behaviour beneath the gaze of surveillance in public spaces. The performance intervention, Panopticon has appeared in city spaces in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Taipei, and Wellington since 2002. Drawing its title directly from Foucauldian discourse, the work aims to mitigate behavioural regulation as the result of latent neo-panoptic systems such as Synopticism and Banopticism discussed by Vetter (2012). The Panopticon comprises a sphere of open interlocking umbrellas with edges

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overlapping to entirely cocoon the upper torso of a person, or ‘passenger’ (Fig. 11.1). Its design protects the passenger’s identity from surveillance networks as they are guided through dense pedestrian areas while carrying out everyday tasks such as getting to work, posting a letter, browsing market stalls, or catching a ferry. The surveillance cocoon delivers more than a simple private space; a critical juxtaposition of ubiquity and futility emerges in the use of the ordinary umbrella. An age-old technology is pitted against new in a blend of vulnerability and resistance. Moreover, the outwardly absurd appearance of the work deliberately (and ironically, since it was resisting surveillance) draws attention to its presence, highlighting a social coding of behaviour in public spaces, while also bringing attention to the underlying critique of surveillance and control. The Panopticon performance on Sydney’s foreshore encountered heavy security restrictions, which usefully illustrates the top-down control of public behaviour around major landmarks. The journeys moved at glacial pace as the leading team navigated traffic, road surfaces, public transport,

Fig. 11.1 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)

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and paused to answer security questions. In one episode, ‘David goes to work,’ for example, the objective was to deliver the passenger to his workplace at the Sydney Opera House. Security Rangers stepped in to halt the journey, requesting permits and demanding that the guides switch off their recording devices. The umbrella spokes were deemed a public safety hazard and security reinforcements were called in to monitor the group’s movement. In effect, these apparent interferences to the journey highlighted the aims of the work. PVI cofounders Kelly McCluskey and Steve Bull (2004) said that the failure to succeed in completing a basic task made evident the issues of surveillance and private security in public space, and exposed unspoken rules about appropriate behaviour in public spaces. The journey was abandoned and the PVI team was reprimanded by Sydney Opera House officials for not seeking approval, and a public liability certificate to host a public event. After the episode, two plain clothes federal officers followed the PVI team back to the gallery that sponsored the work and threatened legal action should they attempt another performance. Arguably, the intervention problematised the extensive gaze of control technologies operating in cities, making its presence tangible in a physical way. This bridges the gap between artistic practice and theories on neo-panopticism by Deleuze and Byung-Chul Han. Foucault’s thesis on Bentham’s prison design, discussed earlier, assured an automatic function of power through a permanent visibility of inmates from a central observation tower: the disciplinary apparatus was an effective means to contain the individual. PVI’s Panopticon echoes Foucault’s claim, but draws it into the present, as in the Sydney journey. The work confirms the new demands of surveillance: a dispersed discipline operating as a system of registration alongside hierarchy, observation, and transparency to immobilise the town through extensive power over its bodies. Foucault (1979, 198) had referred to the disciplinary apparatus as the modern promise of the perfectly governed city. Art interventions can expose the hidden mechanisms of optical power in the city and their function to ensure permanent observation in the society of control. 11.1.4

Hasan Elahi: ‘Performing Transparency’

Hasan Elahi’s self-surveillance work Tracking transience: The Orwell project (2003), takes the realisation of a neo-Foucauldian paradigm further. Conceived in a post-9/11 climate of fear and counterterrorism,

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Bangladeshi-American artist-academic Elahi, drew on his experience of being detained by Immigration and Naturalization at Detroit Airport in 2002 on suspicion of hiding explosives in a Florida storage unit. After six months of periodic interrogation and monitored movement, the charges were dropped. However, due to ethnic profiling following 9/11, he was under scrutiny any time he travelled. Waiving his constitutional claim to privacy, the artist used the opportunity to enact his own self-tracking as a critical art performance. Releasing personal information on the internet, Elahi documented the minutiae of his personal daily life, including credit card and phone records, airline tickets, visits to public facilities, and meals consumed during the day. Forgoing his right to privacy in order to feel more secure, Elahi’s project ‘performed transparency’ in an ironic way that reworked strategies of resistance from within powerful flows of digital surveillance. Similar to Weiwei’s With flowers , yet more antagonising, Elahi’s work agitated within the pervasive networks of data tracking, drawing attention to how information is collected by multi-national surveillance complexes. Images published on the Tracking transience website (which is no longer live), shared real-time locations, connecting digital and physical spaces that Elahi visited, with records available to all audiences with internet access. The landing page was divided into two images. On top was a panning shot of everyday surroundings such as the outlook from a window towards the city or a suburban street. The mundane subject matter was complemented by equally amateur photography; images were often overexposed, of low digital quality or out of focus. Below the photo view was a map with a global satellite position (GPS) pinpointing the artist’s real-time location. In-screen boxes provided closer and more detailed images with arrows pointing to the roof of the house Elahi was currently in, for example. The format and images adopted the style of geo-tracking, satellite triangulation and digital cartography, the tools of surveillance systems and the mode of data harvesting, to zoom in ever closer to capture more information about the citizen. In addition, the website methodically documented Elahi’s past movements in thematic collages of images. After a few seconds, the landing page transitioned to a series of everyday scenes: a blurred road sign taken from a moving car; a plane on a tarmac runway; eggs on toast; unmade beds in different bedrooms, some listing the date and time of photograph. Audiences could locate Elahi’s physical and digital position, and see what he ate, where he travelled to, how he travelled, and where he slept.

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Tracking transience grappled with a basic premise that data holds value when the information is secret or hard to obtain. If value can be extracted from data, it can be bought and sold or used to extract further information. Gary Kafer (2016, 234) has argued that by generating a surplus of information, Elahi negotiated a spin on the logic of federal surveillance by doing the work of data mining systems that would otherwise gain from controlling how that information might circulate in spaces of digital profit. By disclosing his own everyday whereabouts, records and movements online, Elahi reworked resistance by manoeuvring within the optics of surveillance and big data. In another ironic outcome, Elahi (2011) noted that the more information he shared, the safer he felt, and further, that he could view who had been watching his movements through visitor traffic logs on his own website, some of whom were government agencies. This inverted the top-down optics and power relations of surveillance and is relevant in today’s networked societies; regimes of visibility operate with increasing ubiquity and the data harvesting market yields large profits. What began as a pre-emptive action to avoid future suspicion became a document of resistance that reimagined the conditions of transparency and anonymity. The project website claimed in a tongue-in-cheek statement to be assisting the FBI and public with tracking Elahi’s activities since 2002 and comprised an extensive archive of locations, journeys, information and images. Although not explicitly stated, the reference in the project’s title points to George Orwell’s seminal novel Nineteen eighty-four, published in 1949. In Orwell’s futuristic dystopian society, political deceptions and covert surveillance manipulate citizens under the guise of a totalitarian functionalism. Audiences of Elahi’s online work could envisage a comparable theme in today’s Big Brother society where shades of totalitarian functionalism are deployed to justify systems of mass surveillance over civilians. Elahi’s project is part of a lineage of practices that have mobilised responses to data-veillance, or that have adopted surveillance tactics within performance. Vito Acconci’s Following piece used a pre-CCTV type of monitoring where the artist pursued unsuspecting pedestrians through the city. Sophie Calle adopted the private-detective style surveillance in The detective in 1980 when she hired a detective to follow her. Francis Alÿs’ Guards merged surveillance footage of the Coldstream guards and relayed this back to the gallery exhibition. Weiwei cam in 2012 was conceived during Weiwei’s police detention and interrogation, prior to With flowers discussed at the beginning of the chapter.

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Unlike Elahi, Weiwei was placed under house arrest after his detainment at Beijing Airport in 2012, with fifteen CCTV-cameras installed in his home-studio. The artist enacted a symbolic surveillance of his own by mounting a further four webcams to send a live 24-hour feed to his website, weiweicam.com (no longer available). Although it was shutdown by government officials after two days, 5.2 million viewers were logged in that period (NBC News 2012). Performing transparency and living under surveillance are given critical visibility by both Weiwei and Elahi’s interventions, and draw attention to neo-panoptic controls that function by way of self-correction, transparency and normative behaviour. In turn, they mobilise alternative actions that respond to surveillance, while manoeuvring within those networks.

11.2 Networked Participation Using Communications Technology The artists discussed above subvert existing networks in the datadriven city to expose how processes of data collection, or data-veillance, operate imperceptibly while practising top-down control. Artists and digital collectives have also used technology to initiate new platforms for networked participation that work against the city’s normative use of data and technology. The 2015 article in The Guardian newspaper discussed the tactics used by key artists and digital collectives that invert the function of data and communications networks in covert ways that counteract the modus of big data to record consumer behaviour or pedestrian movements in public spaces, for example. Interventions in data networks take on a range of forms and emerge independently of each other in a rhizomic fashion. Collectively, however, they demonstrate a shared objective to render visible technologies of control, capture and analysis that characterise the data or smart networks operating in the everyday spaces of the city. In addition, they use the space of networked technology to engage public participants in an alternative dialogue about the city and its systems and spaces. Chapter 4 introduced the audioguided walks of Janet Cardiff as a form of psychogeographic wandering that created ambiguity and a new awareness about the physical spaces of the city. Cardiff’s methodology invites participants to follow the voice of the artist-narrator to discover the city through a semi-autobiographical or fictional journey. This strategy dovetails with networked participation that involves a repurposing of technology such as QR codes, portable

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radios and mobile phones for participation projects that are open-ended, dialogic and immersive. These interventions show a tendency to check out of the mainstream uses of digital networks to foster alternative urban communities and liminal spaces for participation activity. 11.2.1

