The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts 9783030553883, 9783030553890

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The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

Edited by Gregory Blair · Noa Bronstein

The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

Gregory Blair · Noa Bronstein Editors

The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

Editors Gregory Blair Evansville, IN, USA

Noa Bronstein Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-55388-3 ISBN 978-3-030-55389-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 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 image: Jessica Thalmann, Utopos (Computer Engineer Working in Lab B10), folded archival pigment print, 2015 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts Gregory Blair

Part I 2

1

Displacements

From Place-Making to Placelessness: How Arts Organizations Attend to Issues of Displacement and Affordability Noa Bronstein

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Tong Yan Gaai: Redefining Racialized Spaces Morris Lum

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Mapping Evictions: Urban Displacement and the Myths of the Sharing Economy Noni Brynjolson

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The City as a Composition: Working Through Geographies of Identity, Belonging, and Memory Joshua Hagen

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CONTENTS

Out of Place: Displacements of the Body in Artistic Practice Gregory Blair

Part II 7

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Disruptions

Losing Site: Folded Morphologies of Photography and Brutalist Architecture Jessica Thalmann

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Souped Up: Slow Building of Support Networks Through Commensality Marsya Maharani and Geneviève Wallen

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Mapping as Aesthetic Practice: Toward a Theory of Carto-Aesthetics Simonetta Moro

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Learning from Las Vegas Redux: Steve Wynn and the New Business of Art Dorothy Barenscott

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Epilogue Noa Bronstein and Gregory Blair

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Dorothy Barenscott is an art historian whose research relates to the interplay between urban space and emerging technology and media forms in the articulation of a range of identities. Her publication record reflects these interests with examinations of painted panoramas, experimental and mainstream cinema, modern architecture, conceptual photography, radical place-making, theories of the avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, and the business of art and art collecting. Barenscott is co-editor of Canadian Culinary Imaginations (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), an interdisciplinary collection that explores how Canadian writers, artists, academics, cooks, performers, and gallery curators are inspired and challenged by the topic of food, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Postmodern Culture Journal, Invisible Culture, History and Memory, and Mediascape. Barenscott completed her Ph.D. in Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia, and currently teaches modern and contemporary art history and theory in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Fine Arts Department. Outside of her academic research, Barenscott acts as an art consultant for Openwork Art Advisory, leads interdisciplinary student groups on field schools to global art cities, and maintains a public blog, Avant-Guardian Musings, dedicated to visual culture research and pedagogy. Gregory Blair is an artist, writer, and educator whose research incorporates interdisciplinary art practices, mobility studies, cultural geography, environmental aesthetics, continental philosophy, eco-criticism, and vii

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philosophies of place. Greg has exhibited his artwork and presented his research both nationally and internationally, in locations including Portugal, Italy, NYC, New Orleans, Boston, Alaska, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Canada. His first book, Errant Bodies, Mobility, and Political Resistance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. His most recent solo exhibition titled, Topographies of Memories, was exhibited at the Brookings Arts Council in SD. From 2009 to 2019, Greg was an Associate Professor of Art at Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD. Greg is originally from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and currently resides in Evansville, Indiana with his wife, two children, and their energetic firecracker of a dog, Luna. Noa Bronstein is a curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice is most often focused on considering issues around place and space-making and thinking through how artists disrupt and subvert systems including those registering across social, political, and economic structures. Noa has held several positions in the arts including Executive Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, inaugural Senior Curator at the Small Arms Inspection Building, and Project Manager at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her writing has appeared in such publications as PREFIX Photo, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, The Journal of Curatorial Studies and C Magazine. Recent curatorial projects include When Form Becomes Attitude at Contemporary Calgary, bust/boom at The New Gallery (Calgary), With an instinct for justice at Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto) and Aleesa Cohene’s solo exhibition I Don’t Get It at Gallery 44 (Toronto), The Rooms (St. John’s), and Western Front (Vancouver). Noa is currently the Executive Director of Gallery TPW. Noni Brynjolson is an art historian who studies collaborative public art projects. Her research analyzes large-scale, long-term works in which artists address the politics of housing and neighborhood redevelopment through forms of cultural production and community organizing. Noni is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism and her writing has appeared in FIELD as well as in Hyperallergic, Akimbo, Geist and Craft Journal. Noni completed her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego in 2019. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Indianapolis.

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Joshua Hagen Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Dr. Hagen has published widely on issues related to the cultural politics of architecture, urban design, historic preservation, and memory. His recent publications include the books The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity and Building Nazi Germany: Space, Place, Architecture, and Ideology. Morris Lum is a Trinidadian born photographer/artist whose work explores the hybrid nature of the Chinese-Canadian community through photography, form, and documentary practices. His work also examines the ways in which Chinese history is represented in the media and archival material. Morris’ work has been exhibited and screened across Canada and the United States. He is currently working on a cross North American project that looks specifically at the transformation of the Chinatown. Marsya Maharani is an independent curator, working exclusively in collaboration with others—including as part of the collectives Gendai, Younger Than Beyoncé, and MICE Magazine. Informed by her position as an immigrant and settler, her projects explore experimentation in learning, working, and playing together that nourishes diverse ways of thinking, specifically in relation to feminism, decolonization, and meaningful inclusion. This is reflected in recent and ongoing collaborative projects that test models of profit-sharing (MOCA Goes Dark: Night Visions ), resource-sharing (Gendai MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration), and kitchen table knowledgesharing (Souped Up). She is interested in the practice of collective care and radical friendship as grounds for institutional structure, work culture, and labor practices. She has worked institutionally as Assistant Curator at Sheridan College and as Exhibition Coordinator at the Art Museum and the University of Toronto. Currently Marsya serves on the board of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and is a Toronto Arts Council Leaders Lab Fellow. She holds an M.A. in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories from OCAD University and will be pursuing a doctorate degree at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She was born in Jakarta and now lives in Toronto/Tkaronto. Simonetta Moro is a visual artist and theorist, with a focus on painting, drawing, and mapping practices. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, including Galleria del Carbone, Ferrara, Italy; BRIC Art House, New York; Center for Architecture, New York; Museum of Contemporary

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Art, Chicago; the American Academy in Rome, Italy; the Harris Museum, Preston, UK. Moro’s research in cartographic aesthetics informs many of her works and academic papers, including a book she is currently writing, Cartographic Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art (forthcoming by Routledge: Advances in Art and Visual Studies, 2021). Moro graduated with a Ph.D. in Fine Arts, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK; MA European Fine Arts, Winchester School of Art, UK; and BFA Painting, Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna, Italy. Simonetta Moro currently lives in New York City, and is the Director and Associate Professor at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). Jessica Thalmann is an artist and educator currently based in Toronto and New York City. She received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a BFA in Visual Arts from York University. Thalmann has taught at the International Centre for Photography, Akin Collective, MacLaren Art Centre, Toronto School of Art, Gallery 44 and City College of New York. She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada, and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, California, USA. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at Aperture Foundation, International Centre for Photography, Camera Club of New York Baxter St, and Humble Arts Foundation (New York), VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), Museum of Contemporary Art, Harbourfront Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Angell Gallery, Gallery TPW, Art Spin, and Gales Gallery at York University (Toronto). Her first solo museum exhibition at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham is forthcoming. Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer. She obtained a BFA in Art History at Concordia University (2012) and a MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University (2015). Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative futurities, and healing platforms. Her ongoing research focuses on the notion of longevity as a methodology for resistance and care work in the arts. Her most recent curated exhibition, Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020), was on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Wallen contributed essays for C magazine and the anthology Other Places; Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, edited by Deanna Bowen. She is an Exhibition Coordinator at Fofa Gallery, a member of YTB (Younger Than Beyoncé) collective, and is the co-initiator (with Marsya Maharani) of Souped Up a thematic dinner series conceived to carve spaces for care and support building among BIPOC curators and cultural workers.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 3.7

Fig. 3.8

Golden Happiness Plaza, Calgary. Archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist) Mississauga Chinese Centre, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 8 × 10 inches, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist) Royal Dragon Chinese Restaurant, Mississauga, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist) Blue Lagoon Seafood Restaurant, Mississauga, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist) 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist) 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist) 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2016 (Image courtesy of the artist) Market Alley, West Facing, Vancouver, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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Fig. 3.9

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Fig. 3.11

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Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Wong King Har Wun Sun Association, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2016 (Image courtesy of the artist) Lim Family Association 121 Dundas Street W, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist) New Chinatown, Los Angeles. Archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2018 (Image courtesy of the artist) Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, All San Francisco Eviction Notices, 1997 –2019, 2019 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, SF Loss of Black Population, 1970–2017 , 2017 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Bay Area Evictor: Michael Marr, 2017 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) Lee monument in New Orleans after the removal of the Lee statue in 2018 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author) The Bronze Soldier in Tallinn after its relocation in 2007 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author) The City Palace in Berlin during reconstruction in 2016 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author) A reconstructed section of the Berlin Wall as part of the Berlin Wall Memorial (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author) Jamie Smith, Spatial Intervention documentation, 2014 (Image courtesy of the artist) Jamie Smith, Spatial Intervention documentation, 2014 (Image courtesy of the artist) The Ninth Floor, 2-channel HD video installation by Jessica Thalmann, 8 minutes, sound, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist) Utopos (Hall Building), folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 48 × 62 inches, unique, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6

Fig. 10.7

Utopos (Computer Engineer Working in Lab B10), folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 48 × 52 inches, unique, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist) Such Places as Memories, folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 17 × 22 inches, unique, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist) Faults and Fractures (Freeway Park), archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 10 × 14 inches, edition of 3, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist) Elevations (Travertine), archival pigment print on Bristol and foam by Jessica Thalmann, 42 × 48 × 18 inches, unique, 2020 (Image courtesy of the artist) Multi-media installation The Laboratory of Dilemmas by George Drivas, 2017. Presented at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017 (Photograph by Simonetta Moro. Image courtesy of the author) In Pursuit of Venus [infected] by Lisa Reihana, Ultra HD video, color, sound, 64 min across a 26 meters screen, 2015–2017. Presented at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017 (Photograph by Simonetta Moro. Image courtesy of the author) Bellagio Model Makers, c. 2000 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections) Dale Chihuly Sculpture Fiori Di Como, in Bellagio lobby, 1998 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections) Picasso restaurant in Bellagio, c. 1998 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections) Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, 2018 (Photograph by David Shane. Image courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic) Wynn interior, Las Vegas, 2008 (Photograph by Jim G. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons) Dining Tables and Chairs on Red Carpet, Wynn Casino, Las Vegas, c. 2005 (Photograph by Ryan Grewal. Image courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic) Wynn and Encore, Las Vegas, 2008 (Photograph by Rob Young. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 10.8

Fig. 10.9 Fig. 11.1

Jeff Koons, Popeye (2009–2011) was purchased by Wynn at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014 for $28 million and placed in the rotunda where the Wynn and Encore hotels intersect (Photograph by Dorothy Barenscott. Image courtesy of the author) Wynn Encore Macau, 2011 (Photograph by WiNG. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons) New Orleans: St. Claude Avenue along Marigny section (Image courtesy of Infrogmation, 2008)

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CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts Gregory Blair

Introduction The word “transgression” is rich and robust with a multitude of meanings. It can suggest an action that is a violation or something that contradicts a code or law. There is also an inherent spatial quality built into its Latin etymology that intimates a “going beyond.” As a metaphor, transgression evokes imagery of “stepping over”—the movement in space past a defined boundary or limit. Historically, there have been numerous theoretical conceptualizations and descriptive methodologies that incorporate transgression—many of which are echoed throughout this anthology. For example, the philosopher Michel Foucault consistently wrote about, and made use of, transgression. For Foucault, transgression represented, “the still silent and groping apparition of a form of thought in which the interrogation of the limit replaces the search for totality and the act of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions.”1 In terms of this anthology, Foucault’s conception is helpful and productive because

G. Blair (B) Evansville, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_1

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he (re)frames transgression as a search, as an adaptable and constructive method of seeking new knowledge. The interminable presence of transgression in Foucault’s own thought and oeuvre is given a detailed exposition by Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan in their text: Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression. Another philosopher, bell hooks, has also written about how she has latched onto transgression as a cornerstone of her methodology. For hooks, transgression is wonderfully productive, because as she states, “I cross boundaries to take another look, to contest, to interrogate, and in some cases to recover and redeem.”2 The human geographer Tim Cresswell has also completed extensive research on transgression including the publication of such texts as: Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects and In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. What interests Cresswell so much about transgression is how physically crossing a boundary holds the potential for a rupture in the normative social order. “The geographical ordering of society” writes Cresswell, “is founded on a multitude of boundary making—of territorialization—whose ambiguity is to simultaneously open up the possibilities for transgression.”3 The cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa was also drawn to the possibilities of transgression throughout her lifetime. In her formative text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she writes, “I am a border woman.”4 A little further on in her writing she explains how she has adopted transgression as a mode of existence—a way of being the new mestiza. A mestiza or mestizo is a word traditionally used in Spain and Latin America to indicate to someone of shared Indigenous American and European descent. For Anzaldúa, being a mestiza meant that “Perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death.”5 For Anzaldúa, transgression became essential as the only way to survive.

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The writer Malcolm Gladwell has also alluded to the practice of transgression in a recent interview in which he discussed cultural subversion. His portrayal of subversion and how one might practice it, is included here to additionally widen our notion of what transgression can be, and also to emphasize the eclectic range of cultural figures that have practiced and played with transgression—from artists and philosophers to writers and geographers. As you read the following quotation from the interview, imagine Gladwell saying “transgression” when he says “subversion:” “You do rebellion in the beginning, but rebellion is often kind of mindless. You do subversion when you understand your culture enough to figure out how to properly critique it—when you take a little needle, and you insert it exactly in the right place, and you make the status quo squirm.”6 Gladwell provides such an ardent and poetic portrayal of the power of subversion/transgression, and I think he would be sufficiently comfortable with the shift in utterance that I have suggested. Transgression is often related to subversion—swapping one for the other is sometimes not really much of a stretch. Another recent discourse on transgression that has a kinship with Gladwell’s comments was contemplated in an issue of the radical revolutionary socialist journal, Red Wedge. In late 2018, an entire issue was dedicated to the “defense of transgression.” In their editorial for the issue, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl put forth their notion of transgression as a fundamental building block for human beings because it is the “starting point for human self-discovery, of which art is a key and unavoidable part.”7 By touching upon these manifold and disparate variations of transgression, I have intended to demonstrate and embrace the ambiguity of transgression. This text purposefully embraces a vague and open-ended notion of transgression, which David Sibley adroitly describes as: “Crossing boundaries, from a familiar space to an alien one which is under the control of somebody else, can provide anxious moments; in some circumstances it could be fatal, or might be an exhilarating experience—the thrill of transgression.”8 Sibley reminds us that transgression is not always appreciated and for some, may even end up being devastating or debilitating. Similarly, Shannon Bell writes that, “in many acts of transgression the intent is not resistance.”9 In Chapter 2, Noa Bronstein examines an instance in which there is a possibility of forced displacement and unwelcomed transgression. Bronstein highlights the bellicose spirit of those potentially being displaced as she posits possible answers to some of the questions Foucault

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asked in his ruminations on transgression in A Preface to Transgression. Originally written for a 1963 issue of Critique which was dedicated to its founder, George Bataille, after his recent passing, in A Preface to Transgression, Foucault wonders about the limit (what we might call the context, site, or place) and if it can “have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? What becomes of it after this act and what might it have been before?”10 Several chapters in this anthology analyze the adverse effects of transgression as their writers wonder about the future of the places and people that are transgressed against. For example, in Chapter 4, Noni Brynjolson explores the practices of the artist/activist collective Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and how they fight for the rights, lives, and place-based histories of those displaced by a process of urban gentrification in the Bay area of California. Transgression, in all of its nuanced and subtly manifested forms, comprises the overarching focus of critique for this text. This project is an anthology that aims to explore and elucidate the various political repercussions of spatial transgressions (either through the displacement of bodies and other entities or the disruption of how we experience space) in the art world. It is distinctive because it explores two of the main variants of spatial transgression—displacements and disruptions— in a fresh and unique manner that reveals both the constructive and deconstructive nature of displacements and disruptions. These two variants have also been used to develop an organization and structure for the text. We have decided to categorize and conceptualize transgression using these two modes, in order to delineate Parts I and II of this book. This categorization has been created in a way that has been purposely left nebulous enough to encompass the divergent manifestations of transgression presented in each chapter. Part I: Displacements examines the physical and symbolic movement or reorientation of bodies, artifacts, objects, and organizations from the places that they are expected to occupy. The rippling effects of these displacements are considered for both the displaced and the spaces left behind. Some of the chapters reveal how people are often coerced into places they don’t want to be, or as in some cases, places they are unwelcome as persona non grata. The delineation of space is built upon exclusion and each of the chapters in Part I considers the tangled web of conditions and consequences that those exclusions manifest. Often these geographies of exclusion become so naturalized and normalized that they can disappear from our consciousness—which is exactly what

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the Situationists feared was happening in the Parisian urban sprawl of the mid twentieth century. This trepidation urged them to find a “new city through calculated drifting (dérive) through the old. Theirs would be a city of play, love, adventure, arousing new passions.”11 I often use a personal anecdote to demonstrate how we can easily and innocently lose our view of the exclusions that exist in place. The story begins with a student describing a research project they had been working on, in which they claimed to have captured a full representation of the population of a small city by surveying people from various religious, ethnic, social, and age groups that attended classes at the local university. I asked her if she was worried about excluding the voices of those not represented by the student body at the university. I clarified that because of the conceptions and perceptions of the university and the space that it occupied, certain members of the community may never set foot on campus—because of distance, stigma, intimidation, economic conditions, etc.—and therefore would not be represented in her survey. My point of sharing this story is certainly not to belittle the student or emphasize the gap in her method, but rather, to demonstrate how we all can become blind to the exclusions that borders create—similar to what occurs with other forms of privilege blindness. Part I takes on the topic of spatial displacements in the arts and the exclusions that they may consciously or unconsciously create. Part II: Disruptions leans more toward Gladwell’s vision of subversion and how it can be related to transgression. These chapters and the artistic practices or aesthetic strategies that they describe, critique the conventional logic and normalized behaviors that have been established for the experience and understanding of certain places. Many of these strategies form radical alternative methodologies that may include transgression, geographies of resistance, or psychogeographies. These spatial performances of disruption set into motion a critical exchange between the subject, space, and materiality, in which ideology and experience are both produced/spatialized and deconstructed/destabilized. Much of the discourse in this section is also in kinship with Nato Thompson’s Experimental Geography in which “artists [and other cultural producers] either disrupt given power relations or reveal the power structures that remain hidden.”12 In doing so, they often attempt to reconfigure aesthetic or geographical experiences, providing a new type of encounter with place. A unifying theme that bridges Parts I and II is the concentration on anthropological space—the human conditions and effects of spatial

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displacements and disruptions. This specific focus is not intended as a centrism towards the anthropocene. While we recognize the growing discourse about the agency of place outside of its human inscriptions, this anthology mostly explores the human relation and transgression of place. As a whole, this project adheres to geographer Edward Soja’s characterization of place as the “uninterrupted flux of human practice—and experience thereof—in time and space.”13 Since Soja mentions it here, it may be helpful to pause for a brief distinction of terms and how they are conceived in this anthology. Throughout this text, both “space” and “place” are repeatedly used as central appellations. Both “place” and “space” carry a plethora of meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary lists nineteen different definitions for the word “place,” an abundance which poses its own set of problems. Along with “space,” “place” has been an ongoing source of dispute and conjecture in differing strains of art, philosophy, social science, and geography. This project heavily draws upon the distinctions between place and space that Cresswell makes in his book, Place: A Short Introduction. Cresswell provides a distinction between “space” and “place,” by devoting a chapter to “work that uses place as an analytical concept that involves the process of shaping meaning and practice in material space.”14 For Cresswell, space is more abstract than place, serving as the stuff from which places with particular meaning emerge. The environmental writer Lawrence Buell provides a similar differentiation between space and place: “Place entails spatial location, entails a spatial container of some sort. But space as against place connotes geometrical or topographical abstraction, whereas place is ‘space to which meaning has been ascribed.’”15 As you read through the following chapters, “space” and “place” may sometimes be applied interchangeably, but no matter what word is used, it is not intended to imply abstract space. Instead, for our usage, both words denote something similar to Gaston Bachelard’s notion of space that is made intimate, precious, fetishized, or even comprise an “area of being” through engagement or experience.16 Whether they emerge as displacements or disruptions, this anthology brings together “domains of transgression where place, body, group identity and subjectivity interconnect.”17 Within these displacements and disruptions one may sense that what is often at stake is the controlling or concealment of being. In this sense, these displacements and disruptions operate in a similar manner to Heidegger’s aletheia. As an unveiling, opening, and disclosure, aletheia was used by Heidegger to explain how

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being is revealed in time. For Heidegger, aletheia describes how being becomes unconcealed, and then is soon covered over by the familiar and mundane, by the everydayness of the world, only to be revealed again in time as a new understanding of being. Both the spatial displacements and disruptions included in this anthology explore how these experiences can provide a new understanding of the beings—both alive and non-sentient—that occupy certain places. To conclude this introduction and to entice you to read on, I offer a brief summary of each chapter in the words of each individual author— mapping the course of this anthology through the terrain of spatial transgressions in the arts. This text is not meant to be encyclopedic, but it does provide an overview of the variable permutations of spatial transgressions in the arts and also provides a sense of the extent to which transgressions can be politicized—through celebration, coercion, refutation, and radicalization. Chapter 2 begins with Noa Bronstein’s From Place-Making to Placelessness: How Arts Organizations Attend to Issues of Displacement and Affordability. Bronstein writes that throughout the chapter, she examines how arts organizations have long attended to our collective relationships to gentrification, venue displacement, urban sprawl, and concepts of land valuation and place. These interests compel larger questions around the ethical and political implications of occupying certain spaces or of being excluded from them. Given that affordable space to make and see art is becoming increasingly rare in many cities, these considerations continue to take on a certain level of urgency. As such, Bronstein considers the conceptual and physical ways in which arts organizations navigate displacement. In Chapter 3, Morris Lum focuses on his own artistic practice. Lum states that: This analysis addresses the evolution of Chinese heritage within North American communities. As a photographer, Lum maps immigration patterns of first and second generation Chinese Canadians and Americans. His images document the way cultural identity is expressed in architecture, which in turn reveals a sense of place for the Chinese community. The chapter will include an analysis of a photographic series that Lum has been working on over the last several years entitled: “Tong Yan Gaai” or Chinatown in Cantonese. Tong Yan Gaai is a journey taken across America and Canada on a path that was built by Chinese immigrants. Utilizing a large format camera, Lum searches for clusters of communities that over time have built Chinatowns for

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the purpose of integration and growth. His aim is to focus and direct the attention towards the functionality of the Chinatown and explore the generational context of how the “Chinese” identity is expressed in these structural enclaves. The work documents the memory and explores the future of the Chinese community in Canada and the United States. For the fourth chapter, Noni Brynjolson examines Mapping Evictions: Urban Displacement and the Myths of the Sharing Economy. Brynjolson explains that for many large urban centers around the world, processes of gentrification have been accelerated during the past decade by realestate speculation and the development of arts districts and creative city paradigms. These transformations of urban spaces involve the displacement of low-income people who are pushed out to make room for new condo buildings and the amenities that typically accompany them: from coffee shops, to breweries, to art galleries. What happens to the stories and memories of those who are evicted, and how might these narratives and cultural practices become part of a broader movement against displacement? Brynjolson addresses this question by focusing on the Oakland-based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective of artists and activists who have produced dozens of interactive, online maps that visualize displacement, and are accompanied by oral histories. Brynjolson considers the project in the context of the Bay Area, where histories of countercultural collectivism and entrepreneurial cyberculture are intertwined. This is visible in the aesthetic forms and relational practices of the sharing economy, in which companies like Airbnb have become extremely profitable by promising community and social connection. The AntiEviction Mapping Project mimics the networked aesthetics of sharing economy platforms, but repurposes their designs in order to critique their promises of collectivism and their material impact on neighborhoods. The maps and stories produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have been used by community organizations to advocate for rent control and affordable housing, and in this way, the project suggests possibilities for art to work against displacement—by using the tools of the sharing economy against itself. In examining this initiative, Brynjolson consider how it produces visibility, and how drawing attention to the stories and cultural practices of displaced individuals and communities can be used as a radical political tool. Joshua Hagen begins Chapter 5 by tackling urban historian Donald J. Olsen observation “that the city, as the largest and most characteristic art form of the nineteenth century, has something to tell us about the inner

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nature of that century.” As Hagen writes, it is this comment that serves as a starting point for thinking through the recent spate of displacements and replacements of public monuments, statuary, place names, and other markers of memory, identity, and belonging that increasingly manifests on a global scale. If we accept Olsen’s analogy of the city as a work of art, we can further conceptualize the city as a type of composition. The idea of “the city as composition” weaves together fundamental concerns intrinsic across the arts, literature, and geography, including attention to location, form, proximity, sequence, flow, and diffusion. The city as composition also frames public spaces as palimpsests; places subject to continual processes of rewriting, revision, reorganization, and reinterpretation that subsequently acquire a sepia patina accumulated through successive waves of humanity. This perspective centers the role of public space to serve as a repository of memory, identity, and belonging. Monuments, memorials, and place names are among the most prominent of the various commemorative markers scattered across the urban landscape, but on a more banal level, architecture and urban design also texture the spatiality of memory. Cumulatively, these places of memory and memories of places condition public discourses and counter discourses and in the process contour geographies of inclusion, exclusion, and occlusion. This chapter provides a conceptual framework for thinking through contemporary agitation regarding the (re)composition of public space, memory, identity and belonging, and in doing so, highlights how attention to the geographies of semiotics, performativity, and affect can tell us something about the inner nature of this century and the overall human condition. In Chapter 6, I consider displacements of the body in artistic practice by examining how some artists have strategically placed certain human bodies in specific places as political acts. These actions question the status of those bodies, which are often put in the position of a persona non grata. By inserting themselves or some other body into a place in which they are not expected or allowed to be, these artists ask us to question the conditions and circumstances in which places are made, leading to certain exclusions and inclusions. By investigating three specific works of art by Christian Philipp Müller, Santiago Sierra, and Keri Smith, I expose how these artworks critique the normalization of who is, and who is not, allowed to be in certain spaces. This revelation notes how these artworks should be considered critical political acts because they dispute the status quo of the geopolitics that have been mapped onto places by human beings. In doing so, these artworks acknowledge how the spatial

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distribution of power is a cultural construct often aimed at benefiting or controlling a specific group. In a Foucauldian sense, the delineation and designation of these places is taxonomical—a means of ordering and classifying space—with the intent of prescribing which bodies are welcome and which ones are not allowed. These artworks seek to reveal this very prescription, urging the viewer to reconsider its mutability, validity, and limitations. To open Part II: Disruptions, Jessica Thalmann describes how Chapter 7 is about her own artistic practice as it seeks to destabilize conventional methods of representation by radically transforming the ways in which we experience or perceive architecture and the urban environment. Thalmann’s series Utopos uses both images she has created herself and archival documents to rethink the meaning of history, memory, and loss while both disregarding and exalting the irreverence of monumental Brutalist architecture and photographs. Thalmann reveals how architectural spaces can be problematized by traumatic histories involving protests, shootings, and violence. The project is surprisingly personal in nature, and began by focusing on a shooting that occurred in 1992 at Concordia University in Montreal where Thalmann’s uncle, Phoivos Ziogas, was a professor killed during the massacre. To work through the emotional implications of his death and its reverberations throughout the family, the images of cold monolithic Brutalist buildings became distorted, organic, and malleable through the mechanism of folding, collage, and analog/digital photography. In a more recent series entitled Isometries, Thalmann focuses her concern on the rise and fall of buildings in the Toronto landscape. While brick gives way to concrete, steel, and glass, Thalmann explores how Walter Benjamin’s words “to dwell is to leave traces” applies more than ever to Toronto. As she reflects on the cultural and architectural legacy of Toronto’s iconic buildings, she reveals that through the collection of traces, the debris, the discarded remnants of the city, we might find clues to, not only the past, but also the possible futures that the past contained. Toronto reveals itself as a palimpsest: a collection of layers built up from half-forgotten stories, hand painted signs, and ruins of Modernist high-rises and bay-and-gable houses. Chapter 8 finds Marsya Maharani and Geneviève Wallen reflecting on their recent, ongoing project Souped Up. Through this chapter they revisit how the project manifested over the course of the past year, elaborating on the different iterations and sharing their goals and wishes for this

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platform. Souped Up explores communal meals and the creation of longterm reciprocal caring systems. For each meal the hope is to encourage community instead of competition amongst racialized arts practitioners conditioned to have a scarcity mentality, while also contributing to a supportive ecosystem for co-mentorship, radical friendship, resourcesharing, and collective governance as primary foundations. Around their table, there is no need for the maintenance of an over-theorized space, the guests do not have to be burdened with legitimizing goals. While mobilizing, they can also just be. In Chapter 9, Simonetta Moro investigates Mapping as Aesthetic Practice. Moro writes that she addresses the theme of ‘Transgressive Geographies’ through the concept of mapping, understood as a new cartographic aesthetic, or what she calls, a cartoesthetics, in modern and contemporary art. Moro situates the problem of mapping within the ‘spatial turn’ of poststructuralist philosophy and current literature on the ontology of cartography, exposing the nexus between topology, space-time, and memory. Mapping is thus seen as a new way of conceptualizing space-time, informing a variety of aesthetic forms and practices, with ontological, epistemological, and political import. In particular, this chapter will touch upon issues such as borders, dislocations, contaminations, and displacements, through a couple of examples from recent international art exhibitions, such as the 57th Venice Biennale and Documenta 14. It is posited that the emergence of ‘mapping’ as a ubiquitous theme in contemporary art’s discourse is to be attributed to the power of cartography to constitute a new worldview, paradigmatic of the postmodern era (rhizomatic, nomadic, horizontal, non-hierarchical, etc.), bridging the aesthetic, ontological and cognitive fields, and crossing a variety of disciplines. Moro further argues that artists deliberately deconstruct the rational appearance of the map to expose the architectonic of time through duration, which constitutes the space where mapping occurs, and to disclose new power dynamics at work in an increasingly borderless world. Dorothy Barenscott concludes Part II with a consideration of Steve Wynn and the New Business of Art. This includes how Wynn strategically transforms various spaces to produce specific experiences for the audience that engages with those spaces. As Barenscott explains, Steve Wynn, American businessman, casino magnate, and luxury hotel owner, is also one of the world’s most prolific art collectors. With a private collection valued at over half a billion dollars, Wynn has become as famous for

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his art collection as he has for placing many of his most prized works on full public display in his properties. Most recently, Jeff Koon’s Popeye (2009–2011), purchased at Sotheby’s for 28 million dollars, became the centerpiece at Wynn’s signature Encore Resort in Las Vegas, complete with its own 24-hour guard. This follows a long history of Wynn’s attempts to attract a new aspirational class of consumers to his art-themed and art-filled casinos and hotels—places and spaces that seek to impart, as Pierre Bourdieu would describe, a kind of cultural capital or embodied “habitus” where one least expects it. Indeed, when Wynn began the wholesale transformation of the Las Vegas strip in the 1990s, taking the casino hotel experience from gaudy, rudimentary, and transactional, to elegant, immersive, and sensational, he would undertake a re-envisioning of the city’s spatial and sensorial landscape, gambling, quite literally, on the idea that the placement of his private art collection into the public spaces and private design sensibilities of his hotels could revolutionize the Vegas experience. At the core of Barenscott’s analysis, she raises questions of how, and to what ends, Wynn is using art to create a successful business model, bringing us uncomfortably close to the present conditions of the art world, where esteemed art institutions seek to attract new publics and re-brand themselves within a shifting global art environment that is characterized by collapsing distinctions between private and public spaces and spheres of influence.18 The critical significance and magnitude of the politics of spatial transgressions in the arts emerges when we acknowledge, “space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively ‘produced’ through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.”19 The chapters in this anthology detail this process of production and restraint—revealing the fluctuations in spatial transgressions from thrilling to threatening. In doing so, this anthology intends to position itself within the discourse of the larger spatial turn that has unfolded over the last few decades within the arts, humanities, social sciences, and more specifically, human geography as detailed in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, Editors. Additionally, this topic holds value for scholars of various fields because of the increasing significance of geographies as part of the current conversation about art, evidenced by several recent publications including Experimental Geography by Nato Thompson, Sites Unseen by Trevor Paglen, and Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers by Karen O’Rourke. This anthology furthers the

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discussion and scholarship of spatial/social art practices because it offers a diverse array of perspectives, insights, and critiques for these significant subjects within contemporary art discourse.

Notes 1. C. L. Lemert and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression (Columbia Univ Press, 1982). 68. 2. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 2006). 5. 3. Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Univ of Minnesota Press, 1996). 149. 4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2012). Preface. 5. Ibid. 101. 6. Malcolm Gladwell and Ryan Dombal, “Malcolm Gladwell on the Music of His Life,” Pitchfork, accessed January 15, 2019, https://pitchfork.com/ features/5-10-15-20/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-music-of-his-life/. 7. Red Wedge, Red Wedge #6: In Defense of Transgression (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018). 4. 8. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (Routledge, 1995). 32. 9. Red Wedge, Red Wedge #6: In Defense of Transgression (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018). 27. 10. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell University Press, 1977). 34. 11. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, 2011). 17. 12. Nato Thompson et al., Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House, 2009). 21. 13. Edward Soja in David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (Routledge, 1995). 72. 14. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). 81. 15. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). 63. 16. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1st ed. (Beacon Press, 1969). 58. 17. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986). 25. 18. Written by Dorothy Barenscott. 19. Trevor Paglen in Nato Thompson et al., Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House, 2009). 29.

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Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (Aunt Lute Books, 2012). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 1st ed. (Beacon Press, 1969). Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). Cresswell, Tim, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Univ of Minnesota Press, 1996). ———, Place: A Short Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell University Press, 1977). Gladwell, Malcolm, and Ryan Dombal, “Malcolm Gladwell on the Music of His Life,” Pitchfork, accessed January 15, 2019, https://pitchfork.com/features/ 5-10-15-20/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-music-of-his-life/. hooks, bell, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 2006). Lemert, C. L., and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression (Columbia Univ Press, 1982). Red Wedge, Red Wedge #6: In Defense of Transgression (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018). Sibley, David, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (Routledge, 1995). Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986). Thompson, Nato, et al., Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House, 2009). Wark, McKenzie, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, 2011).

