The Psychogeographies of Site-Specific Art
Shana MacDonald2018
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Contemporary efforts at urban revitalization have encouraged an increased production of site-specific public art events that temporarily inhabit popular city hubs. These "pop up" interventions range from loosely assembled happenings to the more institutionally supported all-night art festivals like Nuit Blanche. This paper examines the types of geospatial memory produced and inscribed through small-scale, participatory, site-specific urban art events. It considers how this work participates in forms of placemaking which both enact provisional and iterative forms of assembly while also marking the psychogeographic remains of space. Taking up examples from SensoriuM lab (Montreal) and Mobile Art Studio (Kitchener), the paper suggests how public art may be used to elicit performance-based and participatory geospatial media that maps residents' embodied and historied relationship to urban space.
Related papers
Psychogeographies of Site-Specific Art
Media Theory Journal, 2018
Contemporary efforts at urban revitalization have encouraged an increased production of site-specific public art events that temporarily inhabit popular city hubs. These "pop up" interventions range from loosely assembled happenings to the more institutionally supported all-night art festivals like Nuit Blanche. This paper examines the types of geospatial memory produced and inscribed through smallscale, participatory, site-specific urban art events. It considers how this work participates in forms of placemaking which both enact provisional and iterative forms of assembly while also marking the psychogeographic remains of space.
Placemaking as performative art
This paper will present grassroots urban creative placemaking as a co-produced and performative artform. It will conceptualise this activity as the logical extension of urban arts practice, from public/new genre public art (Lacy 2008) and participatory arts to a ‘new situationism’ (Doherty 2004). This is a polylogic performative artform with space/place the non-human actant (Whybrow 2011, Kwon 2004) to the human ones of creative process and urban creatives. It will position participatory art as lacking a meaningful collaborative ethos and practice, and a co-produced one as a new paradigm of art practice of social relatedness (Gablik 1991, Miles 1997) and place this practice within a placemaking taxonomy (Legge 2013 and authors working paper). The paper will problematize the notion of urban arts practice and the formal arts sector as a critical spatial practice (Rendell 2006, Petrescu 2006) and will extend geographers critical thinking on the co-production of art as constructive of new spatial configurations and emergent relations between users and space, impacting public life (Meejin Yoon 2009), whereby locating it in the socio-political of urban life, this practice has to be understood as an art form that dematerialises the art object and is concerned with creative and social processes and outcomes. It will present research findings of fieldwork case studies that work in the public realm and aside from the formal galleries/museums sector, in a community co-produced context. Specifically, Art Tunnel Smithfield, Dublin; W Rockland Street, Philadelphia; and in the UK, Homebaked, and Greyworld.
Device to Root Out Place: An Ethnography of Public Art in East Calgary
In 2008, a large-scale outdoor sculpture created by world-renowned artist, Dennis Oppenheim, was installed on a proposed site for a billion dollar mixed-use real estate redevelopment project in Calgary’s historic Ramsay neighbourhood. Oppenheim’s sculpture, Device to Root out Evil is one of many public artworks recently installed in East Calgary and serves as a prime example of how public art is being integrated into urban development and private real estate projects. This research project explores how cultural artifacts, such as public art, are being used as placemaking tools. This localized case study connects artistic practice to economic emplacement and displacement, cultural consumption and production, and urban change. It is a mixed-methods ethnography that moves beyond visual analysis of public art to incorporate sensory experiences of being in a place, thereby revealing how attending to the senses can contribute to the placemaking process.
The City as Place: Remapping Urban Space through Artistic Research
Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, 2018
The City (as) Place: Performative Re-mappings of Urban Space Through Artistic Research" This essay examines the potential value of artistic research within the urban environment by outlining three public-art projects I have worked on over the last decade. These projects include two collaborative public art installations Collect My Junk (2005) and Dear Ruth (2009), and my current artistic research project Mobile Art Studio (2014-). The three projects share a commitment to performatively re-mapping urban space via site-specific, intermedial installations. The work investigates the inter-animating layers of history, culture and matter that make up the spaces we live in. Each project employs phenomenological and performative inquiries into the relations between spaces and the objects and architectural structures contained within them. Drawing on methods of dwelling, collecting and remediation, each project aims to address the complex, varied and at times invisible histories of our city landscapes. The public art component of the projects foster discussions with the audience around how our lived experience of spaces inflect our sense of self, our migrations and mobilities, our encounters with development and gentrification, and our civic responsibilities to one another and to the environment. I trace a course across these three works, showing my purposeful move from implicit research questions in the earlier works toward an explicit practice-based research agenda in the current project. This trajectory reveals both the potential and limitations of various methods I have explored. It also speaks to where my work fits within the terminology currently used to discuss work at the intersection of creative and scholarly research practices. Under the broad continuum of artistic research, I situate my work as practiceas-research, or as it is termed within Canadian social science and humanities discourse, 2 research-creation. I am an interdisciplinary artist-scholar working between communication studies, performance studies, film and media studies and visual culture.