Hello Lamp Post and Adventure 1

In 2013, artists Sam Hill and Ben Barker of Pan Studio, carried out an experimental city-wide project in Bristol that encouraged city dwellers to engage with the everyday urban furniture in different ways. Hello lamp post started as a provocation by hijacking an existing infrastructure of reference numbers found on post-boxes, bus stops, lamp posts and other street objects to relay messages, in order to start an unusual dialogue with the ‘smart city.’ The duo found that maintenance codes and serial numbers found on street objects linked digital networks and tangible objects; they could therefore be co-opted as location markers for a different kind of conversation between objects and city dwellers. Stories and memories about the city could be left for others to discover while waiting at a bus stop, for example. While it originally set out to subvert the use of maintenance networks, and was designed to appropriate data systems for different ends, the project has gone on to become absorbed into the smart-city mentality. Its original provocation has been weakened by expanding beyond its own concept, taken over by smart-city stakeholders with vested interests in data collection such as Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft. Hello lamp post has been upscaled to a city-wide initiative, which is also promoted globally, to build a conversation using technology in ways that empower the communities they serve and gather feedback in real-time. One could argue this development signals an intention to connect city dwellers with urban governance via smart networks, and to sponsor technology startups. However this outwardly charitable agenda contradicts the workings of the society of control or neo-panopticism in the transparency society. Cheery, helpful infographics positioned on fire hydrants, manhole covers, and post-boxes encourage city dwellers to leave feedback, inviting trust and transparency that voices will be heard. But the mediating network remains faceless and anonymous while collecting the data. This is precisely the one-sided nature of the transparency society that Han (2015, 49) argues leads to voluntarily participation and surrender to the panoptic

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gaze. There is little scope for meaningful interaction beyond basic information while the question of whose knowledge is shared and for what purpose, remains unanswered. The convivial novelty of the Hello lamp post project made it a worthwhile idea that could be adapted by the smart city business model. By contrast, interactive theatre company Coney used furtive tactics for Adventure 1 in 2013 to spark curiosity about the financial system in the heart of London, while reversing a surveillance dynamic. Smart phones were used for an immersive espionage experience; participants received text messages and audio files with orders to follow a financial programmer without raising attention because the mission took place without the knowledge of the programmer. Adventure 1 drew attention to the digital and physical spaces of global financial markets and reframed the premise of public knowledge of financial markets in a politico-economic context. The covert operation aimed to reverse a one-way direction of knowledge to overturn a general assumption that the public has little knowledge of the financial workings of the economic world. The project did not necessarily reveal corporate information: the ‘game’ of pursuing the person who ‘has the information’ was, however, designed to draw attention to the exclusivity and secrecy of the finance industry. Joan Gibbons (2007) argues that projects like these engage in a psychogeography in today’s cities by recruiting public participation for creative practices using mobile phones and digital networks. Among the examples she cites are Urban tapestries by Proboscis in London, based on a fluid geography that adapted new technologies for sharing experiences and memories of the city, and traced relationships and communities across time and place; the [murmur] project in Toronto that collated stories of local residents in Toronto’s Kensington Markets to create an alternative mapping that tourists or strangers could listen to for personalised histories of the local area; and One block radius in New York that, similarly, collected memories and recorded them in a guidebook for local areas of New York, forming a psychogeographic mapping of a small part of the larger city. Using mobile apps these groups annotate responses to the city in ways that link a virtual and actual experience of the city. The works embed new kinds of content into geo-specific locations out of which, Gibbons (2007, 99) states, the threads of an ‘organic accretive tapestry’ emerge. A soundscape work, This side of the tracks: If I recall correctly, there were pictures of horses and plastic pot plants, which appeared as part of

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Uncommon places for the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2015, shares consonance with this group. Participants in the temporary, site-specific work were invited to listen to an orated history of the ornate Nicholas Building on Swanston Street in central Melbourne. The voices of former shop owners and custodians shared personal anecdotes of everyday life in the building from the mid-twentieth century while participants travelled up the deco-style lifts and along corridors. Using storytelling and memory activation the work generated a new proximity between people, places and collective memory, facilitating a novel way to co-author or think about the surrounding environment. Gibbons (2007, 5) also sees a synergy with relational aesthetics in such works. In Bourriaud’s terms, they constitute moments of sociability based on relational encounters. In addition, the use of media technology also emphasises how art encourages city dwellers to check out of routine or habitual encounters within the circuits of consumerism, advertising or social media. As these practices demonstrate, the art of ‘checking out’ is sometimes packaged in outwardly small gestures, as described by Mika Hannula (2006). 11.2.2

‘Radioballett’ and ‘Deviator’

LIGNA’s Radioballett in 2002 and PVI’s Deviator in 2013 complicate a straightforward use of the city’s networks, mapping alternative routes and actions in the city. Audience-participants are guided using portable radios, iPods and mobile phones to create impromptu coordinated actions or playful ruses. Outwardly, they appear poetic, yet they initiate a different engagement with the city. LIGNA is a German performance, media and radio art collective started by Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen to explore the limits of free expression and movement in urban spaces through unconventional gestures and behaviour. Since the late 1990s, LIGNA has produced more than 50 interventions, performances and live radio ballets, in which participants are guided through discrete, synchronous movements in public places such as train stations and shopping malls. Recent works that highlight LIGNA’s tactics include Walking in the city that invited participants to respond to an audio guide while walking through the cities of Poitiers, Utrecht, Strasbourg, Dresden or Basel. Participants were not together but dispersed, connected by a radio network and therefore strangely synchronised. At the same time, participants would pause and then begin walking again, or walk a little

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faster than other pedestrians, forming a subtle subversion of the everyday actions of pedestrians without drawing suspicion. Radioballett was a networked gathering first coordinated in 2002. The first iteration took place in Hamburg’s main railway station. Participants were not professional actors or dancers, but everyday radio listeners, each equipped with a portable radio and headphones tuned to a rebel radio frequency for FSK (Freies Sender Kombinat). A series of choreographed movements were suggested. These included actions prohibited in the train station such as begging, lying down or sitting on the station floor. Instructions were interspersed with reflections on the train station as a public space, with reference to its transition to private ownership under Deutsche Bahn (DB) in the mid-nineties. To the outside observer, the performance unfolded silently over 15 minutes before the eyes of security officers and afternoon commuters. Across the station, apparently unrelated strangers suddenly appeared to mimic each other at the same time. They performed movements such as holding their arms outstretched as if mimicking the hands of the large station clock (the definitive form of rational control in the station), sitting down on plastic bags, or crouching down with ears to the floor as if listening for trains. Public attention was diverted in Radioballett through non-regulation idling, sidestepping rules prohibiting political assembly, using a different approach to demonstration. Each action took place under the optics of station surveillance. Art theorist Kai van Eikels (2008, 86) argues that Radioballett strategically implied two shifts in acting collectively in public. On one hand, the artistic movement set new boundaries to act politically, while on the other, it offered a training ground of sorts to enact collective subjects of action. Mobilising a collective and dispersing it via instructions issued on a radio network showed a momentary shift in the power dynamic. The performance shifted from a gathering to a dispersal, or a collective dispersal, without a clear idea of who was directing the ballet or how it was arranged. Eikels (2008, 86) explains that the performance moved from intentional acting to the display of movement, using radio as the medium to facilitate the orchestration of bodies, giving the ballet a spontaneous, unscripted character. Set against the everyday movements of pedestrians, shoppers and commuters, the ballet seemed to emerge incidentally to trace an alternative set of coordinated movements. This demonstrates the visual anomaly of a series of unconnected bodies who appear from different corners of the station to fulfil a pre-arranged task, made possible by networked radio.

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The struggle the organisers experienced before they were able to activate the work highlights an underlying political agitation. The German transport network Deutsche Bahn (DB) initially banned the intervention and took legal action against LIGNA to prevent the performance. However, a court ruled in LIGNA’s favour. DB’s claim that Radioballett constituted a political assembly, which is prohibited in train stations, was overruled. The court stated that the ballet was a dispersion of radio listeners that could not be forbidden in stations (LIGNA website). Through its alternative direction of movements in public space, Radioballett demonstrated a ruse to overcome a rational protocol for behaving in the city. Idleness, for example, undermined the productivity of the society of control described by Deleuze, and networked society analysed by Castells in the age of advanced capitalism. Loitering suggested a divergence from normalcy. Radioballett directed the movements of potentially radical, non-compliant bodies that did not adhere to the social code of public behaviour permitted inside the station. In addition, the ballet complicated the conditions of cognitive capitalism through an assembly of bodies who did not engage with routines of absent consuming. Part political, part artistic, without claiming either, the work changed the atmosphere of the station in its quarter-hour duration. Portable radios were repurposed to create different realities, cutting across the rational order of the city. In Australia, the PVI collective have used tactical media interventions for the work Deviator to repurpose communication technology for different networked forms of participation. The work is a citywide game that recruits players for a mission to seek out hidden audio instructions and inviting them to temporarily transform their urban surroundings into a playground. Audio instructions are hidden in the city and contain the rules for games such as ring-a-ring-a-rosy and twister, while interacting with other players (Fig. 11.2). The game uses GPS tracking and camera phones to locate codes and activate instructions. The customised phone app gives each player access to onscreen maps where they can select and locate games around the city. Android devices and iPhones are loaded with scanning technology that allow players to load instructions from QR codes around the city. During the game, PVI collaborators facilitate the journey and help players rediscover the playful charm of disobedience. Each game encourages players to dwell in the city in ways that author new meanings of public space.

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Fig. 11.2 PVI Collective, Deviator, Perth 2014. Sack race intervention. Presented at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth Australia (Photo: Bodan Warchomij, courtesy PVI Collective)

A blend of technology and live performance in Deviator encourages audience-participants to intervene in the city through subversive actions that disrupt social norms of public space. Like Radioballett , it pivots on an ambivalent position as both artistic performance and, as inferred by the work’s title, deviation from the city’s rules. A momentary transformation of the city is proposed; it is envisaged as space to discover, interact, and play freely. Its outward charm and convivial attitude disguise a political thrust to change or subvert socially coded behaviour in urban space. Deviator lends a platform to a post-situationist psychogeography using networked participation to temporarily check out of consumer activities. Instead, radical and unproductive activities invite creative disruption in the city’s spaces and networks.