PART I

Displacements

CHAPTER 2

From Place-Making to Placelessness: How Arts Organizations Attend to Issues of Displacement and Affordability Noa Bronstein

Lamenting the loss of a neighbourhood’s character or grit seems a particularly lauded pastime for most urban dwellers. A costly condo goes up and a small but pricy restaurant replaces the local corner store and suddenly the taken for granted personality of a place is unsettled, or at least it is assumed to be. What exactly is it that these kinds of street-level changes indicate? Why do they matter so much? Who gains and who looses most when urban priorities are skewed too far in one direction or the other? These questions have been a source of increasingly urgent concern for urban-based arts organizations that often share in and are deeply impacted by gentrification. What follows is a look at one particular case study of arts displacement and context specific gentrification experienced by the cultural hub 401 Richmond, located in Toronto, Canada. In order to unpack this specific case study the issue of arts displacement is filtered through a spatial justice framework.

N. Bronstein (B) Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_2

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This chapter is meant to read as a thought experiment on the language and reasoning that might be applied to the increasingly complicated discourse around how space is valued and monetized. 401 Richmond is a shared space and a building that houses several artist-run centres. In keeping with the ethos behind these organizations, who value transparency, accountability, positionality and different forms of knowledge production, this chapter is based largely on my own observations and conversations with colleagues. I have purposefully chosen to focus on anecdotal “evidence” in order to challenge the very structures in which discussions around displacement typically transpire.

Case Study: 401 Richmond1 401 Richmond was founded by the Zeidler family in 1994. Under the leadership of Margie Zeidler, the historic building, once a smallscale factory in Toronto’s former garment district, has been restored to provide space to more than 140 microenterprises and arts organizations: artist-run centres, festivals, theatre companies, supportive arts institutions, environmental agencies, design firms, commercial galleries, social-service providers, artist studios, cafes, shops and a daycare among them. Like many similarly realized adaptive re-uses of industrial spaces, this one was envisioned as realizing Jane Jacob’s concept that new ideas need old buildings. In October of 2016, tenants of 401, myself included as the former Executive Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, received hand-delivered notices that spelled out the potential loss of affordable workspace in Toronto’s downtown core. The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), which calculates commercial property taxes based on “best and highest use,” determined that 401’s taxes should correspond to rampant commercial and condo development in the Richmond and Spadina neighbourhood. This would mean that Urbanspace, who owns and manages the building, would now be taxed based on market rents, as opposed to the subsidized rents currently being collected from tenants. A helpful analogy might be that this situation is comparable to the government collecting personal income tax based on the prospect that individuals could be paid as doctors or lawyers rather than on actual salaries. While the building and tenants had been paying incremental property tax increases of around two percent annually, this latest MPAC assessment was unsustainable for the building’s occupants

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who were suddenly absorbing unexpected rent increases of over $13,000 annually. Given the scales and operating budgets of most organizations in 401 this unanticipated rent increase was not fiscally manageable, especially because it was only the initial tax increase promised by MPAC. Concerned that the 2016 MPAC assessment was just the beginning of a race towards unprecedented valuations and unaffordable property taxes, the building’s tenants quickly mobilized and started pressuring the municipal and provincial governments to find a short and long-term solution that would safeguard 401 from further tax increases and, subsequently, higher rents. Interestingly, the City of Toronto rallied behind 401. Councillor Joe Cressy attended several tenant meetings convened to address this issue and worked closely with Margie Zeidler and the building’s internal special issues steering committee to rezone 401 and stave off at least some future tax hikes. Initially, the province of Ontario offered little support. One possible solution that the tenants pushed for: have the province adopt a new property tax class that would account for the realities of mixed use and creative spaces. This legislation would safeguard 401 tenants from inflated property tax (and therefore rent), and hopefully encourage socially engaged development practices that would incentivize more projects like 401 in the province of Ontario. The political context that contributed to 401’s taxation issue is rooted in policies and municipal priorities related to gentrification, property valuation and local development practices. For this particular context gentrification is defined as the changing of a neighbourhood due to an influx of affluent residents and commercial interests and subsequent increases in real estate values and an outflow of less affluent communities and business owners. According to Robert Murdie and Carlos Teixeira “gentrification in inner-city Toronto dates from the late 1960s and early 1970s and now includes much of the city’s central area.”2 Ute Lehrer and Thorben Wieditz explain that since the 1970s spatial separations in Toronto based on income levels have created a concentration and consolidation of prosperous neighbourhoods in the inner city and impoverished neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs.3 This trend “can be seen as the result of what Hackworth (2007) calls the three emerging forms of a ‘neoliberal spatial fix’: the relationship between (1) continued rapid suburban growth, (2) a volatile decline and disinvestment in the inner suburbs, and (3) considerable inner city reinvestment, often in the form of gentrification.”4 The approval of Toronto’s Central Area Plan in 1976 was a first step in the “reorientation of real estate investments towards the

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city center,” establishing a commitment to “expand Toronto’s finance, insurance and real estate industries” and “heralded Toronto’s process of ‘going global.’”5 These political bents have continued more recently as urban planning in Toronto has “actively contributed to the construction of a ‘competitive city’: new planning regulations at both the municipal and provincial level have been created which focus on increasing Toronto’s economic attractiveness on a global scale, supplemented by an array of social, cultural, ecological and other place specific assets.”6 Government policy and Richard Florida’s amplified influence in Toronto have facilitated ongoing gentrification vis-à-vis a sustained focus on: attracting and retaining international investors, the “creative class” and new middle class; utilizing targeted neighbourhoods in the marketing of desirable arts and cultural districts; and larger developments gaining traction through an increasingly globalized real estate industry.7 It is no surprise then that property value and tax has increased drastically in many of Toronto’s neighbourhoods, including the ward in which 401 is located. MPAC’s tax calculation, based on the “best and highest use,” overlooks the fact that 401 already operates at its best and highest use. 401 is certainly not a utopic space. It lacks total accessibility and, as everywhere, tensions do arise between tenants and the landlord. For the most part, however, it fosters a profound sense of camaraderie. At its best and highest use, 401 functions like an intimate neighbourhood. The kind of neighbourhood where furniture, installation materials or equipment is left out and ends up being re-used by a neighbour. Or the kind where, if you need a proverbial cup of sugar (in this case technical advice or help with a grant), you can ask next door and be sure to get help. Co-habitation creates many possibilities that foster artistic resiliency and knowledge sharing. As Deirdre Logue, development director at the video art distribution and programming centre Vtape, says, “intense mutual investments and productive co-dependence are fundamental to many of the arts organizations in 401, and the building itself reinforces these values.” Collaborative projects, of which there are copious examples, often materialize by way of accidental and organic cross-pollination, through the very human interactions that take place in the building— picking up kids from childcare, waiting in line for the washroom, getting a coffee and so on. One example is the reciprocal membership program between Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and Trinity Square Video, which was initiated through casual, in-passing conversations in the building’s shared spaces. Another similar example is that of

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video artist Deidre Logue’s sprawling solo exhibition (2017) that took place across Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Tangled Art+ Disability and Aspace Gallery in collaboration with the Images Festival. This too evolved out of less formal relationships and conversations between all the 401-based institutions. In many ways, 401 shares a likeness to the Salk Institute. Scientists working in Louis Kahn’s iconic building have remarked that the architecture shapes their work because generous stairwells and other interstitial spaces create conditions for accidental dialogue and togetherness. This is also the case in 401, in which social alchemy is forged by way of proximity to partners and peers and a building plan that promotes informal gatherings. This kind of spatial sharing further assists artists in securing meaningful professional development. When interviewed for this article several cultural workers, including Aidan Cowling and Sally Lee, credited 401’s supportive networks with helping them move between different organizations and roles within the building. “The building was so key to my entry into the Toronto art world,” artist Michèle Pearson Clarke explains. She recalls that volunteering with Inside Out LGBT Film Festival and spending time in 401 helped her enter other institutions and galleries. The welcome she received at Inside Out led to exhibiting with the media-arts focused artist-run centre, Trinity Square Video, which created more opportunities. As Clarke notes, the building’s shared audiences, stakeholders, patrons and communities mean that artists can more easily navigate through the art world, which can otherwise be unreceptive and inaccessible. As she notes, “What 401 did for me was allow me to give myself permission to make work as a black, queer, immigrant person, who didn’t go to art school and didn’t go to film school.” Multi-disciplinary artist Hiba Abdallah shares a similar sentiment about the building. She recalls that: My relationship with 401 started before I even lived in Toronto. I remember learning about the space in one of my undergraduate classes – it was presented as an example of what a physical space for an artist run community could look like. This was over a decade ago, and still today it remains an important building that houses a huge network of our artist culture. This year (2019) I participated for the first time in a show at 401 at Trinity Square Video. I found myself in amazement at the endless connections between artists that I have known for a long time and new ones I

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was just meeting – they all collided in that building. For a space that has consistently supported and brought together as many cultural practitioners as 401 Richmond has, it needs to be protected.

Adding to the chorus of voices on the significance of 401, community organizer and cultural worker Britt Welter-Nolan describes the building this way: “There are nascent projects and fledgling ideas that are vitally important to our city, and though they may not be fully formed, they need an environment that supports their growth. The Zeidler family, with their sensitive and collaborative vision for urbanism, have supported these nurturing environments that defy categorization and have enabled creative economies to exist.” One of the primary issues that MPAC’s 2016 assessment of 401 brought to the fore is that if tenants, all publicly funded non-profits and charitable organizations, vacated the building, it would be at the expense of taxpayer dollars. Renowned organizations Vtape, imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and FADO Performance Art Centre recently pooled their resources to jointly secure a long-term lease and to renovate a 7500-square-foot space on the 4th floor of 401 that includes offices, classrooms, a screening room and a research centre. Costing close to $1,000,000—mostly fundraised through public grants—the project was intended to leverage resources across several organizations to create security and long-term capacity building. Major renovations and capital improvements have been made in 401 by numerous additional organizations with long-term leases including Open Studio, A Space Gallery and Trinity Square Video. All of these projects have been made possible through municipal and provincial funding. At risk of becoming unstable undertakings, these particular tenants repeatedly tasked the Toronto and Ontario government to account for how they could so easily default on their own investments and gamble with their constituents’ assets. Due to the unexpected rent increases several organizations within 401 had considered layoffs and program cuts, while others were forced into making difficult budgetary decisions involving staffing and community engagement. At the height of the uncertainty over whether or not the tenants could find a solution to the taxation issue several discussions were had regarding the importance of place that the building provides.

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Jennifer Bhogal, former Executive Director of the print focused artistrun centre Open Studio, noted that moving to a different building might mean that the organization’s members could lose an accommodating, centrally located and public transit-accessible studio—a lifeline to emotional support, income generation and mental health for many people. South Asian Visual Arts Centre’s Executive Director, Indu Vashist, similarly expressed concern about smaller non-profits and arts organizations continuing to be pushed further out of the city and away from their publics. At Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography digital and analogue facilities also function as a safe space for storytelling and self-representation for underserved communities, including numerous youth-focused arts and social justice organizations. Gallery 44 feared that moving might destabilize these relationships that have been carefully built over time and, at least to a certain extent, tied to a location and a sense of place. “Though the immediate urgency is the tax issue, the larger question remains as to how the city relates with its marginalized communities and sectors—be it social housing or affordable artist’s studio space and rental spaces for not-for-profit organizations and small businesses,” says Zainub Verjee, the Executive Director of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. “These not-for-profit organizations are already under immense stress and this [tax] proposition will be the proverbial last nail into many of these organizations’ ability to survive.” As it happened, this was not entirely the case. Verjee was correct in pointing out the complexity at the core of this matter, but rather than this being the final chapter for 401 the tenants did manage to influence the city and province in adopting a new tax class for creative hubs. For now, cultural advocacy for how cities are designed—and what kinds of places and sectors are protected—proved successful. The case study of 401 is not entirely unique. It is a recognizable problem, a scenario known all too well through the many incarnations that gentrification takes on a local, national and international scale. In effect, 401 helped to create a more vibrant and commercially viable district and in so doing (almost) priced itself out of its own neighbourhood. This common cycle of art driving up real estate value which ultimately drives out art and artists has become a predictable and expected outcome of the urban condition. What 401 demonstrates specifically is that every loss of affordable living and working spaces indicates a shift in civic priorities. Artists and cultural workers tend to serve as society’s

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coalmine canaries. An unstable arts ecology can signal wider political symptoms of distress. Taking our current political pulse through case studies such as 401 can provide a productive opportunity to address larger issues around spatial justice and cultural production.

Spatial Justice Spatial justice emerged in the early 2000s as a critical concept that helped to illustrate the need for more socio-spatial thinking in regards to urban planning and design, academia and advocacy work. As the term implies, spatial justice acknowledges the connection between space and justice as integral to understanding how we arrive at our relationships. Spatial justice recognizes that how space is organized reflects social realities and injustices that profoundly impact on our lived experiences. Conceptually, spatial (in)justice is made evident through many concerns, including geographically uneven development; gerrymandering electoral districts; locational discrimination created through biases imposed on certain populations; redlining and ‘gray urbanism’ in which particular communities are denied full membership in politics and resource sharing. In other words, “space is not an empty void. It is always filled with politics, ideology, and other forces shaping our lives and challenging us to engage in struggles over geography.”8 Rooted in theoretical foundations dating to the late 1960s and 1970s, including Henri Lefebvre’s writing on the ‘right to the city,’ spatial justice is strongly associated with environmental and food justice and socially located discourses related to democracy, citizenship and sovereignty. Edward W. Soja, a key figure in developing the concept, states that: As both outcome and process, seeking spatial justice can be studied at multiple scales and in many different social contexts. Stretching the concept to its maximum scope, we can speak of unjust geographies involving the human body, as in debates about abortion, obesity, stem cell research, the transplantation of body parts, sexual practice, or the external manipulation of individual behavior. At the other extreme, the physical geography of the planet is filled with spatially defined environmental injustices, some of which are now being aggravated by the uneven geographical impact of social produced climate change and global warming. These two extremes, the corporeal body and the physical planet, usefully define the outer limits of the concept of spatial (in)justice and the struggle over geography…9

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Although not speaking directly to this topic, Linda Tuhiwai Smith frames space in a useful way that echoes back to discourses related to spatial justice and to the many ways we conceive of space more generally. She explains that concepts of space are “articulated through the ways in which people arrange their homes and towns, collected and displayed objects of significance, organized warfare, set out agricultural fields and arranged gardens, conducted business, displayed art and performed drama, separate out one form of human activity from another. Spatial arrangements are an important part of social life. Western classifications of space include notions such as architectural space, physical space, psychological space, theoretical space and so forth.”10 Tuhiwai Smith’s quote makes clear that space has many permutations and our relationships to these are produced and reproduced culturally and socially. More recent invocations of the right to the city posit a more equally distributed claim to co-creating space and to shaping the city to many needs rather than to a select few. Mark Purcell explains: “the goal [of the right to the city] is to encourage urban policies that promote justice, sustainability, and inclusion in cities.”11 He further states: Most agree that it is the everyday experience of inhabiting the city that entitles one to a right to the city, rather than one’s nation-state citizenship. As a result, most also emphasize the importance of the use value of urban space over and above its exchange value. Currently, in almost every city in the world, the property rights of owners outweigh the use rights of inhabitants, and the exchange value of property determines how it is used much more so than its use value. And so in almost all its forms the right to the city is understood to be a struggle to augment the rights of urban inhabitants against the property rights of owners.12

Spatial justice is a useful conceptual tool from which to consider the realities of arts-based displacement. When artists and arts institutions are displaced due to economic, social and political forces that weaken artistic resiliency what is at stake is the right to the city. Here I do not necessarily mean the city per se, but rather an expansive employment of this concept translating to the right to be able to co-create, access and shape space, place and cultural geographies. As I discuss above, this right to the city for arts institutions can include access to:

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• Density: Being able to leverage location in order to serve broad publics and numerous distinct communities. • Proximity: Being able to work and produce alongside peers and colleagues in order to foster resource sharing, collaboration and mutual support. • Transportation: Being able to operate along major public transit routes in order to ensure accessibility. 401 illustrates that the right to city and to seeking spatial justice is also a matter of, not just the right to exist but, the right to persist. Development practices, government policies and privatized and capitalist civic priorities often conflict with ensuring that arts institutions can fully participate as public actors in the spaces they occupy. When arts institutions are not able to put down roots, invest in infrastructure or to fulsomely act as neighbourhood stewards the ramifications are significant. This mode of displacement re-enforces precarity and vulnerability. Anectodatly, it is perhaps not surprising that smaller, grassroots arts organizations and non-profits are immersed in similar struggles for spatial justice as many equity-seeking communities and individuals. This is certainly due to the fact that grassroots organizations and equity-seeking communities have historically been co-committed to redressing socio-political power imbalances. Within 401, a commonly held concern about the potential loss of affordable working space in the downtown core (inner city) of Toronto relates to community experiences and choice. If artist-run centres and differently scaled organizations are not able to inhabit centrally located spaces, then the results are homogenous urban geographies. In Toronto, for instance, limited programing space and real estate prices remaining unchecked could result in exclusively monolithic cultural institutions being able to afford to remain in the city centre. This matters, in part, because larger cultural institutions are typically not able to be as nimble, improvisational, adaptive or malleable as smaller organizations. While an artist-run centre has the dexterity to program quickly and shape shift to current political moments and social movements in need of immediate address, larger institutions tend to be mired in slow-moving bureaucracy. For the purposes of this context, larger or conventional arts institutions are meant to generally include museums or galleries with blue

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chip collections and exhibitions, operating budgets in the millions (as opposed to thousands or hundreds of thousands) and possible academic or government affiliation. Artist-run centres, or what I will call smaller organizations, are meant to encompass independent organizations with restricted budgets and a focus on emerging and underrepresented artists and alternative and experimental art forms. Artist-run centres, or similarly positioned institutions, were founded specifically to address some of the failings entrenched in traditional art museums and galleries. These failings can include: privileging heteronormative content delivery methods; prioritizing white male artists; operating at scales that run counter to responsive programming models; adopting capitalist frameworks that perpetuate the commodification of culture; and drawing arbitrary distinctions between emerging and established artists and professional and community-based art. This is not to say that traditional art museums and galleries do not serve an important function but it is to say that the particular approach taken by these institutions needs to be balanced within a robust and diverse arts ecology that amplifies many voices, lived experiences and curatorial and pedagogical frameworks. Sarah Shulman explains in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination that “real artists–people who invent instead of replicate–need counterculture as a playing field.”13 She further explains that the “tight fist of prevailing institutions” can stymy the foundational conditions that encourage artistic production, namely–“freedom, oppositionality, imagination, rebellion, and interaction with difference.”14 Before I go on, there are serious risks to this line of thinking that needs to be addressed. Firstly, there is a danger here in fetishizing urban space to the point of presuming that arts institutions cannot thrive or find allied audiences when located in suburban or rural settings. This is certainly not the case. Urban sites and arts institutions, however, have historically supported one another in generating and cultivating artistic possibility and origination, which should not be overlooked. Secondly, focusing on the importance of the arts within urban contexts can read as Richard Florida-esque. While Richard Florida maintains that it is important to sustain artistic production in urban areas because the sector reinforces positive economic impacts, I am arguing that the value proposition of spaces such as 401 and small-scale arts organizations is not economic or monetary. As previously mentioned, the “best and highest use” of spaces such as 401 is rooted in supporting diverse artistic practices, collaboration, cultural reciprocity and communal resource sharing. Looking to

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Purcell again, 401 demonstrates “the use value of urban space over and above its exchange value.”15 Surely the arts cannot be separated out from wider market conditions but the impact of the arts is social not merely commercial. Finally, it is essential to note that many small arts-based organizations are complicit in creating the conditions that encourage gentrification and that displace more vulnerable populations. This is not excusable or justifiable but does articulate the complications of occupying certain spaces, wherein some public actors may be both the displacer and the displaced. This chapter is clearly attuned to a particular dimension of this complicated reality, which is admittedly a limitation of focused case studies such as this one. It could be argued that grassroots organizations are more often able to truly reflect the community they serve for several reasons. One of these is that small staffing models create opportunities for artists and community members to directly interface and converse with decision-makers. Whereas within larger cultural spaces the opportunity for a direct audience with a CEO, director or senior curator is rare or highly unlikely unless you happen to be an internationally-renowned artist or high-level donor. I have seen the importance of inter-connectedness at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography many times. Leaders within Gallery 44 are also, out of necessity, called on to answer the phone, set-up for a program or tend to administrative tasks. This blurring of distinction between back and front of house creates a certain level of transparency that diminishes barriers between those managing the institution and members of the public. Direct access allows cultural workers to build trust with community members and to be held accountable to many different stakeholders precisely because they know who these stakeholders are. Another reason that artist-run centres can more readily meet community need is that in Canada these non-profits take risks and offer radical, oppositional and challenging programs in-concert with community interests because they are publically funded and therefore less reliant than larger organizations are on conservative donors and risk-averse corporate sponsors. Certainly, there are many large institutions that challenge their own privilege and many smaller ones that have professionalized to the point of no longer maintaining a community-focused mandate. For the most part, however, substantial differences in scale and scope continue to demarcate cultural institutions from one another. Differentiating institutional strengths and values is constructive in highlighting why it is that the displacement of small-scale arts organizations registers significantly on the

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urban landscape. Arguably, city centres that exclusively accommodate one typology of cultural institution fail to offer the public and artists themselves a multiplicity of experiences and different levels of engagement with cultural institutions. To put it another way, we might consider the parallels between food justice and art justice. Aside from issues pertaining to food deserts, it might be fair to say that a spatially uneven urban environment would be one filled with box stores while being devoid of access to religiously appropriate foods (Halal and Kosher foods for example), locally owned restaurants offering different price points or corner grocery stores that carry culturally specific options. These kinds of diverse selections ensure that space is held for many different needs, tastes and cultural appetites. Although art meets indirect human needs as compared with food, variety in both supports diversity within the cityscape. “In the broadest sense, spatial (in)justice refers to an intentional and focused emphasis on the spatial or geographical aspects of justice and injustice. As a starting point, this involves the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them.”16 Supplanting emerging artists, alternative forms of artistic production and politicized and subversive practices easily pivots us towards a uniform arts ecosystem that unevenly dispenses with cultural assets and sanitizes cultural consumption. Ultimately, spatial shifts that displace certain arts-based organizations reinforce uneven geographies and the imbalanced distribution of immaterial needs.

Conclusion Spatial configurations that displace vulnerable arts institutions can create uniform public spaces through which the distribution of immaterial social resources becomes polarized. This kind of displacement is not a natural condition of the urban environment but rather a systemic issue that overtly values commerce over community. By applying a spatial justice framework to case studies such as 401 Richmond we might be able to repeal the value propositions that inform urban planning and to rearticulate the importance of arts-based place-making. Spatial justice helps to clarify the need for inclusionary practices within city centres which, to return to Shulman, defend “freedom, oppositionality, imagination, rebellion, and interaction with difference.”17

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Notes 1. This section of the article first appeared in Canadian Art on-line on July 27, 2017, the interviews for this article took place throughout May, June and July of 2017. 2. Robert Murdie and Carlos Teixeira, “The Impact of Gentrification on Ethnic Neighbourhoods in Toronto: A Case Study of Little Portugal,” Urban Studies 48, no. 1 (2011), 67. 3. Ute Lehrer and Thorben Wieditz, “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship Between Policies, Building Activities and Socio-economic Development in Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18, no. 1 (2009), 83. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 86. 6. Ute Lehrer and Jennefer Laidley, “Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2009), 790. 7. Ute Lehrer and Thorben Wieditz, “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship Between Policies, Building Activities and Socio-economic Development in Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18, no. 1 (2009), 85. 8. Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 19. 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonializing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 53. 11. Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013), 141. 12. Ibid., 142. 13. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 83. 14. Ibid., 82. 15. Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013), 141. 16. Edward W. Soja, “The City and Spatial Justice,” Justice Spatiale|Spatial Justice, no. 2 (2009), 2. 17. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 82.

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References Lehrer, Ute and Jennefer Laidley, “Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 4 (2009), 786–803. Lehrer, Ute and Thorben Wieditz, “Condominium Development and Gentrification: The Relationship Between Policies, Building Activities and SocioEconomic Development in Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18, no. 1 (2009), 82–103. Murdie, Robert and Carlos Teixeira, “The Impact of Gentrification on Ethnic Neighbourhoods in Toronto: A Case Study of Little Portugal,” Urban Studies 48, no. 1 (2011), 67. Purcell, Mark, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013), 141–154. Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013). Soja, Edward W., Seeking Spatial Justice (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2010). Soja, Edward W., “The City and Spatial Justice,” Justice Spatiale|Spatial Justice, no. 2 (2009), 1–8. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, Decolonializing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012).

CHAPTER 3

Tong Yan Gaai: Redefining Racialized Spaces Morris Lum

Introduction Over the years I’ve had to adjust, adopt, and change the way that I research, investigate, and interpret Chinatowns. Since 2012, I have been searching for clusters of Chinatown communities that have been built across Canada and the United States for the purpose of settlement and growth. My aim is to focus and direct attention towards the functionality of Chinatowns and to explore the generational context of how “Chinese” identity is expressed in these structural enclaves. Armed with a large format camera, I have documented Chinatowns in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. I have often traveled back and forth to these Chinatowns to record the rapid architectural and economic changes that these communities have been facing. The images are visual records of dynamic cityscapes in which I highlight historical and contemporary cultural fixtures such as small mom-and-pop shops, Chinese restaurants, and community organizations. In this chapter, I will discuss several key images that help explain my practice more generally. I approach this chapter as a portfolio of sorts, wherein I move from

M. Lum (B) Mississauga, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_3

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Fig. 3.1 Golden Happiness Plaza, Calgary. Archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

different images and vignettes and the background and context informing each of my photographic interests (Fig. 3.1). Conceptualizing a project that examines the historical and cultural impact of a specific ethnic group began after casually watching a television program about Chinatowns across Canada. The program was produced and broadcast on OMNI television, a network that was founded with a mandate to provide a multilingual experience on television. This four-part documentary series entitled “Chinatown Canada” was broadcast in 2011 and featured different Chinatowns located in different geographic regions, including Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal. Each episode focused on examining the beginnings of each of distinct Chinatown, while exploring their current realities. I was interested in the series because it detailed the differences and similarities between each Chinatown and highlighted the struggles of establishing these spaces. While informative, the series left much to be desired. Having

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grown-up in Canada but not really knowing much about Chinese heritage in North America, I consider myself to be the target audience for this kind of program. Yet even after watching the series, I was left with many unanswered questions, including the following: did the formation of Chinatowns happen because of the barriers or challenges that existed for Chinese Canadians in integrating into Canadian society? And are these Chinatowns still relevant and necessary today? These questions piqued my interest as an artist and pushed me to want to investigate further and to think about deepening discussions around immigration and integration. In particular, I wanted to better understand how early Chinese communities arrived in North America and how this may or may not have differed from future waves of Chinese immigration. Around the same time that OMNI aired the series “Chinatown Canada” I began noticing changes happening to the Chinese plaza that I grew up going to in Mississauga, known as the Mississauga Chinese Centre, located near the intersections of Dundas Street and Dixie Road (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2 Mississauga Chinese Centre, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 8 × 10 inches, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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Originally opened in 1987, the Mississauga Chinese Centre reflected a need for community-oriented public and commercial space during a time when Mississauga was seeing an influx of Chinese immigrants, who were mainly coming from Hong Kong. My family arrived in Canada from Trinidad and Tobago in 1988, a year after the completion of the Chinese Centre. For me, the Mississauga Chinese Centre was a city within a city. The entrance to the Centre is marked with a giant gateway built using traditional Chinese techniques, and the interior is extravagantly decorated with traditional architectural features including a Soo Chow Garden, pagoda, and pond.1 My early visits to the Mississauga Chinese Centre were in many ways my first experiences of visiting an Asian-centric, ethnic enclave. I have memories of my parents taking my sister and I to the Centre to attend Chinese calligraphy classes, Canotonese language lessons, and to grab groceries from the Asian grocery stores. I even remember going to the food court and experiencing my first bites of “authentic Chinese” cuisine from the Hong Kong region. Prior to this experience, what I thought was Chinese cuisine was actually a combination of Chinese and Caribbean food often cooked in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, a suburban ethnic plaza could not be complete without a traditional banquet style Chinese restaurant. Mississauga Chinese Centre’s primary venue of this kind was the Royal Dragon Chinese Restaurant. In its heyday, the restaurant could easily cater large wedding receptions; in fact in the early 2000s my cousin held her wedding reception at the Royal Dragon and I fondly remember the wedding being vibrant and loud with lion dancers serenading the entire reception. Looking back at my upbringing within the Mississauga Chinese Centre it becomes clear that those experiences formed my understanding of the Chinese community and what it meant to be “Chinese.” In early 2012, after stopping in at the Mississauga Chinese Centre I noticed that Royal Dragon Chinese Restaurant was not open for regular business hours. This gave me pause. I decided to return a few days later and photograph the façade of the restaurant, as I had a feeling that this could be the end of the Royal Dragon. After processing the photograph I stored the image in my archive not really having an immediate purpose for it, but thinking that it might be of some significance in the future. In the coming years I revisited the Royal Dragon site and to my dismay found the signage had been removed. Thinking about the photograph I took in 2012, I decided to re-photograph the location over a number

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of years and to document the changing of this cultural landmark. In 2015, the Blue Lagoon Seafood Master replaced the Royal Dragon. The Blue Lagoon is a Chinese seafood restaurant that specialized in a style of cooking from regions in Mainland China. This shift in regional cuisine signalled a mutable socio-geography shift that once represented Chinese immigration that was mainly from Hong Kong and now represented an influx of immigration from Mainland China. This is all to say that these restaurants are more than simply businesses and documenting their existences and disappearances allows for a nuanced visual exploration of shifting cultural landscapes and communities (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4).

Fig. 3.3 Royal Dragon Chinese Restaurant, Mississauga, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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Fig. 3.4 Blue Lagoon Seafood Restaurant, Mississauga, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Toronto Chinatown I started to see a similar pattern occurring in Toronto’s West Chinatown, which is located at the intersection of Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West. In 2011, I began to notice that some of the mainstay restaurants of Toronto’s Chinatown, The Bright Pearl, Saigon Sister, and Lee Garden, permanently closed their doors. Like many others, I was saddened to see these longstanding and well-respected businesses no longer being part of the community they once helped make vibrant. As Arlene Chan explains in her book The Chinese Community in Toronto Then and Now, the 1960s wave of Chinese immigration from Hong Kong to Toronto was split along economic lines.2 One group of immigrants did not have the means or opportunity to settle anywhere they chose and relied on proximity to Chinatown to provide a network to help establish a new life. On the other

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hand, those who had the financial means chose to bypass the existing Chinatown community and to settle on the outskirts of the city, specifically Agincourt in Scarborough. In the 1980s Chinese businesses began to flourish in plazas across Agincourt and shortly thereafter several Chinese language churches were founded in the area. This transition away from downtown Chinatowns to suburban Chinatowns is a well-established phenomenon. In many North American suburban neighbourhoods where there are large concentrations of Chinese immigrants, one can often find ethnic enclaves that expand beyond plazas and strip malls and exist in pockets of suburban sprawl. Examples of these large ethnic enclaves can be found in Ontario cities such as Scarborough, Richmond Hill, Markham, and Unionville and in the American suburbs of San Gabriel Valley in California and Flushing in New York. Over the last several decades these enclaves have overtaken the original downtown Chinatowns in size and desirability for new immigrants.3 One of the reasons for this may be the expanding variety of food options available in these suburbs. In places such as San Gabriel Valley or Markham the sheer number of Asian food options is exponentially larger than that of ‘original’ Chinatowns. Housing is also generally newer, larger, and more affordable in the suburbs, which is appealing for many newcomers. The suburban ethnic plaza, therefore, has essentially replaced the function of downtown Chinatowns, because diverse food options, better housing, places of religious worship, and access to large-scale venues for weddings and other celebrations are all more readily available. Shifting immigration led to, for a time at least, the stalled development of Toronto’s downtown Chinatown. That is until Vietnamese communities began to migrate into the city centre and into the downtown Chinatown. This was likely an easy transition in at least one regard as the groceries stores in Chinatown stocked vegetables and ingredients that are native to both Vietnam and China. Decades later, the Vietnamese community had established themselves as a significant contributor to Chinatown’s regrowth with new restaurants and businesses supporting local residents. More recently with the rise of enrolment of international students from Mainland China at the University of Toronto there has been a steady growth of businesses reflecting regions of Mainland China in Toronto’s Chinatown. I took a similar photographic approach to documenting these shifts in Toronto’s Chinatown as I had taken with photographing the Royal

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Fig. 3.5 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Dragon Chinese Restaurant in the Mississauga Chinese Centre. An example of these fluctuations can be seen quite clearly in the changing ownership of the businesses occupying a re-purposed Victorian home built in the 1880s that sits on Spadina Avenue between Queen Street West and Dundas Street West. Between 2012 and 2016, I produced a series of images that document the businesses coming in and out of this building as evidence of the demographic shifts I note above. My hope is that these images make clear that ethnic enclaves are evolving constructs and that there is not a homogenous Chinese immigrant community, or experience (Figs. 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7).

