Art in the City, the City in Art

ISBN-13: 9789819960415 / Angielski

Elisha Masemann

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Establishing the city’s ‘ground rules’.- Part I: Hardware.- Chapter 2: A rational city programme.- Chapter 3:Critical responses to the ‘city plan’.- Chapter 4: Art’s non-rational uses of the city.- Part II: Software.- Chapter 5: Ideology and the city.- Chapter 6: The body and the city.- Chapter 7: The everyday city.- Chapter 8: Disrupting ‘normalcy’ through art.- Part III: Networks.- Chapter 9: Networks that create control in the city.- Chapter 10: Foundations for cognitive dissonance.- Chapter 11: Art’s intervention in the society of control.- Chapter 12: Epilogue: An ongoing struggle between ‘art in the city, the city in art’.

O autorze

Elisha Masemann (PhD, The University of Auckland 2018) is a researcher and educator in visual art practice and urban theory. She has taught art history at The University of Auckland and was awarded the Kate Edger Charitable Trust Postdoctoral Research Award in 2018. With Cameron Cartiere (Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and Leon Tan (Unitec), Masemann co-authored 'Mapping art in the public realm 2008-2018' in The Routledge companion to art in the public realm (2021).

Blurb

Elisha Masemann (PhD, The University of Auckland 2018) is a researcher and educator in visual art practice and urban theory. She has taught art history at The University of Auckland and was awarded the Kate Edger Charitable Trust Postdoctoral Research Award in 2018. With Cameron Cartiere (Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and Leon Tan (Unitec), Masemann co-authored 'Mapping art in the public realm 2008-2018' in The Routledge companion to art in the public realm (2021). 

Art in the City, the City in Art examines an interplay between emerging forms of urbanity and the strategies of post-war movements and contemporary practices that developed alternative modes of visual and public engagement in urban spaces. The book analyses a tension between discourses on the modernisation of cities that stressed rational and functional order and the role of art that provides contrast to the rigidity of rational systems and an imaginative deviation from the structures of urban life. Moving between theory and praxis, the book explores the methods artists have used to scrutinise the city as a physical and mental construct through which lives and possibilities are shaped or defined. A three-part framework: hardware, software and networks is developed to demonstrate how artists have grappled with the conditions of an urban system. The practices of the Situationists, Fluxus and happenings from the mid-twentieth century are discussed, with performance and conceptual practices from the late-twentieth century and street art, urban interventions and participatory practices in the early twenty-first century. Artistic strategies of shock, performative embodiment, culture jamming, hacktivism and participation are situated as disturbances and switches that throw the urban system into sharp relief. Art provides a momentary catharsis that risks escape from the hyper-valorisation of rational order. The book queries how spontaneous and playful interludes in the city create spaces through which new expressions emerge, implicitly or explicitly, beyond the urban system.

 

Art in the City, the City in Art offers a new approach to interdisciplinary studies of art and urbanity. A strong focus of this book delineates how the city—as a concept, system and structure—is made visible through artistic practice and in turn challenged or interrogated. Students, researchers and professionals with interests in the interplay of art and modern city planning will discover a new perspective on how urban conditions and issues have been addressed through artistic practice. The book is designed to intersect with an evolving discourse in the urban humanities field through its exposition of the city’s default construct that is interrupted and reimagined through visual art practices.