Transformations

Description

Critically challenging the notion of cities as hegemonic spaces, Transformations: Art and the City explores interactions between the human subject and their urban surroundings through site-specific art and creative practices, tracing the ways in which Chapters include case-studies raging from corporate- and public-funded art in Sydney; creative exchanges in Cambodia; politically-engaged enterprise art in the USA; affordable housing models in Australia; street-art under surveillance in Melbourne; and community memorial in post-disaster New Zealand, amongst others. People live, imagine and shape their cities. Drawing on the work of artists globally, from Cambodia to Australia, New Zealand to the USA, this edited collection investigates the politics and democratization of space through an examination of art, education, justice, and the role of the citizen in the city. The writers critically and poetically engage with the temporality and genealogies of public spaces, and ask: how do we reconcile artistic practices with an urbanism driven by globalization and capital? And is there room for aesthetic practices in urban discourse? This collection explores how creative practices can work in tandem with ever-changing urban technologies and ecologies to both disrupt and shape urban public spaces, democratization of space through an examination of art, education, justice and the role of the citizen in the city.

Section I

Mapped City

 

Reading the Mapped City 

William Cartwright

 

Carto-City Revisited: Unmapping urbaness 

Maggie McCormick

 

Sensing Sydney: An experiment in public art of the smart eco-city 

Jodi Newcombe

 

Section II

Contested City

 

Travels and Tapestries: Possibilities for creative exchange in Melbourne and Phnom Penh

Clare McCracken and Roger Nelson

 

Art as Enterprise

Grace McQuilten

 

Recipe for Homefullness 

Keely Macarow

 

Interrogating Space: The 'Urban Laboratory'

Fiona Hillary and Geoff Hogg

 

Section III

Pedagogical City

 

Writing transparadiso: Across and beside 

Jane Rendell

 

Raising Alterity: Working towards a just city 

Elizabeth M. Grierson

 

Fragments, Lyotard and Earthquakes: A mosaic of memory and broken pieces

Kirsten Locke and Sarah Yates

 

Section IV

Temporal City

 

Feature 13: Suburban 'Terrain Vague'

Anthony McInneny

 

Beyond the Tarmac: Temporality and the roadside art of Melbourne 

Ashley Perry

 

Walking the Post-Quake City: (Re)making the place in Ōtautahi Christchurch

Barbara Garrie

 

Section V

Creative City

 

Listening to the City 

Kristen Sharp

 

Applying the Creative City: Curating art in urban spaces

Tammy Wong Hulbert

 