The First Chinatowns Before continuing on with the lineage of Toronto’s Chinatown I would like to touch upon the origins of Chinatowns in North America. It is

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Fig. 3.6 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist)

important not to loose sight of the historical context in which Chinatowns were founded. In the mid 1800s Chinese labourers traveled across the Pacific Ocean to find work, as there was significant demand for hard labourers. One such example is the miners in California during the Gold Rush. Most often these labours were poor young men who were looking for opportunities to provide for their families. Migrants to North America during the mid 1800s predominately came from one region of China, the province of Guandong, where migrants arrived from cities such as Guangzhou (also known as Canton) and Taishan.4 When they arrived in North America some traveled to California and some traveled north to British Columbia to work in the gold mines of the Fraser Valley. After arriving, many of these labourers faced hardships including poor working conditions, racism, and violent discrimination.5 Employing labourers from China was considered lucrative because they were paid less than Caucasians, thus allowing employers to increase their profit margins. The Chinese were also targeted and discriminated against because of

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Fig. 3.7 233–235 Spadina Ave, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2016 (Image courtesy of the artist)

their “exotic” appearance, often criticized for their long braided hair and clothing. Furthermore, “the Chinese were seen to be disease-ridden and morally physically inferior to whites.”6 In addition to the mental and physical discrimination that Chinese immigrants suffered, they were forced to pay a head tax for entering Canada. In 1885 under the federal Chinese Immigration Act the head tax was a fee of $50 and over the following years increased to $500.7 Even with paying these incredibly high taxes living conditions remained just as isolated as they had been, while also posing additional hardships. White labourers did not want to live next to the Chinese and that forced these communities to live in overcrowded homes with poor living conditions. The “bachelors society” is a term that was given to Chinese labourers who arrived in Canada during the Gold Rush era.8 The term makes reference to the fact that it was predominately men who made the trip across the Pacific and who lived on their own until they had paid the head tax fee as well as other costs to bring their families to Canada. After the Gold

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Rush ended, Chinese labours continued to look for work as many of them still had not been able to accumulate enough surplus wealth to pay the head tax for their family members. Many workers turned to opportunities to earn wages through the Canadian Pacific Railway. The work on the railway was dangerous and many labours died due to unsafe working conditions. The type of work had changed but the discrimination, racism and forced isolation had not.9 In Vancouver specifically, segregation was enforced though The Chinese Quarters (now Chinatown) which was established in the 1880s. The establishment of The Chinese Quarters ensured that the Chinese were isolated from other communities while providing a clearly marked boundary indicating to white people what areas of the city to avoid. This was a complicated space, however, as The Chinese Quarters also somewhat insulated the Chinese from discrimination and racism and provided a certain level of security, which fostered community growth. After the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, labourers needed to find new work and many found those opportunities at restaurants and laundry shops within The Chinese Quarters.10 In Vancouver, as progress of the Canadian Pacific Railway continued, the number of Chinese labourers began to grow as well. “Immigration dropped in 1886 and 1887 to 212 and 124 respectively, but by 1890 annual arrivals numbered over a thousand again as migrants found means of raising additional funds to pay the head tax.”11 The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 was designed to slow Chinese immigration into Canada but it was not entirely successful. In the coming decades, up until The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923–1947, the Chinese population grew, specifically in Vancouver where The Chinese Quarters was in close proximity to budding industry, including the Vancouver harbour and the rail yard. With the growth of Chinese populations in Vancouver, Chinatown’s infrastructure grew with it.

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Alleyways The expansion of Vancouver’s Chinatown ran parallel with the enforcement of the Chinese Immigration Act. Included in the Act was a set of restrictions in the form of a curfew where Chinese were not permitted to be out on the main roads after certain hours. Because of this the Chinese community began to utilize hidden alleyways, a network of small passages between different buildings that were often hidden from the main streets, as a necessary means to travel, gather, and socialize within their community. Many of these hidden alleyways still exist today, having been either refurbished or preserved. Many of them still remain hidden from the public.12 These images speak to the history of discrimination against the Chinese in Canada while also highlighting community resistance and ingenuity in the face of state sanctioned racism (Fig. 3.8).

Fig. 3.8 Market Alley, West Facing, Vancouver, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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Family Associations What are generally referred to as Family Associations were formed in the early 1900s to help support family members with the same surname that usually came from the same or neighbouring villages in China.13 These Associations supported newcomers by providing them with boarding, job support, and English classes. Family Associations also pooled money together to help support each other during a time when banks did not allow Chinese to have bank accounts. The Family Association essentially acted as a credit union for each of its members. They also helped to form smaller community networks within Chinatown. Today the Associations function more like social clubs, where you can often hear the clanging of tiles from seniors playing Mah Jong or the singing from a choir. Youth groups also access Family Associations’ spaces to practice martial arts or perform in lion dances.14 The Family Associations usually owned their own buildings, which is an important aspect in understanding why many continue to exist in their original and current locations. Again, these images speak to a complicated history of spaces within Canada that simultaneously outline discriminatory practices and community resiliency and strength (Fig. 3.9).

Toronto’s First Chinatown Along with the influx of international students from Mainland China to Toronto, there has also been an evolution in the palate of Chinese cuisine in Toronto’s Chinatown. In the early 1900s when Toronto’s Chinatown was first established at the intersection of Dundas Street and Elizabeth Street, beside City Hall, the Chinese community was small and was comprised of a number of families who ran and operated businesses, such as laundries and restaurants. Some of the restaurants in the area catered to two populations, one being the local Chinese community and the other being the non-Chinese Toronto community. The definition of Chinese Canadian cuisine is often described as a hybrid of Taishan (one of the four counties known as the Siyi, Taishan in the Guangdong province of China) and Canadian ingredients that catered to a Western palate. The most popular dishes that came out of this era of Chinese Canadian cuisine included Chicken balls with “red sauce” on rice or chop suey which is loosely translated into “bits and pieces.”15

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Fig. 3.9 Wong King Har Wun Sun Association, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2016 (Image courtesy of the artist)

When the Chinese Exclusion act of 1923 was repealed in 1947, and immigration from Hong Kong started to flow into major cities in Canada, a wave of cuisines from Hong Kong began to populate the restaurants in Canadian Chinatowns. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s in Toronto’s Chinatown, a number of banquet-style restaurants opened their doors and introduced a new style of Chinese restaurant serving regal style dinners, often with multiple courses. During the morning and lunchtimes these restaurants would serve Dim Sum, which is popular in Hong Kong and is a style of meal that is usually served in small steaming hot baskets where a variety of dishes are served a la carte right to the table. This style of dining became incredibly popular in Toronto, to the point where Chinatown saw a flurry of restaurants open to supply the demand. During this era four restaurants established themselves as mainstays in satiating this burgeoning taste for Dim Sum: Nanking,

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Lichee Garden Restaurant and Club, Kwong Chow, Golden Dragon, and Sai Woo.16 In the 1960s, a new City Hall was built beside the original City Hall, displacing Chinatown and forcing the community to re-establish itself at its current location at the intersection of Spadina and Dundas Street West. Tensions grew between the Chinatown community and Toronto’s planning department over this relocation. The City was keen on moving Chinatown further West and employed a number of tactics to do so. Canadian filmmaker Keith Lock explains in an interview he did with myself in Toronto in November of 2019 that one of these strategies was to characterize Chinatown as an “eyesore.” 17 The City purposely presented an image of Chinatown that undervalued the cultural, historical, and property values of this crucial community space. There was opposition from the community to prevent the demise of Chinatown; largely lead by the activist and owner of the Kwong Chow Chinese Restaurant, Jean Lumb, and approximately 29 Family Associations. Secondly, the City tried to entice the Chinese community to move west by renaming city streets near Spadina and Dundas in Chinese and English. Lock further explains that the aim was to create a false sense of ownership over the new neighbourhood and new Chinatown. Many of the property owners did agree to sell their land to the City but the land was purchased at below market rates. “They just expropriated all those people to build the city hall…and they didn’t give them fair market value. They just told them to get going and they got going.”18 Lock further recalls talking to an elder in the 1980s who was living at Mon Sheong, an established seniors home in Chinatown, stating: “He pulled me close and he said “tell them the truth.”19 This was in reference to the expropriation that occurred in the early 1960s when the City supplanted Chinatown communities to build what is now City Hall. Lock’s emotional retelling of this conversation expresses how deep the scars of being displaced from old Chinatown are and how the pain lives on decades later. There are only a few remnants of old Chinatown left in their original locations, including the Lim Association (Fig. 3.10). I took this image with this history in mind, as a way to capture the challenges that communities face in trying to put down permanent roots. One of the reasons I focus my attention towards documenting Chinatowns is that many of them are in decline and many of the community members are continuously displaced due to new development project and changing civic priorities.

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Fig. 3.10 Lim Family Association 121 Dundas Street W, Toronto, archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2012 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Conclusion My interest in documenting Chinatowns in North America has focused on addressing a more layered and complicated depiction of the histories and contemporary conditions of ethnic enclaves than what is typically shown in the media or elsewhere. I have used my camera to document several key issues including complex migration patterns, histories of exclusion, and community resourcefulness in the face of segregation, and the ongoing realities of displacement in urban centres. As a whole, this body of work serves as a living archive that charts the changing of Chinatowns in Canada and the Unites States, giving voice to the structures and spaces that have helped communities gather, grow, and thrive (Fig. 3.11).

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Fig. 3.11 New Chinatown, Los Angeles. Archival pigment print by Morris Lum, 40 × 50 inches, 2018 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Notes 1. Joseph Chin, “Mississauga Chinese Gate Depicted on Stamp,” accessed May 1, 2020 from Mississauga News: https://www.mississauga.com/ news-story/3116319-mississauga-s-chinese-gate-depicted-on. 2. Arlene Chan, The Chinese Community in Toronto Then and Now (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013), 107. 3. Interview with Jim Wong-Chu, Richmond BC, 2013. 4. Paul Yee, Saltwater City (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd, 2006), 6. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Ibid., 14. 7. Ibid. 8. Interview with Jim Wong-Chu, Vancouver BC, 2013. 9. Arlene Chan, The Chinese Community in Toronto Then and Now (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013), 35.

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10. Ibid. 11. Paul Yee, Saltwater City (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd, 2006), 14. 12. Interview with Jim Wong-Chu, Vancouver, 2013. 13. Arlene Chan, The Chinese Community in Toronto Then and Now (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013), 48. 14. Interview with Judy Lam-Maxwell, Vancouver, 2014. 15. Ann Hui, Chop Suey Nation (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd, 2019), 77. 16. Interview with Arlene Chan and Leo Chan, Toronto, 2018. 17. Interview with Keith Lock, Toronto, 2019. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

References Chan, Arlene, The Chinese Community in Toronto Then and Now (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013). Chin, Joseph, “Mississauga Chinese Gate Depicted on Stamp,” accessed May 1, 2020 from Mississauga News: https://www.mississauga.com/news-story/ 3116319-mississauga-s-chinese-gate-depicted-on. Hui, Ann, Chop Suey Nation (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd, 2019). Yee, Paul, Saltwater City (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd, 2006).

CHAPTER 4

Mapping Evictions: Urban Displacement and the Myths of the Sharing Economy Noni Brynjolson

In many large urban centres around the world, processes of gentrification have been accelerated during the past decade by real-estate speculation and the development of arts districts and creative city paradigms. These transformations of urban space often involve the displacement of low-income people who are pushed out to make room for new condo buildings and the amenities that typically accompany them, including coffee shops, breweries and art galleries. In this chapter, I look at what happens to the stories and memories of those who are evicted or priced out. How might these become part of a broader sociocultural movement against gentrification and displacement? I focus on the work of the AntiEviction Mapping Project, a collective of artists and activists based in the Bay Area in California.1 The group has produced dozens of interactive, online maps that visualise displacement, accompanied by a growing number of oral histories. Over the past several decades, many artists, curators and critics have examined maps and cartographic practices in their work. For example,

N. Brynjolson (B) Indianapolis, IN, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_4

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the Museum of Modern Art’s Mapping exhibition in 1994 included historical maps as well as map pieces by artists such as Jasper Johns and Alighiero Boetti, and looked at maps as emblems of power that combine strategies of representation and abstraction.2 A number of exhibitions and publications in the 2000s took an approach that focused more on social activism, and explored links between art and geography. Atlas of Radical Cartography, curated by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, examined “social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration.”3 Nato Thompson’s Experimental Geography project also looked at links between art, representation and spatial politics, and included a range of art practices, including “sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centres, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid.”4 Commonalities among these projects include an interest in exploring links between space, representation and politics, through practices that challenge conventional understandings of Cartesian objectivity. Many of the artists, curators and theorists involved in these explorations have grounded their perspectives in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and/or the Situationists, and visualised the production of space through mapping everyday practices, social relations, or political confrontations. Trevor Paglen has referred to these forms of experimental geography as involving “practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and [demonstrate] that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice.”5 More recently, in the past decade, numerous artists have experimented with geographical information systems, or GIS, technologies that have made mapping projects more accessible and interactive through a variety of different online platforms. This brief overview provides background context for considering the practices of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—which looks critically at the production and uses of space in the Bay Area in California, and emphasizes Paglen’s argument that cultural production and spatial practices are intertwined. These connections are highly visible in San Francisco, which along with Manhattan, is the least affordable place to live in the United States.6 There are symbols associated with displacement that are unique to this region, including shuttle buses that transport well-paid tech employees from San Francisco to their campuses in Silicon Valley—a

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highly visible symbol of the privatization of formerly public services. The consequences of the housing crisis in this area are widespread: displaced individuals and families have been pushed further and further away from jobs, services and communities, and homelessness and housing instability have increased—dramatically illustrated by the 2016 fire that destroyed the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, killing 36 people. Many were artists, and some were living in the building because of its low rents, affordable because of the lack of proper safety features. It must also be noted that gentrification in the Bay Area disproportionately affects people of colour, as with other cities, and many neighbourhoods in San Francisco and Oakland have grown increasingly white in the past several decades. The Bay Area is home to numerous Silicon Valley startups that have promised to change the way we live, work, travel, entertain ourselves and socialize, in part through the emergence of the sharing economy. While this now seems like a ubiquitous part of everyday life, some of its philosophical underpinnings can be traced back to countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. In his book From Cyberculture to Counterculture, Fred Turner examined the growing appeal of network building and technological entrepreneurship for the counter-culturalists of the 1960s, and described emerging tech industries as part of a “New Economy” that involved the breakdown of traditional relationships between employers and the work force.7 During this time, as employment became increasingly precarious, it became necessary for many workers to turn to the gig economy, or to become more entrepreneurial, constantly updating and promoting one’s skills and personal brand. Turner made these observations in 2006, the same year that Facebook began to allow users to create a public profile. Since then, networked entrepreneurship has greatly expanded through the use of social media, which gives new meaning to the concept of a ‘global village’ and its promises of community and connection. The sharing economy may be seen as an expanded form of the “New Economy” described by Turner, and many of the same conundrums are visible in contemporary examples that have promised to change our lives, bring us closer together and disrupt tradition, but which often produce issues associated with the “Old Economy,” including labour disputes and inequalities between owners, workers and users. Adding to the conundrum is the fact that many of the CEOs and entrepreneurs behind sharing economy companies see themselves as liberal, enlightened thinkers leading the way toward a more equitable society. For example,

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some tech entrepreneurs and CEOs have participated in efforts to position San Francisco as a liberal enclave in opposition to Trump, by defending its status as a Sanctuary City, protesting Trump’s travel ban, or vocally supporting so-called DREAMers after their legal status was threatened by the federal government.8 But while the ideas driving the development of such companies might have once been progressive and visionary, the material reality is now very different. Both San Francisco and Oakland face extreme income inequality, largely driven by the rapid growth of the tech industry, a consequence of which has been widespread displacement in the Bay Area. The services that make up the sharing economy offer new forms of convenience for users and consumers, along with the promise of increasing our social capital. However, they also provoke important questions about privacy and surveillance, and contribute to rising levels of employment precarity through the growth of the gig economy. Sharing is undeniably a major appeal of Airbnb, for example, and it offers many undeniably attractive features: in addition to paying less than you would for a hotel, you have the conveniences of a home in a new city, and the opportunity to meet new people. Regardless of its worldwide reach, and its multi-billion-dollar value, it does offer intimate, personal experiences to its customers, who are encouraged to feel that a transaction is more than just a transaction. However, many critics have pointed out that Airbnb’s success has come through avoiding traditional rules and regulations. These issues speak to some of the hypocrisies within the sharing economy more broadly, which have existed for decades in Silicon Valley with the interconnected growth of cyberculture and counterculture. Tom Slee writes about Airbnb that “despite its talk of community, the only logic it seems to understand is that of the free market: the right of property owners to do what they want with their property.”9 The company has also been criticized for failing to prevent discrimination against guests and hosts of colour, creating a form of digital redlining.10 One of the biggest critiques of Airbnb has focused on its effects on cities and housing patterns, and the role that it has played in driving up median rents. This is highly visible in San Francisco. It is common to hear stories of landlords evicting tenants or raising rents to get them to leave, and then listing units on Airbnb. This has become so common, in fact, that some tenants unions have used private investigators to find out where this is taking place, in order to file lawsuits against developers.11

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The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was initiated in the fall of 2013, in part as a response to displacement driven by the sharing economy and other large tech companies in the Bay Area. It was started by artist and housing activist Erin McElroy along with a collective of others as a way to address the increasing number of evictions and foreclosures in the Bay Area after the 2008 recession. McElroy was interested in finding ways to push back against the tech industry in Silicon Valley and the encroachment of its white-collar workers into city spaces that were once affordable for the middle classes. Over the past several years she has worked with other artists and activists to compile data on evictions, getting information from public records, court documents and online database searches for property listings, in order to figure out where evictions were taking place, why they were increasingly common, who was responsible for them, and what they could do to make it visible through a series of interactive maps that could be accessed through the project’s website. There are maps on gentrification, evictions, homelessness, the proliferation of Airbnb and short-term vacation rentals, policing and race, and dozens of other subjects. The maps are made using sophisticated cartographic software. They are interactive, they can be added to, and they are frequently updated by the collective and by website users with new data. One example is a map that shows all San Francisco evictions from 1997 to 2020, and includes information on the evictor, the type of eviction, and how eviction rates compare across different neighbourhoods (Fig. 4.1). Users can zoom in and look at the neighbourhood, or even search block by block. We see that those who are displaced are much more likely to be low-income people of colour. Other maps show how displacement results in the breaking-up of communities and longer travel times to places of employment. It also results in the homogenization of urban space in terms of race and socioeconomic status, a process often termed whitewashing. This is apparent in a map of formerly Black neighbourhoods in San Francisco and Oakland, which are visualised at different points in time to reveal the erasure of Black communities (Fig. 4.2). As the maps demonstrate, Ellis Act Evictions are the most common— this refers to a California law stating that landlords have the right to evict tenants in order to “go out of business,” and then must either sell the building or change its use, for example, from rent-controlled units to condos.12 It is a law that has been abused frequently and is often used by landlords to raise rents or convert housing into profitable vacation rentals. Several of the maps on the website are intended to call out those

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Fig. 4.1 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, All San Francisco Eviction Notices, 1997 –2019, 2019 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project)

responsible for the evictions, for example, one titled “Bay Area Evictor: Michael Marr” (Fig. 4.3). In viewing the map, users learn that Marr, one of the region’s biggest landlords, acquired more than 1500 properties in the Bay Area and flipped many of them for huge profits. In 2017, he was convicted of setting up a bid-rigging scheme, through which he purchased hundreds of foreclosed homes at suppressed prices in 2008.13 In 2020, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project collected and displayed data on the COVID-19 pandemic and how it had affected tenants around the world. Millions of people were sickened by the virus and millions more lost their jobs. Housing instability and homelessness greatly increased as a result, and in response to this, housing activists called for a global rent strike, sometimes using the hashtag #CancelRent.14 In alignment with this movement, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project created a map showing places where officials had passed emergency tenant protections, and places in which rent strikes were occurring. The map was interactive, meaning that users could continuously update it with new data. Hundreds of strikes were posted by users across the map, illustrating the massive scale of the crisis and the drastic need for government action.

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Fig. 4.2 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, SF Loss of Black Population, 1970– 2017 , 2017 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project)

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Fig. 4.3 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Bay Area Evictor: Michael Marr, 2017 (Image courtesy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project)

Eviction involves a traumatic act of forced exposure—furniture and personal possessions are dumped on the curb for all to see. Yet the systemic nature of eviction is often hidden or obscured, in favour of the familiar narrative of individual failure. What these maps seek to do, then, is to make visible the degree to which eviction is a social problem and not the result of poor choices. What we see through the maps is that displacement is widespread, and is exacerbated by the inability of governments to regulate the housing market and provide urban dwellers with adequate public services. In addition to the maps, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project also collects oral histories from people who have been displaced, providing a humanizing component to the map data. According to McElroy, the collective “felt uneasy about reducing complex geopolitical worlds to dots on a map, and they wanted to add more nuance.”15 The group began to collect interviews through their work with tenants unions and other non-profit groups, and hundreds of these interviews are now available on their website. The stories tend to follow a similar narrative: they are about growing up in San Francisco neighbourhoods, living there for decades, witnessing changes, and then being evicted. Many of the storytellers express feelings of loss, not just of their home, but of their community as well. Displacement means that communities are broken apart, resulting in the breakdown of networks of neighbours, relatives

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and friends—networks that might be conceptualized as informal sharing economies, in which use value is prioritized above exchange value. The narratives of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project emphasise collectivity, and there are opportunities for storytellers to find common cause, or to recognize similar themes or characters in each other’s stories. One woman speaks about moving to New York from Chile, and then to the Mission in San Francisco, where she lived for ten years and owned a small empanada shop before being evicted. A disabled senior discusses his battle with AIDS and how he felt about receiving an Ellis Act eviction notice after living in the Castro for nineteen years. He decided to fight the eviction with the help of Eviction Free SF and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. There are numerous artists and cultural workers who have been evicted and have shared their stories on the website. One man, a photographer, describes making his own camera lenses out of the bottoms of wine glasses. He lived in a rent-controlled apartment for 34 years before being served an eviction notice by the Harshawat family, named by multiple individuals and families as responsible for evictions. Another woman describes living in Section 8 housing in the Tenderloin with her family for 13 years, and then receiving an eviction notice along with other families in the building, who joined together and successfully fought the eviction. Since most tenants in the building speak Cantonese or Vietnamese, she took on the role of translating during their appeal. She also took it upon herself to do research online, finding out that the owner was planning to convert the building into condos. The aesthetic of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s website mimics certain features of sharing economy platforms like Airbnb, but it repurposes their designs in order to critique their promises of collectivism and their material impact on neighbourhoods. Both websites feature bird’s eye view maps of the city covered with individual dots representing homes. The design of the oral history component of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s website parallels the personalized testimonials of Airbnb and the sense of trust and authenticity they provide. In addition to Airbnb, the oral histories evoke the aesthetics of online fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe, in which personal stories play a key role. Eviction stories are extremely common on GoFundMe— a keyword search on any given day might turn up more than 10,000 results.16 At first glance, the narratives seem similar to the oral histories of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Yet, in looking in more depth at the stories and photos presented in GoFundMe campaigns, a different

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approach to storytelling becomes evident. Expressions of anger, outrage or blame are rare. Instead, fundraisers portray themselves as decent, deserving people who worked hard and tried their best, but suffered from unavoidable circumstances, and need a helping hand to get back on track. Many provide specific details related to their employment history to emphasise that they are hard workers and are not just asking for a “handout.” One man describes falling behind on rent because of a roommate who gambled away all of his money. He says, “As many know I am not one to ask for help. I was raised to be the giver. The supporter. The helper. I was raised to work hard for the things I want and need. To be self-sufficient and strong.” Another man in Los Angeles expresses shame for being evicted: “Yes I am COMPLETELY embarrassed and humiliated to have to post this, but honestly I don’t know what else to do… I’m sorry to put this out there I really am, but I guarantee that I will pay this back when I receive my retirement funds.”17 There are thousands of similar stories. Yet while the personal narratives on GoFundMe are just as poignant as those told by participants in the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, there are few attempts to connect these to a broader political analysis, or to use them as a starting point for action. I could not find any examples while doing research. This may be due to the structure of the website, which spotlights individual stories and is not designed to promote social movement building. What this point demonstrates is that eviction-related narratives can be thematically similar, but activated in very different ways through framing and context. A valuable question to ask about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project might be: what do participants get out of telling their stories? According to McElroy, the individuals who have participated are “outraged about what’s happening and think that their story is part of the greater picture and want to share it…and there are a lot of people who are wanting to document these things as they happen because they’re happening so quickly.”18 Storytellers on the website express frustration and anger at being evicted, and in some cases, explain how they fought back. Together, these stories are a powerful tool of protest, linking together disparate individuals who have experienced the same thing, and who might learn from each other’s actions. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project appeals to viewers’ desire for individual stories and personal insights, by positioning faces and testimonials alongside its map data—we learn that an eviction took place, and we

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learn the reasons why. However, evictions are not portrayed as individual failures, but as political and social failures caused by the inability of governments to take action and stand up against the powerful real-estate lobby. We are invited by the project’s organisers to contribute money to support an individual’s eviction defense, or help someone pay rent, as with GoFundMe, but we are also invited to learn more about who is doing the evicting, and join coordinated actions to protest developers who profit from dispossession. By engaging with politics outside of the sphere of aesthetic representation, the project may be seen as a form of intervention, disruption or transgression. It draws certain art historical parallels with institutional critique and tactical media, by using tech tools to investigate the material and symbolic effects of the sharing economy’s entrepreneurial cyberculture. For example, it may be looked at in relation to Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, a work that famously resulted in the cancellation of an exhibition by the artist at the Guggenheim. Museum director Thomas Messer refused to include the piece in the show, writing that museum policies “exclude active engagement towards social and political ends.”19 Haacke’s piece involved an investigation of the holdings of real-estate developer Harry J. Shapolsky, who owned more than 200 tenement buildings in Harlem and the Lower East Side. Shapolsky’s identity became public through the work of the artist, as did the fact that he was making huge profits by renting out substandard housing units, primarily to poor people of colour. Haacke collected information by searching through public records, similar to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and displayed photos alongside short texts providing data on the building, including addresses, size of the lot and date of acquisition, producing an aesthetic that now looks very much like a website or database. Created nearly 50 years after Haacke’s piece, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project could be seen as a high-tech, interactive form of real-estate investigation, that similarly places a spotlight on the powerful individuals and corporations responsible for evictions. In addition to institutional critique, The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project may be looked at as a form of tactical media, which works by exposing previously obscured power structures and hierarchies, often by using forms of mimicry and satirical reproduction. In their text “ABC of Tactical Media,” David Garcia and Geert Lovink defined it as a way of using the texts and artifacts of everyday life in a rebellious manner.

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Informed by Michel de Certeau’s writing on tactics and use value, they argue that tactical media practitioners similarly use what is available within popular culture, but in ways that subvert the original intentions of a particular cultural form, to produce “an aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring.”20 They view tactical media as a “qualified form of humanism,” that involves “an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic scientism.”21 The maps produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project demonstrate aspects of tactical media as outlined by Garcia and Lovink. As McElroy told me, “we’ve been written about as anti-tech a lot, but what I always say is, no, tech has many lives and iterations, and it’s possible to utilize digital technology with an anti-capitalist agenda even if you’re immersed in a capitalist system.”22 In addition to using high-tech cartographic software, the collective has employed techniques such as crowdsourcing to produce their maps— mimicking the supposedly democratizing aspects of sharing economy companies. The project seeks to tell stories and offer humanizing connections to the effects of displacement, and in this way, the quantitative and qualitative are brought together. This is a design quality that once again parallels Airbnb: both platforms allow users to easily comprehend certain patterns on a neighbourhood or city-wide level. Both also offer an inside look at what goes on behind closed doors—Airbnb in the form of hosts’ personal stories and guests’ experiences, as well as photos that provide details of decor, taste and furnishing, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in the form of oral histories from individuals who have experienced displacement. In her book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Rosalyn Deutsche argued that “urban space is the product of conflict.”23 Conflict is part of what becomes visible through maps produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. They reveal the scale and pattern of evictions in the Bay Area, and the processes and power structures through which individuals and communities are displaced. They name names—exposing the developers who are responsible. But they also do something else that goes beyond exposing the existence of conflict. In their open-ended, interactive nature, their usability, and their links with other organisations, they move beyond moments of revelatory visualisation, and they attempt to connect the production of visibility with community organising efforts. McElroy frequently organises community mapping workshops, to encourage residents to become more familiar with who pulls the real estate strings in

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their neighbourhood. The work done by the collective has contributed to a greater awareness of some of the specifics surrounding eviction: many people in San Francisco are now more aware of policies such as the Ellis Act and have been actively organising against landlords who use it to evict tenants. Within the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, personal stories are a way to organise politically, and they demonstrate that the issue of displacement is a matter of social, not individual failure. Collectively, the stories become something more than they would be on their own, or if they were told through GoFundMe or social media. They are amplified and recontextualised, and they offer insight into the lives and experiences of others. The maps and stories have been used in city council meetings and local hearings, to sue landlords, and to push for different policy amendments. In this way, narrative is used as a method of building social movements and political resistance. In 2016, the group pushed for legislation to place restrictions on Airbnb, which ultimately failed, but sparked public outrage and a broader debate about the company. This is perhaps the most valuable aspect of the work done by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: it informs public conversations, provokes debate and provides evidence, and in doing so, it has become part of a broader narrative focused on displacement in the Bay Area. The maps and stories produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project exemplify how disruption has evolved as a form of artistic intervention. They share Deutsche’s focus on exposure and revelation, making evictions visible, and publicising the names of developers who are responsible. They play with iconography as forms of tactical media, mimicking the design features of websites associated with the sharing economy, but subverting their narratives of individualism, profit and private property. However, their initial intervention is positioned as a starting point rather than the end goal. The project’s production of visibility may be seen as a foundation, upon which advocacy for affordable housing is built by a community of people on and offline who want to turn stories into action.

Notes 1. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project website: https://www.antieviction map.com/. 2. Mapping, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 6–December 20, 1994.

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3. Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest), 2007. 4. Nato Thompson, curatorial statement on Experimental Geography website. See, also, Nato Thompson, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (New York: Melville House, 2009). 5. Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009. 6. Sarnen Steinbarth, “Breaking Down the Highest and Lowest Rent Costs in the U.S.,” Forbes, February 4, 2019. 7. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 8. Ian Sherr, “Here’s What Tech Has to Say About Trump’s Immigration Ban,” C-net, February 2, 2017. 9. Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (New York: OR Books, 2016), p. 41. 10. Elaine Glusac, “As Airbnb Grows, so Do Claims of Discrimination,” New York Times, June 21, 2016. 11. David M. Levitt, “Prying Eyes Are Watching Airbnb Users as Tenants Fight Back,” Bloomberg, December 27, 2016. 12. Saul Martinez, “Evicted: How the 1985 Ellis Act Can Be Used to Kick You Out of Your Rent Controlled Apartment,” KCRW , June 30, 2016. 13. Teresa Watanabe, “3 Northern California Men Convicted in Massive BidRigging Scheme to Buy Foreclosed Properties,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2017. 14. Annie Lowrey, “Cancel Rent,” The Atlantic, May 2, 2020. 15. Erin McElroy interview, January 10, 2017. 16. A search performed on March 28, 2018 turned up 16,714 results. A search performed on April 11, 2020 turned up 19,330 results (most likely higher due to the Covid-19 crisis). See www.gofundme.com. 17. Postings on GoFundMe, accessed March 25, 2018. 18. McElroy interview. 19. Michael Brenson, “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke,” New York Times, December 19, 1986. 20. David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media,” 1997, available at: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l9705/msg00096.html. 21. Ibid. 22. McElroy interview. 23. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 278.

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References Anti-Eviction Mapping Project website: https://www.antievictionmap.com/. Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times, December 19, 1986. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Garcia, David and Geert Lovink. “The ABC of Tactical Media.” 1997. Available at: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html. Glusac, Elaine. “As Airbnb Grows, so Do Claims of Discrimination.” New York Times, June 21, 2016. Interview with Erin McElroy. January 10, 2017. Levitt, David M. “Prying Eyes Are Watching Airbnb Users as Tenants Fight Back,” Bloomberg, December 27, 2016. Lowrey, Annie. “Cancel Rent.” The Atlantic, May 2, 2020. Martinez, Saul. “Evicted: How the 1985 Ellis Act Can Be Used to Kick You Out of Your Rent Controlled Apartment.” KCRW , June 30, 2016. Mogel, Lize and Alexis Bhagat. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2007. Paglen, Trevor. “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009. Sherr, Ian. “Here’s What Tech Has to Say About Trump’s Immigration Ban,” C-net, February 2, 2017. Slee, Tom. What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. New York: OR Books, 2016, Steinbarth, Sarnen. “Breaking Down the Highest and Lowest Rent Costs in the U.S.,” Forbes, February 4, 2019. Thompson, Nato. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Melville House, 2009. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Watanabe, Teresa. “3 Northern California Men Convicted in Massive BidRigging Scheme to Buy Foreclosed Properties,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2017.

CHAPTER 5

The City as a Composition: Working Through Geographies of Identity, Belonging, and Memory Joshua Hagen

In his book The City as a Work of Art, Donald J. Olsen posited “that the city, as the largest and most characteristic art form of the nineteenth century, has something to tell us about the inner nature of that century.”1 Although focused on the bourgeois urbanism characteristic of fin de siècle Western Europe, this chapter tackles Olsen’s observation as a starting point for thinking through the recent spate of controversies concerning public monuments, statuary, place names, and other markers of identity, belonging, and memory that increasingly manifests on a global scale. If we accept Olsen’s analogy of the city as a work of art, we can further conceptualize the city as a type of composition. The idea of “the city as a composition” weaves together fundamental concerns intrinsic across the arts, literature, and geography, including attention to location, form, proximity, sequence, flow, and diffusion. The city as composition

J. Hagen (B) University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Stevens Point, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_5

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also frames public spaces as palimpsests or pentimenti; places subject to continual processes of rewriting, revision, reorganization, and reinterpretation that subsequently acquire a sepia patina accumulated through successive waves of humanity. This perspective advances and elaborates the role of the city to serve as a spatial repository of identity, belonging, and memory.2 Monuments, memorials, and place names are among the most prominent of the various commemorative markers scattered across the urban landscape, but on a more banal level, architecture and urban design also texture the spatiality of memory. Cumulatively, these places of memory and memories of places condition evolving public discourses and counter-discourses and in the process contour geographies of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter provides a conceptual framework for thinking through contemporary agitation and apathy regarding the (dis)placement and (re)composition of public space, identity, belonging, and memory, and in doing so, highlights how attention to the geographies of semiotics, performativity, and affect can tell us something about the inner nature of this century.

