Interventions

Description

Interventions is a contribution to current considerations of how cultural initiatives and interventions affect the development of cities. It draws together policies and projects for cultural urban interventions, from the UK, Lithuania, India, and North America. The authors include artists, arts managers, academics in cultural and geographical fields, and policy makers. The book has three sections: the first on policies and strategies for cultural intervention; the second on specific projects (a set of case studies); and the third includes two important research reports evaluating public art and cultural interventions in London, Exeter, the northeast of England, and Barcelona.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Architecture
• Landscape
• General
• General officer
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Performing Arts
• Public Policy

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841501185
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Interventions
Advances in Art and Urban Futures Volume 4
Edited by Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall
First Published in 2005 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in USA in 2005 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdoni
Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon - Toucan
Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Set in Joanna
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84150-118-2
ISSN 1742-9412 (Print)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Malcolm Miles
Contributors
Part One - Policies and Strategies
Cultural Ambiguity in an Urban Development Master Plan: Deception or Miscalculation?
Tania Carson
Opening up the Symbolic Economy of Contemporary Mumbai
Andrew Harris
Monuments and Monkey Puzzles: Public Art in Bristol
Alastair Snow
B rgerMeister: New Tactics for Shrinking Cities
Friedrich von Borries and Matthias B ttger
Part Two - Projects
Urban Image and Legibility in Kings Cross
Ben Campkin
Cargo
Esther Salamon
On the Edge: the Visual Arts in Remote Rural Contexts of Northern Scotland
Anne Douglas
I Fail to Agree
Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan
Going Public: Strategies of Intervention in Lithuania
Laima Kreivyte
Instruments
Laurie Palmer
Part Three - Evaluations
A Comparative Evaluation: Projects in Exeter, Barcelona, London,Tyneside
Sarah Bennett, John Butler, Nicola Kirkham and Malcolm Miles
Public Art in the City: Meanings,Values, Attitudes and Roles
Tim Hall and Chereen Smith
Acknowledgements
The Editors wish to express their thanks to all contributors; and to Josh Beadon of Toucan Design, Exeter for designing the book.
Chapter 7 describes a project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Chapters 11 and 12 have arisen from evaluation research projects also funded by AHRB, at the University of Plymouth and the University of Gloucestershire respectively.
Thanks are due, also, to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Plymouth which has supported several seminars at which papers revised for publication in this volume were first given; and to the University of Barcelona, Carnegie Mellon University, and Bristol Legible City for hosting further events from which papers have been derived.
Interventions Introduction
This is the fourth volume of collected papers in the series Advances in Art and Urban Futures. It follows Cultures & Settlements (edited by Malcolm Miles and Nicola Kirkham, 2003), and maintains the intention to bring together the perspectives of academics in several disciplines, artists, and other professionals involved in various ways in shaping contemporary cities. It maintains, too, a geographical breadth, with contributions in this volume from the USA, Germany, and Lithuania as well as the UK; and from UK contributors material on India, the Baltic states, and Barcelona. While most of the material relates to urban conditions and cultures, this volume includes a chapter on a rural arts project in Scotland. This offers a contrasting scenario through which at least the urban is seen more clearly via the contrast; it offers as well a reminder that significant cultural formations take place outside major centres of population. Of course, the intention is usually to remould the conditions of cultural production and reception, and in selecting papers for inclusion the editors have looked for critiques and case studies which state or imply such an aim. At the same time, wary of the difficulty of too easily accepting a model of cause and effect, they have included a paper which critically discusses instrumentality on the part of artists and arts organisations.
