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Extra/Ordinary Cities
In 2008, in my role as Senior Research Curator at the Casula Powerhouse and the Center for Contemporary Art & Politics, College of Fine Arts/UNSW in Sydney, I organized the Forum 'Extra/Ordinary Cities: The Cultural Dynamics of Urban Intervention'
Extra/Ordinary Cities: Extra/Ordinary Cities: The Cultural Dynamics of Urban Intervention. The Forum was held in associated with the 2008 Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms that Turn. Extra/Ordinary Cities explored the intricate relationships between art, politics and the built environment in Asia and Australia. Traveling from Sydney’s eastern suburbs to the city's southwest, this day-long event centered at the Bach Dang Vietnamese Restaurant in Canley Vale/Cabramatta. It brought together a group of leading international artists, architects and writers in examining the complex crossings, transformations and challenges in relation to urban landscapes and urban interventions.
In the coming months I will continue working on these issues, and look forward to sharing more information on this Forum and its themes. I welcome a chance to exchange further thoughts on these issues with the contributors of n.e.w.s.
Some of the initial questions that were raised included:
- What constitutes the link between art and the city?
- How does art inhabit the urban environment?
- What is the role of art in urban consciousness?
- What are the socio-political levels of art in relation to urban communities?
- How do artists inhabit urban space?
Extra/Ordinary Cities is organized by:
Center for Contemporary Art & Politics, College of Fine Arts/UNSW, Sydney - http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Faculty of the Build Environment, UNSW, Sydney - http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au
Casula Powerhouse: International Centre of Cultural Diversity, Sydney - http://casulapowerhouse.com
2008 Biennale of Sydney - http://www.bos2008.com
Participants in the Forum included:
Asia
Neville Mars, urban researcher based in Beijing
Ou Ning, artist and urban researcher based in Beijing
Map Office (Laurent Guttierrez & Valérie Portefaix), artists and urban researchers based in Hong Kong
Ruangrupa (Reza Afisina & Ardi Yunanto), artists and curators based in Jakarta
International (Biennale of Sydney)
Manray Hsu, curator based in Tapei
Michael Rakowitz, artist based in New York
Rene Gabri & Ayreen Anastas, artists based in New York
Australia
Richard Goodwin, artist and architect based in Sydney
Shakthidharan, artist and urban researcher based in Sydney
Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, artists based in Brisbane
Squat Space, artists-run initiative based in Sydney
(For more information, please contact me directly)
Comments
inhabiting the urban environment
i'm interested in how to inhabit the urban environment, that's the role i can think of. i don't see or define the role as a distance or subject and object, or artist and stage kind of relationship. many artist has been using the urban space a stage or the expanding gallery space, again it has the exclusivity and exoticism in itself. what we can do is actually appear or exist as one of the mechanism in urban environment.
the biggest challenge i experienced is that how to be inhabit the urban environment in the middle of the super fast speed of change that the urban space has been develop. in physical sense is that how we can challenge the architecture for example.
city that have capability to produce and reproduce it's (visual) culture of course will be more interesting. this happen i think mostly in the city with fail of modernity or it's still strugling define it's space - like jakarta for example - , it's much more organic. the people and the space define themself. every individuals strugling and marked their own teritorry, of course then the power of capital play stronger role, but we can still see people are strugling make their own space.
me and friends in ruangrupa were discussing about how we define the space shifting from soeharto regime and post-soeharto. we put an example - why there is no public art in soeharto regime -. how the trauma or the fear are develops, and producing self censorship.
inhabiting the urban environment
i'm interested in how to inhabit the urban environment, that's the role i can think of. i don't see or define the role as a distance or subject and object, or artist and stage kind of relationship. many artist has been using the urban space a stage or the expanding gallery space, again it has the exclusivity and exoticism in itself. what we can do is actually appear or exist as one of the mechanism in urban environment.
the biggest challenge i experienced is that how to be inhabit the urban environment in the middle of the super fast speed of change that the urban space has been develop. in physical sense is that how we can challenge the architecture for example.
city that have capability to produce and reproduce it's (visual) culture of course will be more interesting. this happen i think mostly in the city with fail of modernity or it's still strugling define it's space - like jakarta for example - , it's much more organic. the people and the space define themself. every individuals strugling and marked their own teritorry, of course then the power of capital play stronger role, but we can still see people are strugling make their own space.
me and friends in ruangrupa were discussing about how we define the space shifting from soeharto regime and post-soeharto. we put an example - why there is no public art in soeharto regime -. how the trauma or the fear are develops, and producing self censorship.
the political body
The way artists inhabit the urban environment raises an interesting point, as you say in how it will be capable of moving into challenging the 'kind of relationship' it seeks. I see a lot of attention is focused on 'exhibiting' - ie. placing objects in space. This also seems the case with the way the city becomes part of curatorial work (including Biennales), which seek to connect art to the dynamics of city, but often are confined to exhibiting artworks in space (even when making use of alternative sites). It would be interesting to look at signals of where art inhabits the urban environment - eg. becomes an integral part of the construction of the urban environment/ and urban consciousness. As per the shifts in urban space following the end of the Soehart regime, I am interesting in how this influenced the embodiment of public space. When the image of Suharto is toppled, what happens to the social/political embodiment of Indonesian national identity -- does it disperse spatially as well as temporarily?