The City as Art, Text, and Memory Landscapes and cityscapes have been popular subjects of painting, engraving, photography, and other visual media across many cultures for centuries, not to mention their prominence in literature, song, and other non-visual art forms. By the eighteenth century, landscape paintings that featured idyllic countrysides or untamed wilderness enjoyed a special popularity for their perceived ability to symbolize and naturalize certain worldviews, especially bourgeois notions of socio-economic class, moral propriety, and national identity.3 Interest in artwork of urban scenes emerged somewhat later, perhaps due to the broad uncertainties and apprehensions associated with the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, but cityscapes and streetscapes, especially of capital cities, gradually gained stature as the literal and figurative embodiments of national history, wealth, progress, and prestige.4 Given their ubiquity over time, these works of art constitute a rich collection of cultural practices and artifacts documenting diverse socio-economic, political, environmental, and technological histories, as well as changing morphologies of space and place at multiple scales. It is hardly surprising, then, that art historians, historians, and other scholars directed their attention to these works of art in an attempt to discern what they might tell us about broader histories of socio-economic and political power.

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Geographers paid scant attention to landscape painting and other visual media as cultural artifacts until relatively recently, but they have long demonstrated an interest in studying actual landscapes. Carl Sauer is commonly credited with popularizing the notion of the cultural landscape as a central object of study among geographers. Initially, geographers focused mostly on rural landscapes in an effort to document and classify regional variations in vernacular culture, but over time, attention shifted to include urban landscapes as well. Like scholars in the visual arts, geographers and other social scientists approached landscapes as a record of human activity, but beyond simply noting changes in architecture, land use, and spatial layout, scholars probed how landscapes could be read to elucidate shifting dynamics of power. Although drawing from differing disciplinary frameworks, scholars across the arts and social sciences generally conceived of the idea, production, and representation of landscape as “a way of seeing that has its own history,” as Denis Cosgrove noted, “but a history that can be understood only as part of a wider history of economy and society.”5 The metaphor of landscape as “a way of seeing” was part of a broader shift across the social sciences and humanities—often referred to as the “cultural turn”—that focused the study of cultural artifacts, social relations, and the built environment on signs, symbolism, interpretation, and meaning. As the emphasis on semiotics gained popularity, the notion of the symbolic landscape gradually eclipsed the cultural landscape.6 The iconography of those symbolic landscapes could be “read”—just as one would read any other text—to discern underlying social relations of power and authority. And just as the production of works of art are intertwined with broader contexts of socio-economic and political power, the (re)production of spaces, places, and landscapes is intrinsic to the (re)production of geographies of inclusion and exclusion.7 As David Harvey noted, the (re)production of space is prerequisite to the establishment and maintenance of socio-economic differentials in power and privilege.8 Urban landscapes, in their material, symbolic, and mental forms, are therefore constitutive and symbolic of the shifting contours of socioeconomic relations, identity, and power.9 If we accept landscape as a type of text, then the city is by extension also a type of text.10 And like all texts are composed by one or more authors, the city is also a composition but authored through space and place, brick and mortar, instead of paper and pen, canvas and brush. And like other works of art, the spatiality of

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the city is a composition that is simultaneously produced and performed. The city is an assemblage of lived spaces and places that provides venues for the production and performance of social relations, including notions of identity, belonging, and memory.11 Occupying prominent locations in the urban landscape, public monuments, memorials, place names, and other historical markers play central roles in the composition of the city and help with “conceptualising memory dynamics as a process of localisation.”12 These historical markers constitute “official places of memory … created to establish a topography of ‘a people’ and to maintain social stability, existing power relations, and institutional continuity.”13 The materiality of the urban landscape confers a reassuring sense of permanence to identities, memories, and meanings that seem unsettlingly fleeting, unstable, and uncertain. “Place makes memories cohere in complex ways,” explained Dolores Hayden. “People’s experiences of the urban landscape intertwine the sense of place and the politics of space.”14 As such, the city is a rich tableau of intended and unintended commemorative iconographies. In that sense, the city functions as a spatial nexus of converging and diverging, concurring and conflicting, aspirations, agendas, and ideologies.15 Although intended to generate and perpetuate a sense of stability and permanence by fixing identity, belonging, and memory in space and place, the city is a composition under constant revision, literally and figuratively. “Most cities are old,” Göran Therborn noted, “which means they consist of different time layers of spatial layout and of manifestations of meaning” so that cityscapes can “be approached through a perspective of cultural geology.”16 Building on the metaphor of the city as text, the urban landscape can be thought of as a palimpsest, a document that has been written over while leaving visible traces of earlier writing.17 Building on the metaphor of the city as a work of art, the urban landscape can also be thought of as a pentimento, a painting that bears visible traces of earlier underlying layers. The idea of the city as a composition ties together those notions to highlight how urban landscapes frame socio-economic relations of power, identity, and memory through the composition of their spatial layout, functionality, architecture, and iconography.

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The City as a Composition of Power and Memory Numerous identities, ideologies, and agendas intersect through the urban landscape, but national identity has traditionally assumed an outsized role. Indeed, Anthony D. Smith has suggested that nations constitute a “palimpsest on which are recorded experiences and identities of different epochs and a variety of ethnic formations, the earlier influencing and being modified by the later, to produce the composite type of collective cultural unit which we call ‘the nation.’”18 In that sense, the city constitutes a composition of national identity, iconography, and memory. Urban landscapes are especially fraught venues for studying these dynamics since, as Lewis Mumford observed, cities constitute “the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.”19 As such, the spatial, architectural, and iconographic composition of the city forms a type of crucible for the construction and contestation of power and memory. The tendency of ascendant political regimes and social movements to rework the urban landscape in support of new political agendas has welldocumented historical precedents stretching back to antiquity. Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors, to take some early examples, routinely tried to erase reminders of unpopular predecessors from public space. Those purges could involve the complete destruction of monuments, buildings, neighborhoods, or even entire cities associated with a discarded past. Conversely, relatively minor additions, removals, or revisions may prove sufficient to reform public iconography. These acts were not fundamentally different from revolutionaries smashing religious iconography during the French Revolution or the more recent efforts to topple statues of Lenin and other communist-era landmarks in post-socialist societies. There seems to be a general rule that more sweeping shifts in political and socio-economic power correlate to more comprehensive revisions, additions, and alterations to commemorative iconography, whether achieved through tumultuous political revolutions or peaceful social transitions. Cumulatively, the extensive historical record also highlights how the processes of remembrance are highly contingent upon processes of purposeful forgetting. Every city and society constitutes a unique case that evolves over time and across space, but there appear to be five main strategies for engagement with the city as a crucible of power and memory: remain, remove, relocate, re-orientate, return.

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The strategy of remain is the most straightforward as it entails no action. The major components of the city’s commemorative landscape simply remain in place, as do their broader spatial and performative contexts. The strategy of remain could reflect a broad consensus that the extant landscape retains a critical poignancy or saliency, for example. Conversely, remain could reflect a broad sense of apathy or irrelevance. Both poles help explain the dozens of Vladimir Lenin statues that remain standing in Russia and several other countries. In some cases, Lenin remains a respected historical figure, while in other cases, Lenin has seemingly sunken into obscurity and obsolescence, to such an extent that his statues are largely forgotten even if they remain standing in prominent locations. The strategy of remove is also pretty straightforward. In these cases, some component of the urban landscape has been deemed sufficiently offensive, undesirable, or at least unnecessary that it warrants deliberate removal from public view. Amid tensions between Ukraine and Russia, for example, authorities and protestors toppled dozens of Lenin statues across central and western Ukraine, while their counterparts in predominantly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine and Crimea defended Lenin statues in those regions. The strategy of remove is also clearly on display in the United States amid a chorus of calls to remove public markers commemorating the Confederacy and other institutions and individuals associated with slavery more generally. For example, the New Orleans city council ordered the removal of several Confederate statues in 2017. Originally erected in 1884, a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee featured an impressive bronze statue of the general perched on a monumental, classically-styled column and plinth. The monument, standing in the middle of a traffic roundabout named Lee Circle, provided the centerpiece for a prominent public space celebrating the general’s contribution to the Confederate cause, at least until it was removed in 2017. Citing Lee’s service to the Confederacy and ownership of slaves, the city council ordered the statue of Lee and all signage referencing Lee Circle removed. Although Lee vanished from sight, the column and plinth remained, creating a somewhat ghostly ambiance that indirectly references the statue’s absence (Fig. 5.1). The strategy of relocate is something of a compromise between remain and remove. As the name suggests, this third strategy involves moving the object in question, which could range from a small commemorative plaque to an entire building, to a new location. The relocation could

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Fig. 5.1 Lee monument in New Orleans after the removal of the Lee statue in 2018 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author)

involve moving the object to a more prominent place to increase its public visibility, but more commonly the opposite is true. In the context of relocate, the dominant decision makers have usually determined that the object no longer warrants such a prominent location but simultaneously that it is not so objectionable to warrant complete removal from public view. The Bronze Soldier in Tallinn, Estonia, provides a timely example.20 Communist authorities originally erected the soldier in 1947 to commemorate the liberation of Estonia by the Soviet Union from German occupation during World War II. In close proximity to downtown Tallinn, the memorial marked the resting place for several Soviet soldiers who perished during that conflict. Many Estonians chafed at Soviet rule and considered Soviet liberation as setting the stage for decades of subsequent occupation. The fall of communism, break-up of the Soviet Union, and Estonian independence brought sweeping changes, including to public space and

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commemorative landscapes. After years of debate and simmering tensions, the Estonian government ordered the Bronze Soldier and associated graves relocated to a less prominent location in 2007. The decision sparked bitter protests and objections from Estonian’s Russian-speaking minority, as well as from Russia, but to no avail. The decision to relocate the Bronze Soldier represented a compromise of sorts that allowed the monument to remain but only after being removed to a less central location (Fig. 5.2). The presence of the remains of Soviet soldiers and the large Russian-speaking minority undoubtedly worked to preclude complete removal, but the desire to deemphasize the Soviet/Russian legacy and continued presence in contemporary Estonia fueled a desire to marginalize that presence throughout the urban landscape. In this case, the new location was less visible and less prominent, although the strategy of relocate could theoretically result in increased visibility and prominence. The communist-era monuments collected to

Fig. 5.2 The Bronze Soldier in Tallinn after its relocation in 2007 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author)

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form Memento Park in Budapest, Gr¯utas Park in southern Lithuania, and Fallen Monument Park in Moscow, for example, arguably receive greater attention as tourist destinations than if they were scattered across their original locations or dispersed to new locations. Like relocate, the strategy of re-orientate is also something of a compromise between remain and remove. In these cases, the monuments or other historical markers are left in their original location, but the surrounding spatial context is altered to such an extent that the original meaning is rewritten, rearranged, or reinterpreted. This is most commonly accomplished through the addition of new monuments, markers, architecture, and other material objects. Sükhbaatar Square in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar offers an intriguing example. Named after communist-era hero and leader of the Mongolian People’s Party Damdin Sükhbaatar in 1925, the square marked the symbolic center of politics and daily life in the capital, including numerous parades and public rallies during the communist period. In 1946, the government erected a statue of a horsemounted Sükhbaatar in the middle of the square to further glorify the establishment of Mongolia as a communist state. The fall of communist rule in 1990 brought about a broad reappraisal of Mongolian history largely centered on reviving the legacy of Chinggis Khan, the renowned warlord and founder of the Mongol Empire.21 In 2013, the municipal government renamed the square in honor of Chinggis, while the national government ordered the renovation of the Government Palace to feature a more modernist façade and massive statues of Chinggis and other leading figures in the Mongol Empire. The new façade and statues replaced the rather austere communist-era exterior and Sükhbaatar Mausoleum, modeled on Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow. The other sides of the square soon featured an assortment of modernist commercial and government buildings, although the Sükhbaatar statute was left unchanged. Overall, these architectural renovations and additions served to recast the square as the symbolic centerpiece of a new Mongolia that was democratic, progressive, and globalized while downplaying the legitimacy of the Mongolian People’s Party. The MPP opposed the renaming, as did Sükhbaatar’s descendants, and challenged the legality of the government’s decision in court. After the MPP returned to power in 2016 and a court decision in its favor, the space reverted to its previous name of Sükhbaatar Square in 2016. In this case, the Sükhbaatar statue

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remained in place, standing just as it had for decades, while the architectural composition and toponymy of the surrounding space underwent a profound re-orientation, albeit not without controversy. A fifth strategy is return. This strategy overlaps partially with remove, relocate, and re-orientate in that return implies some earlier change in location or context that will be reversed. The saga of the Berlin palaces highlights the strategy of return.22 The City Palace was home to the imperial family until Germany’s defeat in World War I and the emperor’s abdication. The palace remained a symbol of German national pride for conservatives through World War II, when it was badly damaged. After the war, the partially intact palace occupied land allocated to East Berlin under the authority of the East German communist government. Communist authorities viewed the palace as a relic of the deleterious influence of militarism and imperialism in German nationalism and so ordered remnants of the City Palace demolished in 1950. The communist government constructed the modernist Palace of the Republic on the same site in the 1970s to signify the triumph of East German socialism. Germany’s reunification, which essentially entailed West Germany absorbing East Germany, left the communist-era palace vacant and needing costly renovations due to asbestos. Some lobbied in favor of renovations, noting that the Palace of the Republic represented an important part of German history worth preserving. After years of intense debate, the German government approved the demolition of the Palace of the Republic and reconstruction of the City Palace. The remarkable return of the City Palace is nearing completion by the end of 2019, but of course, this return was predicated on two successive removals (Fig. 5.3). Of course, the saga of the Berlin palaces also highlights how the formulation and application of distinct and discrete strategies can be simplistic and subjective since reality often blurs those categorizations. The Berlin Wall is arguably a monument in a category of its own, and its unfolding story suggests the utility of approaching the city simultaneously as a palimpsest and a crucible of identity, belonging, and memory.23 Originally constructed as a functional structure to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the west, the Berlin Wall soon became a symbol of the Cold War in general and communist oppression in particular. After the collapse of the communist Soviet bloc across Eastern Europe and German reunification, the Berlin Wall became almost universally unwanted, if not hated, overnight.

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Fig. 5.3 The City Palace in Berlin during reconstruction in 2016 (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author)

The post-collapse story of the Berlin Wall encompasses all five strategies. Jubilant citizens from east and west spontaneously pursued the remove strategy almost immediately as images of crowds chiseling away at the hated edifice broadcast around the globe gained iconographic status. In a more deliberate fashion, government authorities ordered much of the wall systematically removed in an effort to facilitate Berlin’s reunification. As a result, most of the wall was ground into pieces and used as landfill for various construction projects in and around Berlin. Other sections of wall were relocated around Berlin and the world, generally as a type of commemorative trophy. These relocations invariably involved re-orientation as well. The wall slabs relocated to the European Union headquarters in Brussels or Seoul, South Korea, for example, reflect aspirations for continued integration or future unification respectively. Although the Berlin Wall was largely removed, the government mapped the wall’s course with a line of dual pavers and other markers that snake

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for miles through the metropolis. The wall’s monumental infrastructure was removed or relocated, but in a certain sense, the wall remains in place, at least symbolically, although that symbolic presence is also a reorientation. The strategy of re-orientation also applies to those places where the wall remained, generally in less central locations such as the East Side Gallery, where it now attracts throngs of curious tourists. It is admittedly speculative, but given the popularity of the Berlin Wall in its various manifestations as a tourist attraction drawing millions of visitors, it would not be surprising if there were eventually calls to reconstruct—to return—some sections of the Berlin Wall in some fashion. Indeed, a small section of the wall in its final version was constructed along Bernau Street as part of the Berlin Wall Memorial complex (Fig. 5.4). A comprehensive and historically-accurate reconstruction of the Berlin Wall, obviously segmented and partial so as to not impede free movement through the city, would undoubtedly be an even greater tourist attraction.

Fig. 5.4 A reconstructed section of the Berlin Wall as part of the Berlin Wall Memorial (Photograph by Joshua Hagen. Image courtesy of the author)

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Concluding Thoughts Speculation aside, the strategy of remove seems ascendant globally. There have been mounting calls to remove monuments and other commemorative markers dedicated to Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes, and dozens of others due to their historical ties to colonialism, slavery, segregation, dispossession, and oppression. Even Mahatma Gandhi has drawn the ire of activists from North America to Africa. Gandhi has long been a global icon revered as a champion of non-violent activism in support of Indian independence and de-colonization in general. Gandhi’s seemingly straightforward legacy has been complicated, though, by his statements using racist and derogatory language to describe Black Africans. As a result, existing statues of Gandhi have been removed or vandalized, and new statues have been blocked. These diffuse activist movements highlight how the contours of identity, belonging, and memory are increasingly situated within transnational histories and discourses of colonialism, inequality, and injustice propelled by increased global mobility, connectivity, and exchange.24 Activism favoring the strategy of remove has also increasingly captured national attention in the United States, especially following the election of President Donald Trump.25 Activists have pointed to the myriad monuments, place names, and other commemorative markers celebrating individuals and institutions associated with various forms colonialism, oppression, and discrimination, especially slavery and racism. It is hardly surprising, then, that monuments associated with the Confederacy have served as flashpoints for controversy. There is little doubt that the Civil War was a seminal event in American history resulting in the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. Despite those triumphs, the former Confederate states soon institutionalized systems of racial segregation and oppression that severely curtailed the full exercise of civil rights and belied the promise of emancipation to the former slaves and their descendants. The establishment of Jim Crow oppression across the American South also manifested in the creation of new commemorative landscapes that celebrated the Confederacy a noble but “lost cause” defense of states’ rights and genteel Southern culture while also obscuring the brutality of slavery. This myth of the “lost cause” Confederacy was soon enshrined through countless monuments, places names, and other commemorative markers by the early twentieth century.

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The Civil Rights Movement and legislation made considerable progress dismantling the legal framework of racial segregation during the 1950s and 1960s, but cities across the American South still featured prominent tributes to Confederate leaders like general Robert E. Lee, as well as the thousands of common soldiers who fought and died on behalf of the Confederacy. These Confederate places of memory remained in place, albeit not without controversy, even as new figures were duly honored in public space for opposing racial segregation, such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. This iconographic juxtaposition persisted into the early twenty-first century and helped fuel public debates concerning the propriety of commemorating the Confederacy and its leaders. Some have contended that Confederate monuments celebrate and, in the process, perpetuate racism, inequality, and oppression. To remedy that injustice, those monuments should be removed or at least relocated to more peripheral locations. Others have emphasized the Confederacy as integral to American history and a uniquely Southern heritage. As such, the monuments should remain in place, according to this line of thought, to document that history for future generations. Another group generally concurred that the monuments should remain while simultaneously acknowledging their intrinsic linkages to justifying racism, segregation, and oppression. Rather than embarking on a potentially endless crusade to rid the urban landscape of all offending monuments, this line of thinking argues that society would benefit more in the long term by a re-orientation of these places of memory to more fully engage those troublesome aspects of history. These debates have unfolded in a highly contingent manner with the strategies of remain, remove, relocate, and re-orientate being adopted in different communities and different circumstances. Perhaps hoping to pre-empt further controversies, a growing number of states have passed legislation forbidding the removal of historical landmarks of any kind. One such state was North Carolina, where controversy swirled around a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The monument in question, dubbed Silent Sam, honored the common soldiers who served the Confederate cause. Originally erected in 1913, the statue drew the repeated ire of protesters and vandals who objected to the apparent veneration of the Confederate cause shorn of its underlying brutality of slavery. Silent Sam seemed well ensconced on campus though, thanks to state law. Undeterred, activists toppled Silent Sam from its perch in August 2018. The state law that

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prohibited the statue’s removal also requires any statues removed illegally be returned to their original location, which has not happened so far. The situation seems at an impasse with continued acrimony between advocates of remove, relocate, re-orientate, and return jockeying for public and legal support. In the short term, the strategy of remain appears the path of least resistance, which purportedly entails Silent Sam remaining in storage at an undisclosed location, although this is subsequent to actions of remove and relocate. Regardless of their eventual outcome, these examples showcase the utility of thinking of the city as a composition. Specifically, the urban landscape represents a type of palimpsest or a pentimento. Whether consisting of words or images, earlier compositions are written over by successive governments, social movements, and interest groups, but the traces of earlier compositions remain visible in space and place. The notion of the city as a composition also highlights how the urban landscape provides an evolving arena for various social actors to work through issues of identity, belonging, and memory. Ultimately, the question of how society should engage a particular monument, memorial, or other place of memory is subjective and determined by shifting constellations of political, social, and economic power. The question, then, is less about which strategy is “correct” and more about understanding why and when groups advocate for one strategy instead of the alternatives.

Notes 1. Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 251. 2. Steven Hoelscher and Derek H. Alderman, “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship,” Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 347–355; Kenneth E. Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, “Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 35, no. 1 (2007): 125–144; Danielle Drozdzewski, Sarah De Nardi, and Emma Waterton, “Geographies of Memory, Place and Identity: Intersections in Remembering War and Conflict,” Geography Compass 10, no. 11 (2016): 447–456. 3. Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995).

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4. Felix Driver and David Gilbert, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 5. Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]), 1. 6. Stephan Daniels and Denis E. Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 7. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995); Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 8. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (New York: Wiley, 1997). 9. Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1991); Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 10. James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11. Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” Geojournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 165–178; Anett Árvay and Kenneth Foote, “The Spatiality of Memoryscapes, Public Memory, and Commemoration,” in The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, ed. Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (London: Routledge, 2020), 129–137. 12. Sarah Gensburger, “Memory and Space: (Re)reading Halbwachs,” in The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, ed. Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (London: Routledge, 2020), 69. 13. Karen E. Till, “Places of Memory,” in A Companion to Political Geography, ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerald Toal (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 292. 14. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 43. 15. Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “The City as Crucible: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity into the Twenty-First Century,” The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 253–263. 16. Göran Therborn, Cities of Power: The Urban, the National, the Popular, the Global (London: Verso, 2017), 22.

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17. Michael Crang, “Envisioning Urban Histories: Bristol as Palimpsest, Postcards, and Snapshots,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 28, no. 3 (1996): 429–452; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “The City as Palimpsest: Narrating National Identity through Urban Space and Place,” The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 1–22. 18. Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995), 59–60. 19. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 3. 20. Martin Ehala, “The Bronze Soldier: Identity Threat and Maintenance in Estonia,” Journal of Baltic Studies 40, no. 1 (2009): 139–158. 21. Orhon Myadar, “The Rebirth of Chinggis Khann: State Appropriation of Chinggiss Khann in Post-Socialist Mongolia,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 5 (2017): 840–855. 22. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, “The Reconstructed City Palace and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin: Restoring Architectural Identity or Distorting the Memory of Historic Spaces?” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25, no. 4 (2017): 441–454. 23. Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Wall and Its Reconstruction as a Site of Memory,” German Politics & Society 29, no. 2 (2011): 78–106. 24. Aleida Assmann, “Transnational Memories,” European Review 22, no. 4 (2014): 546–556. 25. Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Confederate Monuments and the Problem of Forgetting,” Cultural Geographies 26, no. 1 (2019): 127– 131.

Bibliography Árvay, Anett, and Kenneth Foote, “The Spatiality of Memoryscapes, Public Memory, and Commemoration,” in The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, edited by Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (Routledge, 2020), 129–137. Assmann, Aleida, “Transnational Memories,” European Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2014, 546–556. Cosgrove, Denis E., Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]).

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Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne, “The Reconstructed City Palace and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin: Restoring Architectural Identity or Distorting the Memory of Historic Spaces?” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2017, 441–454. Crang, Michael, “Envisioning Urban Histories: Bristol as Palimpsest, Postcards, and Snapshots,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1996, 429–452. Cresswell, Tim, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Daniels, Stephen, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton University Press, 1993). Daniels, Stephen, and Denis E. Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Diener, Alexander C., and Joshua Hagen, “The City as Crucible: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity into the Twenty-First Century,” in The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity, edited by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 253–263. Diener, Alexander C., and Joshua Hagen, “The City as Palimpsest: Narrating National Identity through Urban Space and Place,” in The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity, edited by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 1–22. Driver, Felix, and David Gilbert, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester University Press, 2003). Drozdzewski, Danielle, Sarah De Nardi, and Emma Waterton, “Geographies of Memory, Place and Identity: Intersections in Remembering War and Conflict,” Geography Compass, Vol. 10, No. 11, 2016, 447–456. Duncan, James S., The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Dwyer, Owen J., and Derek H. Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” Geojournal, Vol. 73, No. 3, 2008, 165–178. Ehala, Martin, “The Bronze Soldier: Identity Threat and Maintenance in Estonia,” Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2009, 139–158. Foote, Kenneth E., and Maoz Azaryahu, “Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2007, 125–144. Forest, Benjamin, and Juliet Johnson, “Confederate Monuments and the Problem of Forgetting,” Cultural Geographies, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2019, 127–131.

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Gensburger, Sarah, “Memory and Space: (Re)reading Halbwachs,” in The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, edited by Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (Routledge, 2020), 69–76. Hall, Peter, Cities in Civilization (Pantheon, 1998). Harrison, Hope M., “The Berlin Wall and Its Reconstruction as a Site of Memory,” German Politics & Society, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2011, 78–106. Harvey, David, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Wiley, 1997). Hayden, Dolores, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997). Hoelscher, Steven, and Derek H. Alderman, “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship,” Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2004, 347–355. Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003). Kostof, Spiro, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Bulfinch Press, 1991). Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (Harcourt Brace, 1938). Myadar, Orhon, “The Rebirth of Chinggis Khann: State Appropriation of Chinggiss Khann in Post-Socialist Mongolia,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 45, No. 5, 2017, 840–855. Olsen, Donald J., The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (Yale University Press, 1986). Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (A. A. Knopf, 1995). Sibley, David, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (Routledge, 1995). Smith, Anthony D., Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Polity, 1995). Therborn, Göran, Cities of Power: The Urban, the National, the Popular, the Global (Verso, 2017). Till, Karen E., “Places of Memory,” in A Companion to Political Geography, edited by John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerald Toal (Blackwell, 2008), 289–301.

CHAPTER 6

Out of Place: Displacements of the Body in Artistic Practice Gregory Blair

The Latin phrase persona non grata typically translates as a person that is not welcome. Created as a compound of several words, persona meaning “person,” and non grata signifying “not pleasing,” the origins of the phrase has its roots in fifteenth century Europe and the language governing the episcopal elections of bishops. It was originally intended to identify a candidate that was unsuitable for election.1 It was not until the nineteenth century that the phrase evolved into something closer to its twenty-first century usage. In contemporary vernacular, the phrase has two similar meanings. The first, and more official one, comes from Article 9 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The article states that, “The receiving State may at any time and without having to explain its decision, notify the sending State that the head of the mission or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non grata or that any other member of the staff of the mission is not acceptable.”2 As Davis VanOpdorp writes, the authority of the article has “mostly been used as

G. Blair (B) Evansville, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_6

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a symbolic gesture as a way for a country to show displeasure with the actions of another country or entity.”3 It is not uncommon however, for a nation to use this policy as a means to physically remove someone. In these cases, the gesture is not symbolic and involves ousting the persona non grata from the host nation. The offender is declared unwelcome and is not permitted to stay within the country. This is one of the sternest reprimands that a country can enact on foreign diplomats, who under other conditions, are protected by diplomatic immunity. The other, less official, meaning of the phrase in common lexicon refers to someone that has become unpopular. It is likely that many of us at some point in our lives, have felt as if we were a persona non grata. Perhaps this feeling was only fleeting or perhaps it still lingers to this day. Although most people are likely able to identify the cause of feeling rebuffed, many of us never think about the systems and structures that we can’t see in plain sight which actually contribute or give origin to the prescriptions of who is, and who is not, welcome in any particular place. These geographies of exclusion often become naturalized and normalized as they silently impinge upon our movements, knowledge, identity, and the nature of our being. The creations by several contemporary artists aim to make us think about these prescriptions and to analyze our own perceptions and understanding of which people belong in which spaces. What many of these artists produce can be referred to what Tim Cresswell calls a “geographical deviance.” Because geography and place are intrinsic to our beliefs about “normality,” those beliefs inherently hold the potential for someone to become geographically deviant, or what we might more accurately describe as “geographical subversion”—to be out of place. As Cresswell writes, deviance from “normality is also shot through with geographical assumptions concerning what and who belong where.”4 The geographical subversions created by some contemporary artists become performances that serve to disrupt our expectations of place and behavior. According to Cresswell, these cultural expectations, or “what one’s place is” are “clearly related to one’s relation to others.”5 For example, we would not expect to witness a doctor performing surgery in between lanes of traffic on a busy highway or someone taking a bath in the middle of the food court at a local shopping mall. However, these actions only become subversive in their relation to others—they need to seen by others to be truly subversive. The three artistic projects examined throughout the rest of this chapter all create geographical subversions that are meant

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to be seen, and in turn, also questioned. As Cresswell makes clear, there is “nothing logical” about the cultural expectations of place and behavior. “Neither are they necessarily rules or laws. Rather they are expectations about behavior that relate a position in a social structure to actions in space.”6 To demonstrate the illogical extremes that these expectations can include, Cresswell relays several stories from NYC in the 1980s in which being “out of place” had some serious consequences for those involved.7 Even decades later, one does not have to look very deep into the news cycle to read of another instance of the police being called on Black people for doing ordinary things in places that they were perceived to not belong. While these calls are certainly racially motivated, they also underscore the belief that these people were not in their “proper” place. Within my own life, an experience with this type of illogical extreme of expected behavior arose from an art project that a student created several years ago. As a university professor, I have taught various history, sculpture, and three-dimensional design courses over the years. One of the concepts that I encourage beginning students to grapple with is the variable ways that we create, understand, and perceive disparate places. In order to do so, I have them complete a project that I call “site intervention,” in which each student has to create an intervention that changes the meaning or experience of a certain place. Several years ago, a student named Jamie Smith conceived of an intervention performance in which she used a blanket and pillow brought from home to pretend that she was sleeping on the ground in the middle of the campus green. Jamie chose a spot on the green in which she was partially blocking a highly trafficked sidewalk (Fig. 6.1). It was not long before this performance drew some attention as several people stopped and crouched down to check if she was alright. She told them that she was in fact just fine and they proceeded on their way. Others seemed to pass by without paying much attention (Fig. 6.2). After about an hour, a professor from one of the adjacent buildings walked over to her and told her that she had to leave, that she was not “allowed” to be there. Jamie told him that she was creating a performance project for an art course. “Does your professor know that you are doing this?” he inquired. “Yes,” she replied. “Well, if you don’t leave, I will call the police!” That is when her performance reached its powerful culmination because it unveiled the illogical nature of the expected behaviors and acceptable persons allowed in that space. She has crossed into being persona non grata. But why should the police be called? She was not doing anything harmful or threatening to the other people using the space. She did however reveal the unwritten rules about the

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Fig. 6.1 Jamie Smith, Spatial Intervention documentation, 2014 (Image courtesy of the artist)

behaviors that were deemed acceptable for the campus green. She had managed to create a geographical subversion. Just as this student achieved, Christian Philip Müller, Santiago Sierra, and Keri Smith are artists that have created certain projects that reveal the illogicality of behavioral expectations in particular places as they play with the notion of being out of place as a persona non grata. In doing so, these artworks acknowledge how the policing of space is a culturally constructed activity often aimed at benefiting or controlling a specific group. In a Foucauldian sense, the delineation and designation of these places is a means of ordering and classifying space with the intent of prescribing which bodies are welcome and which ones are not allowed. The artworks examined in the following pages seek to disclose these very prescriptions, urging the viewer to reconsider their validity and limitations. A detailed analysis of a specific artwork by each artist reveals how they prompt viewers to consider the often ambiguous and arbitrary delineation and definition of space and the acceptable behaviors that are allowed to happen in those spaces.