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11.3 Beyond City Networks: Socially Engaged Projects Beyond the city’s networks of communications, consumerism and big data, socially engaged projects establish heterogeneous spaces for people to gather and take part in a debate or creative workshop. Hirschhorn’s Bataille monument in 2002 and Assemble collective’s Granby Four Streets in 2015 demonstrate different ways to abandon the data-driven programmes and hyper-connected flows of the city. Instead, they invite opportunities for people to come together in physical spaces rather than in technology’s networked systems, and allow a relational aesthetics to emerge through encounters and grass-roots community projects, while still embedded in the city. 11.3.1

Thomas Hirschhorn: ‘Bataille Monument’

Working away from digital networks, Thomas Hirschhorn’s series of makeshift monuments invites audiences to author new spaces to pause, slow down, and take time to learn something new and reflect. In addition to monuments, Hirschhorn has installed four temporary altars and eight kiosks dedicated to artists, poets and writers, and to provide a small information resource about them. A desire to act directly and question surroundings underscores Bataille monument . One of four monuments created by the artist with the help of local communities, and dedicated to modern European philosophers, each large-scale project reflects the local area and residents where it is constructed. The Spinoza monument was installed in Amsterdam’s red-light district in 1999; the Deleuze monument in a suburban neighbourhood in Avignon in 2000; and the Gramsci monument was realised in 2013 in the Bronx, New York. Conceived for documenta 11, Bataille was designed as a temporary art project in a public space, built and maintained by residents of the neighbourhood (Hirschhorn 2014, 225). It was intended as a grass roots engagement with the community to raise questions and create space and time for discussion and ideas, communicate knowledge and disseminate information, and allow for new perspectives on art to emerge, not only for the art-literate. The design and structure included eight interconnected elements: a sculpture, a library, an exhibition, a place to hold workshops, a food and drinks area, a television studio, a shuttle service for visitors, and a

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website. For the physical aspect of his monuments, Hirschhorn used raw, everyday and temporary materials such as wood, cardboard, tape, plastic and simple signs handwritten in ballpoint pen. The materials reflect the artist’s non-exclusive approach to thematic and political practice. Formal concerns aside, Hirschhorn intended that Bataille would raise social issues and provide a gathering point for community interaction. The artist’s first aim was to cultivate friendship and social collaboration, while a secondary aim was to convey the philosophies of French philosopher, Georges Bataille (Hirschhorn 2014, 339). Hirschhorn considered the people who participated in building and using the monument as integral to the monument itself. This priority of community engagement reveals that the philosophical theme underlying the monument was secondary to the monument’s purpose. It further highlights Hirschhorn’s political and aesthetic philosophy, which is evident in his more recent project the Bijlmer-Spinoza festival, mounted in an Amsterdam suburb with a large migrant population. A large-scale book sculpture of Spinoza’s Ethics appeared incidental in comparison to the festival’s overall aim to bring together the community through daily lectures and workshops. Hirschhorn’s choice of neighbourhood for the Bataille monument was the Friedrich Wöhler housing block in northern Kassel, where half of the population are Turkish migrants (Bishop 2012, 21–22). He invited local residents to open a dialogue, and to imagine and construct the monument, without reducing the exercise to superficial encounters. Hirschhorn (2014, 238) states that it is proper that social issues are raised in the art project, however he claims this does not imply he seeks a role as social worker, but rather an artist seeking to locate his works in an immediate reality, without illusion or fantasy. To achieve a dialogue within and about today’s political, economic and socio-cultural realities, Hirschhorn co-produces the spaces that he sees are needed for gatherings to take place. Elsewhere the artist (2014, 209) has stated that his intention is to confront politico-economic realities in order to create dialogue, not to avoid it. He does not seek out difficulty for its own sake, but as a mirror of reality that he wants to confront. His monuments reveal his dedication to producing spaces where the dialogues of many can come together in solidarity, rather than leaving the cultural and political resources contained in the general population lying dormant (Foster 2011). This counters a pervasive global situation that seeks to order and homogenise the masses and neutralise political difference. The monuments present contradictory and complicated encounters without seeking to resolve them.

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Hirschhorn’s working principle is based on production and presence with a double commitment to be on site during the construction and during the participation in his works, acknowledging that his presence may antagonise as much as restore connection. This exercise opens pathways for urban communities to collaborate and participate in a range of interactions that might not otherwise surface in the fragmented, alienating logic of today’s cities. Hirschhorn’s practice aims to connect the otherwise separated parts, people and phenomena that make up a multitude or community. Bringing people together in a collaborative situation, Bataille created space for relational antagonism to emerge, as Bishop identifies in her writing on participatory art. However, Hirschhorn regards customary ideas about participation with caution. Hirschhorn (2011, 11) has conveyed in correspondence with Bishop that he sees participation as another word for consumption; real participation, he says, is the involvement of collaborative thinking. His practice concerns the collapsing of straightforward interpretation, presenting monuments as works in progress as they continue to evolve. The monuments set the scene for encounters and invite participation without demanding it, gathering a group together in solidarity beyond the routine expectations of fragmented urban communities. Bataille was a means to show how living and connecting with the immediate world in art integrates the issues experienced in daily life. Without a straightforward or homogenous reading of the monument or its construction, a sense of precarity surfaces from which political agency might be revived (Foster 2011). Precarity is a state of insecurity engineered by a regime of power that an emerging class, the precariat, is dependent upon. The neologism precariat blends precarious and proletariat, and helps to define an economic, social and political status for people whose employment today is not guaranteed tomorrow, and who therefore exist without security in those terms, affecting material existence and emotional states of wellbeing. For Hirschhorn, precarity takes on a synergistic connection to political agitation. Hal Foster (2011, 170) asserts that Hirschhorn acts out the precarious, evoking its dangers and adverse effects, but also to question how and why they are produced, and so to implicate the power or authority that inflicts this ‘revocable tolerance.’ In effect, the position of precarity is both political and ethical. This is supported by Hirschhorn’s (2014, 323) claim on the political power of precarity; he states that the conditions of precariousness, which include being without assurance, stability, guarantee or an established future, offer

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new ways to invent and create because the precarious is, by necessity, open to shaping a new geography and forming new exchanges and values if these are affirmed as positive states of being. In its engagement with precarity in terms of materials, purpose and outcomes, the open-ended, flexible working structure of Bataille affirms the non-assured and non-established as part of an urban reality. It offers ways for contingent meaning to emerge, in opposition to sedentary categories of everyday routine operation in the data-driven, hyper-connected spaces of the city. Hirschhorn’s role draws on precarity as a resource for an unfiltered dialogue, and he embraces precarity as a pathway to exchanging different points of view as part of a political solidarity that draws from the grass roots of social engagement and collaborative practice. 11.3.2

Assemble: ‘Granby Four Streets’

The Assemble collective’s Granby Four Streets project began in 2014 with a goal to rebuild a row of Victorian terraced housing in Granby, a small area in the Liverpool suburb of Toxteth, England. The project involved the renovation of ten terraces on one of the streets that had been left to deteriorate as the result of failed urban regeneration schemes. The project characterises a socially engaged community-based practice that operates beyond the networks and hyper-communication frameworks that permeate the data-driven city. It makes use of participation as a medium for production and presence, and to create diverse forms of experience. Granby Four Streets shifts the dialogue towards possibilities for repairing social bonds, and minimising alienation and constraint through a tangible rebuilding of the community at a local level. Assemble’s intervention followed a long period of economic, political and cultural stagnation at this site. The Toxteth area including Granby was the historic settlement for Liverpool’s black community from the 1920s onwards, although prior to this, it had been home to wealthy merchant classes and European immigrants. More recently, it has been the newly settled home for large Somali and Yemini communities. In addition to its cultural history, the area saw waves of regeneration schemes from the 1970s, with cycles of top-down demolition and renewal fragmenting what once was an ordered urban plan. In 1993, the Granby Residents Association started to campaign against further demolition in streets running off Granby Road. The group disbanded in 2010 and focussed on smaller projects such as market days, flower planting, and painting pictures on

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boarded up windows to remind outsiders that a community was still in residence. A new campaign called Granby Four Streets Community Trust was set up in 2011 to work with the council and developers to raise funds to renovate the remaining undemolished houses and streets. Authorities had threatened more demolition since the late twentieth century, with new development schemes, introduced by the Blair administration in 2002, advancing a demolition campaign up to the Granby border. In 2014 the trust secured rights to purchase and renovate ten Victorian terraces with social investor group Steinbeck Studios enlisted to direct renovation plans. It was through this group that Assemble became involved. Assemble’s method was to connect activation, social enterprise and community collaboration. The art project involved designs for the interiors of ten terraces in Cairns St, five of which were sold to finance the project, with the remaining five retained as units to be rented. Affordable recycled materials, in keeping with the period features of the houses, were used. Assemble’s approach focussed on a revival of the area’s architectural and cultural heritage with supportive initiatives and public participation. Training and employment were offered to locals to leverage the existing spirit of ingenuity and creativity already demonstrated by the community. Along with continuing market days, Assemble used their Turner Prize nomination to set up Granby workshop, a social enterprise in which products made locally were sold to raise funds for the larger project. The Granby Workshop continues to create outputs of interior decor on an ongoing basis. Granby Four Streets is emblematic of practices that have mapped new terrain at the intersection of social practices in architecture and art. Assemble is not a collective of artists, categorically speaking, but a group of young architects, designers and non-specialised enthusiasts who, in terms of their collective identity and practice, carve out new niches within the architectural profession. Architecture critic Rory Olcayto (2015) argues that Granby Four Streets confirmed that a social turn is taking place in architecture, which has given rise to alternative approaches to urban design and spatial use. Yet, Olcayto (2015, 3) states, these remain largely ignored by the architecture profession. An example of this shift is demonstrated by Urban-Think Tank, who designed the Caracas Metro Cable as a radical alternative to government plans for an imposing road system through the city’s barrios. Another example related to Caracas is found in Alejandro Haiek Coll’s experimental and collaborative approach to his