integraly difficult
to become an integral part of the urban consciousness...i think the process should expand it'self or the artists/art shouldn't be only have one central tendency.
there is should be a level of 'misunderstanding' of both ways, we have to enter the tension between (pretentious) art and not art. or art and activism. as long as those tension is exist i might say that is the real complexity that should be approached. the 'misunderstanding' or those tension can be a way/tool or even nature to get closer to the integral part of the urban consciousness that already have complexity in itself . most of the time the works couldn't have the organicity to be part of mechanism of the artistic (re)production of people/city. though there's always another problem; several spot of our mural project in the city few years back, now become an advertisement billboard...they used to paint it over, but now they sell it :-)
after soeharto regime, it's an explosion, many layers appear. people more powerful then before, but the capital always have much more power. public space entering different phase of battle ground. in soekarno and soeharto era the orientation is actually very clear, now we're in the disorientation era after soeharto, it's very noisy and chaotic, it's actually the right time to try, propose something or negotiate. but some are always faster than others, now i think the public space is define by state and capital owner. the only different is that i can see many people in many ways trying hard to work things out, from hardcore activists to a spoiled artists.
came across few facts from many things that we can observe more relate to space, body and politic after soeharto:
- demonstration on the street that become more massive and attractive as well as vandals, the province/district autonomy policy makes most of people thinking more bout the local/city because after soeharto centralized corruption, now become decentralized corruption. but we can still have some at least, people own the street when it goes to a demonstration from activists, moslem organization, political parties, to labour and students...the weather forecast of demonstration always influence the traffic here
- malls and shopping centre, this is our 'public space' now, in jakarta it occupies 3 millions m2 (around 300 football fields) few days ago we have a very interesting meeting with suryono herlambang - an architect, he is now doing a research on malls phenomenon in jakarta - he reveal that malls in jakarta grows more after the economic crisis in 1998, especially in 2000, the consumption behavior has safe the production
you can see more here for few essay on public space in jakarta ('karbon 2000-2006') :
http://karbonjournal.org/en/karbon/index.php?ID_edition=1
and cinema and the city might interesting as well
http://karbonjournal.org/en/home/index.php
urban sovereignty
It's a fascinating idea to focus on a city through the lens of the art produced in it. To read urban subjectivities in the art that reflects, embodies and maybe, sometimes, contributes to their transformation. I think it was only last year, in April if I remember correctly, that for the first time in human history we city-dwellers became the majority and the rural world went minority. Somebody, in some city, was born; or somebody, from some impoverished countryside, arrived in a city, and the balanced toppled. This underscores a political issue -- that of the political specificity of cities, and their increasing rupture from the more convention-structured subjectivities of the hinterland. Since cities are, apparently, our future, we need to think about the degree of sovereignty to be enjoyed by cities, whose collective habitus and mindsets - because of their uneasy diversity - are often at odds with those found in the suburbs and beyond. It is in those cities where this is most exacerbated that interest me most: places like Beirut, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and to some degree less often cited cities like Montréal, from whence I write. Since I see your title is plural, what cities other than Sydney are you looking at?
Ongoing
I agree that the idea deserves out attention, and it is very important to look at others cities, expanding on the use of the plural. During a preliminary discussion in Sydney we addressed the current urban transformation in Asian Cities, which were previously identified as ‘chaotic’, ‘contradictory’, ‘hybrid’, and ‘full of contestations’ (including in 'Cities on the Move', 1997-1999). Hence, part of my interest lies in the idea that 'Cities have moved on since Cities on the Move'.
The discussions in Sydney turned from the issue of ‘density’ (based on a centre-periphery model) to the ‘intensity’ of the urban environment – the ‘spatial’ becomes related to the ‘temporal’, also relating to the way cities are inhabited, and their histories. Next we came to discuss the issue of ‘permanence’, including in the way people are often defining their own space, despite planning strategies. This also becomes the realm of artists, who pay attention to the realities of everyday life, as well as to the ‘appropriation of space’ by its users. Besides the ‘production of space’, one also needs to think about the ‘space of production’. Here, the ‘primacy of action moves into the primacy of space’ (and visa versa). I would like to see the discussion continue.
The cities you mention are also of interest to me, and I am very interested in exchanging further ideas. I have grown some interest in the spatial-informed notions of identity, whereby in Sydney (the city I write from) there is often a distinction/social classification made between the Eastern suburbs, the Inner West, and the Outer West. I was also reading some of the research on 'Shrinking Cities' (which focuses mainly on Europe and North America). I am interested in the research work that is done in cities such as Jakarta (Ruangrupa/Ade Darmawan) -- looking at how the density of the population in Jakarta constantly changes -- including during the weekend/public holidays when a great number of Jakarta residents travel to Bandung (3 hours away). Ade also mentions the city as something much 'more organic'. It becomes interesting as well as well to look at how communities inhabit the city.