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Fig. 6.2 Jamie Smith, Spatial Intervention documentation, 2014 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Let me begin with Christian Philipp Müller’s 1993 performance artwork Green Border. Created for the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Green Border was produced over several months leading up to the opening of the Biennale. The project entailed Müller exploring Austria’s wooded boundaries with a photographer assistant in order to make illegal border crossings into the countries contiguous to Austria including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Germany. To document each crossing, Müller sent postcards to friends and his art dealer from one of the local post offices once he made the successful crossing. Each card declared: “I crossed the border between X and Y and I am still alive.” Additionally, Müller’s assistant took snapshots of the moment when each border was being traversed. These images serve as the permanent visual documentation of his crossings. To assist in not being caught by authorities, Müller also wore disguises based on national stereotypes—although they did not always

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work. While crossing into the Czech Republic, Müller and his assistant were arrested and barred from entering the country for three years. As Alexander Alberro has written, these types of projects by Müller “unfold as critiques.”8 In Green Border, the object of his critique were the borders separating nations and how they have been produced by humans which then overlay them onto place as a form of taxonomy which classifies, controls, and categorizes what those places are, who they belong to, and who belongs within them. These borders are part of what Jeremy Rifkin calls the “fiction of the nation state.”9 Emma Willemse has also written about national boundaries in similar terms: “A nation is actually nothing; countries don’t exist. When astronauts went into space they did not see a line between France and Spain.”10 Müller’s Green Border works to question the power that has been invested in the creation and maintenance of these borders. As Alberro claims, “Müller’s border crossing antics operate to highlight and problematize the complex network of socially, politically, and economically constructed seams that demarcate territory.”11 Müller creates a geographical subversion by performing a transgression that does not follow the accepted process of a legal and regulated border crossing—his actions do not follow the expected and acceptable behaviors that have been determined for that place. The illegal border crossings emphasize the “role of performativity in the construction of identity.”12 Through established patterns and habits of behavior (in this case, legal and documented border crossings), the border is reified and made real as it slowly takes on the quality of intransigence. When Müller breaks from these entrenched behaviors by doing something one is not “supposed” to do, he urges the viewer to question the stability, permanence, and facticity of these delineations. By being out of place—going somewhere he should not be and doing something he is not supposed to—Müller made himself into persona non grata (as evidenced by his three year ban from the Czech Republic). As viewers of Müller’s actions, we are brought to a greater awareness of the normativity of crossing a national border and the typical procedure for doing so. The subversive act provides a heightened conscious about how space is regulated. As Cresswell writes, “our consciousness of place all but disappears” when everything “appears to be working well.”13 It is through subversion and insurgency that we gain a sense of “what is proper as opposed to what is not proper—that which is in place and that which is out of place.”14 In

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doing so, we then have the opportunity to reflexively question how and why these norms were established. Yet, the questions that arise do not stop there, Müller also incites us to consider the transgressive characterization of his actions. Why have these crossings been deemed illegal? Who has made this decision and how do they benefit from this restriction of mobility? In this manner, Müller’s performance of geographical subversion becomes critique. Its effect is similar to what Judith Butler describes as the potency of performance, namely that it can suggest “an openness to resignification and recontextualization.”15 Yet, Butler also reminds us that these types of subversive bodily acts serve as displacements of norms (perhaps only temporarily), and not their destruction. “The deconstruction of identity [or boundary]” writes Butler, “is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity [or boundary] is articulated.” This is what Green Border reminds us of—the political, economic, and social forces responsible for the development of territories and the mutable manifestation of their circumscriptions. Santiago Sierra is also an artist that creates disruptions in the expectations of who belongs in a given place and the appropriate behaviors to be conducted in those places. For this analysis, I will focus on Sierra’s 2008 piece Remake of group of persons facing the wall and person facing into a corner exhibited at the Tate Modern in London. The installation was a recreation of a similar artwork from 2002 presented at the Lisson Gallery in London. Sierra’s artwork at the Tate Modern (as well as the one at Lisson) consisted of several homeless people silently facing a blank wall and a corner while onlookers watched them from behind. Sierra paid each of them the price of a one-night stay at a hostel to soundlessly stand in the exhibition space for the duration of the day. The experience of the viewer watching these faceless people being remunerated for performing a useless task was, as Claire Bishop describes, one of “unease and discomfort.”16 The discomfort seemingly arose from Sierra’s use of displacement—by putting specific bodies into a context in which they appear as being out of place. Sierra’s project enacted a geographical subversion that focused not only on who is creating the disorder, but also on what the subversive behavior is in itself. The behavior of the homeless people is critical, because it differentiates the unexpected bodies from the rest of the crowd. The potent efficacy of Remake and its original is brought to fruition when

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the viewer is forced to question both the identity and behavior at the same time: “Who are those people that would do that here?” If the hired homeless of Sierra’s project were instructed to mill about the crowds of the Tate Modern, they may have perhaps gone undetected, but by having them face a vacant wall while remaining still, Sierra signals to the viewer that something is amiss, an unexpected behavior is occurring within this particular setting. The bodily displacement of the individuals from where they are “supposed” to be, “aims to unmask the power relations” that keep certain people invisible and excluded.17 Most of the visitors to the Tate Modern were likely conscious of the issue of homelessness, yet they still found themselves discomforted by the presence of the homeless in a place they did not expect them to be—an institution of high culture. Even though the Tate Modern does not charge an admission fee, its status and reputation as an arbiter of, and setting for, fine art, creates invisible inhibitive barriers of exclusion that keep a certain section of the local socio-economic demographic from ever passing through its doors. Anyone is free to enter the Tate Modern, but they do have security guards and docents to protect the artworks and also to surveil—to ensure that no one is behaving in a manner that has been deemed unacceptable. As the Tate’s website states: “We are committed to ensuring that Tate galleries are safe, inclusive and respectful places. We will take immediate action when this is not supported by those visiting our sites.”18 Maintaining the safety of the visitors to the museum is certainly an expected high priority, but there is ambiguity in the reach of security efforts as the museum’s website also claims “We do not discuss the details of our security arrangements.”19 The point is not to paint the Tate Modern as a dark overlord, but rather to emphasize the space of the museum as a highly controlled and monitored space with a normative set of acceptable people and behaviors. By bringing homeless people into the gallery, Sierra renders an “embodiment to the unseen” and makes an “absence visible.”20 As Teresa Margoles has stated, this displacement of bodies, “point to real, if often unmarked, accessibility issues.”21 Yet, Sierra’s performance is not solely concerned with affairs of accessibility. It is meant to remind the museum visitors of their place of privilege. As Sierra himself has stated, “the art spectator can access any site. He (sic) lives in a privileged world.”22 Sierra attempts to dispel the notion that space is an empty container and instead emphasizes how power is embedded in the delineation, organization, and construction of places—including a free public museum.

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The embedded and spatialized powers that govern any given place reaffirm their control by codifying the types of acceptable behaviors allowed to occur there. As Kelly Baum claims “space isn’t merely a weapon, an instrument that supports the status quo, but the physical manifestation of (unequal) human rights.”23 Many of Sierra’s artworks, such as Remake and its original, also suggest how the art world is complicit in using spatial organization and classification as a means of inclusion and exclusion. In this sense, much of the tone of Sierra’s practice draws upon the tradition of institutional critique as developed by artists such as Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Similar to some of Haacke’s artworks that direct the viewer to consider the capitalist exchanges and machinations working behind the polished veneer of the museum and gallery surface, Sierra attempts to elucidate the “imbrication of this [gallery and museum] system with the larger schema of capital exchange and control.”24 Through this process of explication, one might wonder what solutions to these issues does Sierra offer. What possible means of untangling the complex web that spatial politics imposes upon human relations and exchange? The answer may be somewhat surprising. Sierra’s performances intentionally do not provide any answers—a crucial departure that Bishop contrasts with the utopic visions of the artists involved in the Relational Aesthetics movement. Sierra does not offer hope or any promises of salvation. There are not any sanguine expectations for his viewers, instead Sierra offers a “grim meditation.”25 Sierra’s projects are revelatory, subversive, and disruptive as they create geographies of subversion, but they never propose a positive resolution. What Sierra does provide however, is a peak behind the curtain—a reminder that the invisible hand of cultural institutions influence the expectations and normativity of who belongs in certain places, and what set of behaviors those people are allowed to perform. Watching homeless people stand in front of a blank wall urges the viewer to question what they are doing and why they are there. For Sierra, hopefully these initial questions lead the viewer to then also “examine the assumptions about inclusion and exclusion which are implicit in the design [and taxonomy] of spaces and places.”26 Sierra compels us to consider our own participation and involvement in the socio-spatial structuring of the places that we inhabit. While possibly rendering uncomfortable feelings, Remake beseeches us to contemplate why these bodies seem so out of place to begin with.

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In 2016, the contemporary artist and writer, Keri Smith, published a book titled The Wander Society. Smith begins the text with a personal anecdote about a visit to an old used bookstore. As she milled about the store, Smith stumbled upon a well-worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. While thumbing through the pages, she noticed several hand written annotations that included phrases such as “WW will show you the way,” “Solvitur Ambulando” (it is solved by walking), and “The Wander Society.” Intrigued by these cryptic messages, Smith purchased the book and went home to research the secretive group known as The Wander Society. Without finding too much online, Smith enlisted the help of a friend. Together, they began to collect snippets of information about The Wander Society that they found on posters and pamphlets before stumbling upon the website of a professor J. Tindlebaum. According to his website, Tindlebaum had spent considerable time documenting the movements and philosophy of The Wander Society. Over the course of the next year, Smith began living more and more by the principles of The Wander Society as she gathered as much information on the organization as she could. What she discovered was that The Wander Society is extremely elusive. Members typically do not identify themselves as they carry on with their wandering in personal and quiet ways. After gaining a reasonable comprehension of the group and their edicts, Smith eventually decided to publish a book about The Wander Society. As she insists in her introduction, “It is not my intent to capitalize on the writings of The Wander Society. Instead, I genuinely wish to share its message with you.”27 The rest of the text is divided into sections that both inform and encourage the reader to become a wanderer, and therefore, a member of The Wander Society. Some of the segments include a Wander Society manifesto, an explicative history of walking, a tactical guide, suggestions for fieldwork, and a how-to section. The over-arching theme of the book is to encourage the adoption of The Wander Society precepts as an aid “in our quest to discover our own deepest soul life, to help us move to a higher plane of consciousness.”28 While the message of Smith’s book is germane and beneficial to those feeling disenchanted with the distractions and destructions of the twentyfirst century, the facts of her story are not entirely accurate. Indeed, some readers may even be a little disappointed to find out that The Wander Society is Smith’s own creation to go along with the publication of her book. Yet, as Candace Braun Davison writes, its fictional nature “doesn’t diminish its message, or its potential to become a movement.”29 So why

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did Smith invent this group and publish this book? The first page offers insight into her imperative by asking some forthright questions: Do you feel like technology is taking up too much of your time? Do you feel disillusioned by a society that seems entirely focused on monetary gain? Have you lost a sense of ownership to the place you live? Very early on Smith makes it clear that The Wander Society exists to “provide a new way of existing for those disillusioned with current societal constructs,” – which can include the spatial distribution of power.30 Smith wants to help people break from the monotony of daily routine and “everyday life—the one that you’ve been taught to believe in from school, society, family, and whatnot.”31 For Smith, some of the monotony of contemporary life comes from our fixation on technology and the distraction it creates from living our best life. The twentieth century philosopher, Martin Heidegger also shared similar concerns about technology. Several of Heidegger’s writings address the dangerous diversions of technology. For Heidegger, an authentic form of existence was slowly being eroded and taken over by urbanization, mechanization, and technology. Heidegger’s great concern about technology arises from his acknowledgement of its powerful ability to cover over being, hiding the true nature of being from us. In “Memorial Address,” for example, Heidegger warns that “those who have stayed on in their homeland… Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off to uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world (Heidegger’s italics).32 Smith’s own sensibilities about technology are closely aligned with Heidegger’s. Far from being a luddite, Smith does not condone the eradication of technology, rather she remains weary of how it can disconnect us from knowing ourselves and the world we live in. Smith offers wandering as a potential antidote. As Smith describes, wandering is “not about a specific place or destination, getting from one place to another, or movement as a means to an end. Instead, it’s about letting the soul and mind roam.”33 What Smith does in her book, is to suggest wandering as a means of creating personal geographies of political radicalism. Smith wants us to use wandering to become out of place—to displace our own bodies from the expectations that society and others have placed on us. Wandering inherently positions the wanderer as out of place because “wandering is viewed as socially unacceptable.”34 Wandering can be transgressive because it emboldens us to cross boundaries and break through barriers that have been imposed

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upon us. These boundaries can be physical—wandering may take us some place we have never been before—but they can also be metaphorical and metaphysical. As Gloria Anzaldúa has stated, borders and walls can also take the form of “entrenched habits and patterns of behavior.”35 Smith wants us to challenge the patterns of behavior determined through societal norms by side stepping their rules and expectations. “Society wants us to live a planned existence” proclaims Smith, “following paths that have been traveled by others. Tried and true. The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe.”36 In becoming a wanderer, one is able to create a geography of subversion by finding your own path. What Smith really seems to advocate is an ontological shift by using wandering to transform into “our true self.”37 Drawing upon the traditions of the flâneur, dérive, and psychogeography, Smith promotes a hybridization of these activities, which can have the “effect of actually altering your consciousness,” and additionally I would argue, actually altering the nature of your being.38 I have previously written about the radical influence that being out of place can have on the transformation of one’s existence in my text, Errant Bodies, Mobility, and Political Resistance.39 This notion of transforming into “our true selves” or revealing the truth of our being also has an affinity with Heidegger’s understanding of aletheia. As an unveiling, opening, and disclosure, aletheia was used by Heidegger to describe how being is revealed in time. He understood the process of aletheia as a continuous cycle of uncovering and concealing of being, as a movement between states of being. A term conventionally thought to have been used by the Ancient Greeks to mean “truth,” Heidegger reinterprets aletheia as the “unconcealment of being.” In his fresh interpretation, the truth of being is more suggestive of revealing or uncovering. For Heidegger, aletheia describes how being becomes unconcealed from the everydayness of the world. Of course for Heidegger, much of this mundane everydayness is the result of being bombarded by technology. His concern was that technological pursuits distract us from Husserl’s imperative of getting to “things themselves.” In Heidegger’s understanding, technology inhibits aletheia and the comprehension of being itself. Indeed, Smith also believes in a sort of wandering aletheia which opens new ways of existing. According to Rebecca Solnit, “getting lost… seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way.”40 In the manner espoused by Smith, wandering is a means of getting lost; it yields a starting point of discovery—both of the self and the world—that is

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not determined by cultural constructs. As Smith writes in the Wanderer’s Creed, she wants us to experiment with being out of place: “Let us not be tied down by clocks, schedules, rules, dictates. Let us remember who we were before we learned these things.”41 And while Smith encourages us to do interesting and relevant work in getting out of place, it is worth mentioning that it is not without flaws and exclusions. Wandering is a privilege of certain mobilities and physical freedoms that are not afforded to everyone, but is also exclusive to particular social and economic positions of comfort—not everyone has the time to attempt such wandering. This is an important caveat to remember when we analyze any attempt at being out of place. Whether it is the arbitrariness of national boundaries, the invisible exclusions built into certain places, or the disillusionment with normative societal prescriptions, each of these three artists have created projects that call for an awakening. They implore the viewer to examine how power is exerted through the control, circumscription, and taxonomy of places and behaviors. Whether a viewer is prompted into advocating for, or actually making a real change, is up to each individual. What these projects offer is a glimpse through the keyhole—an insight into the ways that space, power, and behavior combine into complex systems that define our existence. These artists encourage us to look beyond those systems and realize that sometimes when we self identify as, or put ourselves in the position of, being persona non grata, it may not be such a bad thing. When this designation is imposed however, it can be dangerous and restrictive, but when it is reappropriated it can be empowering and a cogent means to wonder about the conditions that have created a situation in which someone is considered unwelcome.

Notes 1. John Considine, “The Origin of the Phrases Persona Grata and Persona Non Grata,” Neophilologus, Vol. 91, No. 3, July 2007, 525–537. 2. “Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations,” United Nations Treaty Collection, accessed Aug. 21, 2019, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Tre aties/1964/06/19640624%2002-10%20AM/Ch_III_3p.pdf. 3. Davis VanOpdorp, “What Does It Mean to Be Declared Persona Non Grata?” Deutsche Welle, Mar. 6, 2019, accessed May 23, 2019, https:// www.dw.com/en/what-does-it-mean-to-be-declared-persona-non-grata/ a-47800884.

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4. Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27. 5. Ibid., 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 4–8. 8. Alexander Alberro, “Unraveling the Seamless Totality: Christian Philipp Müller and the Reevaluation of Established Equations,” Grey Room 06, Winter 2002, 9. 9. Jeremy Rifkin, “The Empathetic Civilization,” TED, accessed Aug. 29, 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_rifkin_on_the_empathic_civili zation. 10. Emma Willemse, “The Phenomenon of Displacement in Contemporary Society and Its Manifestation in Contemporary Visual Art,” Master in Visual Arts Thesis, University of South Africa, 2010, 64. 11. Alexander Alberro, “Unraveling the Seamless Totality: Christian Philipp Müller and the Reevaluation of Established Equations,” Grey Room 06, Winter 2002, 10. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 10. 14. Ibid. 15. Judith Butler, RC Series Bundle: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2006), 188. 16. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110, fall 2004, 70. 17. Teresa Margoles, “Santiago Sierra,” Bomb, Winter 2003/2004, 63. 18. “Tate Gallery Rules,” Tate Museum, accessed Sept. 10, 2019, https:// www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-gallery-rules. 19. Ibid. 20. Emma Willemse, “The Phenomenon of Displacement in Contemporary Society and Its Manifestation in Contemporary Visual Art,” Master in Visual Arts Thesis, University of South Africa, 2010, 67. 21. Teresa Margoles, “Santiago Sierra,” Bomb, Winter 2003/2004, 63. 22. Ibid., 69. 23. Kelly Baum, “Santiago Sierra: How to Do Things with Words,” Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 4, 12. 24. Andr´es David Montenegro Rosero, “Locating Work in Santiago Sierra’s Artistic Practice,” Ephemera, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013, 102. 25. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110, fall 2004, 70. 26. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995), x. 27. Keri Smith, The Wander Society (Penguin Books, 2016), xxii.

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28. Ibid., xxii–xxiii. 29. Candace Braun Davison, “What It Takes to Join ‘The Wander Society’,” Life Between Weekends, Mar. 29, 2016, accessed Sept. 19, 2019, http:// www.lifebetweenweekends.com/2016/03/takes-join-wander-society/. 30. Keri Smith, The Wander Society (Penguin Books, 2016), xxv. 31. Ibid., 1. 32. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit (HarperCollins, 1966), 48. 33. Keri Smith, The Wander Society (Penguin Books, 2016), 7. 34. Ibid., 91. 35. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 101. 36. Keri Smith, The Wander Society ( Penguin Books, 2016), 1. 37. Ibid., 27. 38. Ibid., 20. 39. Gregory Blair, Errant Bodies, Mobility, and Political Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 40. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin Books, 2006), 14. 41. Ibid., 171.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2012). Baum, Kelly, “Santiago Sierra: How to Do Things with Words,” Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 4, 2010, 6–13. Bishop, Claire, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110, fall 2004, 51–79. Cresswell, Tim, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Davison, Candace Braun, “What It Takes to Join ‘The Wander Society’,” Life Between Weekends, Mar. 29, 2016, accessed Sept. 19, 2019, http://www.lif ebetweenweekends.com/2016/03/takes-join-wander-society/. Harmon, Katherine, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). Heidegger, Martin, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit (HarperCollins, 1966). Kenning, Dean, “Art Relations and the Presence of Absence,” Third Text, Vol. 23, No. 4, July 2009, 435–446. Margoles, Teresa, “Santiago Sierra,” Bomb, Winter 2003/2004, 62–69.

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Rosero, Andr´es David Montenegro, “Locating Work in Santiago Sierra’s Artistic Practice,” Ephemera, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2013, 99–115. Scott, Emily Eliza and Kirsten J. Swenson, eds., Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (University of California Press, 2015). Solnit, Rebecca, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin Books, 2006). Smith, Keri, The Wander Society (Penguin Books, 2016).

PART II

Disruptions

CHAPTER 7

Losing Site: Folded Morphologies of Photography and Brutalist Architecture Jessica Thalmann

An image does, indeed, kill.1 Once I look past an image’s lustered surface, peel back its layers of emulsion, I am left with a piece of paper and a cruel illusion. Henri Lefebvre’s poetic multivalent use of killing applies both to an image’s ability to outlive its subject and inability “to account for richness of lived experience.”2 And this killing is then multiplied upon realization that a photograph, the ultimate indexical depiction of truth, is flat. So, I often wonder how to render a photograph in three dimensions. How to extrude its surface—to see past the photograph as a pictorial object and to reach deeply into the image, extend a hand, and touch the spaces inside the frame. Contending with Roland Barthes’s conception of photography as a “wound”3 or a “puncture” amplifies this idea of photography’s perpetual failure to depict objects, people and places as they truly are. Barthes’ disillusionment crystalized when he asked how “to accede to what is behind?” the photograph, only to be met with the swift disappointment of empty white paper. This cognitive dissonance subsequently reinforces the photograph’s inability to realize and depict

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truth and reality. Perhaps it is photography’s flatness, rigidity and lack of haptic sensibility that epitomizes its failings and prohibits me from seeing, touching, and possessing what I desire. As a photographer, I am frustrated with the medium’s ephemeral nature, tied to the brittle emulsion on paper that will decay and fall apart over time. So I began to seek refuge in architecture, a medium focused on massive solid objects that outlast not only paper but also our lifetimes. The allure of architecture was tempting. It’s solidity and monumentality was a salve to heal the heartbreak of torn and grainy photographs that disintegrated between my fingers.4 Ironically, architectural practitioners possess an immense tendency towards privileging the image. Even Walter Benjamin notes “everyone will have noticed how much easier it is to get hold of a painting, more particularly a sculpture, and especially architecture, in a photograph than in reality.”5 The photograph often acts as a stand-in for a building since it necessitates experiencing the building, moving through space to truly understand it. So in this way, architecture is a field of image translation. These visual translations are all facsimiles for the ultimate building as either perspectival drawings, blueprints, cross-sections, elevations, isometric perspectives or axiomatic views, etc.… Architect John Hejduk explores the tricky relationship between architectural and pictorial space in his essay on “The Flatness of Depth,” lavishing the still image’s power to see a building in its entirety immediately and its subsequent ability to “heighten to an extreme, exorcising out from a single fixed photographic image all of [a building’s] possible sensations and meanings.”6 So how am I to reconcile this ultimate incongruity between architecture’s dependency on the image and the artifice and ephemeral nature that imbues the photographic object? How to transform a fragile paper photograph that is “[a]ttacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes: there is nothing left to do but throw it away?”7 Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in in the middle. Subsequently, my photo-based practice as a whole attempts to reconcile these material and conceptual shortcomings of photography and architecture by destabilizing conventional methods of representation; thereby radically transforming the ways in which we experience or perceive architecture and ideas of place.

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The Henry F. Hall Building This radical change in my practice began with confronting the haunted past of a single building: the Henry F. Hall Building at Concordia University in Montreal. This massive grey concrete and glass block sits unassumingly in the middle of campus. Originally designed by the architectural firm Ross, Fish, Duschenes and Barrett, the Hall Building was opened on October 14, 1966. Designed with a sensitivity to democratic values and honest, inexpensive materials such as concrete, the building was also touted as the only single structure to contain an entire university, including: “10 auditoria, one seating 700 people, 42 classrooms, 15 seminar rooms, 47 undergraduate laboratories, and 37 other smaller laboratories for research and graduate work, three language laboratories, four student lounges, a student government centre, and a Computer Centre.”8 Its aesthetic tended towards a high modernist, even Brutalist, approach with the façade’s modular, pre-stressed concrete exterior. Fabricated by Dutch company Schokbeton, each window module has a slightly curvilinear aperture for the glass, giving the skin of the building an almost ethereal feeling in contrast to the rectilinear or hard-edged facades with large swatches of béton brut. Nonetheless, there were several traumatic events involving protest, shootings, and violence that occurred within the Hall Building that could not have been predicted by the architects; and subsequently, irrevocably transformed the way this building is seen, used and experienced. It is this inherent dichotomy between the utopian sensibilities of brutalist architecture and the grimy traumatic histories that have spurred my artistic practice. I will begin with the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ and the intimate connection I have with this building as it spawned many years of artistic investigation to document the site. On August 24, 1992 Valery Fabrikant, an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, walked onto the ninth floor of the Hall Building carrying a briefcase that contained three handguns and many rounds of ammunition. Spurred by a long history of erratic behavior, harassment of staff, students and colleagues, and being denied tenure, Fabrikant killed four of his fellow professors, including my uncle Phoivos Ziogas, the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.9 He was shot twice in the stomach and died a month later in the hospital. To work through the emotional implications of his death and its reverberations throughout the family, I returned to the site of trauma and photographed its interiors, hallways, staircases, façades

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and architectural details. Thinking of the long circuitous almost claustrophobic architecture of the hallways in the building, I made a two-channel short film entitled The Ninth Floor examining the disorienting feeling of following an ambivalent figure down a long hallway. Shot as a single unbroken take to add a dense layer of tension, the viewer is forced to stay within the enclosed space as a potential threat of violence looms. The work makes reference to a rich history of filmmakers exploring similar subject matter including Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989), Gust Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) and Denis Villineuve’s Polytechnique (2009). In The Ninth Floor, the camera swoops and spins across the Brutalist concrete spaces of Concordia and York University; creating moments where the difference between floor, ceiling and walls are ultimately indecipherable (Fig. 7.1). Subsequently, I began researching the Hall Building’s past, searching for archival images of the building during construction and its opening. Unexpectedly, I discovered a series of riots and violent events that occurred before and after the 1992 shooting that dramatically changed the way I viewed and experienced the space. In 1969, the largest student protest known as the Computer Riot saw unprecedented violence on the ninth floor.10 Fueled by accusations of racism and unfair grading, students occupied the lounge, computer labs, and “barricaded the stairwells on the seventh floor and shut off the elevators and telephones.”11 Somehow, a fire broke out and the university’s computer labs were consequently destroyed. One of the most striking photographs in the archive was an image of millions of IBM computer punch cards and various papers flying out the windows from the ninth floor. The computer cards littered Maisonneuve Boulevard and surrounding streets below, blanketing the

Fig. 7.1 The Ninth Floor, 2-channel HD video installation by Jessica Thalmann, 8 minutes, sound, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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streets in a snow-like paper puddles. It remains a striking image of mayhem and destruction with complicated layers of institutional critique and violence. Another instance of unrest occurred on September 9, 2002, when riot police were deployed to the Hall Building to contain protestors opposing a scheduled visit from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Glass windows on the ground floor were broken, metal barricades and chairs were thrown, until finally, the riots ended in tear gas and pepper spray. Ingrid Peritz from The Globe and Mail reports, “Protestors occupied the front vestibule, only a few metres from the auditorium where 500 mostly Jewish spectators had gathered to hear the speech. Demonstrators outside smashed a large plate-glass window in the vestibule and began hurling objects at police inside, prompting officers to fire back with pepper spray. The acrid gas began to fill the vestibule. As chaos began to take hold, police pushed back the protesters inside. In response, several hurled wooden furniture and metal chairs at the officers from an upper mezzanine. By lunchtime, the vestibule of Concordia’s main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray.”12

How can a single building have such a troubled history of violence? Was there a connection between its Brutalist design and violence? Are there geometric shapes and textured concrete at fault of fostering a cold authoritarian environment? How can the lived experience of a building sharply veer away from an architect’s intent or original design? Can these experiences and traumas of the past seep into the pores of concrete walls, and sublimate into our own experience of the place? Having my own connection to this place, it is even more disconcerting to find these other troubling associations and stories that had taken place over fifty years prior. How to reconcile these intertwined histories?

Deleuze, Paper and the Fold It became increasingly clear that traditional means of photographic practice could not properly capture and articulate the mass of the Hall Building and the weight of its experiences. The simple black and white photographs that lay suspended in film emulsion or as a silver gelatin print became a kind of flat death 13 on my studio wall. Staring at those images on the wall, a feeling of paralysis slowly creeped in as these cold

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authoritarian grey buildings loomed larger while I shrank smaller. How could a photograph of these flat grey buildings hold so much power? But, what is a photograph really? What are its compositional elements? It was just a piece of paper. It was just a piece of paper that has a front and a back. The image is made up of light, chemicals, and paper. Once that realization was made, they were no longer holy decisive moment s. But rather, were converted from photographs to images; and, ready to be transformed. They could be torn, folded, ripped, cut, glued, collaged, sewn, and layered on to one another. Moreover, this idea of layering and inversion resonates strongly with Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the fold. “Always a folding with a fold, like a cavern within a cavern. […] The unfold is thus not the opposite of the fold, but follows one fold until the next.”14 This Deleuzian understanding of folding creates a kind of conceptual and emotional freedom. There is liberty in realizing that a photograph needn’t be rectangular or square, that historical choices that had shaped the medium’s aesthetic and conceptual conventions could be undone. Folding was one of the first strategies that altered the photograph almost immediately. Akin to the moment in the darkroom where an image magically appears in the developer bath; the process of folding is much the same. The fold defies the laws of physics; somehow, at once hiding and revealing the front and back of a photograph. Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the fold as “a sheet of paper or of a tunic into folds, in such a way that there can be an infinite number of folds, one smaller than the next, without the body ever dissolving into points or minima.”15 And this idea of fold within a fold extended not only to the material in which I was moulding and shaping in my hands but also the photograph and all of its mimetic implications. The first artwork in this series was Utopos (Henry Hall Building) where a black and white image of the façade of the Henry Hall Building is repeated, reflected, then folded into a triangle tessellation grid (Fig. 7.2). The process for these works involves cutting, folding, gluing and pinning prints directly onto the wall, creating distorted almost organic shapes out of the bleakest and sharpest geometric concrete objects. Folding as a strategy became a transformative tool to recover my power over these buildings. I could physically shape these spaces, misalign windows, invent optical illusions and build distances of space where there was none. The destructive practice of folding and cutting was always

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Fig. 7.2 Utopos (Hall Building), folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 48 × 62 inches, unique, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

paired with gluing and re-assembly, as if one gesture was inevitably counterbalanced by the other. With this new methodology, I realized that history, time, and architectural space are as much a material to bend and fold as paper, steel, and concrete. Additionally, that the metaphor of folding could extend beyond the image itself and become a transformative tool to fold the past into the future; or by extension, to fold facades, interiors, stairwells, and hallways into one another. Thus, a single building is not one space and one place but many spaces folded into many places.16 Architecture perceived as a single space is folded into many places. This Deleuzian formation of space time became a liberating artistic tool throughout the series; especially in the Utopos (Computer Engineer Working in Lab B10). In this work, a quasi-fictional imagining takes place beginning with an archival promotional image of a computer engineer working in a laboratory of the Hall Building during its opening in 1966. A temporal superimposition occurs as the anonymous man in

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the white lab coat play-acts as my uncle. I imagine a time over twentyfive years before the Fabrikant shooting where Phoivos Ziogas sat in his office working away in this black and white pictorial space. The colourful sections of the image interrupt monochromatic space and act as a kind of rupture; moving gradually then suddenly throughout the picture plane. These abstracted colourful elements are actually archival images from the 1992 CBC News footage depicting the Fabrikant shooting and year-long subsequent trial. In essence, two temporal spaces exist in a single image, fragmenting and folding several pasts into one another. From archival document to immense monument, Utopos (Computer Engineer Working in Lab B10) was one of the first works to imbue personal and intergenerational memories into an indexical photograph. Though despite these attempts, the work inevitably enacts what Barthes describes as photography’s dual challenge when addressing memory. He writes “not only is the Photograph never, in essence a memory, but it actually blocks memory quickly becoming a counter-memory”17 (Fig. 7.3). In these ways, folding as a physical and conceptual metaphor became a powerful tool to transform and render the photograph solid. The fold was a way to rid the photograph of its illusory and ephemeral qualities, add weight, give texture, and blur the boundaries between interior and exterior space. With the fold, I was now able to convey the confusing and destabilizing experience of assimilating traumatic experience within Brutalist architectural spaces.

Monuments and Traces Like Janus, the Greek god with two faces, one looking towards the past and the other the future, my practice evolved looking forward and backward. I moved forward by experimenting with rigid materials but constantly looked to my initial interest in Brutalist architecture and trauma. My recent solo exhibition, formless endless ruin at Angell Gallery in May 2019, ruminates on the porous boundary between object and image; exploring the ways ruins, monuments and abandoned public spaces such as Freeway Park in Seattle or Keller Fountain in Portland embody failed utopian architectural sensibilities of Brutalism. There is a tragic incongruity seeing these once seemingly utopian public spaces becoming obsolete or slowly descending into modern ruin. Freeway Park, for example, remains one of the most compelling experiments in postwar landscape architecture by transforming the unused space above

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Fig. 7.3 Utopos (Computer Engineer Working in Lab B10), folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 48 × 52 inches, unique, 2015 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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and between two major highways. Designed by Lawrence Halprin’s office under the supervision of Angela Danadjieva, Freeway Park was intended to “heal the scar”18 of an Interstate bisecting the residential neighbourhood of First Hill. Its use of innovative design and integration of materials such as concrete, water, and flora were ground-breaking. Halpern brought together sharp cast-in-place concrete walls, geometric patches of grass, and an artificial waterfall that humanized this 5.2-acre space that would otherwise be dead-zone between two concrete highways. The park’s most iconic feature is the cascading canyon of concrete fountains that originally emptied into a deep pool that park-goers used as a swimming hole.19 However, the park’s status as a positive urban public space for the community changed drastically as air pollution from the highways combined with failed irrigation systems and shallow soil depth created difficult conditions for the trees, lawns, and planters to grow. Also, over the years, the park’s furnishings have been heavily vandalised, public washrooms have been closed, and “concerts or other programming that the park had been designed to accommodate were either discontinued or moved to other venues within the city.”20 But one of the most important issues is the lack of coherent wayfinding creating confusing entrance and egress routes for the park. The Seattle Parks Department’s report entitled A New Vision for Freeway Park goes on to describe, “As the vegetation matured and cut sightlines, the park became darker and more difficult to navigate. Seattle’s growing drug-using and drug-selling population, as well as its homeless population, found a home in Freeway Park, in large part because of the Jensonia Hotel on its eastern edge. The murder of a blind and deaf homeless woman in broad daylight in 2002 spurred a city-wide effort to revitalize and reactivate Freeway Park.”21

A lack of safety, combined with lack of maintenance, and care were all signals to the public to neglect and overlook this major urban park. It became an ironic monument to its own failure to connect neighbourhoods and bring people together. In so far as a monument, much like a photograph, is never itself; in that they are inextricably caught between their meaning and their being. Both photographs and monuments yearn to very much be the objects, places or people they depict but remain silent and inert. They often make visible what cannot be seen and erase or obscure what is solid. And in many ways their mnemonic possibilities

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are troubled by their material limitations. Robert Smithson even notes that “instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.”22 These new monuments, then, fall into ruin. For architecture, something similar applies: ruins from times long past are widely appreciated and consumed as memories of worlds that no longer exist. It becomes distressing, however, when we encounter obsolete or decaying buildings or structures from our own times.23 With a new series of work titled Such Places as Memories, I began photographing natural elements like trees, vines, or plants that grew alongside these concrete monuments in Freeway Park (Fig. 7.4). Also, a more naturalistic colour palette crept into the work, which contrasted greatly with the Utopos series as it made evident an unconscious stylization of colour. More specifically, it became clear that colour could only be used in acidic or highly saturated tones in direct contrast to black and white. Unconsciously, my myopic vision was now opening up. Perhaps this may be a sign of opening not only pictorial space but also shedding a binary viewpoint that could restrict the image? The colours in the Such Places as Memories are no longer biting and acrid but are soft pinks, peaches, and blues that seem almost dusty or windswept, like the desert ruins of a future King Ozymandias. And as the palette grew more complex and refined, so did the folding technique. Instead of a repeating grid of equilateral triangles in previous works, the folding focused on the creative potential of V-pleating as a tool to create asymmetrical and visually dynamic patterns. The V-pleat itself is composed to two intersecting folds, creating an optical inversion that seems to defy material capabilities. And this trompe l’oeil effect is also achieved because of the change in scale and proportions of paper. Instead of cutting and gluing twelve prints to make these mural-like illusions, these smaller works are made from a single sheet of paper. This more directly corresponds to the intimate scale of my hands rather than the monumental scale of my body. The smaller scale also changes the relationship between the viewer’s body and object; Such Places as Memories situates the viewer in a more manageable space, not engulfed in an almost confrontational fashion. However, another strategy emerged from this material experimentation: that of a rip. In Faults and Fractures (Freeway Park), a new kind of pictorial language is established almost in direct conflict with that of the fold (Fig. 7.5). The rip activates the pigmented surface of the photograph in a radically violent way, almost making visible Barthes’ punctum. In this

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Fig. 7.4 Such Places as Memories, folded archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 17 × 22 inches, unique, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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Fig. 7.5 Faults and Fractures (Freeway Park), archival pigment print by Jessica Thalmann, 10 × 14 inches, edition of 3, 2019 (Image courtesy of the artist)

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work, the torn middle section is rotated, flipped, and reinserted back into place, as if trying to blend back into the image. The horizontal lines of the cast-in-place concrete slabs act as a visual marker to connote spatial difference. Again, allowing the limited monochromatic cool palette to help differentiate between objects that are closer or further away from the camera. In this way, this slippage between image and object and being is radically interrogated; suggesting a kind of visual and emotional violence occurring within the photograph and this space. Perhaps even referencing the park’s troubled history of violence, or perhaps simply referencing a kind of loss and displacement over time. Finally, the most recent material exploration is also the most hybridized, drawing on architectural technologies and fabrication methods (including architectural model making and digital 3D rendering software). These cross-disciplinary strategies can be seen in Elevations (Travertine), freestanding photo-sculpture made of paper, foam, and Bristol. This new artwork is designed and rendered in a three-dimensional digital space of 3D rendering program Rhino where a single photograph is projected onto every facet and surface of the forms. Then the 3D model is flattened in sections, printed, cut and reassembled seam by seam to create a sculpture that supports itself without a wall. The photograph used to project across each surface is taken at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, looking specifically at the travertine stone used throughout the complex. Elevations (Travertine) speculates on the ruins of a possible future; a monument of beige-colored, cleft-cut, textured travertine stone baked in the warm honeyed glow of the California sun. Quarried with fossilized leaves, feathers, and branches sedimented into the natural grain, this travertine stone makes solid the weight of time. At once solid and permanent, the rocks are continually cracking and shaking; like gravestones straddling a fault line (Fig. 7.6). This new series of works is a natural extension of my previous research and aesthetic tendencies as I am examining new ways in which photography and architecture overlap, conflict and co-exist. In this work, the architectural model and folded photograph co-exist as the material limitations of both disciplines draw on John Hedjuk’s lamentations on the flatness of depth.24 Elevations postulates on what lies beyond the surface of the photograph, depicting an architecture that is ultimately made up of “parts, fragments and fabrications.”25 These photo-sculptures endeavor

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Fig. 7.6 Elevations (Travertine), archival pigment print on Bristol and foam by Jessica Thalmann, 42 × 48 × 18 inches, unique, 2020 (Image courtesy of the artist)

to create a photographic experience where the viewer inhabits photographic space much “like an interior, surrounded and ingested by it; and where the boundaries between what is inside and outside fade away”26 and become indecipherable. To cross disciplines and boundaries can be seen as a transgression or violation. In many ways, I identify as photographer interloping as an architect; using another discipline’s language, set of aesthetic and conceptual values, and materials and methods to re-invent my own. Or perhaps, this artistic practice of folding paper and architectural image-making is simply an attempt to make a kind of architecture that is less haunting or less rigid; to make space for loss, grief, and the complex ways that memory and place are intrinsically interlinked.