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architecture practice, which has developed hybrid micro-urban infrastructures such as community hubs and footpaths in other areas of the informal city. The social turn in architecture shares consonance with examples of social practice in art. Claire Bishop (2006) argued that a mixed panorama of collaborative work forms has revived the early twenty-first century avant-garde. Social situations created by artists offer a new platform for political engagement, continuing the modernist’s call to blur the boundaries of art and life. Moreover, many of the emerging social and collaborative practices are lodged in urban neighbourhoods where they operate with the input of local communities. Theaster Gates’ Dorchester projects , which commenced in 2009 in Chicago’s South Side, responded to a high numbers of abandoned buildings in the area. Gates acquired an abandoned property, which, using repurposed materials from the city, he converted into a library, an archive room for slides and records, and a kitchen serving soul food. As with Hirschhorn’s approach, a political critique is discernible underneath these projects. Similar to the Granby project, Dorchester projects involves manual processes of rebuilding sites of neglect and actively engaging the community. Through social practice, these artists aim to revitalise urban communities that have experienced alienation or fragmentation as the result of failed urban renewal schemes or economic downturn and the withdrawal of government support. In the process, they expose the contradictions of the spaces of networked data exchange and the smart city, which operate as an invisible layer or infrastructure, removed from the material realities of urban communities and their needs. The Granby and Dorchester projects illuminate concepts of relational aesthetics and the power of participation, which remain critical to understanding specific forms of exchange in art. In line with this, the projects provide scope to reflect on how spaces of encounter establish a new basis for intersubjectivity and a collective elaboration of meaning. The ongoing duration of these projects is testament to the regenerative potential of encounter to ameliorate strains in social bonds. Progress is measured by a revitalisation of each area, affirming that artistic praxis works over and through the forces that create alienation and fragmentation as part of a remedial hands-on utopia that is needed to sustain possibilities for social exchange. Granby weaves together isolated relationships in the suburb’s shared spaces following decades of uneven urban development. Its handson approach and product workshop revives the grass-roots commerce that

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works against economic imperatives that have been used to justify councils and developers reneging on promises to preserve streets and urban communities. Considered thus, art practices provide a middle ground where connections can be re-established through a shared experience. In the process, the project works away from the data-driven, fragmented and controlled city to remind audiences of their own connection to the urban surrounds and to each other. In their participative dimensions, these socially engaged projects echo a point Bishop (2012, 6) makes: participation is about the value of that which is invisible—a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, or a raised consciousness. In each case, the realisation of spaces of encounter in Kassel, Liverpool or Chicago affirms an ethical necessity and the political efficacy of participative process instigated at grass-roots level. The politics of participation and small gestures thus concern broader socio-cultural, urban and political processes in which they are situated. Art is shown to engage people beyond the top-down constraints, ideologically or physically enforced by rational order. In today’s data-driven cities, art intervenes critically in social media and surveillance networks. In some cases, technology is subverted to introduce alternative participation networks that deviate from the technology-mediated society, while in others, relational strategies establish connection and dialogue. Art thus demonstrates consistent ways to agitate or introduce variables for how one can engage with, move in or sense the city, and how the city might be articulated or re-imagined beyond its own rational concept.

References Bishop, Claire. 2006. The social turn and its discontents. Artforum International 44 (6) (February): 178–183. https://www.artforum.com/print/200602/ the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274. Accessed 26 June 2023. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Elahi, Hasan. 2011. FBI, here I am! Talk for TED Global. https://www.ted. com/talks/hasan_elahi_fbi_here_i_am?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_med ium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare. Accessed 27 June 2023. Foster, H. 2011. Toward a grammar of emergency. In Establishing a critical corpus, ed. Thomas Hirschhorn, 162–181. Zurich: JRP|Ringier. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

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Gibbons, Joan. 2007. Contemporary art and memory: Images of recollection and remembrance. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The transparency society, trans. Erik Butler. Berkeley: Stanford University Press. Hannula, Mika. 2006. The politics of small gestures: Chances and challenges for contemporary art. Istanbul: art-ist. Hirschhorn, Thomas, ed. 2011. Establishing a critical corpus. Zurich: JRP|Ringier. Hirschhorn, Thomas. 2014. Critical laboratory: The writings of Thomas Hirschhorn, ed. Lisa Lee and Hal Foster. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kafer, Gary. 2016. Reimagining resistance: Performing transparency and anonymity in surveillance art. Surveillance and Society 14 (2): 227–239. LIGNA website: http://ligna.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/radio-ballet.html. Accessed 28 June 2023. McMullen, Thomas. 2015. How art is making the data-driven city more liveable. The Guardian, 11 June. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/ jun/10/art-data-digital-city. Accessed 28 June 2023. McCluskey, Kelli, and Steve Bull. 2004. PVI Collective—Panopticon: Sydney, Filter, 58. http://filter.org.au/issue-58/pvi-collective-panopticonsydney-2/#more-3809. NBC News. 2012. After 5 million views in 2 days, China orders Ai Weiwei to turn off webcams. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/after-5-millionviews-2-days-china-orders-ai-weiwei-flna664888. Accessed 5 July 2023. Olcayto, Rory. 2015. From the editor. Architects’ Journal 241 (19) (22 May): 3. PVI Collective. 2018. Get ready for some serious play. https://pvicollec tive.com/were-looking-for-artists-who-deviate-from-the-norm/. Accessed 28 June 2023. Steyerl, Hito. 2013. How not to be seen: A fucking didactic educational .MOV File. https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-beseen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651. Accessed 5 July 2023. The Yes Men. 2016. ‘Anger marketing’ at Roskilde. https://theyesmen.org/pro ject/roskilde. Accessed 28 June 2023. Van Eikels, Kai. 2008. This side of the gathering: The movement of acting collectively: Ligna’s Radioballett. Performance Research 13 (1): 85–98. Vanolo, Alberto. 2014. Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies 51 (5): 883–898. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801349 4427. Vetter, Grant. 2012. The architecture of control: A contribution to the critique of the science of apparatuses. Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books. Weiwei, Ai. 2013. Flickr account. https://www.flickr.com/photos/aiww/. Accessed 30 June 2023.

Epilogue: An Ongoing Struggle Between ‘Art in the City, the City in Art’

A discursivity that relates art to the city, the city to art is like two hands with fingers interlocked. On one hand, the city’s top-down order sets the rules; on the other, unruly art practices emerge from the bottom up. The interdigitation creates a tension or struggle to expose the city’s modus operandi while claiming space for creative interludes in unexpected ways. To investigate this dialectic further, my study posed two principal questions: How does the city affect art and how does art affect the city? And what possibilities are afforded by art that transform an awareness of what the city is, or can be? In response, the rational-functional city—its structures, processes, systems, ideologies and coded uses of space—was differentiated from how art perceives and expresses urban experiences at grass roots level. Using art practices since the mid-twentieth century as a lens, this struggle was examined in three layers: hardware, software and networks, to show how art has grappled with contentious conditions in different types of public space. Since the mid-twentieth century, art’s entanglements with the city have actualised alternative possibilities for dwelling in the city. Art’s actions are not always rational or intelligible. Rather, they are unpredictable, sometimes shocking, or open-ended and elusive, appealing to intuitive connections. Unexpected moments of encounter unsettle everyday routines and behaviours; they ruffle the seamless flows of consumer and bureaucratic processes to make the familiar unfamiliar. The avantgarde tactics in Situationism, Fluxus and happenings in the 1960s and performance and conceptual works from the late twentieth century show © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024 E. Masemann, Art in the City, the City in Art, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6042-2

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how art supplements theory with a phenomenal richness, to render the city visible through interruption, resistance or exposure. Substantial thematic links can be made across these different movements, which all bring imaginative expression into an urban context that contrasts with a rational-functional order. This is not to suggest a seamless continuity of these practices or the methods they used, however; each has its own frame of reference and trajectory in art history. Strategies of culture-jamming and hacktivism from the late 1980s through to the present show a radical departure from the earlier avant-garde, intervening in urban phenomena, such as advertising screens, media interfaces and networks. These, along with social and participatory practices in the twenty-first century, have exposed issues of alterity, alienation and exploitation, and networks of big data through practices targeting social media use or surveillance in urban spaces. An interweaving of artistic practice, architecture, urbanism and sociopolitical theory requires considerable synthesis. This book set out to establish a dialogue between the top-down structure of the city, critical theory, and art practices that complicate and undermine the restrictions of imposed order. The theories discussed were intended to complement the practices examined, confirming that deviation from the rational is imperative to reassert creative, spontaneous and experimental (mis)uses for the city. In theory, one discerns the push–pull of powerful forces to homogenise not only the spaces of the city to ensure legibility, ready surveillance and easy replication by urban systems, spawning an oppressive sterility, but also the actions of the bodies who use those spaces. Yet theory can only take us so far. The heart of this book uncovers a diversity of ways in which art renders visible, non-literal and intuitive tactics for challenging the city’s fundamental order. Art practices problematise a rational psychology of everyday systems that routinely organise the city, its social relations and behaviours into profitable enterprise. Art can therefore show us how the city takes effect as hardware in the imperceptible soft conditions or regular rhythms and seriality of the everyday. Art ruptures the everyday by making it tangible, showing how art can produce a different way of perceiving the city. The first step in my approach was to establish a working idea of the city or a set of ground rules that visualised how modern cities developed as rational-functional mechanisms of order. While theoretical studies have defined the city using an interdisciplinary geographic, economic, institutional and socio-political construct, they have not adequately captured