The Poetic City: Old songs left beneath the arches

Nicholas Lyon Gresson

Sujets

• Public Art
• History of art
• Conceptualism
• Index of urban studies articles
• Design
• Art
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783207749
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 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.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Lucy McArthur
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik, Matthew Greenfield and Naomi Curston
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-772-5
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-773-2
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-774-9
This work has been developed and published in collaboration with AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society).
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Sponsored by CAST Research Centre for Art Society and Transformations
RMIT University Melbourne Australia.
This is part of the Mediated Cities series.
ISSN: 2058-9409
Series editor: Graham Cairns, AMPS
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Situating trans-formations
Elizabeth M. Grierson
Section I: Mapped City
Chapter 1: Reading the Mapped City
William Cartwright
Chapter 2: Carto-City Revisited: Unmapping urbaness
Maggie McCormick
Chapter 3: Sensing Sydney: An experiment in public art of the smart eco-city
Jodi Newcombe
Section II: Contested City
Chapter 4: Travels and Tapestries: Possibilities for creative exchange in Melbourne and Phnom Penh
Clare McCracken and Roger Nelson
Chapter 5: Art as Enterprise
Grace McQuilten
Chapter 6: Recipe for Homefullness
Keely Macarow
Chapter 7: Interrogating Space: The Urban Laboratory
Fiona Hillary and Geoff Hogg
Section III: Pedagogical City
Chapter 8: Writing transparadiso: Across and beside
Jane Rendell
Chapter 9: Raising Alterity: Working towards a just city
Elizabeth M. Grierson
Chapter 10: Fragments, Lyotard and Earthquakes: A mosaic of memory and broken pieces
Kirsten Locke and Sarah Yates
Section IV: Temporal City
Chapter 11: Feature 13: Suburban Terrain Vague
Anthony McInneny
Chapter 12: Beyond the Tarmac: Temporality and the roadside art of Melbourne
Ashley Perry
Chapter 13: Walking the Post-Quake City: (Re)making place in Ōtautahi Christchurch
Barbara Garrie
Section V: Creative City
Chapter 14: Listening to the City
Kristen Sharp
Chapter 15: Applying the Creative City: Curating art in urban spaces
Tammy Wong Hulbert
Chapter 16: The Poetic City: Old songs left beneath the arches
Nicholas Lyon Gresson
Author Bionotes
Index
Foreword
This anthology emerged from a very special symposium that brought together leading arts practitioners, academics and stakeholders from industry and government to grapple with pressing issues in the public and urban realm. Its driving questions were framed around the notion of transformation, the operation of changing—by rotation, mapping, mutation—from one configuration or expression into another. Transformation can be radical or incremental, it can be sudden or gradual, but (as most definitions tell us) it will eventually result in a marked change of appearance, usually (according to the more optimistic texts) for the better.
This is an ambitious claim and the contributors to this highly stimulating volume rise to the task in hand. They do so largely, though not uniquely, through the multi-focal lens of creative practices. Many of the chapters also embrace trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking, exploring the urban through a diverse set of interests—arts, media, education, policy, business, science, engineering, cartography, law. The result is a stimulating cocktail of enquiry that offers fresh insight alongside rigorous critique.
Focusing on the roles of creative and aesthetic practice, this new study offers innovative insights into contemporary debates and the current dynamics of our urban domain. By problematizing the dominant rhetoric, the anthology offers a fresh critique of our over-furnished cities, explores the essential role of socially engaged practices and invites a reappraisal of the current fascination with place-making. Contributors take to task the easy diction of space, place and the urban; through some excellent analyses they contest the familiar—and possibly overused—ideas that permeate the discourse of ‘public art’, a term now so overused as to have lost much of its traction.
It is the right moment to offer up this critique. This timely anthology, originating from Australia but drawing on global case studies and examples, highlights a refreshing array of projects and positions through the lens of differentiated and material practices. Taking ‘the city’ as an extensive field of enquiry, it adopts a five-part structure to lend thematic shape to the book, allowing the very notion of difference to form its own organizing strategy.
Sixty years ago, in ‘The Natural History of Urbanization’ Lewis Mumford warned that ‘the blind forces of urbanisation, flowing along the lines of least resistance, show no aptitude for creating an urban and industrial pattern that will be stable, self-sustaining and self-renewing’. However bleak this prognosis and however real its dystopian vision, this volume demonstrates a willingness to bring together artists, art historians, philosophers, architects, political geographers, cultural theorists, urbanists, and media practitioners and writers to address the concerns of globalization and the environment, and to grapple—with wit, innovation and creative insight—with the twenty-first-century conditions and concerns of urban space, the public realm and the human condition.
Professor Paul Gough
Pro-Vice Chancellor and Vice-President
RMIT University Melbourne
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to thank Intellect Ltd., UK for accepting this book into the Mediated Cities series. Thanks are due also to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their practical and helpful comments.
Grateful thanks to Paul Gough for dedicating his time to provide a Foreword for the book. And a special thank you to all the contributing authors for their scholarly and readable texts, and, during the editing stages, for their attention to detail and coherence.
Thanks are due to the Research Centre for Art, Society and Transformations (CAST) at RMIT University for supporting this publication.
Acknowledgement is given to those artists, photographers and institutions who gave permission for images to be reproduced in these pages.
Finally, the editor and authors acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work and live, and extend respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and to the tangata whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
Introduction: Situating trans-formations
Elizabeth M. Grierson
Situating Trans-formations
This book investigates trans-formations in an urban context. It raises enquiry about cities, the ways we live in them, engage with them and react to them. It asks what it may mean to form and transform the places we inhabit . Is transformation something that just happens in the collective processes of daily lives? Or do we set out to transform urban environments with active intent? How may aesthetic practices play a part to activate or transform city inhabitants and spaces; and likewise, to what extent do cities, their inhabitants and regulatory technologies effect practices?
The impetus for this book project came from a symposium on art and city transformations held by the Research Centre for Art, Society and Transformations (CAST) at RMIT University, Melbourne in 2014. That event brought together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives—arts, media, communications, education, policy, business, science, engineering, geography, cartography, law—to address issues of change and transformation in and of the city. Stimulating debates around discourses arose. It became clear that the time was right to grasp the ideas in ferment, to extend the research and to widen the audience for this important topic.
Trans- acts as a crucial sign in thematizing this book: trans -formations , trans -positions, trans -locations, trans -figurations, trans itions, trans cripts, trans lations, all suggesting a movement across, lending spatial and temporal dimensions to place. As art, design and architecture form objects in their spatial dynamics, so they also trans-pose those same dynamics. Between formation and trans-position lies a productive site of transformation.
The signs of transformation are situating discourses ‘as practices obeying certain rules’ (Foucault 1994: 138). The collection acts as a discourse of the city—the book as a discourse founded in discursivity with all its differential formations; it does not stand ‘as a sign of something else’ (Foucault 1994: 138).
Discursive practices encompass the various works, objects, ideas, languages, regulations or laws that determine a particular meaning—embedded in institutions of society—at any given time and place. The discourse as presented here ‘does not seek another, better-hidden discourse’ (Foucault 1994: 139). It is what it is: a construction of discursive practices that comprise its evidential findings.
Questions of Power and Politics
Some key questions arose from the symposium. What roles do the arts and aesthetics, creative practices and poetics play in this discourse? How may we understand the city of the twenty-first century through an aesthetic lens—and what possibilities exist for transformative action? The collection gives opportunity to consider the relations of power and politics in on-the-ground practices. What does it mean to have an informed public re