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Notes 1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1st edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 97. 2. Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 132. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 1982), 26. 4. Ibid., 100. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings 1927 –1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 523. 6. John Hejduk, “The Flatness of Depth,” in Judith Turner Photographs: Five Architects, by Judith Turner, 1st edition (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1980), 3. 7. Barthes, 93. 8. Wes Colclough, “The Henry Foss Hall Building, Montreal: From Riots to Gardens in Forty Years,” in Palimpsest III: The Dialectics of Montreal’s Public Spaces, ed. Cynthia I. Hammond (Department of Art History, Concordia University, 2010), 3. 9. Morris Wolfe, “Dr. Fabrikant’s Solution,” in Essays, New & Selected, accessed February 6, 2020, http://www.grubstreetbooks.ca/essays/fabrik ant.html, 10. 10. Tracey Lindeman, “A Look Back at Montreal’s Race-Related 1969 Computer Riot|CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Company, February 15, 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/a-look-back-atmontreal-s-race-related-1969-computer-riot-1.2538765. 11. Ibid. 12. Ingrid Peritz, “Israel’s Netanyahu Greeted with Violence in Montreal,” The Globe and Mail, September 10, 2002, https://www.theglobeandm ail.com/news/world/israels-netanyahu-greeted-with-violence-in-mon treal/article4139011/. 13. Barthes, 92. 14. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies 80, no. Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy (1991): 227–47. 15. Deleuze, 231. 16. Ibid., 234. 17. Barthes, 91. 18. Projects for Public Spaces, Inc., “A New Vision for Freeway Park” (Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and Freeway Park Neighborhood Association, September 2005), 7.

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19. Antonio Pacheco, “Freeway Park in Seattle to Undergo WayfindingFocused Renovation,” The Architect’s Newspaper, July 12, 2017, sec. City Terrain, https://archpaper.com/2017/07/freeway-park-seattle-way finding-remodel/. 20. Alison B. Hirsch. “The Fate of Lawrence Halprin’s Public Spaces: Three Case Studies.” Theses (Historic Preservation), University of Pennsylvania, 2005. 21. Projects for Public Spaces, Inc., 7. 22. Peter Smithson and Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (University of California Press, 1996), 11. 23. Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). 24. Hejduk, 2. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 3.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” In Selected Writings 1927 – 1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Colclough, Wes. “The Henry Foss Hall Building, Montreal: From Riots to Gardens in Forty Years.” In Palimpsest III: The Dialectics of Montreal’s Public Spaces, edited by Cynthia I. Hammond. Montreal: Department of Art History, Concordia University, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Fold.” Translated by Jonathan Strauss. Yale French Studies 80, no. Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy (1991): 227– 47. Deleuze, Gilles, and Paul Bove. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. 1st edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Dillon, Brian, ed. Ruins. London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Hejduk, John. “The Flatness of Depth.” In Judith Turner Photographs: Five Architects, by Judith Turner. 1st edition. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1980. Hirsch, Alison B. “The Fate of Lawrence Halprin’s Public Spaces: Three Case Studies.” Theses (Historic Preservation), University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

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Leach, Neil, ed. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. 1st edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992. Lindeman, Tracey. “A Look Back at Montreal’s Race-Related 1969 Computer Riot|CBC News.” Canadian Broadcasting Company, February 15, 2014. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/a-look-back-at-mon treal-s-race-related-1969-computer-riot-1.2538765. Pacheco, Antonio. “Freeway Park in Seattle to Undergo Wayfinding-Focused Renovation.” The Architect’s Newspaper, July 12, 2017, sec. City Terrain. https://archpaper.com/2017/07/freeway-park-seattle-wayfinding-remodel/. Peritz, Ingrid. “Israel’s Netanyahu Greeted with Violence in Montreal.” The Globe and Mail, September 10, 2002. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/world/israels-netanyahu-greeted-with-violence-in-montreal/article41 39011/. Projects for Public Spaces, Inc. “A New Vision for Freeway Park.” Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and Freeway Park Neighborhood Association, September 2005. Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. Reprint edition. New Directions, 2016. Smithson, Peter, and Robert Smithson. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Wolfe, Morris. “Dr. Fabrikant’s Solution.” In Essays, New & Selected. Accessed February 6, 2020. http://www.grubstreetbooks.ca/essays/fabrikant.html.

CHAPTER 8

Souped Up: Slow Building of Support Networks Through Commensality Marsya Maharani and Geneviève Wallen

Building Our Own Table Geneviève: Souped Up is a new endeavour initiated by Marsya and I. The idea of hosting dinners with racialized curators and cultural workers was first sparked due to a pleasantry about Marsya’s hostess skills, suggesting how in her friend circles she is probably everyone’s “Martha Stewart.” Following that tangent, there was conversation about creating a web series that we would co-host, interviewing artists and curators while cooking simple dishes. Marsya has this gift for uniting people from different formal and informal friend circles with great food in a welcoming atmosphere, creating instances of meaningful and heartfelt engagements. And on my end, although hosting puts me in a state of anxiety, I am blessed with the skill of being a great conversationalist. In June 2019, on the occasion of

M. Maharani (B) Toronto, ON, Canada G. Wallen (B) Verdun, QC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_8

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curator and producer Tian Zhang visiting Toronto, we decided to organize our first dinner event. The title Souped Up came through a simple google search on English food idioms. Through this search, I stumbled on the expression “souped up,” which means to render more powerful or stylish. Through our dinner series, guests empower one another through shared food, drinks, and conversations. Marsya: It’s also fitting that “souped up” originated from the context of racing, referring to performance-enhancing drugs for horses or, later, supercharged cars. I have been fixated on the reality TV adage “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win,” hoping to upturn that sentiment in the way I work. The feeling of isolation in winning culture was wearing me down, especially after finding myself as the only woman of colour at too many meeting tables. I seek methodologies of working together that are centred around making friends, collaboration, collectivity, and supportive networks, particularly coming from Asia. Our Souped Up project is envisioned as a platform for making friends in spite of artworld pressures that encourage competition, and a place where we “soup up” by an open sharing of vulnerabilities and failures. Geneviève: Looking back and thinking through the why and how this project started we wondered about what made food such a potent platform not only to care for others via sustenance, but as a voice amplifier. What makes eating together a catalyst for vulnerability? Although food has the power of bringing people together with a purpose, what is food’s place in conversations about support networks? What can we literally and figuratively stomach? How does the kitchen table hold space for trust and safety? While there is plenty of fascinating and complex history and theory on these questions, we wanted to start with practice-based research that approaches these inquiries based on our own experiences. Marsya and Geneviève: Souped Up is a platform that explores communal meals and the creation of long-term reciprocal caring systems. Two questions guide this ongoing project: What does it mean to eat together? What kind of relationships can emerge from this dinner series? What we hope is that these meals encourage community instead of competition amongst racialized arts practitioners conditioned to have a scarcity mentality, while also contributing to a supportive ecosystem for co-mentorship, radical friendship, resource-sharing, and collective governance as primary foundations. What also drives this initiative is a shared exhaustion from the burden of carrying out commitments to decolonization and inclusion and from

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navigating toxic and precarious workplace culture that continues to proliferate in Canada’s cultural institutions. We fight for change all the time, from discrete gestures of refusal to loud manifestos. We deserve to be fed, to be cared for, and to share our experiences without having to explain or censor ourselves. Around our table, there is no need for the maintenance of an over-theorized space, particularly when such a space is often performative. We do not have to be burdened with a goal, we do not have to legitimize this initiative through institutional standards, and that is a great respite. While mobilizing, we can also just be. Our framework takes in the existing landscape of social meals orchestrated by curators and artists within the art institutional realm of Toronto. However, our objective to expand our solidarity networks necessitates a different structure. Our initiative is not rooted in public spatial activism, education or social performance, but rather in the generative potentiality of support networks that are built on already shared socio-political agendas. Longevity and sustainability are therefore central for us. Making space for solidarity, friendship, and togetherness is refreshing in the context of temporary exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Reoccuring sociable meals can focus on sustaining face-to-face engagement, relationship building, and meaningful exchange. These meals offer deeper interactions when fleeting encounters, transactional relationships, and tokenizing metrics-oriented inclusion often define how the practices and relationships of racialized cultural workers operate with and within institutions.1 For each Souped Up gathering, we aim to create a congregational space that can be maintained beyond a project-based mindset, which has pervasive effects on the nature of our collaboration. We see so many one-off programs tending to privilege short-term care which feed into disposability culture. So far, every dinner has had a different group of people onboard; but our guests are usually invited more than once so we can continue to deepen our relationships. We hope to have a sense of continuity, while also expanding our relationships and social circles. In building our table, we largely invite those who are already part of our extended networks of friends and acquaintances. We struggle in making this decision but realize the importance of easing into the process of trust-building among our guests. There is a limit to how many people can sit at the table for trust to be nurtured. We try to open it up by bringing together our separate (but sometimes overlapping) circles of acquaintances, so that this is not entirely an exclusive power club. What we can share beyond a seat

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at our dinner table is our research and lessons from our past dinners, as a loose roadmap for anyone interested in building their own supportive network. A heartfelt thank you to all of past and future participants, we are grateful for your presence, your trust, your invaluable work in the arts, your thoughtfulness, genuine engagement, emotional labour and excitement. Thank you for eating, sharing stories, and laughing out loud with us. We are honoured to care for you, and to be in your care.

What We Have Learned so Far Session One: Testing the Idea Souped Up: how to hold each other Thursday, June 20, 2019, 7–10 p.m. with guests Liz Ikiriko, Safia Siad, Shani K. Parsons, and Tian Zhang Menu: Smoked salmon rolls, fig and goat cheese salad on toast, stuffed bell peppers with shrimps, Klondike bars and lemon pie “Dear all, We are so excited to host this dinner which will hopefully be part of a lasting series. For now, it is at its experimentation phase. This dinner has been conceived as a way to carve space for care and support building among curators who identify as POC, Black, and Indigenous. Aware of the isolating and competitive nature of our work as curators, especially when working independently, we believe that sharing meals together can perhaps break down some of the weight brought on by these factors and more. While working towards different collaborative models for BIPOC curators (and in the future artists will also be part of the conversation). We hope to work beyond scarcity mentality; to share resources and strategies; to mobilize, advocate for, and build up one another; to dismantle hegemonic ideas of power dynamics, leadership models, winning culture; and to learn together. The conceptual thinking behind the menu is meant to reflect the conversation we are hoping to have around the table. For this occasion, we are thinking about serving simple dishes with foods holding other ingredients, echoing the thinking process and concerns that can go into holding space for one another, considering that our needs are different, yet similar in many ways. In addition, to accept that sometimes even with the best intentions,

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when generating spaces for conversations around vulnerability, accountability, and support, it can get very messy, like a fully-loaded taco. What happens then, when you are trying to catch the falling pieces with your hands? Alright enough taco/sandwich metaphor, but you got our vibe, right? For this first iteration, we are so happy to host Sydney-based independent curator Tian Zhang as our guest of honor. Zhang is a socially-engaged curator and creative producer whose research into non-European /Asian diasporic cultural forms of curating and leadership serve as a means and methodology to deconstruct social issues and facilitate change. If you are free this Wednesday, FYI - Tian will be presenting a talk on Curating For The Future: https://www.facebook.com/events/2440704475969123/. Old friends, new friends, we are so happy that you can be present for our very special first edition of Souped Up! With love and food, Marsya and Geneviève” Geneviève: Souped Up’s first iteration was more of a test than anything else. It was the result of a mutual need fed with exciting what ifs. What if we are able to provide a space wherein our isolation as curators can be set aside? What if we can actually make time to eat together and share our aspirations and interests? What if this can become something bigger? Even with all of these questions, we didn’t have an end goal in mind apart from experiencing the meal, and gauging our peers’ interest. Ultimately, we wanted to explore if a shared meal could help us further our commitment to empower and enable each other’s successes. The individuals invited were part of our social circles. We also had the desire to continue the conversations generated at the Xpace Cultural Centre’s first curatorial focus group for racialized emerging curators, which was held in April 2019. Given Zhang’s research in non-European approaches to curating and leadership, her visit to Toronto gave us a small window of opportunity to simply give this a try, without overthinking it. We were excited about the prospect of creating an international supportive network of racialized curators. Other factors that were considered in our organizing of this event were space and budget since this event was supported by us, out of our own pockets. At this point, Souped Up was in its experimental stage (quite frankly, it still is) since we wanted to better understand the parameters of our intentions. When the dinner occured, it was not yet envisioned as an

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event to pitch to an arts council for funding or to an institutional host or partner. However, we have to admit that after the first session we were so excited that we started to apply to calls for submissions from residencies and artist-run centres. “The particular structure of the meal and the event (the kind of food served; the levels of formality expected; the division of labour required) is connected to the kinds of relationships people are trying to create.”2 To Alice J. Pulier’s point regarding the importance of structure in setting a tone, we prepared the meal together and set up as one would when having friends over. We brainstormed recipes, made a grocery list, shopped for the ingredients, and cooked a meal together based on the time we had to pull this dinner off. We opted to take the route of a thematic meal as a practical incentive. We asked our guests to bring something to drink or deserts (which would follow the theme), and their wonderful selves. Arts workers do not have too much time on their hands, especially for “purposeless” dinners. In all honesty, we are both guilty of being most responsive to project-oriented invitations. Being aware of the challenges to bring people together outside of exhibition openings, artist talks, or other institutional driven activities, led to focusing on eating with purpose as a step towards self and communal care. Food is never just food, especially when generating support systems. We ended up being a small group of seven, and when debriefing, realized that keeping these events intimate offers the best format. It was a memorable evening that went “overtime.” The discussions gravitated around the necessity of having a fee schedule for curators because of the challenges we have in enumerating our labour. We examined what are the parts of our job that are not quantifiable and remain invisible as well as the financial status of emerging curators in Canada, the United States, and Australia. We made space for each other’s concerns about the difficulties of conjugating the independent gig economy with balancing family-partnerships, our wellbeing, hobbies, and artworld expectations and pitfalls. Our souls and bellies were full. Session Two: The Question of Time, Duration, and Opportunism Souped Up: Collective Pot Friday, January 31, 2020, 6–8 p.m. at the Textile Museum of Canada Souped Up: Collective Pot is taking place within the context of Petrina Ng’s artist residency at the Textile Museum.

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With guests3 : Hannia Cheng (Tea Base), Eric Chengyang (Glory Hole Gallery), Marina Fathalla (MICE Magazine), Raven Lam (Whippersnapper Gallery), Peter Rahul (BUMP TV), Rachel Wallace (Durable Good), Florence Yee (Friends of Chinatown and Tea Base), as well as Textile Museum staff Khadija Aziz, Leah Sanchez, and Susan Fohr. Menu: Hot Pot Potluck “This session is envisioned as a space to discuss ways of sharing resources. Many of us are reluctant to share ideas, keeping a lid on resources that could be enjoyed by many in the interest of self -preservation. What if we can instill trust among us? To see each other as accomplices rather than competitors for funding and opportunities? We encourage everyone to come with ideas on persevering together to create sustainable relationships among collectives in the city. Souped Up menus are meant to reflect the conversation we are hoping to have around the table. For this Collective Pot edition on resource-sharing, if you like/are able to, we invite you to bring an ingredient for a collective vegetarian Hot Pot soup or chocolate fondue dessert. Even something that you already have in the fridge!” Marsya: We tend to host Souped Up without having to meet any expectations of productivity or a regular schedule. Though not unapologetically, we cannot even seem to invite people with enough notice. We appreciate the chance not to be dictated by a production schedule but by need. Due to these parameters alone, Souped Up as a space and practice becomes largely illegible to funders and institutions. But as it happened, we gathered at the Textile Museum of Canada at the invitation of artistin-residence Petrina Ng, whose project at the time looked at legacies of colonialism both abroad and locally from a diasporic perspective, while also investigating the Museum’s own colonial histories. As with Geneviève, Petrina and I had also been talking about forming a group of racialized cultural workers. We were interested in ways of navigating existing organizational structures, and in reimagining new approaches to institution-building. The idea was brewing for many years, but we did not find the capacity to put in the work until we were both working as independents and became drawn towards collective modes of organizing. Petrina’s residency became a small window of opportunity to bring together representatives from local DIY artist collectives with a majority of racialized members who are interested in space-making and community-building on the ground.

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The gathering was called Collective Pot, after a concept by the same name put forth by the collective-of-collectives Gudskul Ecosystem in Jakarta, Indonesia. It refers to a radical sharing of resources and clout to lift the collective’s long-term sustainability, which to my view also benefits the careers of everyone involved. Through residencies organized by the Art Gallery of York University, Gudskul members met with artist collectives in the Toronto area—including an open meeting at Tea Base4 —leading to the term “collective pot” gaining resonance locally.5 We wanted to pick-up on these threads and begin an action plan to weave our own supportive fabric. Representatives from collectives Whippersnapper Gallery, MICE Magazine, Tea Base, Glory Hole Gallery, Durable Good, BUMP TV, and Friends of Chinatown were able to join. Geneviève and I as members of Younger Than Beyoncé Gallery also represented the collectively-run nomadic gallery at this gathering. Some of the issues discussed were familiar to us: burn out, tokenizing relationships with large institutions masked as “opportunities,” conflict, and financial instability. Despite the collectives’ differing mandates, platforms, and interests, banding together to address shared operational challenges made sense. Perhaps even more so precisely because of these differences. After synthesizing the stories shared at this session, an idea emerged for a ten-month think-tank in which the same collectives co-learn and innovate upon various aspects of running a small-scale, community-forward, grassroots art organization, without replicating the same systemic barriers that we have all experienced as rooted in the organizational structures of many Canadian cultural and arts spaces.6 Ironic perhaps that this plan was hatched at an institution, but isn’t all this labour a direct response to our institutional experiences—the good, the bad, the somewhat uncomfortable? The institutional resources are useful in generating the most measurable successes from all of our Souped Up sessions so far. We had the space, budget, and platform to host practitioners outside of our circles. But did we nurture a supportive network within the institutional space of the Textile Museum? Out of respect for the staff of the Textile Museum, we had a strict two-hour window, which is not exactly conducive to putting everyone at ease and to the meanderings of gossip and conversation that Souped Up typically supports. We also had to come up with ideas fast to meet a grant deadline. Time restrictions

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forced us into action, which led to starting something new that has great potential. But while we did meet our goals by sitting around a boardroom table, we also wondered, was this all sufficient in starting a ten-month, and possibly longer, bond and collaboration? Does the institutional space support the way of working and being together that we want to explore? Essentially, in this session of Souped Up, we dipped our toes in the institutional resource pool to quickly jump back out. And as for the think tank, we plan to take turns to meet in each of the collective’s spaces. Sharing the responsibility of hosting could aid in building a nonhierarchical space for collaborative knowledge-production. By spending time in each other’s spaces, we can perhaps better intimate each collective’s unique circumstances and characters, become more comfortable in sharing our experiences and ideas, and nurture a long-term collective trust. Session Three: In This Together Souped Up: Bring Your Own Soup (BYOS) Monday, March 30 and Thursday, April 2, 2020, 7–8:30 p.m. EST With guests Su-ying Lee, Tian Zhang, and Petrina Ng (Monday); Vince Rozario and Alexia Briard (Thursday). Menu: Open “For this 3rd iteration, entitled Bring Your Own Soup (BYOS), we wish to share a meal while exploring current shifts in our lifestyles and their immediate impacts on our practices. We are wondering about the following: What have you been doing to take care of yourself, how would you redefine balance? How does rest vs restlessness manifest in your routine (thinking also about privileges and precariousness in relation to resting)? What do we want to take away from this moment when we get back into full capacity within institutions?” Geneviève: During this period of confinement due to COVID-19, we thought that it would be a good opportunity to experiment with Souped Up’s format and bring it to the virtual realm. This moment in time is a hard one to navigate because of the layers of inequities exposing themselves through the fraught systems regulating our lives. We are also deeply affected by fear for our loved ones, the collective grievances that we share

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and the mixed bag of emotions surfacing about how we relate to ourselves and others. The fragile ecosystems that structure our lives are shaken and the arts and culture sector will never be the same. This is a time wherein we re-evaluate the sense and meaning of being productive, of constantly feeding into the burnout culture in our field of work, battling illusions around worthiness and labour. This is the moment to question the ways in which we connect with one another, to think through the quality of our interactions, and ultimately how we can work toward sustainability. What do we want to manifest post-pandemic? How do we want to contribute to the new “normal”? These questions and concerns brought about the need for healing conversations and support, and so the idea of bringing the event online emerged. Therefore, for this shared meal we returned to a looser form. We ended up facilitating meandering google hangout sessions. Two dates were proposed to provide flexibility but also to make sure that we both had the bandwidth to support this version of Souped Up. It was organized during the third week of the quarantine in Toronto and Montréal. It is funny that when debriefing, we realized that most people did not eat during the conversations, and although we invited our guests to open the invitation to their housemates (if desired), they chose not to. Our schedules not being what they used to be, the ways in which we engage with food were greatly affected. We also observed that during this period of adjustment, the individuals we invited were overwhelmed with the number of online interactions they had through work, social, and familial commitments. Juggling employment (or the lack of), roommates, couple and family living situations, and other factors heightening anxiety, weighed down on many of us. In addition, it turned out that two sessions in the same week were too much for us. We were less organized for the second session and less attentive to logistics resulting in us missing the opportunity to interact with one of the interested parties. And so, we wondered about how we can be intentionally present for each other, in the context of social distancing, especially when we are already overstimulated with online content and emotionally saturated. Crucial meditations on the factors aggravating the precarity of our work and how this crisis can be leveraged for institutional accountability were brought forward in the conversations we had. Petrina Ng raised concerns about the relevance and use of certain laws for project-based contracts. Many of us are facing project cancellations and postponement.

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The “Acts of God” clause in many of our contracts releases both the artist and the institution of their responsibility during times like these. This is worrisome since this pandemic is an unprecedented occurrence; it can be used as a protectionist measure against contractual employees. Post-COVID, we believe that particular attention to the language that binds us to institutions is in order. Furthermore, Tian Zhang shared how independent cultural workers in Australia take advantage of the renewable structure of core operating grants to campaign against well-funded institutions with questionable practices. This is important in thinking about how we can mobilize for better accountability in regards to institutional care. We were informed that Australian art institutions are renewing their operational funding currently and that the jury is led by practitioners. As assessors, factors such as how institutions have been thoughtfully supporting their constituencies during these hard times can potentially weigh in the final decision. We wondered how this model could be applied here, in Toronto and Montréal.

Speaking Our Truth Geneviève and Marsya: The last iteration of Souped Up became a way to meditate on the immense potentiality of the event: how it can be patient, fluid, forgiving, and how there can always be another time to meet and to support one another, whether we have an agenda or not, or whether we have a specific goal in mind. Marsya: As we recall these past sessions, I am reminded by something artist and curator David Garneau once said at a conference about relationships between institutions, artists, and publics: “it is by sharing our stories that we begin to map the contours of oppression.”7 We think of the dismissed and overlooked spaces for gossip and stitch-and-bitch sessions, their appearance of smallness and incompatibility with the gentrifying grandness of contemporary art spaces and starchitect-designed museums. The latter has the tendency to make us feel small, voiceless, and isolated— conditions that can easily nurture self-doubt, especially when coupled with a lack of representation of our own experiences. With Souped Up, we build on the former to claim a seemingly illegible space for time(in)sensitive meandering hangouts where everyone is an expert of their own experience. But while we pit one space against the other, we still also toy with the question: do we want to be more legible to large-scale institutions?

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The short and true answer is yes, because we want to access funding so that we as co-hosts and all of our guests can be paid for this labour—the kind of labour that we find urgent and lacking. The long answer? We do not know. On the one hand, why would we want to be legible to the institutions that have brought us harm? It is tiring to do the dance of trying to be seen by someone who barely makes an effort to see you, to see just how useful you can be. On the other hand, how far would refusal take us? During a recent visit with curator and community organizer Chen Yun, I asked for advice for how an emerging curator can hold power while accepting a tokenizing invitation by a big institution. She asked me, “What can you do that is meaningful to you but does not add value to the institution?”8 So here we are, co-writing in our respective cities amidst the COVID19 lockdown, dreaming up future iterations of Souped Up. I want to be in Geneviève’s kitchen, freshly painted with a warm strip of marigold yellow. We also have visions for a picnic in a park, a catered meal by small businesses run by racialized folks, and a mall food court or food truck rendez-vous. While I do miss art, as it turned out I do not miss being in institutional art spaces. Geneviève: Recognizing the emotional labour and value in the knowledge shared with our peers during these dinners is the reason why we would endeavor to apply for funding. Returning to our conversation about what part of our work is quantifiable or invisible, emotional labour is one of these often unnoticed realities. Not only through the nature of our relationships with our collaborators, but more so with the institutions hiring us. We are in constant negotiation. Longevity is something that I am looking into as a racialized curator. Longevity as a radical form of resistance, resisting short-lived collaborations, academic burnout, ranking my physical and mental health after my work in the fear of not being given another opportunity. As a Black curator, the artworld is not conceived to provide me with an opulent and long career; it created a system that allows for overbooking but only when my presence is deemed urgent and relevant, to box my aspirations under the ethos of equity and diversity, while leaving me grappling with the extra labour that comes with all the intersections composing my positionality. The hiring of racialized professionals in permanent roles of leadership being rare, our presence is mainly temporary. We are expected to appear and disappear at command, with a

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selective archiving of our accomplishments. Marsya and I want sustainability, slowness, slow-building projects, lasting relationships, working with collaborators more than once, and moving away from superficial bonds. In these ways, longevity for us and for all resides in a willingness to understand our worth when working independently, acknowledging each other’s grind, and redistributing resources when available. I do not want to feel out of breath anymore. As the past sessions of Souped Up unfolded, we concluded that focusing on the qualities of the domestic and the everyday contributes to our refusal. The shared trauma of institutional oppression heightens the praxis of care that can be practiced around our own table, the one we are slowly building with our co-conspirators, whether they are based in our vicinity or elsewhere in the world.

Notes 1. We acknowledge that we are not the only ones who are passionate about the unique qualities inherent to collective meals. Artists and curators alike (such as Basil AlZeri, Dana Prieto, Alvin Luong, Su-Ying Lee, Myung-Sun Kim, Annie Wong, Shellie Zhang, Anique Jordan, Lisa Myers, cheyanne turions, Magdalyn Asimakis and Heather Rigg of ma ma projects, Renelyn Quinicot, among others) have been investigating food as a vessel to practice reciprocal relationships, social justice, or unearthing individual and collective histories. 2. Alice P. Julier, Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality (University of Illinois Press, 2013), 188. 3. We specified in the invitation that POC and white led collectives should ensure that their POC members attend. We also requested that if our guests knew of another collective who they think should be on our list, to please send us an email. 4. “Collectively Collecting Collectives: A Collective Conversation,” organized by Tea Base on April 9, 2019. 5. In fact, Gudskul’s practice is centred on making friends and hanging-out, and was among the main inspirations for Souped Up. 6. The project will be administered by Petrina and I, as we were recently appointed as the new stewards of Gendai Gallery—an organization supporting artists of colour with a 20-year history in collectivity. 7. David Garneau, “Living Agreement,” Banff International Curatorial Institute Symposium: Living Agreements (Presentation, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta, August 8, 2019). 8. Personal interview with Chen Yun, founder of the collective Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, in Shanghai on November 28, 2019.

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References Garneau, David. “Living Agreement,” Banff International Curatorial Institute Symposium: Living Agreements (Presentation, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta, August 8, 2019). Julier, Alice P. Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality (University of Illinois Press, 2013).

CHAPTER 9

Mapping as Aesthetic Practice: Toward a Theory of Carto-Aesthetics Simonetta Moro

This chapter addresses the theme of “Transgressive Geographies” through the concept of “mapping” understood as a new cartographic aesthetic, or what I call, a carto-aesthetics, in modern and contemporary art.1 In particular, I focus on the concept of itinerrance developed by Paul Ricoeur, and the concept of duration we find in Henri Bergson, as philosophical lenses that will help us interpret two artworks displayed at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017: The Laboratory of Dilemmas by George Drivas, and In Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana. These are just two examples of contemporary artworks that deliberately employ and deconstruct cartographic methodologies poetically, which allows them to expose the architectonics of time through forms of narrativization. Both Drivas and Reihana employ narrative forms by way of video installations and cinematographic techniques, and both artists refer to ancient stories or myths: Drivas by way of Greek tragedy, Reihana by way of the historical encounter between European explorers and Indigenous populations. The

S. Moro (B) Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_9

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physical aspect of experiencing the installation is crucial to understanding either Drivas’s or Reihana’s work, since they both involve a journey—an actual one for the former, and a represented one for the latter. In Drivas’s installation, the visitor encounters the video pieces one by one by moving across a labyrinth before arriving at the end of the itinerary and watch the conclusive film; in Reihana’s installation, the journey is part of the subject matter, but it is enhanced by the panoramic format of the video, which does not lend itself to being viewed from one position only, but invites the viewer to move along with it. Through these devices, and by infusing history with new interpretations, the active work of memory, and the inclusion of marginalized voices, the artists reveal old and new power dynamics at work in a globalized world and draw new cartographies for it. This particular form of mapping also indicates a return of the imaginary in contemporary carto-aesthetics, often infused with politically informed content. The relationship between errancy, memory, and history has been well observed and theorized by Paul Ricoeur over an extended period of time and throughout his oeuvre. In particular, in “Architecture et narrativité,”2 (architecture and narrativity) an essay written for the catalogue of the XIX International Exhibition of the Milan Triennial in 1994, the concept of itinerrancy (trans. from the Italian itinerranza) first appears. Its appearance was short-lived, as it was not retained in the later version of the essay published in French in 1998, nor in Ricoeur’s reminiscence of that essay in Memory, History, Forgetting, as Franco Riva reports.3 This term, and Ricoeur’s related ideas about time, narrative, space, and architecture, offers some rich hermeneutic possibilities to effectively link movement across space, locality, memory, and cartography. Ricoeur starts with the premise that the city is not reducible to a totalizing vision, alluding rather to a unity in plurality, “an always imperfect mediation that manifests itself also in the mourning for the end of total comprehension, in favor of itinerancy.”4 The city can thus be described as “a context of internal migration,”5 in which new social prototypes appear, embodying different forms of mobility: from the most painful and ambivalent movements of the migrant, to the more privileged journeys of the tourist, the traveler, and the urban “nomad.” The acceleration of urban life that results from these multitudes of social roles co-existing together, leads to what Ricoeur calls a process of “de-familiarization,”6 whether it takes the dramatic form of alienation experienced by the migrant, or the more benevolent effects of puzzlement provoked by the novelty of a leisure travel. In any case, the multiple perspectives make it impossible to arrive at

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a total comprehension of the city. However, the curious term itinerrancy reveals an even richer core of meaning: whilst the “err” contained in the neologism echoes the Heideggerian equivalence established between “to err” (as in, to be in error) and “to engage in errancy” (to be on the path, and to risk being led astray), the prefix itiner—points to the Latin root of the verb “to go” and reinforces the notion of being on the move, in transit. This movement in turn points to the possibility of following a planned route, a “mapped” itinerary, thus a movement that is less haphazard and left to chance, and at least partly plotted, traced, or “narrated,” to use a term that Ricoeur placed at the center of his philosophy. Itinerrancy is located “half way between errancy and the domestic spirit. With itinerrancy space and time are integrated into each other in what Bakhtin had very well defined a ‘chronotope.’”7 To paraphrase, a simple environment ceases to be such and becomes a “world” when it emerges as an environment defined by narrative identity and itinerrancy; and what makes this act of becoming possible, is the projection we impose onto the environment that allows our manifold “possible worlds” or “potential beings” to actualize themselves.8 Obviously the reference to the act of “projecting” and its attendant cartographic quality should not be lost in the context of mapping: maps occupy a space in between architecture and narrativity, and in between the space of building and the time of inhabiting, while telling a story about the experience of inhabiting. In fact, the analogy Ricoeur draws between narrative and architecture could be extended to a triangulation that includes architecture, narrative, and mapping, a kind of assemblage that frees the map from the realm of representation and opens it up to a temporal dimension. It is significant in this context to analyze the art installation The Laboratory of Dilemmas by George Drivas, representing Greece at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). The installation is structured like a labyrinth— the quintessential place of errancy and narrativization, and a type of map—in which the viewer finds herself deambulating and finding clues to a story that unfolds one piece at a time (Fig. 9.1). On screens located at different stations along a path, one encounters fragments of videos that reconstruct a scientific experiment of a biological nature. Some of the videos show close-up views of a culture of bacteria under a petri dish, which resemble strange cartographies of aerial views of a multitude of living beings, human or non-human; other videos show scientists in sterile environments describing an experiment.