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how the city functions as a default entity through which lives and possibilities are shaped and defined, or how creative practices respond to this. Michel de Certeau captured this paradox to some extent in his writing on the concept city. In The practice of everyday life (1984) he described an Icarian view of Manhattan from the former World Trade Center as a simulacrum of order: seen from far above, the city was suspended in time like a photograph, its intricacies made legible as an all-encompassing panorama. But the view was contradictory. At ground level, multitudes of pedestrians traced what De Certeau called the ‘chorus of idle footsteps,’ micro-scale movements that are undetected from above, yet actualise the possibilities from within the city’s spatial order. De Certeau identified a series of intrusions and deviations in the everyday that undermined the top-down order: a dichotomy between this order and a series of imperceptible forms of resistance was established. The second step in my approach was to set up a framework to critique the city through analyses of art. Three layers were proposed: hardware, software and networks, to assess how the city’s relationship with art has developed across tangible and intangible constructs, intersubjective spaces, circuits and systems. This approach stressed the tensions between discourses of rational order that developed in modern urban planning and counter-positions provided by critical theory and art practice, which tested the strengths and limitations of different theories for critiquing art’s relationship to an urban system. Theoretical responses to the effects of networks and digital communications showed how a rational order transitions from a symbiosis of hardware and software to an infrastructure of virtual networks, digital and cloud-based operating systems. In Part I, I set out the technologies of utopian modernism that developed concrete expression in the city’s bricks and mortar. In case studies on Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, a common thread in modern city planning emerged that ultimately hinged on three doctrines of modernism: rationality, functionality and economic productivity. As well as De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacobs and the Situationists led a rebuttal, questioning the modern urban structure and calling for creative misuses and challenges in response. Lefebvre argued that the industrial town of Mourenx stated its function so overtly that there was little scope for creative potential. Jane Jacobs lamented the degree to which modern urban planning had eroded a variety of expressions in American cities, breeding instead a dull functionality and a mediocrity of building standards. The Situationist theories proposed radical strategies to circumvent

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these positivist visions of urban modernity and break with the spectacle of reality, which they claimed had collapsed into a fetishising of images and false wonders. An enquiry into the oppositional and denunciatory stance of Situationist methods of détournement, dérive and psychogéographie laid the foundations for contemporary practices that have repurposed some of these techniques. Subtle yet significant differences appear in the contemporary setting where artists seek to bring the oppressive effects of a dominant ideology to the surface. Art’s response to a predetermined order of the city has evolved through tactics of shock, experimentation, non-sensical performance, rupture and parody, which radically break with an established order, particularly if this order is understood as having psychological as well as concrete structural or rational functions. Frequently, the ideas underlying the artworks suggest a transition to more perceptive states of idle wandering, flux, fluidity, flow, walking, following, daydreaming and stealing time to create. Fluxus and happenings gave attention to the ephemeral and the power of spontaneity in everyday life; artists created moments of absurdity, fleetingness, spoofing and non-rationality to interrupt the coherent order and disturb a modernist myth of permanence. Gordon Matta-Clark’s iconoclasm, by contrast, sliced through buildings to create anti-monuments in response to modernism’s functional design and the cognitive mastery it implied in architecture. Mierle Laderman Ukeles brought together the mechanic and poetic to reimagine maintenance systems in her work ballets, showing how bureaucratic processes systematically sweep workers into the gyre of state machinery. Francis Alÿs’ walks subtly questioned a politics of mobility and visibility through non-linear drifts away from hierarchies of order and productivity. Janet Cardiff’s audio guided walks interrupted a rational-functional order, leading participants on a journey to rediscover the city through Situationist-inspired psychogeography. While there are important differences between them, collectively these artists contested a hyper-valorisation of top-down order, demonstrating how it stifles creativity and autonomy, often imperceptibly. In Part II, I conceptualised how the city’s rational-functionalproductive order is performed daily through a cooperation of ideology, the body and the everyday. The urban software was conceptualised as a relational terrain in which the bodies of city dwellers are coerced and disciplined through ideological interpellation and everyday conditions that routinise control as a sense of normalcy; the city thereby occupies the body as it moves in the city, performing its economic cycles and

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consumer imperatives. Manfredo Tafuri’s concept of consumer ideology illuminated how an ideology of architecture distributed new meaning for the correct use of the city, including the norms of consumer behaviour. Louis Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses was used to describe a process by which top-down ideology is disseminated and practised in urban society and to discern the interests of the dominant status quo that go largely unquestioned, despite the limitations they place on freedom. An internal structuring of docile bodies and the unremarkable quotidian cycles and routines of the everyday are implicit in the ideological workings of the relational software. The argument was reinforced by Michel Foucault’s thesis on the docile body and theories on the everyday by Lefebvre and De Certeau. Docile bodies use the city in ways that internalise its structures and rhythms, giving them form as everyday habits and experiences. Whether consciously or not, as bodies move through the city, enacting cycles of productivity, they affirm the city’s top-down order in a feedback loop. The cognitive controls that pervade networked city spaces today are the latest iteration in this misanthropic paradigm. Ideologies of self-productivity and efficiency writ large in neoliberal agendas tend to operate surreptitiously while maintaining a distracted or disengaged public. This conceptualisation, as a predominant modus vivendi in many of today’s cities, underscores my arguments. Performance and conceptual art practices, with art interventions and examples of institutional critique, have exposed a range of powerful ideologies that reinforce compliance in a normative use of the city that does not question its social hierarchies. Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko have interrogated public buildings and museums as sites of power within which lopsided, duplicitous ideologies produce and project socio-political and cultural division. Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s performances have exposed the harsh realities of homelessness and marginalisation, while living on the streets of Auckland. Valie Export, Regina José Galindo and William Pope.L have exploited the expressive, radicalised or gendered body as a vehicle for resistant action and non-conformity. These artists demonstrate how the body can be (mis)used as an object or mass that stubbornly complicates an existing set of rules or order, creating obstacles to the seamless flow of the urban software. The city’s everyday routines, scenes and social behaviours have been momentarily destabilised through parody and anti-spectacular methods by Peter Burke and the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin. On the other hand, Bianca Hester and Nevin

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Alada˘g have experimented with acoustics and ambiences to create poetic interludes and divert attention away from the laborious repetition of the everyday. In this section, a particularly significant argument emerged that highlights art’s struggle with the city vis-à-vis the body. The body is, biologically speaking, a vulnerable vessel that is open to manipulation by the apparatuses of discipline and ideology; these tend to moderate behaviour to shape and coerce a mass of productive, non-questioning docile bodies that, in turn, produce the city’s ideological order. A non-compliant body is unpredictable, and therefore a radical or revolutionary source of disruption. In this sense, the body represents the site for resistance. My study has articulated how artists have engaged the body in diverse ways in urban spaces to externalise and complicate a range of ideological forces acting on it, implicitly or explicitly. The body is centralised as an important and contested site: inhabiting or misusing the body for creative, intuitive expression diverges from the ideological norm, and makes evident ways to recode the city through disruption, intervention and blockage. The position of the disciplined body is further complicated by issues arising from networked society and the data-driven city, the subject of Part III. Today, the impact of networks and digital communications is leading to a new set of rules and conditions for using or interacting with the city, with a transition from the urban hardware and software to networked technology systems and cloud-based operations. An increasing ubiquity of digital, data-driven technology or online operations demands new analytical perspectives that respond to the simulated structures of the internet, augmented reality, screen interfaces, big data, and online consumerism, along with surveillance and the mutations of panopticism. A logic of bricks and mortar that once cemented modernist structures in the city, is diffused or embedded in a networked system that is not always readily visible, but concealed or latent in its operation. Key to an understanding of this development is the shift from Foucault’s theory on panopticism and the disciplinary apparatus to Deleuze’s society of control with its dispersed constraints, and, more recently, to Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the transparency society. The mutations of panopticism, and later, the onset of cognitive capitalism, advanced communications technology and the data-driven smart city, was promoted as a market-friendly development designed to optimise the city’s operation and boost economic productivity. In this paradigm, surveillance captures and harvests data on citizens to deliver insights on

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the city’s function. However, as antagonists of cognitive capitalism have clarified, this is attended by the hyper-communication state, or a constant need to be logged on or plugged in. An increase in warehouses and transport chains is, in addition, required to supply new interiorities that are born from online activity but are still bound by a physicality of infrastructure: distribution warehouses and logistics networks deliver the online purchases, desires and dreams. Global networks are thus reshaping the ways one uses the city, blurring boundaries of public and private, work and leisure, time and space. Although art is often swept into this new urban spectacle, it can provide uncanny switches, affective ruptures, or a disturbance of an augmented space–time. Artists have appropriated and subverted communications technology to set up alternative operations within the networks of the city. Hasan Elahi and the PVI Collective have demonstrated how art can rework resistance from within the optics of surveillance. PVI Collective’s Deviator and LIGNA’s Radioballett created radical new practices for participation that in a sense subverted the operating modus of the data-driven city. By contrast, socially engaged art has checked out of a matrix of communication superhighways, by returning focus to analogue technology, rudimentary materials and simplified models of interaction. Participation projects by Thomas Hirschhorn, Assemble Collective and Theaster Gates have adopted a slower pace and highlight the power of communities working in collaboration. This provides foundations for a post-digital relational aesthetics in which disparate groups are brought together in temporary situations to create micro-communities that work away from digitally mediated communications. Sitting outside the frantic pace of the hyper-connected city, and beyond the machinations of consumer culture and ‘production for production’s sake,’ these works demonstrate cognitive dissonance and a bottom-up molecular activity. Their break with the implicit expectation of digital mediation to move within or interact with the city reminds us of art’s subversive qualities. Contingent, ameliorative and open-ended interactions may also raise conscious agents in those who experience art in this context. My study analysed a range of artistic engagements with the city and the reasons why the artists have concentrated their practices in public space. It focussed primarily on art that challenges or deviates from a top-down order, breaking with discourses of rationality, utility, productivity, uniformity and normativity. The works have introduced elements of