The book is organised in three sections: Policies and Strategies, Projects, and Evaluations. The first section addresses the arts and cultural policies, the strategies of cultural intermediaries and entrepreneurs in major cities including London, Mumbai, and Bristol. It includes a paper, in largely visual form, demonstrating a tactical game designed to elucidate the processes of decision-making facing shrinking, post- industrial cities. The papers are topical, dealing with, inter alia, issues of gentrification, cultural re-coding of urban neighbourhoods, public art policy, and depopulation from the loss of industries and its impact on perceptions of a city's future. Tania Carson critically reviews the cultural plan for London under its elected mayor. While the published strategy concerns culture in its broadest and most inclusive sense, Carson concludes that spatial planning is inevitably a controlling mechanism, in this case hiding social problems under a veneer of affluence denoted by culture. Andrew Harris extends the critique of culturally led redevelopment, looking more to the private sector and to Mumbai (Bombay, the site of Bollywood). He finds Indian entrepreneurs taking up the model of, say, SoHo in New York and Hoxton in London - in which art galleries and other cultural insertions in a run down neighbourhood serve to polarise wealth and poverty. In course of his investigations he casts new light on Sharon Zukin's work on loft living in SoHo. Alastair Snow writes from the viewpoint of a local authority officer (and performance artist, known previously for his guerrilla tactics). He looks in detail at policies for public art in Bristol, a city which has a revitalised harbour district housing a number of cultural institutions. He links this to the re-branding of Bristol as a legible city , and emphasises the role of consultation in defining appropriate public policies. Finally in this section, Friedrich von Borries and Matthias B ttger, writing from a perspective of architectural and urban design, present a game in which notional citizens participate in re-visioning their city. The focus is the shrinking city of Halle in the ex-East Germany, typical of many cities from which older, heavy industries have departed while the promise of newer, usually high-tech or knowledge-based industries has not as yet been realised. What is said of Halle could as easily apply to Pittsburgh or Middlesbrough.
Section Two looks at a range of projects and programmes in which artists intervene in urban (and in one case rural) sites. It combines descriptive and critical writing to construct a debate from which we might learn that there is no ideal model for intervention and that local conditions retain a degree of imperviousness to global scenarios. In some cases the projects seek to be regenerative; in others they problematise concepts such as culture and development. Ben Campkin scrutinises a project in London's Kings Cross area and its relation to the idea of legibility. He contextualises it in terms of a changing urban landscape and looks in detail at specific works. These tend to be specific not so much to a geographical site as to a set of conditions and to be temporary. He concludes with a cautionary note, that cultural re- branding of a neighbourhood can bypass its social needs or ignore its social complexities. Esther Salamon writes as an arts intermediary and consultant on an ambitious project (yet to be fully realised) linking post-industrial sites in the north- east of England, Latvia and Sweden. The sites define a Baltic territory in which heavy industry is depleted and some settlements left without the activity on which they were founded. As well as celebrating socio-economic histories, the project seeks to work within processes of identity formation. Perhaps one factor which artists can introduce in such situations is visibility, particularly for the everyday histories which are often overlooked in more glamorous or official media. Anne Douglas writes, in contrast, about an arts project in the north-east of Scotland, in rural Aberdeenshire. Here settlements comprisea few houses and farms, presenting an artist with a social fabric quite different from that of a city, in this case a resilient fabric despite pressures for depopulation. She emphasises individual participation and creative risk and the sharing of perceptions as well as transfer of skills.This is followed by a paper by Sheffield-based artists Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, whose work operates in the interstices of urban redevelopment. For instance, a space in a redundant industrial building typical of the kind converted into lofts to attract a new bohemian class to areas of economic decline is transformed into a simulated new apartment. The artists write that they do not build a last (romantic) barricade against capitalism but use art's experimental aspect to construct a space in which the influence of capital is nonetheless questioned. Laima Kreivyte, next, gives a summary of developments in non-gallery art in Lithuania since the late 1980s - since, that is, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, end of the cold war and beginning of a liberalisation of the east bloc. In Lithuania, as in other Baltic states, this allows a resurgent nationalism intertwined with post-communism. The projects exhibit, variously, a post-modern irony, an understanding of feminism and the space of the body, and a concern for unselected public participation. In one case, rave culture intersects institutional culture. In another artists use public transport as their arena. Finally in this section, Laurie Palmer, a member of the artists' group Haha in Chicago, writes critically about instrumentality - the idea that artists (or planners, developers and cultural intermediaries) might intervene in a way which relies on a model of cause (the art policy or project) and effect (the fantasised revitalised city, for instance)