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Fig. 9.1 Multi-media installation The Laboratory of Dilemmas by George Drivas, 2017. Presented at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017 (Photograph by Simonetta Moro. Image courtesy of the author)

After exiting the labyrinth, still trying to recompose the narrative of the events represented, and not entirely sure whether it was fiction or reality, the viewer finds herself in a dark room, where a film is screened. The looped film shows a highly staged meeting among international scientists; at this point, the stylization of the debate and the presence of recognizable actors, including film star Charlotte Rampling, reveal the fully fictional nature of the “documentary.” The scientists are called to decide the fate of a culture of “foreign organisms” that emerged—unforeseen, unexpected—in the milieu of an experiment deemed successful in resisting a disease. The film references Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women (fifth century BCE), but is re-staged as a modern tragedy taking place in a scientific laboratory at some time in the middle of the twentieth century. The Greek tragedy “poses a dilemma between saving the Foreigner and maintaining the safety of the Native,”9 through the story of the Suppliants, or Danaids, who have left Egypt and arrive at Argos seeking asylum

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from the King of the city, Pelasgus. As we learn from the official project description, Aeschylus’ Iketides (Suppliant Women) is the first literary text in history that raises the issue of a persecuted group of people seeking for asylum. The Suppliants have left Egypt to avoid having to marry their first cousins and arrive at Argos seeking asylum from the King of the city. The King is then faced with a dilemma. If he helps the foreign women, he risks causing turmoil among his people and going to war with the Egyptians, who are after the Suppliants. But if he doesn’t help them, he will break the sacred laws of Hospitality and violate the principles of Law and Humanism, leaving the Suppliants to the mercy of their pursuers.10

The dispute among the scientists never comes to a resolution: the film loops on itself at exactly the point when the debate reaches a climax, perpetually returning to the key points of the debate, enumerating the pros and cons of each of the two options—either suppress the culture of new, “foreign” organisms, or let them live among the cells that managed to survive a disease—stuck in an endless aporia. In an interview with the artist, curator Orestis Andreadakis points out how Aeschylus “attempts to formulate a universal cosmogony and conceptualize a ‘common homeland’ in which the ‘foreign’ and the ‘intimate’ are in fact identical.”11 The daughters of Danaus (the mythical king of Argos), the suppliants, do not invade a city but in fact return to their place of origin; “they return to their past to claim their future.”12 Andreadakis then quotes Calvino telling the imaginary story of Marco Polo and his encounter with the Great Khan, in Invisible Cities: “Journeys to relive your past? … Journeys to recover your future?” asks the Khan to Polo. “And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror, the traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.’”13 What emerges from this exchange is the blurring of the lines between the socalled “foreigners” and the “autochthonous” inhabitants of a place, the symbiotic relationship that exists between them, and the pliability of the concepts of time and original belonging to a place. To return to the initial argument that this artwork constitutes a new mode of cartographic aesthetics related to temporality, there is an evident connection between the constituting elements of Drivas’s installation— the journey, the labyrinth, the narrative—and the map: they presuppose the act of orienting oneself, of finding one’s way in a new territory, of

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drawing a line from a point of departure and arrival; and they imply an act of border crossing, and of durational time—a concept of time that implies experiential unfolding, memory, and becoming. It is in the philosophy of Henri Bergson that the concept of duration (from the French durée) acquires a particular relevance, and a formulation that will prove to have especially rich ramifications in the theoretical discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By rethinking the problem of time through duration, Bergson attempted to disentangle time from the erroneous equivalence with space, conceived as a homogeneous extension: “we shall see that time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness.”14 For Bergson, duration is conceived as qualitative multiplicity (as opposed to quantitative multiplicity). While quantitative multiplicities are homogeneous and spatial (as it is the case, for instance, of a sum of elements expressed by a number), qualitative multiplicities are characterized by being heterogeneous without being juxtaposed; and most importantly, they are temporal—they define the duration.15 Examples of qualitative multiplicities include “purely affective psychic states or even mental images other than those built up by means of sight and touch,”16 for instance, a feeling of sympathy or a moral feeling, which do not possess clear boundaries. A feeling of sympathy begins by putting ourselves in the place of others (sym-pathos: to perceive a pain together).17 The feelings associated with sympathy are heterogeneous and may involve feelings apparently in contradiction with it, such as repulsion, horror, fear, etc., but no one feeling negates the other; there is no negation in duration. The feelings interpenetrate one another, are continuous with one another: “A qualitative multiplicity is therefore heterogeneous (or singularized), continuous (or interpenetrating), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and progressive (or temporal, an irreversible flow, which is not given all at once).”18 The non-immediate quality of duration, the fact that it unfolds over time in a continuous form points to the narrative element analyzed at the beginning of this chapter. Contributing to that relationship are the three “imperfect” images of duration that Bergson provides, the first of which is that of the coil that is constantly unrolled and rolled up again, like in a thread or ball, where the past “follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way … But actually it is neither an unrolling nor a rolling up, for these two similes evoke the idea of lines

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and surfaces whose parts are homogeneous and superimposable on one another. Now, there are no two identical moments in the life of the same conscious being.”19 Memory is what maintains the non-identical quality of the different moments: “a consciousness which could experience two identical moments would be a consciousness without memory.”20 This analogy with the coil, or spools, as imperfect as it may be to illustrate the concept of duration, is for us quite useful because of the concrete correspondence with the type of scroll-like map or itinerary map that precedes the modern idea of cartography, where “modern” designates a cartography based on the idea of space as pure homogeneous extension. Linear itinerary maps were common in antiquity and the Middle Ages, when the modern idea of space as pure geometric extension had not been conceived yet. The dialogical dimension of way-finding maps is crucial, steeped as they are in oral traditions. Travelers relied on others to help them along the way, with indications for landmarks, points of safe crossing, and so on. Most travelers did not possess maps as we understand them today, but simply a set of local references that would take them from one point to the next on the route. Graphic itineraries were mostly used for planning purposes, as is the case with medieval pilgrim maps, or for imaginary and spiritual journeys that monks would perform without moving from their cells, in which the map would act as a stimulus or visualization of the journey that took place in their minds as they followed the route from one signpost to the next (symbolizing, perhaps, different spiritual stages). The scroll format lends itself to a slow intake of the scene, bit by bit, either as movement of the viewer across space, or as movement of the map itself as it is being unrolled. It is here that the concept of duration resurfaces as we attempt to think philosophically about this experience of unfolding time in graphic format. The analogy with the coil and the scroll implies that duration is memory: what allows for the prolongation of the past into the present, thus the temporalization of a spatial representation. The map encourages movement in a certain direction, but it also encourages remembrance and re-tracing of one’s steps, in a constant back-and-forth that defies chronological time. It also evokes the time-based property of film, but of a film that is deconstructed in its narrative elements to include non-linear and circular recurring time. In Lisa Reihana’s installation Emissaries for the New Zealand Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), the central piece is a large panoramic video, titled In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] (Fig. 9.2).

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Fig. 9.2 In Pursuit of Venus [infected] by Lisa Reihana, Ultra HD video, color, sound, 64 min across a 26 meters screen, 2015–2017. Presented at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017 (Photograph by Simonetta Moro. Image courtesy of the author)

The reference to the panorama is actually historically based, since the inspiration for the video came to Reihana after seeing the neoclassical French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean) (1804–1805) by Joseph Dufour et Cie and Jean-Gabriel Charvet. The wallpaper, which was common in highend European and American drawing rooms of the time, references the journeys of early French explorers and the three Pacific voyages of British explorer Captain James Cook, by representing “an Arcadian fantasy that embraced Rousseau’s notion of the ‘noble savage.’”21 As we learn from the official website of the Museum of New Zealand (where the original nineteenth century wallpaper is displayed), “The title in Pursuit of Venus [infected] plays with the notion of the filmmaker’s ‘point of view’

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or ‘POV’. The Venus that the artist references alludes to both the international search to measure space and time by documenting the 1769 transit of Venus and Europe’s romantic conception of the South Seas.”22 The astronomical observation of the planet Venus is alluded to by another element of the installation, the brass telescopes that are located at the entrance of the pavilion, inviting viewers to look through them. With these instruments and the panoramic piece at the center of the installation, Reihana, an artist of Maori and British descent, creates a reversal of the point of view, turning the map inside out by presenting the viewpoint of the very people who were “visited upon,” “studied,” “classified,” “catalogued,” “mapped out,” “written about,” and so on, under the Enlightenment pursue of scientific knowledge and world domination that often came with it. The time of the journey collides with the space of the panorama; where one alludes to cyclical, recurring events the other suggests a steady and continuous motion in one direction; but against the static backdrop of the painted forest dramatic actions lead to a multitude of encounters, accidents, and violent interactions that result in captain Cook’s death. A polyphony of actions keeps unfolding in the expansive horizontality of the panorama, to seamlessly begin again where it started, not dissimilarly from Drivas’s endless loop of the Laboratory of Dilemmas’ film. In fact, we can appreciate another point of commonality between Reihana’s and Drivas’s projects: just as Drivas’s film and installation alludes to a microbial “foreign” invasion, Reihana’s epic panorama explicitly depicts the impact of colonization on Indigenous people of New Zealand as a type of infection brought in by external agents. In Lisa Reihana’s own words, There are many different views about Cook, but of course he is held to task by people from all over the Pacific, as so much culture and languages were lost in the wake of these encounters. Many people are boycotting a current series of events dedicated to his commemoration. I admire Cook as a selfmade man. Hero or villain, he did his job well, so well that he mapped the coordinates that led to a trail of destruction and stolen resources. You can’t turn back time, and the title of this work reflects this. The inclusion of “[infected]” goes beyond the menace of introduced pathogens to indicate that once you know something, you can’t unknow it.23

From a narrative point of view, the infection goes both ways: it is not just the past that appears “infected” by historical events (the arrival of

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Captain Cook and its momentous consequences), but the present itself “infects” the past, by way of re-orienting the gaze. As Rihana points out, “It’s really great to return that gaze, where the talented who appear in the work—who really are embodiments of their own ancestors—have an opportunity to speak back; speak back in time and through space geographically to this place here, which is Venice and the old world.”24 In conclusion, we have briefly illustrated how two installations, one by George Drivas and one by Lisa Reihana, serve as examples of artworks in which the idea of “transgressive geographies” is manifested through a cartographic aesthetic—or carto-aesthetics as I call it—in which the concept of “mapping” is utilized to expose the nexus between narrative and memory. Mapping is constituted topologically, where topology refers to the idea of a place and a time experienced in conjunction, through the layering of memories onto places and historical moments: through the artwork, we are moving from one point of the map to the other, from one epistemic moment to the other. Thus cartography, memory, and narration are employed to rescue art and philosophy from the tyranny of the historical discourse, while putting them back on the map of topological locality. As such, a possible re-definition of mapping indicates a way of organizing space interconnected with a way of temporalizing content, or in other words, the becoming-space of a narration that constitutes particular kinds of world views—often alternative to the dominant narrative.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on previously unpublished material that will be included in a monographic book with the title Cartographic Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art (Routledge, projected publication date: 2021). 2. First published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Identità e differenze” (Triennale di Milano, 1994), and later, in reduced version, as “Architecture et narrativité” in Urbanisme, n. 303, nov.-déc. 1998, 41–51. For this discussion I will refer to the text appearing in Leggere la città: quattro testi di Paul Ricoeur, edited by Franco Riva (including his essays in the same volume, “Itineranza, erranza, sradicamento,” 59– 67) (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2013), 79–93. Translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 3. See Franco Riva, Leggere la città, 60; and Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), note 2, 527, where he reports ending with “some praise of traveling” the essay

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published in the 1994 Triennale catalogue, without mentioning the concept of “itinerrancy.” Philosopher Pier Aldo Rovatti returns on the term coined by Ricoeur in an essay for the Triennale catalogue: “with the strange term ‘itinerrancy’ [Ricoeur] weaves together in the form of plot and paradox the element of dwelling as staying, and the element of dwelling as continuous errancy” (cit. by Riva, 60). Riva, Leggere la città, 59. Riva, 59. Riva, 60. See also Ricoeur Paul. “Urbanisation et sécularisation.” In: Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique. N°76–77, 2003. 113–126. Ricoeur (1996), cit. by Riva, 60. See in particular, Time and Narrative, Vol. I, Chapter 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). One could read an Aristotelian reference in this idea, and Ricoeur was indeed indebted to Aristotle for many of his considerations on time and space. Official website of the installation, http://laboratoryofdilemmas.gr/, accessed May 3, 2020. Official website of the installation, http://laboratoryofdilemmas.gr/, accessed October 23, 2018. George Drivas, Laboratory of Dilemmas. Curator Orestis Andreakis. 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale de Venezia, Greek Pavilion, 2017, 40. Drivas, 40. Drivas, 40. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, in Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2002), 59. For this discussion of qualitative multiplicities, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), from which most of these references are taken: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#2, accessed October 23, 2018. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 53. The feeling of sympathy is not just an example among others, given the importance of sympathy in relation to intuition, one of the key concepts in Bergson’s philosophy. SEP, “Bergson” (emphasis added). Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: The Knickerbocker’s Press, 1916. Google Books), 12. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 12–13. Rhana Devenport, “Introducing Lisa Reihana: Emissaries.” Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa website, https://www.tepapa.govt. nz/learn/for-educators/teaching-resources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihanaemissaries/introducing-lisa, accessed March 7, 2020.

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22. Devenport, https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teachingresources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihana-emissaries/introducing-lisa, accessed March 7, 2020. 23. Claudia Schmuckli, “Q&A with Artist Lisa Reihana,” September 16, 2019, deYoug Museum website, https://deyoung.famsf.org/qa-artistlisa-reihana, accessed March 7, 2020. 24. From an interview with the artist, “Returning the Gaze—‘in Pursuit of Venus [Infected]’ at the Biennale Arte 2017,” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3TsT6Tdh0jU, accessed March 7, 2020.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. New York: The Knickerbocker’s Press, 1916. Google Books. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will, in Key Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, 49–77. London: Continuum, 2002. Devenport, Rhana. “Introducing Lisa Reihana: Emissaries.” Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa website, https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/ for-educators/teaching-resources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihana-emissaries/int roducing-lisa/. Drivas, George. Laboratory of Dilemmas. Curator Orestis Andreakis. 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Greek Pavilion, 2017. Lawlor, Leonard, and Moulard Leonard, Valentine. “Henri Bergson.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/bergson/. Reihana, Lisa. “Returning the Gaze—‘in Pursuit of Venus [Infected]’ at the Biennale Arte 2017.” Video, 0:18–0:36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ts T6Tdh0jU/. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Vol. I . Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ricoeur, Paul. “Urbanisation et sécularisation.” In: Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique. N°76–77, 2003. pp. 113–126. Riva, Franco, ed. Leggere la città: quattro testi di Paul Ricoeur. Roma: Castelvecchi, 2013. Schmuckli, Claudia. “Q&A with Artist Lisa Reihana.” DeYoug Museum website, https://deyoung.famsf.org/qa-artist-lisa-reihana/.

CHAPTER 10

Learning from Las Vegas Redux: Steve Wynn and the New Business of Art Dorothy Barenscott

In 1972, when architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour traveled to Las Vegas to undertake what would become one of the boldest indictments of modernism and traditional notions of built space, they dared to approach the urban environment of the Las Vegas Strip on its own terms. Learning From Las Vegas became one of the most significant texts heralding the postmodern turn—a treatise that not only called for a re-examination of foundational thinking around the city and architecture, but also an invitation to view and apprehend the spaces of the city as a field of aesthetic relationships, receptive and open to changing cultural signs and cues, tastes, notions of beauty, embodied experiences, and the like. “To question how we look at things” argued the book’s authors is a way of becoming “revolutionary.”1 Two decades later in the 1990s, when American businessman, casino magnate, and art collector Steve Wynn systematically began the wholesale transformation of his business—taking the casino hotel experience from

D. Barenscott (B) Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_10

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gaudy, rudimentary, and transactional, to elegant, immersive, and sensational—he would undertake a similar re-envisioning of the city’s landscape and spatial relationships, gambling, quite literally, on the idea that the placement of his private art collection into the public areas and design sensibilities of his hotels could revolutionize the Las Vegas experience. Critically, fine art, aesthetics, and accessible connoisseurship, were centerpieces of this rebranding exercise. Setting out with a team of designers, architects, and art experts, Wynn oversaw every last detail of each of his hotels. And with a private art collection valued at over half a billion dollars, Wynn’s influence on hotel design would eventually spill into the world of art collecting and exhibition practice, expanding well beyond Las Vegas throughout the 1990s into the mid-2010s onto the global stage. Amassing a constantly changing stable of iconic works by coveted artists, Wynn not only joined the ranks of the world’s most prolific art collectors, but he would become as famous for his art collection as he was for placing and integrating many of his most prized objects on public display in his properties. Steve Wynn’s desire to trade in the symbolic capital around which the art world operates arguably became the guiding principal of his entire business model. And it is through a chronological examination of episodes related to Wynn’s art collecting, design philosophy, and exhibition practices “Vegas Style,” that it is possible to unpack powerful configurations, conflations, and meaning making mechanisms that can be taken from the world of Wynn’s casino hotels as they collide and intersect with the shifting dynamics of high art exhibition and the art world at large. At the core of the analysis are questions of how, and to what ends, the rebranding of Las Vegas via art and spatial aesthetics brings us uncomfortably close to the present conditions of the art world, where esteemed art institutions seek to attract new publics and re-brand themselves within a shifting global art environment that is characterized by collapsing distinctions between private and public spaces and effaced spheres of influence.

Cultural Capital and Aesthetic Entrepreneurship Steve Wynn’s aesthetic sensibilities and collecting philosophy are strongly rooted in an appetite for design, and the creation of spatial environments and “wonderlands”—places where people go “Wow!” Wynn’s is also an uncompromising vision and is closely wed to a business model that seeks to introduce fine arts to the masses with the express aim of redefining

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the culture of Las Vegas for the twenty-first century. In a 1997 Charlie Rose interview, Wynn explained his understanding of how art activated the collective imagination: “I think of the relationship of fine arts to the psyche of the citizens of the world today, and I am convinced that this is not an esoteric, affected kind of thing for the very few who are dilettantes that go to museums. I think that fine arts have a powerful bedrock kind of appeal.” Wynn went on to reference urban culture directly, stating how “the complexities of urban life are rolling over all of us” suggesting how art had the capacity to awaken and revive another part of collective perception (Wynn 1997).2 Wynn’s larger vision was therefore to construct special spaces of interaction, public and private, where people could engage and commune more directly with art. Wynn, however, was not the first to think about art’s powerful role in capturing the attention and imagination of the Las Vegas consumer. His ideas were borne, in part, through close observation of Las Vegas’s first generation of themed landmark casino hotels, notably Caesars Palace. Originally built in 1966 by Jay Sarno and Stanley Mallin, the property was modeled on the imposing architecture and scale of ancient Roman imperial buildings. Sarno, who Wynn has compared to entrepreneur showman Walt Disney and blockbuster filmmaker Steven Spielberg, was the visionary behind the hotel and created potent spaces inside and outside the property. Utilizing replica classical statuary, imported marble, gold leafing, floor to ceiling mirrors, trompe l’oeil, and dozens of private meeting spaces with unique themes, the hotel was understood by Wynn to successfully reproduce structural elements of Renaissance art and architecture.3 To this end, Wynn envisioned the aspirations of his imagined hotel guests united with his goal to spark their imaginations and desires through spatial aesthetics. As Wynn’s long-time interior designer Lee Cagley explained about Wynn’s vision for his hotels, “Las Vegas operates on the idea that there’s a possibility that I could be richer.. with permission to misbehave or be someone else… or try on an alternative lifestyle…Interior design is a way to make people feel valued and valuable.”4 For Wynn, this included using principles of baroque movement in casino design, a goal that Cagley described as “moving [lots of people] through big spaces—moving as if it they were part of a procession.”5 Architect and global entertainment designer Joel Bergman, who would later design Wynn’s first signature property, The Mirage, described Wynn’s desired spatial aesthetics in more practical and economic terms:

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“Wynn knew that the exteriors will get you in the door once, but the interiors will keep you coming back and back and back again.”6 In this profound sense, Wynn recognized how art and art spaces functioned as critical components of cultural capital. A term developed and popularized by late-twentieth-century French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that one can tap into to demonstrate their cultural competence, and constitutes a powerful determinant of a person’s social status and standing in society.7 The “worlds onto themselves” that Caesars Palace introduced to Las Vegas, and Wynn emulated, signaled universally appealing spaces that were a close facsimile of the special aura traditionally associated with cultural capital and the rarified world of high art and culture.8 This aura, or as Bourdieu more correctly defined as “habitus,” was the embodiment of cultural capital and therefore held great value as a profit-driving force for business. Media researchers Gregory Borchand and Anthony Ferri offer a complimentary analysis of how the entertainment cultures of Ancient Rome and Las Vegas operated as a form of “public welfare” that promulgated belonging. On the one hand, this public welfare could pacify and distract audiences from social and class inequalities, while on the other hand provide the illusion of participation, inclusivity, and access to a world far beyond the average person’s means.9 Historian Margaret Malamud, writing on the topic of ancient Rome in modern popular culture, posits elsewhere that the creation of Las Vegas casino hotels was modeled on Roman art and architectural design strategically “to evoke grandeur, tradition, and civic magnificence” and “to juxtapose popular and high culture images of antiquity” as a capitalist enterprise. Here, conspicuous consumption is given “a legitimizing veneer of classical culture, and spending money is made entertaining”.10 Within the context of the American Dream narrative, an account derived in large part from a tradition of western cultural humanism that values certain art and artists as the epitome of human potential, Las Vegas exists as a self-inventing urban place that reflects the pursuit of freedom, riches, beauty, and self-actualization that Wynn would come to shape and extol through his casino hotels. And this “aesthetic entrepreneurship,” as sociologist Michael Ian Borer describes, would also come to play a powerful role in the city’s evolution and global influence: “The inclusion of aesthetic as a qualifier for entrepreneurship is intended to demarcate the sensuous side of creativity that reaches beyond dollars and cents of

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economics and moves toward the emotions and senses of embodied and emplaced persons.”11

Democratizing Art, Legitimizing the Wynn Collection 1989–2000: The Mirage and Bellagio The intoxicating blend of accessible connoisseurship and spatial aesthetics that framed Wynn’s business model drove the creative network of architects, designers, engineers, and other creatives who would design and build the first of Wynn’s casino hotels—The Mirage and Bellagio—properties that would forever change the landscape and experience of the Las Vegas Strip (Fig. 10.1). Beginning with the development and opening of The Mirage in 1989, which made headlines for being both the largest and most expensive hotel ever to be constructed, Wynn began to upend the associations of the low market and tacky “sin city” Las Vegas with the lure of authenticity and luxury promised via fine art and attention

Fig. 10.1 Bellagio Model Makers, c. 2000 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections)

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to design. Tapping into the powerful dynamic Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno have ascribed to the parallel between the masses’ reaction to art and their relation to real consumer goods, Wynn instinctively understood how consumption could become vicarious enjoyment of prestige, even if fleeting and temporary, tapping into a desire to keep up with the Joneses.12 As the first hotel to be built on the Strip in sixteen years, Wynn took complete advantage of the spotlight and spared no expense in introducing all of the latest and high-end technologies in hotel construction, interior and exterior design, landscaping, entertainment, and gaming. Importantly, most of these features were created for the public and not exclusively for casino hotel guests. The Mirage experience began on the Strip with an expansive artificial lagoon, cascading waterfalls, imported full size palm trees and flora and fauna, all meant to replicate an escape to an exclusive Polynesian island, complete with a volcano that “erupted” nightly. Inviting the public inside, The Mirage’s spectacular exterior matched its elegant interior with its signature gold and white design, and impressive hotel lobby and casino which brought tropical elements indoors through an expensive indoor garden atrium. An element of further sophistication was soon added with the introduction of the first Cirque de Soleil performances in Las Vegas, a significant move that, as lead architect Bergman described, “replaced the T&A shows every casino had.”13 Wynn would next embark on his own self-declared masterpiece, Bellagio, taking all that he had learned with The Mirage and his “beautification” of the Las Vegas Strip.14 Opened in 1998, with a construction cost of $1.6 billion and topping The Mirage in scale and expense, the casino hotel debuted one of the most luxurious and elegant resort experiences anywhere in the world. Rivaling the finest hotel properties in Europe and Asia and named after the exclusive Lake Como town of Bellagio, Italy, Wynn’s casino hotel boasted interior spaces designed with imported marble, the finest materials and fabrics, expansive botanical gardens and conservatory, and a ten million dollar custom designed Chihuly sculpture adorning the lobby ceiling made with over two thousand hand-blown glass flowers15 (Fig. 10.2). The Bellagio’s public showstopper featured an eight-acre manmade lake complete with choreographed fountains and a nightly water/light show set to classical music. Significantly, and as a sign of things to come, works of art from Wynn’s private art collection were also prominently featured in the public

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Fig. 10.2 Dale Chihuly Sculpture Fiori Di Como, in Bellagio lobby, 1998 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections)

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spaces of the hotel, influencing what could be described as Bellagio’s very special and distinct mise-en-scène. What distinguished Bellagio from The Mirage was the abandonment of any preconceived theme. It was not, as Bellagio lead interior designer Roger Thomas described, an exercise in “imagineering” design where one would write a story and follow a script.16 Instead, Bellagio’s spatial aesthetic was one-of-a-kind and evolved out of a desire to capture the animated discussions and brainstorming sessions Thomas and Wynn were having about their travels, ideas around the art they liked, and the drama, destination, and sophistication that Wynn wanted for his new and most cosmopolitan hotel. “We never talk about materials, we talk about emotions” recalled Thomas. “Give them a reality, a now that is so fetching, so alluring that they don’t want to be anywhere else and you’ve got them” Wynn said.17 For Wynn, exerting full control over the building and design of these two hotels, but especially Bellagio, not only meant having the power to consecrate works of art in his private collection, but also to do so through his claim to be an art patron first and foremost. Wynn’s love of culture, travel, the finer things of life, and the will to share those passions with the public were also understood by those around him to supersede any financial concerns or profit motive.18 Years later, at a preview exhibition of Wynn’s art collection at the Desert Inn (before the renovations on another of his hotels was complete) Wynn proclaimed “Nobody owns this stuff… You just have custody. The pictures are bigger than us, and we’re just the guardians.”19 This ideal, extended to the open access to his properties, almost as if they were cultural landmarks, with availability and access to his hotel rooms at a range of price points.20 In short, both properties were designed to extend this vicarious consumption of art, culture, and luxury. From Bellagio’s Michelin star restaurant Picasso that featured an array of the modern artist’s original canvases, to the public rooms decorated in colour schemes matching Wynn’s favourite paintings in his private collection, there was an uncompromising attention to design and aesthetics—all fastidiously overseen by Wynn himself (Fig. 10.3). The focus moved seamlessly from public to private space, where the experience of the hotel and casino interiors extended into the intimate settings of guest rooms. Wynn’s obsessive attention to detail, even at the expense of losing money, appears to have set him apart as a broker of taste in the name of art.

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Fig. 10.3 Picasso restaurant in Bellagio, c. 1998 (Photograph by Robert Beckmann. Image courtesy of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections)

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And while increasing access to art, culture and luxury inspired Wynn almost as a form of philanthropy—a way to counteract art world elitism and share works of art that would often remain locked away in private collections and far from public view—his motivation to legitimize and leverage the value of his own art collection began to play a larger and more decisive role in his business model. Indeed, what remained effaced to the public until much later in his career was how Wynn took full advantage of tax breaks that would build his art collection through shareholder money and the increased value amassed for his collection through exhibition.21 The most important step towards building legitimacy for his art collection while simultaneously taking advantage of the profit motive of showing his work to the public was through the creation of his own art gallery. Inaugurated at Bellagio’s opening, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art was located at a highly accessible location near the hotel’s grand staircase and designed to emulate the look and feel of a worldclass art museum (Fig. 10.4). Overseen by art historian and curator Libby Lumpkin, a former University of Nevada, Las Vegas art history professor, the gallery displayed Wynn’s art collection to the public and partnered with other art institutions to mount exhibitions and display works on loan from museums and private collections from around the world. Therefore, while the Bellagio gallery was ground-breaking as the very first space dedicated to the exhibition of fine art on the Las Vegas Strip, attracting entirely new audiences to modern and contemporary art, it did so while operating within the framework of a decidedly traditional art institution.