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chance, shock and rupture, risking outward irrationality. They are inherently subversive and polysemic, sometimes subtle, ephemeral and poetic, and sometimes antagonistic, provocative and anti-establishment. While they represent different trajectories in the modalities of art history, they share a tendency to show the city’s order in sharp relief. Collectively, they help to establish a propensity in art that exposes or works against oppressive urban conditions, systemic controls and dominant ideologies, manifesting points of difference, which bring these conditions into a collective awareness. Exploring diverse practices that contest or perceive the city differently across a global arena, my study demonstrates part of a complexity and struggle that relates art to the city and the city to art. The artists show us that the city is more than a singular rational concept. Rather, it is constantly changing, in a sense becoming rather than crystallising. This push–pull of the rational and non-rational is pivotal to unpacking the relationship between the city and art. In my research, I aim to contribute to interdisciplinary studies of the urban humanities. Drawing art into interdisciplinary analysis can enrich discourses on the impact of significant and fast-moving changes on the lived urban experience and human condition. This book has highlighted four key aspects in that regard. First, that art tells us something about the city that theoretical or rational studies alone cannot: the open-ended, imaginative and interruptive aspects of these works complicate a singular definition of the city as a rational-functional order. Second, that art presents opportunities for unexpected encounters to occur through the challenges it poses and the moments of surprise it creates within the urban order. Third, that art unsettles familiar routines or behaviours, demonstrating different ways to dwell in the city, and breaking with social or ideological norms. Finally, that art complicates urban processes and systems; it disrupts coded uses of space through actions that appeal to intuitive connections and subjectivities. Without proposing a resolution, art materialises the conditions that bring the city’s ideological order to the point of its own precarity. As a subversive strategy, art poses experimental, open-ended encounters that contrast with a conclusive, categorical urban system. My study accounts for art’s disjunctive and sometimes restorative relationship with the city as it pushes back on currents of homogenisation and disenfranchisement, while remaining open to debate different interpretations, subjectivities and perspectives. Today’s cities are morphing into more complex entities with burgeoning urban populations and a rhetoric of scarcity, precarity and

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insecurity that reportedly threatens global stability. As the Anthropocene reaches a new level of urgency, there is equal need to deepen understanding of the phenomenon of the city, to critique the contradictions that riddle urban societies and expose new, sometimes less visible assemblies of order. The dynamic expressions of art provide useful insights into a creeping uniformity and homogeneity as well as a growing precarity of urban existence, with an incremental erosion of individual security and access to services. What my study has revealed thematically is a pressing concern in art to expose contentious urban conditions across a range of social and geo-political specificities. This includes issues related to homelessness; exploitation; consumerism; surveillance and data-tracking; uneven development and cognitive capitalism; a stifling of creativity; and new forms of alienation and a fragmentation in the social body or the individual. The effects of economic policy, consumerism and increasing inequality in cities is a driving force for many artists to position their works in the streets and confront the uncomfortable or ‘unsayable’ headon. The artist’s body is particularly significant in a struggle to undermine the disciplinary forces of self-censorship and automated productivity: in many works, the position of the body is highlighted as a contested site. Finally, my book has presented the city as a mechanism of rational and functional order that is upheld by ideological discourses based on economically controlled productivity. Developing a framework of the city through hardware, software and networks, elucidates the necessity and efficacy of art that ruffles the seamless flow of the city’s top-down order. The study demonstrates how a series of powerful ideologies influence the movements, behaviours and inter-subjectivities of city dwellers, in turn, producing a normalised everyday order of predictable appearance and productive flow. Art rallies against this predetermined order, complicating the everyday cycles and routines as a way to disrupt systemic control. The strength of this approach exposes how powerful the city is as a mental or physical construct. Through creative variety, as in the works discussed, art presents a countermeasure and a way to express alternative ways of being, of resisting, and of performing difference beyond hierarchical structures. It is through its diversity of strategies, tactics and interruptions that art can transform an understanding of what the city is, or can be.

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Index

A Absurdity (in art), 136–139, 201 Acconci, Vito, 72, 204 Acousticon, 170. See also Neo-panopticism Adorno, Theodor, 82 Advertising, 4, 13, 39–41, 84, 86, 112, 132, 133, 145, 157, 165–168, 196, 208, 222 Agency (in art), 184, 185, 188, 191, 195 Agonism, 124, 127. See also Mouffe, Chantal Airbnb Inc., 93, 94, 157 Alada˘g, Nevin, 121, 123, 140–143, 226 Traces , 141–143 Alienation, 4, 9, 13, 30, 36, 48, 72, 73, 103, 107, 111, 116, 133, 134, 136, 169, 215, 217, 222, 229 All you need is data (Denny), 171 Althusser, Louis, 85, 125 ideological interpellation, 88, 224

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), 79, 85, 86, 124, 125, 225 Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), 86 Alÿs, Francis, 9, 44, 45, 50, 67–71, 106, 123, 140–143, 178, 184, 204, 224 Guards , 45, 69–71, 143, 204 Amazon Inc., 158 Amsterdam, 212, 213 Anarchitecture (Matta-Clark), 61–64 Andre, Karl, 61 Anthropocene, 6, 12, 229 Appadurai, Arjun, 160 Architectural ideology (Tafuri), 80 Architectural sublime (Foster), 82 Architecture and ideology, 80, 81, 84, 124, 126, 127, 225. See also Tafuri, Manfredo contemporary architecture, 89 histories of, 8 modern architecture, 26, 37, 39, 61, 63, 65, 82, 114

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024 E. Masemann, Art in the City, the City in Art, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6042-2

249

250

INDEX

postmodern architecture, 81, 82, 90, 91 social turn in architecture, 217 Artangel UK, 178 Artificial intelligence (AI), 107 Art intervention, 126, 131, 145, 147, 148, 166, 202, 210, 215 and rational-functional order, 13, 30 and technology, 13 and the body, 97, 101 and the everyday, 13 ASCO collective, 103 Asher, Michael, 119, 120 Caravan, 119, 120 Assemble Collective, 212, 215, 216, 227 Granby Four Streets , 212, 215, 216 Auckland, 129, 130, 173, 225 Autobodys (Oldenburg), 59, 60 Avant-garde, 1, 4, 8, 13, 24, 26, 40, 45, 53, 55, 65, 67–69, 116, 147, 148, 178, 217, 221, 222 ÅYR Collective, 93 B Bangalore, 189 Banksy, 123, 148, 149, 161, 162 Better out than in, 161, 162 Vandalised phone box, 148 Banopticism, 99, 170, 171, 200. See also Neo-panopticism Bataille monument (Hirschhorn), 212, 213 Battle of Orgreave (Deller), 55, 186–188 Baudelaire, Charles, 21–23, 28, 72, 81 Baudrillard, Jean, 46, 84, 155, 167, 168, 196 Bauhaus, 24, 40 Beijing, 195

Bentham, Jeremy, 20, 98, 171, 202 Berlin, 139–141, 143, 144, 225 Berman, Marshall, 20–23, 27–30, 44 All that is solid melts into air, 20 Better out than in (Banksy), 161, 162 Beuys, Joseph, 120 7000 Oaks , 120 Big Brother, 200, 204 Bio-opticism, 99, 170, 171. See also Neo-panopticism Bishop, Claire, 12, 54, 55, 177, 178, 180–182, 185–189, 192, 213, 214, 217, 218 Blanchot, Maurice, 116 The body and the city, 102, 103, 104–106, 123 Bodies and technology, 106. See also Grosz, Elizabeth Body configurations (Export), 106, 131 The body in art, 103, 107 misuse of, 106, 131, 132, 139 representation, 107 resistance, 103, 105–107, 131, 134, 139, 200 Bogota, 183 Bonaventure Hotel, 90 Boston, 60, 129 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 12, 89, 90, 92, 94, 177–180, 182, 189, 192, 208 relational aesthetics, 178–180, 182, 208 Brisbane, 201 Bures Miller, Georges, 71 Burke, Peter, 92, 123, 145–147, 225 Pop-up art , 145 C Calle, Sophie, 72, 179, 204 Capitalism, 4, 5, 18, 21–23, 26, 39, 40, 45, 80–82, 85, 91, 111, 157, 160, 162, 163, 181, 210

INDEX

and the city, 85 Caracas, 216 Caravan (Asher), 119, 120 Cardiff, Janet, 71, 73 Münster walk, 71, 72 The city of forking paths , 74 The missing voice Case study B, 71, 73 Castells, Manuel, 155, 159–162, 196, 210 Catalysis (Piper), 133 Chicago, 217 The city and crisis, 55, 138, 143, 157 as a concept, 1, 118 as a medium for art, 10, 191 control of, 201 destruction of, 20, 21, 198, 199 economies of, 35, 92, 147, 157 histories of, 8, 9, 21, 29, 102 in literature, 21 mapping of, 207 master planning of, 13, 21, 27, 29 modern building of, 37, 54 modernisation of, 18, 23 planning of, 13, 21, 115 politics of, 50, 224 renewal of, 20, 114 smart cities, 158, 206, 207, 217, 226 structure of, 127, 157, 222 systems of, 3, 117 The city hall tower projection (Wodiczko), 126, 127 The city of forking paths (Cardiff), 74 Cleaning event (Hi Red Center), 58, 113 COBRA, 40 Cognitive capitalism, 155, 165, 166, 182, 185, 196, 210, 226, 227, 229

251

Cognitive dissonance, 177, 192, 193, 227 Collins, Phil, 178, 183 The world won’t listen, 183, 184 Communications networks, 199 Commuter spaces, 12, 84 Concept city, 1, 33, 46–50, 71, 117, 144, 223 Conceptual art, 110 Conceptual art and the city, 67 Conflict kitchen (Weleski and Rubin), 190 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 24, 25, 34 Constructivism, 53, 54 Consumerism, 3, 4, 18, 19, 33, 40, 64, 81, 83, 112, 115, 145, 167, 170, 182, 185, 189, 196, 208, 212, 226, 229. See also Shopping Contemporary art, 90, 94 Culture jamming, 41, 83, 84, 196, 198 D Dada, 41, 55 Data-driven city, 156, 158, 159, 205, 215, 218, 226, 227 Data harvesting, 197, 204 data policy (The Yes Men), 197 Data-veillance, 204, 205 Debord, Guy, 4, 39, 41–44, 68 The society of the spectacle, 39 De Certeau, Michel, 71, 74, 109, 117–120, 144 concept city, 33, 46–48, 50, 71, 117, 144, 223 everyday life, 33, 46, 47, 49, 50, 109, 118, 119 la perruque, 49, 66, 117, 144, 191 pedestrian speech acts, 47, 49, 50, 68, 71, 117 Deleuze, Gilles, 162, 163

252

INDEX

Societies of control, 162–164, 167, 170, 177, 202, 210 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 190 the minoritarian, theory of, 190 the molecular, theory of, 190, 191 Deller, Jeremy, 9, 55, 178, 186, 187 Battle of Orgreave, 55, 186 Denes, Agnes, 121 Denny, Simon, 9, 171–173, 199 All you need is data, 171 Secret power, 172, 173 dérive, 41–43, 45, 66–69, 74, 224. See also The Situationists détournement , 41, 43, 45, 53, 64, 197, 224. See also The Situationists Deutsche, Rosalyn, 10, 37, 124, 125, 128 Deviator (PVI Collective), 208, 210, 211, 227 Diyarbakir, 198 Documenta, 135, 212 Dorchester projects (Gates), 217 Dublin, 157 E Elahi, Hasan, 196, 202–205, 227 Tracking transience: The Orwell project , 202 Eliasson, Olafur, 123, 143, 149, 150 Green river, 149, 150 The New York City waterfalls , 149 Endurance art, 65 Entladung (Knecht and Greiner), 143 Entropy, 61 entropic, 64 Eppink, Jason, 166, 167 Pixelator, 166, 167 Everyday life, 110–112, 115, 116 Everyday life and the city, 140, 147, 208

Everyday life, theory of, 50, 110, 118 Critique of everyday life (Lefebvre), 111. See also De Certeau, Michel Export, Valie, 9, 103, 105, 106, 123, 131–133, 136, 225 Body configurations , 106 Touch cinema, 105, 131–133 F Facebook Inc., 157 Feher, Michael, 100, 106 Feminism, 113 Festum Fluxorum, 56, 57 Five Eyes (FVEY), 172 flânerie, 67, 69 FLOW CITY (Ukeles), 65 Fluids (Kaprow), 60, 61, 150 Fluxus, 8, 55–57, 59, 103, 110, 114, 184, 221, 224 Follow in your footsteps (Ukeles), 65, 66 Fordism, 34, 61 Foster, Hal, 82, 84, 213, 214 Foucault, Michel, 97–101, 162, 164, 170, 202 disciplinary society, 99, 101 dispositifs , 98, 100, 162–164 the docile body, 98–100, 103, 131 Functionalism, 4, 18, 27, 33, 34, 38–40, 63, 64, 70, 143, 204 resistance to, 144 Futurism, 54 Futurists, 67 G Galindo, Regina José, 9, 123, 131, 134–136, 225 Presencia, 134, 135 Gates, Theaster, 217, 227 Dorchester projects , 217

INDEX

Gehry, Frank, 82 The German ideology (Marx and Engels), 86 Gezi Park Fiction St. Pauli (Park Fiction), 186 Giedion, Sigfried, 27, 29 Global cities, 155, 157. See also Sassen, Saskia Globalisation, 4, 6, 11, 90, 91, 110, 157, 161, 180, 197 Google Inc., 174 Google LLC, 157 Granby Four Streets (Assemble Collective), 212, 215, 216 grands ensembles , 34, 114 Green river (Eliasson), 149, 150 Greiner, Andreas, 121, 140, 143 Entladung , 143 Grosz, Elizabeth, 12, 97, 103–107, 132 Bodies-cities, 103–105, 107 Guards (Alÿs), 45, 69–71, 143, 204 Guatemala City, 134 Guggenheim Bilbao, 91 Guggenheim Museum, New York, 124 H Haacke, Hans, 9, 10, 37, 89, 123–126, 225 Shapolsky et al , 124 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum board of trustees , 125 Hacktivism, 161 Haiek Coll, Alejandro, 216 Hamburg, 134, 186, 209 Han, Byung-Chul, 155, 173, 202, 226 transparency society, 173, 174 Handshake ritual (Ukeles), 65, 66 Hannula, Mika, 12, 177, 182–185, 192, 208

253

Happenings, 59, 103, 110 Hardware, 38, 71, 74, 79, 100, 127, 155, 196 Hartford wash: Washing, tracks, maintenance outside (Ukeles), 113 Haussmann, Baron, 13, 17, 20–24, 26, 27, 29, 43, 81, 223 Hello lamp post (Pan Studio), 206, 207 Hester, Bianca, 121, 123, 140, 141, 225 Hoops: sound tests, performances , 140 Higgins, Dick, 55, 56 Highmore, Ben, 110, 113, 116, 118, 119 Hi Red Center (HRC), 55, 56 Cleaning event , 58 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 9, 180, 212–215, 217, 227 Bataille monument , 212, 213 Holzer, Jenny, 83, 84 Truisms , 84 Homelessness, 127–131, 137, 157, 181, 225, 229 Homeless projection (Wodiczko), 127, 128 Homeless vehicle project (Wodiczko), 127, 128 Hong Kong, 5, 157 Hoops: sound tests, performances (Hester), 140 Horkheimer, Max, 82 Housing, 3, 5, 18, 25, 28, 34, 124, 157, 199, 213, 215 demolition of, 27 modern housing, 34, 63 Howard, Ebenezer, 36 How not to be seen (Steyerl), 199, 200

254

INDEX

I Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser), 79, 85, 86, 225 Ideology, 3, 4, 6, 12, 13, 18–20, 29, 48, 55, 64, 79–94, 99, 104, 109, 113, 116, 123–126, 128–132, 136, 137, 144, 150, 165, 174, 224–226 Improv Everywhere, 169 Instagram, 161, 196 Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin University of the Arts, 225 Institutional critique, 89, 113, 125, 126 Internet, 93, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 171, 172, 197, 203, 226 Istanbul, 183, 184

J Jaar, Alfredo, 83, 84 Jacobs, Jane, 13, 30, 33, 35–39, 50, 63, 223 Jameson, Frederic, 82, 83, 90, 91 Jeremy Bentham, 20 Jerusalem, 67, 68 Johannesburg, 149 Johnstone, Stephen, 110, 119 Jorn, Asger, 39, 43, 44

K Kaprow, Allan, 56, 59–61, 150 Fluids , 60, 61, 150 Self service, 60 Kassel, 121 Kester, Grant, 186 Knecht, Fabian, 121, 140, 143 Entladung , 143 Kraków, 126 Kruger, Barbara, 83, 84 Kwon, Miwon, 146, 147

L Labour cycles of productivity, 101, 225 dematerialised labour, 165 La fila (Sierra), 181 la perruque (De Certeau), 49, 66, 117, 144, 191 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 155, 163–166, 196 noo-politics, 164, 196 Le Corbusier, 13, 17, 20, 21, 24–27, 29, 33, 34, 36, 54, 63, 64, 223 Plan Voisin, 25 Ville Contemporaine, 25, 26 Lefebvre, Henri, 97, 101–103, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114–116, 118, 132, 157 abstract space, 102, 103 critique of everyday life, 111, 114, 115 differential space, 102, 132 Notes on the new town, 33 on the production of space, 101 production of space, 101, 102 representations of space, 101, 102 spatial practices, 101, 102 Lettrist International, 40, 41 LIGNA, Radioballett , 208, 210 Liverpool, 215 London, 7, 18–20, 45, 56, 57, 67, 69–71, 73, 85, 93, 140, 141, 148, 157, 207 Los Angeles, 10, 59, 60, 90, 103

M Maintenance art, 65 Manhattan, New York City, 18, 29, 46, 64, 66, 72, 121, 136, 162, 223 Marginalisation, 126, 129, 139 Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso, 54

INDEX

Marrying the barges: A barge ballet (Ukeles), 65 Marxism, 80, 111 Marx, Karl, 21, 86, 111 Communist Manifesto, 21 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 9, 61–64, 224 anarchitecture, 61–64 Splitting the Humphrey Street building , 63 May ’68 protests, 45, 116 Melbourne, 7, 10, 140, 145, 208 Mexico City, 67, 68, 106 Milan, 181 The minoritarian (Deleuze and Guattari), 190 The missing voice: Case study B (Cardiff), 71, 73 Modern architecture, 26, 37, 39, 61, 63, 65, 82 Modernism, 4, 13, 17, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 33, 35–40, 53, 59, 61, 223, 224 Modern urban design, 37 The molecular (Deleuze and Guattari), 191 Molesworth, Helen, 110, 113 Moses, Robert, 13, 17, 20, 21, 27–29, 33, 35, 63, 64, 223 Jones Beach State Park, 27–29 Triborough Project, 29 Mouffe, Chantal, 89, 92, 126 Mo’ui tukuhausia (‘Uhila), 129, 130 Mourenx, 33–36, 59, 114, 223 Mumford, Lewis, 8, 27 Münster, 119 Münster walk (Cardiff), 71 Mythic being (Piper), 133