Rise of the Curator and Collector, 2000–2008: Wynn Las Vegas At every level, Wynn attempted to emulate what the best art institutions in the world were doing and offer it up to a new audience. From the Bellagio gallery’s first blockbuster show featuring “Landscapes from Monet to Hockney,” to later surveys of Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, and Alexander Calder, and shows on loan from prestigious American galleries such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wynn upheld all of the expectations of a high brow art museum. These efforts were made further manifest through the extraordinary attention to detail that went into planning the exhibition catalogues. Using the same Italian publisher that Sotheby’s and the Museum of

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Fig. 10.4 Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, 2018 (Photograph by David Shane. Image courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Modern Art commissioned (right down to the choice of the most expensive paper stock), Lumpkin edited sumptuous catalogues that contained featured writings on par with scholarly essays from a who’s who of serious academics, art historians, and art critics. Importantly, many of these writings, beyond their legitimizing function for the Gallery, reinforced Wynn’s perceived status as an art world insider. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the inaugural Bellagio Gallery catalogue, went as far as to compare Wynn’s collection to those of Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon and made the conceptual leap to the improbable urban milieu in which they resided: “Now another remarkable American collection comes together suddenly in a place that seems less unlikely the more one thinks about it. Las Vegas is an international crossroads of dynamic prosperity—an Oz-like emerald city, a reminder of Renaissance Venice— whose reason for being happens to be the pursuit of pleasure. All pleasures are pleasurable, but not all are equal.”22

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Bellagio was also increasingly part of the public imagination tied directly to Wynn’s persona. The Wynn art collection and Bellagio Gallery, for example, made special cameo appearances in the star-studded Ocean’s Eleven (2001) movie and its sequel Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Julia Roberts playing Tess Ocean, the fictional head curator of the Bellagio gallery, is romantically involved with the suave and sophisticated hotel owner Terry Benedict, played by Andy Garcia, a character loosely based on Steve Wynn. As a result, the combined spectacle and profitability of the Bellagio gallery did not go unnoticed by the art world, nor did Wynn’s tactics to increase the perceived value of his art collection over and above any altruistic concerns. As LA Weekly art critic Jeffrey Vallance quipped in a review following the Bellagio gallery opening: “In a town where fake is the name of the game, seeing something truly authentic seems all the more unreal.”23 For her part, gallery director Lumpkin defended Wynn years later, citing his move to open the Bellagio Gallery and leverage the Wynn brand in the process as a revolution: “Contrary to what people thought, it was not intended so much as a shrewd business enterprise in itself, however, the gallery did generate an extraordinary amount of revenue. I reckon it earned the most money ever made in a museum, if calculated according to turnover per painting!”24 Perhaps not surprisingly, the art world would soon come calling to Las Vegas. In 2001, the Guggenheim Museum made its presence felt through a high-profile collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, opening a Rem Koolhaas designed satellite museum on the Strip. Located prominently at the recently opened Venetian hotel—a competing resort casino built by Wynn’s business rival Sheldon Adelson—the museum, nicknamed the “Jewel Box,” attempted to capitalize on the same formula for success seen at the Bellagio Gallery. Yet in the end, the museum could not duplicate Wynn’s success (closing by 2008). In the interim, Bellagio only continued to gain in global popularity as the premiere destination hotel Wynn had dreamt of, and the success of the Bellagio gallery was arguably part of a much broader and difficult to pinpoint phenomena that had more to do with the distinct branding, spectacle, and experiential spaces that Wynn had created. In other words, art exhibition was just one component of the overall Bellagio milieu. It is here that the rise of the curator in the art world at the same time as Wynn’s growing success with Bellagio cannot go unnoticed. As focus shifted in the late 1990s into the 2000s to the transformation of the profession, significant changes emerged in how the public was experiencing exhibitions and how

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art institutions could be transformed through new curatorial visions. As art critic Michael Brenson argued in his famous address “The Curator’s Moment” in 1998, all of which aligned with Wynn’s newfound role: “As much as any artist, critic, or museum director, the new curator understands, and is able to articulate, the ability of art to touch and mobilize people and encourage debates about spirituality, creativity, identity, and the nation.”25 At the same time, the spectacle of record prices in the art market continued to draw public attention and interest towards individual collectors as the Internet helped make public and circulate the outcome of art auctions. Notably, Wynn became far more involved in the organization and exhibition of his collection by the mid-2000s, and depended less and less on traditional legitimizing forces like Bellagio’s gallery exhibitions or consultation with art experts to grow his collection. Instead, he began a campaign to acquire the most expensive works of art at auction to bring back and display at his Las Vegas properties, beginning a shift towards branding his own name to promote his hotels and trading on his growing celebrity as a high profile art collector.26 Wynn’s evolution to self-branding crystalized with the construction of his next hotel. The largest privately funded construction project in the United States, the new casino hotel was originally to be named after Wynn’s most prized art object, Pablo Picasso’s Le Rêve “The Dream.” The oil painting, made by Picasso in 1932, was acquired by Wynn for $60 million in a high-profile sale completed in 2001, becoming the trophy in his art collection.27 But the slated hotel name Le Reve changed in the latter phases of the hotel’s design, evolving simply, but perhaps predictably, into his own name—Wynn. When the Wynn hotel debuted to the public in 2005, Wynn began to systematically and strategically divest from his more traditional art gallery model, removing his art collection from the Bellagio Gallery altogether and turning to a new form of luxury and lifestyle branding that intensified and more firmly integrated his art collection into the design and décor elements of the Wynn. At the core of these efforts was less the use of art to evoke accessible connoisseurship, as had been the case at Bellagio, and more of an intensifying focus on mood, light, feeling, and the senses, something that inched closer to exclusivity and more intimate and private engagement with tightly curated micro-environments (Fig. 10.5). Thomas, the lead interior designer of Bellagio and Wynn, repeatedly used the word “evoca-texture” to language what is often

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Fig. 10.5 Wynn interior, Las Vegas, 2008 (Photograph by Jim G. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

impossible to put into words when executing the Wynn design philosophy, described as “moments of experiential emotion that result in a memory so captivating and so unique that if you want to repeat that you have to come back.”28 “We all want to feel a little more powerful, a little elevated, a better version of ourselves whenever we walk into a new experience,” explained Thomas, “especially one we are paying for, and I hope that’s what we provide.” This extended to gaming and the way the player shifted their consciousness in a Wynn hotel: “Let’s not make it a table” Thomas explained of the mindset, “let’s make it your table” (Fig. 10.6). Such embodiment of the Wynn brand took form at every level of the new property. Thomas described attempts to use forms in the hotel’s pools that “almost seemed to breath,” and working lots of texture into the stone, woodwork, and even wallpaper in the private rooms. And on the use of art, the direction was far more unusual and experiential than ever before. As Thomas recalled: “I was an absolute Matissean in all

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Fig. 10.6 Dining Tables and Chairs on Red Carpet, Wynn Casino, Las Vegas, c. 2005 (Photograph by Ryan Grewal. Image courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)

of my coloring choices. So we decided that the accent coloring on this dramatic brown and white would be the palette of Henri Matisse, and we might bring that into the floor or we might dance it across a chair or we might put it in unexpected places. We didn’t want to put it in the regular places.”29

Globalization and Populism, 2008-Present: Encore and Wynn Macau/Palace Even as the economic downturn in 2008 hit Las Vegas very hard, it only intensified Wynn’s efforts to strengthen his luxury brand. While other developers were in trouble and even going bankrupt, he continued to pour large sums of money into his signature hotel that was constantly being updated and renovated.30 Key among these investments was Wynn’s retail partnerships in the ultra-upscale Wynn Plaza Shops (located inside the Wynn with Strip street access) that were vital to extending his

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design philosophy. Signing contracts with couture fashion houses, many of whom would never have before stepped foot into the Las Vegas market, let alone a “mall,” Wynn elevated his hotel’s exclusivity by brand association.31 Mirroring his retail procurements, Wynn kept up the pace of new art acquisitions to attract and keep people coming to his properties. Despite these additions, Wynn followed his carefully perfected formula of pricing hotel rooms at the intermediate end of market, just shy of full luxury hotel pricing, so that middle class visitors had a way to buy into the Wynn experience if even for a few nights. And by the time he was ready to break ground on his next hotel project located immediately adjacent to the Wynn, the aptly titled Encore, he had also discovered a new and altogether conceptual idea to pursue in its design. Wynn called it “Life Imitating Art” (Fig. 10.7). In attempting to describe Encore’s design philosophy, Cagley recalled Wynn’s directives and prompts for the Encore through an emphasis on

Fig. 10.7 Wynn and Encore, Las Vegas, 2008 (Photograph by Rob Young. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

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how an artist would see and feel a space, and how the art they produced would affect audiences. “Okay, I walk in the door. How do I feel?” Wynn would ask. “It’s not, what do I see?” He would continue, “what have you done to make me feel that way? Then ten more steps; now how do I feel?” This translated to design and spatial requirements, like layering light within a space, explained Cagley, to feel “like volume of air itself has light” and “manipulating space in a way that makes you change your perception of space…”32 Encore interior designer DeRuyter Butler also emphasized how revolutionary the property was for upending the norms of casino design and incorporating natural light into its gaming spaces, a preferred environment that Wynn understood as optimal for artist’s studios and also one “people naturally…like to be in.”33 Encore was also built with more exclusive and intimate spaces with access for VIP guests to their own part of the hotel, promising separate “food, gambling, retail, arrival, checkin, pool, everything within 120 feet…” As Butler explained, “there are certain clientele that like to observe but not necessarily be observed…It is a classification thing normal for society, people like to aspire to live better than the masses, so we give them the opportunity.”34 In the art world, there is a parallel in how the growing art market of the 2000s drove interest in art fairs and biennales as catered-to destination affairs, with tiered pricing, exclusive brand partnerships, and VIP events. Along with the increase in blockbuster art shows at world class museums featuring popular and bankable artists, these transformations in the art world closely mirrored Wynn’s business model to frame art experiences as a luxury good, available for browsing, consumption, and pleasure. Following trends in the art market, which were increasingly divorced from traditional influences of art museums, academics, and art’s past, it was also around this time that Wynn began to focus his collecting more squarely within the realm of contemporary art, fostering a special interest in the work of artist Jeff Koons. In 2012, Wynn made news globally with the purchase of Koon’s Tulips for $33.6 million and immediately made the sculpture the centerpiece of his hotel complex. Complete with a 24-hour guard to signal the value and importance of the work, the art object was conspicuously positioned in the Wynn Theatre rotunda where the Wynn and Encore hotels joined along the same corridor as the exclusive high-end luxury goods stores. In many ways, Koons and Wynn are in perfect alignment in how they regard art. Dorothea Von Hantelmann in her 2009 essay “Why Koons?” describes the artist’s ambitions as emanating from an avant-garde ethos to

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“redefine the function of art in society” and “to renew the social contract between art and society by opening art up to a differently structured and more widely conceived public.”35 Hantelmann goes on to explain that, unlike the historic avant-garde, Koons was not driven by anti-bourgeois critique. In fact it is quite the opposite. Koons wanted to rehabilitate the idea of art as an instrument for the self-empowerment of the bourgeois viewer—an idea that unites him with Wynn. Broader engagement and populism inform both of their motivations. Art historian Hal Foster, also writing about Koons in “The Medium is the Market,” published in the immediate wake the 2008 global financial crisis, describes his sculptures as “the ideal public art work,” presenting “a seductive mix of populism, at the level of the image, and exclusivity of ownership.”36 Exporting the Wynn brand would turn out to be Wynn’s next and most ambitious move. In a significant development that would be duplicated by many other developers, Wynn had replicated his hotel casino model with the construction of nearly identical Wynn and Encore hotels in Macau (in 2005–2010), followed by the Wynn Palace (opened in 2016). This appeal to “new money” in the wake of the impending economic downturn in the United States paralleled similar trends in the art world to grow the global market for art in emerging economies around the world. During the construction of the Macau properties, Wynn would once again raise art world eyebrows with the purchase of his second Koons sculpture. Popeye, purchased for $28 million in 2014, replaced Tulips, which was relocated to Wynn Palace (Fig. 10.8). Boasting the most extravagant and art-intensive interior of all his properties, Wynn Palace successfully duplicated the Wynn Las Vegas business model with important twists. For example, Wynn had learned through market research that it would be appealing to his Chinese clientele to feature a blend of traditional Eastern and Western art. For his centerpiece art statement, Wynn chose the high profile and record-breaking purchase of a set of 18th-century Chinese porcelain vases and a number of tapestries, purchases meant to signal his goodwill, altruism, and desire to return and exhibit Chinese treasures to the people of Macau. “I want this hotel to honor China” said Wynn.37 He also placed the more decorative Koons Tulips within the property, and commissioned nine stainless steel pop sculptures from contemporary Chinese artist Liao Yibai to round out his “East meets West” visual statement at the property. With a value of over $150 million, Wynn’s China-based art collection perfectly exported Wynn’s spatial aesthetics to a new aspirational consumer, targeted squarely

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Fig. 10.8 Jeff Koons, Popeye (2009–2011) was purchased by Wynn at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014 for $28 million and placed in the rotunda where the Wynn and Encore hotels intersect (Photograph by Dorothy Barenscott. Image courtesy of the author)

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Fig. 10.9 Wynn Encore Macau, 2011 (Photograph by WiNG. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

at the growing middle class of Chinese who were presumed to be seeking a kind of cultural capital or its Western-inspired habitus equivalent in a Wynn branded hotel (Fig. 10.9).

Conclusion: Las Vegas’s Role in Rebranding the Art Experience Meanwhile back in Las Vegas, the past decade has been marked with generational shifts and renewed focus on the emerging millennial consumer—an audience interested even more so in micro-environments, areas of exclusive interaction, and spaces that feel unique, authentic, and non-traditional. From day-time beach clubs and remodeled gaming areas (to include smaller and more intimate environments), to the creation of hotels offering “destinations within destinations,” and engineered spaces providing more opportunity for peer group interaction and access to

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live events, these are among the most profitable proven concepts first pioneered at Wynn properties.38 Ironically enough, it is precisely these kinds of experimental designs driving the renewal and rebranding of many of the world’s top art institutions and public art programs as they scramble to retain and expand their audiences. They also follow closely to the phenomena of contemporary art’s dematerialization in recent decades where space, affect, embodiment, and relational aesthetics take a central focus in art production and exhibition. Look no further than the most recent Venice Biennales where it is striking how entire pavilions are emptied of art objects and made into environments or overtaken by elaborate installations and platforms for performance and experience. The recent remodeling and reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in 2019 is another case in point—a project not so distantly related to Wynn’s hotels by design—that has reimagined the traditional museum space as one embracing a range of new modalities, visions, and possibilities to experience art. As lead art critic of the New York Times Holland Cotter summarized in his review: “In short, what’s primarily different about the reopened MoMA is the integrated presence of ‘difference’ itself— a presence that takes the museum back to its experimental early days.”39 To be sure, many of today’s seismic and spatial shifts in the art world were prophesized by art philosopher Arthur Danto two decades earlier in After the End of Art. “What we see today” argues Danto “is an art which seeks a more immediate contact with people than the museum makes possible… and the museum in turn is striving to accommodate the immense pressures that are imposed on it from within art and outside art.” Danto goes on to identify “a triple transformation” that could well summarize Wynn’s vision—“in the making of art, in the institutions of art, and in the audience for art.”40 Wynn’s design philosophy and business model have arguably led to an increased access to art and been utilized in public exhibition to be personalized, experienced, spatialized, interactive, and fully integrated into non-traditional places and spaces. Here, Wynn’s understanding of art’s role in society—to perform a kind of democratizing function that enhances quality of life for a wider audience—is modeled on Enlightenment ideals that call for broadening access, visibility, and everyday enjoyment of art and design as a way to individual betterment.41 Art’s assimilation into the everyday world is a goal we could ascribe to many avant-garde art movements from the 1960s onwards, yet it has also resulted in an art world and art market that is today defined by the global

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one percent. Indeed, the production and circulation of meaning around art has also been profoundly transformed by Wynn’s business model and we must all pay attention. There is a loaded symbolism present in the Wynn casino hotels, where infinite and visible wealth via public art and immersive art environments presents an illusion of ease, accessibility, and vicarious consumption for all. Critically, however, the reality of inevitable losses on the casino floor—the profit-making mechanism of all forms of gambling that concentrates wealth to the house—remain abstracted and go largely invisible to the public. Wynn’s business model and collecting style also reflects this reality, even as his entire fortune and reputation have recently been called into question with the #MeToo movement, a fate of unfolding and ongoing consequences met by many high-powered men of Wynn’s generation.42 In the art world, there are similar mechanisms at play, as selective branding, entertainment, spectacle, tiered access, politics, and donor and collector influence play an outsized role in the shadow world of art institutions, art fairs, and the art market. And so the questions arise: are we heading towards a more profit driven and bankable future of name-brand artists and art history that are determined by populist, art market, and collector appeal? Or, will artists, galleries, museums, curators, art critics, and art historians understand this as a moment to shape and transform, to give way and become open to new models of art production and exhibition that can co-exist with market and commercial forces? And how significantly is the art world today determined by a whole new configuration of spatial and aesthetic relationships that are only beginning to be apprehended, relationships first founded in a city and by an individual that have for too long flown under the radar of serious art historical study? Returning to Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s call that opened this examination—to look more carefully at the spaces around us, and at Las Vegas in particular—it appears as though the topography of power is radically shifting, and there are still many more lessons to be learned. Acknowledgements This paper includes extensive archival research completed as part of an Eadington Fellowship in Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in April, 2019. Special thanks to Su Kim Chung, Peter Michel, Aaron Mayes, Stefani Evans, and Claytee White in the Special Collections and Archives at UNLV, and to Vice-Provost Dave Schwartz and Robert Tracy in the Art Department for their generosity and assistance with my research questions, and for helping me navigate the life and legend of Steve Wynn.

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Notes 1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 3. 2. Steve Wynn, “Interview,” Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose, May 20, 1997. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3kSpifvAds. 3. Comparing Jay Sarno to Disney and Spielberg, Wynn singles out “those people that create places” as his inspiration, and willingly concedes that if anyone changed Las Vegas, it was Sarno: “Jay’s concept of the destination themed resort redefined the city.” Steve Wynn, interviewed by David Schwartz, December 2006, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Oral History Collection. 4. Lee Cagley, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 5. Wynn and Cagley often discussed Michelangelo’s design for the Piazza Campidoglio in Rome and the way it “shaped the space” as an inspiration for traffic flow in Wynn’s hotels. Lee Cagley, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 6. Bergman recalls is his unpublished memoir how “Steve Wynn didn’t want to do anything that was remotely close to architecture. He wanted to do what was in his mind that would relate well to the potential customers he wanted to attract and he didn’t really give a damn about architecture at that time.” Joel Bergman, Whatever You Hear About Me Is True: A Memoir, 2015, original manuscript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collection. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 8. Wynn used this evocative term when describing Jay Sarno’s design concepts. Steve Wynn, interviewed by Dave Schwartz, December 2006, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Oral History Collection. 9. Gregory A. Borchard and Anthony J. Ferri, “When in Las Vegas, Do As the Ancient Romans Did: Bread and Circuses Then and Now,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 4 (2011): 71. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00859.x. 10. Margaret Malamud, “As the Romans Did? Theming Ancient Rome in Contemporary LasVegas,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 6, no. 2 (1998): 14. 11. Michael Ian Borer, “Re-sensing Las Vegas: Aesthetic Entrepreneurship and Local Urban Culture,” Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 10, no. 1 (2017): 113. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2016.1139619.

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12. The term “culture industry” was coined and developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1947 in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment. See the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” for a complete discussion of their theory related to popular culture and art (Horkheimer et al. 2002, pp. 94–136). 13. “T&A” is a colloquialism for “tits and ass.” Joel Bergman, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 14. Landscape designer Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs (the daughter of Donald Brinkerhoff, Wynn’s first landscape designer who worked The Mirage) describes the significance of the hotel’s exterior design and landscaping for creating an association of beauty with Las Vegas. She goes on to describe how Wynn funded a beautification project to keep the Las Vegas Strip visually appealing, green, and inviting. See Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs, interviewed by Stefani Evans, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 15. The material testing to install Dale Chihuly’s Fiori Di Como in Bellagio’s lobby ceiling took over a year and cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wynn worked closely with the artist and Boeing scientists on the experiments to meet all safety and aesthetic standards. This episode in Bellagio’s construction is a fascinating look at how involved Wynn was in the design elements of his hotels (and at any cost), and is discussed in great detail by interior designer Roger Thomas. See Roger Thomas, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 16. Roger Thomas, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 17. Ibid. 18. Several of Wynn’s architects and designers discussed how he didn’t plan a budget for his construction projects in any conventional sense, instead aiming to produce a particular affect, outcome, or vision of what he wanted. As landscape architect Donald Brinkerhoff explained, this frustrated his accountants: “…the term I kept hearing is ‘It doesn’t pencil’…Steve’s made a good business out of doing things that don’t pencil and yet, in the end, they do pencil.” Donald Carl Brinkerhoff, interviewed by Stefani Evans, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 19. Tom Gorman, “Columnist Tom Gorman: Watching to See If Wynn Art Gallery Closes Shop,” Las Vegas Sun, October 21, 2005, https://dev.lasvegassun.com/news/2005/oct/21/columnist-tomgorman-watching-to-see-if-wynn-art-g/.

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20. As Bergman explained, Wynn provided room rates at a lower level than other places understanding that people wanted to feel special “Whether I come to Las Vegas with a hundred bucks or five thousand, I want to feel special. I want to be catered to…” Joel Bergman, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 21. For more discussion on episodes and controversies related to Wynn’s art collecting, tax loopholes, and his use of shareholder assets to fund the art acquisitions at Bellagio, see Smith, 339–342; and especially Binkley’s Chapter “Picasso’s Penis,” pp. 199–216. 22. Peter Schjeldahl, “An Archive of Eden” in Libby Lumpkin, Mirage Resorts Inc., and Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art (Las Vegas, NV). The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art: Impressionist and Modern Masters (Las Vegas, NV: Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Mirage Resorts, Inc., 1998), 13. 23. Jeffrey Valance, “The Greatest Art Show On Earth,” LA Weekly, April 21, 1999, https://www.laweekly.com/the-greatest-art-show-on-earth/. 24. Nicky Ryan, “Gambling on Contemporary Art in Vegas.” Art book 13, no. 3 (2006): 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8357.2006.00688.x. 25. Michael Brenson, “The Curator’s Moment,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1960): 16. https://doi.org/10.2307/777925. 26. Libby Lumpkin, who ran the short-lived Las Vegas Museum of Art once leaving the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, witnessed and commented on the shift towards the interests of the private art collector in a show she curated with work almost exclusively from local private collectors (Wynn included): “The arrival of private collections is a healthy sign for any city wishing to see a change in its cultural climate. Despite the fact that artworks held by private individuals generally are not available for public viewing, the enthusiasm of collectors ultimately seeps into all the corners of civic life” (Ryan 2006). 27. Le Rêve was the painting that Wynn inadvertently punctured with his elbow in a notorious incident covered by the global press in 2006, bringing him even more publicity. See Paumgarten for a detailed account. 28. Roger Thomas, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 29. Ibid. 30. Another Wynn innovation, the move to constantly update and refresh the décor, interiors, restaurants, and entertainments in his hotels is a business practice that is now adopted across the hotel, cruise, and resort industry globally. Wynn’s thinking behind beautifying, updating, and refreshing his hotel design is discussed at some length in Jane Radoff, interviewed by Barbara Tabach, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project.

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31. As Roger Thomas recalled, “Chanel and Oscar de la Renta and Dior and Vuitton and Hermès, all of the owners of those companies were personal friends of the Wynns by that time. So they all wanted aboard. We talked in terms of, well, we don’t want to do anything that’s out there because that’s already existing and it’s got to be something someone’s never seen.” See Roger Thomas, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 32. Lee Cagley, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 33. By this point in Wynn’s career, it is important to note that Wynn is nearly blind, relying on his senses other than his vision. This may have also contributed to his gravitation towards embodied senses in his hotel designs. Wynn was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at an early age, a condition that leads to increased degeneration of vision over time. 34. DeRuyter O. Butler, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 35. Dorothea Von Hantelmann, “Why Koons?” In The Market: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Natasha Degen, 217–222 (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 18. 36. Hal Foster, “The Medium is the Market,” London Review of Books 30, no. 19 (October 2008): 9, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n19/ hal-foster/the-medium-is-the-market. 37. Roger Thomas, interviewed by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White, August 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 38. For a discussion of Wynn’s influence on proven concepts in Las Vegas resort design and its global influence, see Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs, interviewed by Stefani Evans, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project; and Brad Friedmutter, interviewed by David Schwartz, September 2016, transcript, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. 39. Holland Cotter, “MoMA Reboots With ‘Modernism Plus’,” New York Times, October 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/ arts/design/moma-rehang-review-art.html. 40. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 41. For a rich study on how the democratization of art has been understood historically, and especially as it relates to notions of everyday engagement by audiences and enhancing quality of life, see Booth (2014). At the core of this idea is the following: “The democratization of art is premised upon

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the idea that the more types of people engage with art… then art has been democratized and that this is, in and of itself, a good thing” (209). 42. Over the course of time researching and writing this chapter, Steve Wynn became embroiled in several legal battles stemming from dozens of sexual misconduct allegations made against him in early 2018. He resigned as chairman and chief executive of Wynn Resorts the same year and sold his entire stake in the company soon thereafter. The fate of his art collection remains shrouded in mystery as the details of his divorce settlement with former wife, Elaine Wynn, are not entirely clear. At the time of this writing, media reports detail Wynn’s efforts to quietly sell off significant parts of his collection.

Bibliography Binkley, Christina. 2018. Winner Takes All: How Casino Mogul Steve Wynn Won—And Lost—The High Stakes Gamble to Own Las Vegas. Revised trade paperback edition. ed. New York: Hachette Books. Booth, Kate, 2014. “The Democratization of Art: A Contextual Approach.” Visitor Studies 17 (2): 207–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2014. 945353. Carroll, Noël. 1998. “The End of Art?” History and Theory 37 (4): 17–29. Hell, Julia, and George Steinmetz. 2014. “Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (3): 1047–1068. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12117. Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Leach, Andrew. 2015. “Leaving Las Vegas, Again.” Grey Room 61: 6–33. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00185. Paumgarten, Nick. 2006. “The $40-Million Elbow.” The New Yorker, October 16, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/the-40-mil lion-elbow. Ryan, Nicky. 2006. “Gambling on Contemporary Art in Vegas.” Art Book (London, England) 13 (3): 14–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8357. 2006.00688.x. Smith, John L. 1995. Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn. New York: Barricade Books.

CHAPTER 11

Epilogue Noa Bronstein and Gregory Blair

“The visible which surrounds us” claims John Berger, “continually appears and disappears.”1 Bringing to consciousness that which is appearing/disappearing or has appeared/disappeared is an impulse that informs the artists, writers, activists, people, and organizations that comprise the displacements and disruptions detailed in the previous chapters. The case studies detailed in each chapter of this anthology examines occurrences that want us to notice the structures, symbols, signifiers, people, histories, and images that are appearing, disappearing, or are already absent within various places. The tension between that which is visible, no longer visible, or not allowed to be visible, provides the grounding for the critical discourses investigated throughout this text. The implications of this concern should not be underestimated. As Jacques Rancière asserts in The Politics of Aesthetics, what is visible is inextricably linked to what is known. Perhaps even more importantly,

N. Bronstein (B) Toronto, ON, Canada G. Blair Evansville, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_11

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what is seen and what is deemed sensible are often politically regulated, and therefore, the extent of what can be known is shaped by politics. As Rancière claims, “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”2 Rancière’s statement is a testament to the significance and consequence of the politics of spatial transgressions in the arts explored throughout this text. As each author has explicated in their own way, the reach of these spatial transgressions extends far beyond the realm of the art world. Rancière also argues that we recognize the importance of artistic actions because “artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities… doing, making, seeing, and saying.”3 The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, also knew all too well the power of visual representations and their influence on truth and being, which is why he spoke so fervently against them in Book X of The Republic. Plato’s fear was that art could make us do and say things that would be out of character and betray our typical demeanor. Plato states that the painter and the poet are “concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason.”4 Plato’s main point for our purposes here is that what we see or don’t see, effects the way that we perceive the world around us and our place in it. Another major thread woven through our text, other than bringing to consciousness the human component in the production of place through revelation and revealing, is the notion of landscapes and places as types of palimpsests. As such, places can often conceal histories occurring just under the surface appearances of architectural facades that often exist as alternatives to dominant narratives. A visual analogy for this fragmented conglomerate of presences is a timeworn billboard that has been left unattended for many years such the one pictured in (Fig. 11.1). This anthology aims to recognize the messy layering and fracturing that comprise places as interstitial zones of colliding desires, histories, and identities. Many of the problems and issues addressed throughout the previous chapters are by-products of these collisions. However, we do not suggest a means to clean things up, rather our approach has been to let places stay messy and to examine the repercussions and existences that these encounters of forces and people produce.

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Fig. 11.1 New Orleans: St. Claude Avenue along Marigny section (Image courtesy of Infrogmation, 2008)

This anthology is also in many ways concerned with thresholds, both figuratively and literally. Thresholds can denote physical boundaries as much as personal limits and physiological breaking points. To put it more eloquently: “Thresholds mark the brink of entry and departure: transitions from one kind of place to another. The original act of threshing was to tread upon grain to separate it from stalk, that is, to walk with purpose. To hold one’s attention on the threshold of entry and departure, to attend to the marker of change is to recognize a shift in what is possible.”5 Many of the authors within this anthology address the ways in which we enter space or are discouraged from doing so. In a more metaphorical sense, the authors here address how it is that spaces transition and adapt due to social and political pressures and how change manifests at the threshold between the old and new, official and unofficial, and intended and unintended.

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The assorted authors of this text were mostly compiled from a fortuitous meeting and a sharing of interests during the 2018 Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada at the University of Waterloo. Most of the authors included here presented their research during the conference on either the Displacement and the Arts or the Transgressive Geographies: Radical Local Spatial Strategies in Aesthetics panels. Because of this origin, from these two specific panels at this particular conference, which has since grown into the text you are reading, we have mostly focused on a Canadian and American experience of spatial transgressions, with special attention to spaces operating at a localized community and neighborhood level. This drilling down to street views allows for a more immediate and intimate understanding of spatial transgressions. As YiFu Tuan notes “objects and places are centers of value. They attract or repel in finely shaded degrees. To attend to them even momentarily is to acknowledge their reality and value.”6 This publication has aimed to do just that—to acknowledge the value systems and realities embedded within the theories, policies, and understandings associated with specific and granular spatial experiences. This being said, these issues certainly resonate more broadly. As we find ourselves in an era in which an enormous number of people find themselves forced to migrate and flee, a growing concern for the impact that these migrations will have on geopolitics, identities, and boundaries continues to develop in aesthetic discourse. While our anthology does not directly address these forced migrations on a global scale as either displacements or disruptions, we do recognize that iterations such as the special feature on “Forced Migration, Cultural identity, and Trauma” by the Council for European Studies or the Harvard Art Museums exhibition “Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art” do engage with the politics of spatial transgressions in the arts. The discourse surrounding these areas of crisis will likely continue to grow and become more pressing. Forced migration is a type of transgression mentioned in the introduction that can be unwelcomed and life threatening. We hope that this anthology can move the needle, however slight, towards more transgressions that are productive and not invasive. Within this shift is a turn towards more agencies enacted in the world, in the realm of place. For example, in his extension of the Foucauldian analysis of apparatuses, Agamben identifies and investigates their effects on subjects. For Agamben, an apparatus is anything that captures, restricts, or determines the thoughts and actions of living beings.

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In a departure from Foucault, however, Agamben advocates finding new ways to dismantle them through individual agency, and indeed points out that “this problem [of reclaiming the desubjective power of an apparatus] cannot be properly raised as long as those who are concerned with it are unable to intervene in their own process of subjectification.”7 Agamben asserts that the subject plays a part in the production of their own subjectivity. Sometimes, to achieve the subjectivity that one desires, transgression may be the only means. We strongly feel that the various case studies presented in this text constitute a well-rounded narrative and examination of the twenty-first century praxis and discourse of spatial transgression in the arts. At the same time, we acknowledge that there are many narratives that are absent from this textual record and voices that need a space of their own to call attention to the many ways that individuals and communities address spatial transgressions. The challenge with any such undertaking is that it cannot fully encapsulate the breadth of thinking and activism that has taken shape around the globe in regards to the politics of space and place. Our hope is that this anthology can act as a starting point for further dialogue and an expanded and deepened discourse surrounding these increasingly pertinent themes.

Notes 1. John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (Vintage International, 2003), 12. 2. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 13. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. Plato, Plato’s Republic (Jazzybee Verlag, 1993), 358. 5. Eve Tuck, et al., “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2014): 52. 6. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 18. 7. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2009), 24.

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References Agamben, Giorgio, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2009). Berger, John, The Shape of a Pocket (Vintage International, 2003). Plato, Plato’s Republic (Jazzybee Verlag, 1993). Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2006). Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Tuck, Eve, Mistinguette Smith, Allison M. Guess, Tavia Benjamin, and Brian K. Jones, “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2014, 52–74.

Index

A Architecture, 7, 9, 10, 21, 68–70, 75, 106–108, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119, 138, 139, 149, 151, 171 Art, 3, 4–9, 11–13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23–29, 45, 51, 52, 61, 67–70, 89, 91, 94, 95, 124–126, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134, 137, 139, 146, 149–154, 156, 158–162, 164, 165, 169, 172, 173, 178, 180, 181 B Being, 2, 3, 6, 7, 18, 20, 23, 24, 26, 29, 36, 38, 45, 47, 58–60, 71, 74, 80, 88–93, 97–99, 107, 114, 123, 128, 131, 132, 134, 139, 142, 143, 153, 159, 163, 178, 180 Building, 3, 8, 10, 18–23, 40, 44, 45, 51–53, 55, 59–61, 63, 70–72, 75, 89, 106–111, 115, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 135, 139, 151, 156, 158, 172–174

C Canada, 7, 8, 17, 28, 33–36, 42–46, 48, 125, 128, 129, 180 Chinatown, 7, 8, 33–35, 38–41, 43, 45–48, 130 Chinese, 7, 8, 33, 35–47, 166, 168 City, 5, 7–10, 12, 19, 20, 22–26, 29, 36, 39, 41, 43, 45–47, 51–55, 59, 62, 63, 67–72, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 114, 121, 134, 138, 139, 141, 149, 152, 159, 170, 173 Community, 5, 7, 8, 11, 19, 21–24, 26–29, 33, 35–40, 42–45, 47, 48, 53–55, 58, 62, 63, 71, 80, 114, 124, 129, 130, 134, 180, 181 Composition, 9, 67, 69–71, 76, 81

D Duration, 11, 93, 142, 143

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Blair and N. Bronstein (eds.), The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0

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INDEX

E Economy, 8, 22, 53, 54, 59, 61–63, 69, 128, 166 Eviction, 55, 56, 58–63

F Fold, 110–112, 115, 120 Food, 24, 29, 36, 39, 123, 124, 128, 132, 134, 135, 165

H Hotel, 11, 12, 54, 149–154, 156, 158, 160–162, 164–174

I Image, 7, 10, 33–38, 40–42, 44–49, 56–58, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81, 90, 91, 105, 106, 108–113, 116– 119, 140, 142, 144, 152, 153, 155, 159, 162–164, 166–168, 177, 179 Installation, 20, 93, 108, 137–139, 141, 143, 145–147, 169

J Justice, 17, 23–26, 29, 135

L Landscape, 9, 10, 12, 29, 37, 68–72, 74, 79–82, 112, 125, 150, 153, 158, 172, 178 Las Vegas, 12, 149–155, 157–164, 166, 168, 170–174

M Mapping, 4, 7, 8, 11, 51, 52, 55–63, 137–139, 146

Maps, 7, 8, 11, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58–60, 62, 63, 133, 139, 141, 143, 145, 146 Memory, 8–11, 36, 51, 67, 68, 70, 71, 76, 79–82, 112, 115, 119, 138, 142, 143, 146, 162

N Narrative, 8, 58–60, 63, 137–143, 145, 146, 152, 178, 181

P Paper, 69, 105, 106, 108–111, 115, 118, 119, 144, 159, 170 People, 4, 5, 8, 23, 25, 27, 43, 47, 51, 53–56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 70, 75, 88, 89, 93–95, 97, 105, 107, 114, 123–125, 128, 129, 132, 141, 145, 150, 151, 160, 161, 164–166, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180 Photograph, 10, 36, 73, 74, 77, 78, 105, 106, 108–110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 140, 144, 153, 155, 157, 159, 162–164, 167, 168 Place, 3–7, 9, 10, 12, 17, 20–23, 25, 29, 39, 52, 54–56, 60, 63, 67–70, 72, 73, 76, 78–81, 88–90, 92–95, 97–99, 106, 109, 111, 118, 119, 124, 140–143, 146, 152, 159, 171, 173, 178–181 Politics, 12, 24, 52, 61, 70, 75, 93, 95, 170, 178, 180, 181 Public, 9, 12, 22, 23, 26, 28, 29, 36, 44, 53, 55, 58, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70–73, 75, 80–82, 94, 112, 114, 120, 121, 125, 133, 150–152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 161, 166, 169, 170, 173

INDEX

S Society, 2, 23, 42, 53, 69, 71, 80, 81, 96–98, 100, 135, 152, 165, 166, 169 Souped, 10, 11, 123–125, 127, 129–135 Space, 1, 3–12, 18–27, 29, 34, 36, 43, 45, 48, 51, 52, 55, 62, 68–73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 88–90, 92–95, 99, 105, 106, 108, 110–112, 114, 115, 118–121, 124, 125, 127–131, 133, 134, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149–152, 156, 158, 160, 165, 168–171, 178, 179, 181 Spatial, 1, 4–7, 9, 11–13, 17, 19, 21, 24–26, 29, 30, 52, 68–72, 75, 95, 97, 118, 125, 142, 143, 150, 151, 153, 156, 165, 166, 169, 170, 178, 180, 181 Stories, 5, 8, 10, 51, 54, 58–60, 62, 63, 76, 77, 89, 96, 109, 126, 130, 133, 137, 139–141, 156 Strategy, 5, 47, 52, 71, 72, 74, 76–81, 110, 115, 118

185

T Text, 2–4, 6, 7, 61, 69, 70, 96, 141, 146, 149, 177, 178, 180, 181 Time, 6, 7, 11, 21, 23, 28, 35, 36, 39, 45, 53, 55, 68–71, 87, 94, 96, 98, 99, 106, 111, 112, 115, 118, 125, 127–131, 133, 137–143, 145, 146, 151, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 171, 174, 175, 178, 181 Transgression, 1–7, 12, 61, 92, 119, 178, 180, 181 U Urban, 4, 5, 7–10, 17, 20, 23–29, 48, 51, 58, 62, 68–71, 74, 80, 81, 114, 138, 149, 151, 152, 159, 171 W World, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 21, 25, 51, 56, 58, 73, 76, 94, 95, 97, 98, 115, 135, 138, 139, 145, 146, 150–152, 154, 158–160, 165, 166, 169, 170, 178, 180 Wynn, 11, 12, 149–154, 156, 158–175