N Neoliberalism, 5, 6, 90–94, 178, 181 and the city, 6, 92

255

Neo-panopticism, 98, 170, 174, 202, 205 acousticon, 170 banopticism, 99, 170 bio-opticism, 99, 170 mutations of panopticism, 99, 170 synopticism, 99, 170 Networks, 4, 7, 9, 11–13, 25, 48, 74, 83, 92, 93, 117, 124, 148, 150, 155–162, 164–166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 177, 185, 191, 192, 195–198, 200, 201, 203–208, 211, 212, 215, 218, 221–223, 226, 227, 229 Network society, 159 New Delhi, 145 New York, 38, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 84, 120, 124, 127, 129, 133, 137, 138, 157, 166, 169, 207 New York City, 27, 66, 106, 133 The New York City waterfalls (Eliasson), 149 Nice, France, 55–57 O Ögüt, Ahmet, 184 Somebody else’s car, 184 Oldenburg, Claes, 59–61 Autobodys , 59, 60 Orwell, George, 204 Os Gemeos, 162 P Panopticism, 98, 99, 155, 171, 174, 177, 196, 226 panoptic eye, 70 panoptic vision, 71 Panopticon, 98, 99. See also Panopticism Panopticon (PVI Collective), 200–202 Pan Studio, 206

256

INDEX

Hello lamp post , 206, 207 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 12, 110, 147 Paris, 13, 17–25, 30, 40, 43, 55–57, 66, 72, 81, 114–116, 118, 179 Park, Robert, 8 Participation art, 145, 177, 178, 185–187, 190, 191, 195, 207, 210, 214–216, 218 participants, 71, 73, 74 Pasadena, 61 Patheja, Jasmeen, 189 Talk to me, 189, 190 Performance art, 66, 67, 97, 103, 106, 110, 129–133, 136, 138, 145 Pile, Steve, 102 Piper, Adrian, 133, 134, 136 Catalysis , 133 Mythic being , 133 Pittsburgh, 190 Pixelator (Eppink), 166, 167 Plan Voisin (Le Corbusier), 25 Pokémon Go, 169 Pope.L, William, 9, 106, 123, 136–139, 225 Thunderbird immolation, 138 Tompkins Square crawl , 137 Pop-up art (Burke), 145 Possibility (in art), 34, 48, 82, 94, 114, 128, 160, 161, 188 open-ended possibilities, 72 Postmodern architecture, 82, 90, 91 Post-structuralism, 46 Precariat (theory of), 2, 214 Precarity, 129, 214, 215 Presencia (Galindo), 134, 135 Psychoanalysis, 102 psychogéographie, 40–43, 45, 68, 74, 144, 224. See also The Situationists Psychogeography, 42, 44, 207, 211, 224

Public art, 10, 11, 189 Public space, 3, 6, 11, 35, 55, 57–59, 69, 83, 84, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 113, 120, 126, 128, 130–135, 138, 140, 144–146, 148, 150, 168, 169, 186, 188, 189, 196, 200–202, 205, 209–212, 221, 227 PVI Collective, 9, 196, 200–202, 210, 211, 227 Deviator, 208, 210, 211, 227 Panopticon, 200–202 R Radioballett (LIGNA), 208–211, 227 Rakowitz, Michael, 129 Rancière, Jacques, 12, 89, 177, 188, 189, 192 Rational-functional order, 3, 8, 13, 21, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 46–48, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 65, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 115, 222, 224, 228 Rationalism in architecture, 19, 39 Relational aesthetics, 13, 166, 178–180, 182, 184, 186, 190, 191, 208, 212, 217, 227. See also Bourriaud, Nicolas Relational antagonism, 180–182, 190, 214 Rendell, Jane, 10, 11 Repressive State Apparatuses (Althusser), 86 Robots today (Steyerl), 7, 198, 199 Roskilde 2016, 197 Ross, Kristin, 114 Ruscha, Ed, 60 S Sadler, Simon, 27, 39–45, 64 San Francisco, 157

INDEX

Sassen, Saskia, 157 Global cities, 157 Schneemann, Carole, 103 Secret power (Denny), 172, 173 Self service (Kaprow), 60 7000 Oaks (Beuys), 120 Sennett, Richard, 101 Shanghai, 145 Shapolsky et al. (Haacke), 124 Shopping, 2, 4, 35, 37, 44, 60, 82, 83, 92, 113, 118, 133, 147, 158, 161, 165, 208 The mall, 83 Sierra, Santiago, 180, 181 La fila, 181 Site-specific art, 72, 145, 189 The Situationists, 33, 39, 40, 45, 112, 114–116 dérive, 40–43, 45, 66–69, 74, 224 détournement , 40, 41, 43, 45, 53, 64, 197, 224 psychogéographie, 40–43, 45, 68, 74, 144, 224 urbanisme unitaire, 41 Situations , 41. See also The Situationists Skulptur Projekte Münster, 71, 73, 119, 120, 198 Smart city, 158, 206, 207, 217, 226 Smithson, Robert, 61 Snowden, Edward, 172, 198 Socially engaged art, 9, 11, 12, 145, 185, 190, 195, 212, 215, 218, 227 Social media and the city, 14, 150, 160–162, 195, 198, 208, 218, 222 Social turn (in architecture), 216, 217 Social turn (in art), 178, 188, 216 Society of control, 164, 173, 226 Society of the spectacle, 112

257

The society of the spectacle (Debord), 39 Software, 11–13, 79, 80, 88, 90, 97, 100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 123, 140, 150, 155, 221, 223–226, 229 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum board of trustees (Haacke), 125 Somebody else’s car (Ögüt), 184 Sonfist, Alan, 120 Sontag, Susan, 61 Sound intervention, 141, 143 Space public space, 3, 6, 11, 35, 55, 57–59, 69, 83, 84, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 113, 120, 126, 128, 130–135, 138, 140, 144–146, 148, 150, 168, 169, 186, 188, 189, 196, 200–202, 205, 209–212, 221, 227 the production of space (Lefebvre), 101, 102 urban space, 1, 10, 12, 19, 22, 41, 42, 49, 56, 58–61, 68, 71, 73, 74, 83, 94, 97, 101, 105, 118–120, 129, 131, 132, 136, 140, 141, 144, 148, 155, 166, 169, 185, 190, 191, 200, 208, 211, 222, 226 Spectatorship, 185, 188–190 Spencer, Douglas, 90 Splitting the Humphrey Street building (Matta-Clark), 63 Steyerl, Hito, 7, 196, 198–200 How not to be seen, 200 Robots today, 7, 198, 199 St Petersburg, 21, 54 Street art, 115, 116, 148 Stuttgart, 141 Surveillance, 69–71, 98, 99, 156, 170, 171, 173, 174, 192, 196–198, 200–205

258

INDEX

Surveillance in art, 12 Sydney, 74, 110, 140, 157, 200–202 Synopticism, 99, 170, 200. See also Neo-panopticism T Tafuri, Manfredo, 79–85, 127, 225 ‘Towards a critique of architectural ideology’, 80 Taipei, 200 Talk to me (Patheja), 189, 190 Tati, Jacques, Trafic, 60 Taylorism, 34, 61 Technology, 157, 159, 164, 168, 169, 171, 185, 205, 208, 210, 218 audio, 72, 74 augmented reality, 169 communication networks, 107, 150, 155, 156, 159–161, 167, 169, 185, 195, 199, 210, 226, 227 digital, 74, 156–158, 205 digital technology, 168 information technology, 159, 160 new media, 164, 185 screen interfaces, 167–170, 185 simulation, 107 social media, 160, 170 Thunderbird immolation (Pope.L), 138 Thylacine (artist), 129 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 179, 180, 182 ® ™ark, 161 Tokyo, 55, 56, 58, 145, 146, 149, 157 Top-down order, 2, 6, 8, 12, 13, 17, 19, 30, 41, 46, 47, 50, 54, 59, 66, 71, 79, 86, 102, 106, 117–119, 144, 150, 158, 196, 221, 223–225, 227, 229 Toronto, 207 Total art (Vautier), 57 Touch cinema (Export), 105, 131–133

Touch sanitation (Ukeles), 65 ‘Towards a critique of architectural ideology’ (Tafuri), 80 Traces (Alada˘g), 141–143 Tracking transience: The Orwell project (Elahi), 202, 204 Transparency society, 173, 174, 177, 193, 196, 206, 226. See also Han, Byung-Chul Truisms (Holzer), 84 U Uhila, Kalisolaite, 129–131, 225 Mo’ui tukuhausia, 129, 130 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 113 FLOW CITY , 65 Follow in your footsteps , 65, 66 Handshake ritual , 65, 66 Hartford wash: Washing, tracks, maintenance outside, 113 maintenance art, 113 Marrying the barges A barge ballet , 65 Touch sanitation, 65 Urban development, 125, 127, 128 Urban humanities, 9–11, 228 Urbanism, 10–12, 43–45, 83, 114, 179, 222 urbanisme unitaire, 41. See also The Situationists Urban planning, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 43, 56, 62, 63, 80, 103, 112, 128, 186, 223 Urban renewal, 30, 35, 43, 114, 126, 128, 215, 217 Urban-Think Tank, 216 V Vandalised phone box (Banksy), 148 van Eikels, Kai, 209

INDEX

Vautier, Ben, 55–59 Total art , 57 Venice, 93, 179 Venice Biennale, 142, 172 Vetter, Grant, 98, 99, 170, 171, 196, 200. See also Neo-panopticism Ville Contemporaine (Le Corbusier), 25, 26 Virilio, Paul, 155, 163, 167–169, 196 Vostell, Wolf, 56 W Warr, Tracey, 103, 107 Webber, Melvin, 156 Weber, Max, ‘iron cage’, 26, 82 Weiwei, Ai, 195, 203–205 With flowers , 196, 203, 204 Weleski, Dawn, and John Rubin, 190 Conflict kitchen, 190 WikiLeaks, 162

259

With flowers (Weiwei), 196, 203, 204 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 37, 84, 123, 124, 127, 180 Homeless projection, 127, 128 Homeless vehicle project , 127, 128 parrhesia, 126 The city hall tower projection, 126, 127 World War II, 114, 116 The world won’t listen (Collins), 183, 184 Y The Yes Men, 196–198 Roskilde 2016 data policy, 197 YouTube, 162 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 89