Performing place, recalling space: a site-specific installation/ constellation in London
Body, Space & Technology
Cultural geographer Doreen Massey (2005) and critical thinker Walter Benjamin (1940) both use the image of the constellation in their writings to describe place and history respectively. By drawing on their theories and bringing into play the concept of the constellation as a useful and multifaceted metaphor, this paper will suggest one way of negotiating the politics of place to document a site's history without fixing or limiting it. My discussion will culminate in the account of a single case-study, a site-specific installation that I created in April 2008 at the Camden People's Theatre in London in collaboration with fine artist Elinor Brass. In the following paper I will introduce a practice of making place-specific work that I have developed which involves engaging with a site's history while trying not to restrict or reduce it. My methodology begins with, and takes seriously, the idea that 'places remember events' (words that James Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses in 1919). I argue that to view a building as an entity that can remember, to approach site as embodied, can lead to creative and ethical forms of engagement and documentation. In my work, I thoroughly research particular buildings and their surrounding areas before using installed objects, sound and/or place-writing to reanimate the sites, or re-perform them, often in-situ if I can. It is a practice that has developed alongside investigations into the writings of cultural geographer Doreen Massey and critical thinker Walter Benjamin in particular, who both use the image of the constellation in their writings to describe and unfix the notions of place and history respectively. The paper will culminate, by way of illustration, in the account of an installation I created (Hampstead Road, 2008) where these ideas were clearly made manifest. I will begin my discussion here, as I begin many of my projects, with the notion that places remember. This anthropomorphising of place is not a new idea. Ecologists, for example, often refer to the earth as a single living organism. i Also, travel writers have been representing places as if they were people with their own distinctive characteristics for many years. (See, for example, sociologist John Eade's 2001 Placing London: From Imperial Capital to Global City). While this approach is a compelling one, however, it is not without its risks. Likening a place to a human being can lead to the consolidation of
Contradictions in Participatory Public Art: Placemaking as an Instrument of Urban Cultural Policy
The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 2018
This article addresses the current focus within urban cultural policy on using art as a tool in urban development. Based on theories of participation, democracy, and public art, the article sets out to investigate critically the concept of placemaking. The discussion is based on an analysis of the public art project Placemaking, which took place during 2015 in eight municipalities around Copenhagen in Denmark. I argue that, when used as a tool in urban development, participatory public art engenders contradictory encounters. These encounters challenge the cultural political effort to democratize art and culture.
Urban space and the politics of socially engaged art
Progress in Human Geography, 2018
This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.
Pop-up ethnography at the Situated Cinema: Confronting art with social science at the Winnipeg Festival of Moving Image
Temporary public art interventions are a relatively common sight in western cities, but whatever claims public artists may make about the social significance of their artworks, these are rarely documented or analyzed in any systematic social-scientific way. This paper presents our analysis of one artistic intervention, the Situated Cinema, a custom-made demountable structure (http://vimeo.com/52432509) that moved to a different public space each day for the four days of WNDX, Winnipeg’s Festival of Moving Image, showing a loop of five two-minute films in the genre of city symphonies. Through the semi-serendipitous interview and observation methods of what we call ‘pop-up ethnography’, we critically examine the contrasts in perspectives of each group of social actors involved in the project: filmmakers, designers, members of the public and us, the urban anthropologists. We discuss 1) the tension between the social and aesthetic properties of the sites where the Situated Cinema was installed; 2) ‘artistically literate’ versus ‘layperson’ viewers’ experiences of the Cinema; 3) the inspiration and constraints that filmmakers found in the Cinema’s structure, and 4) the ways in which artists’ and social scientists’ goals, methods and expectations vis-à-vis urban public art can diverge, which call into question the compatibility of the two fields.
Related papers
Performative Tactics and the choreographic reinvention of public space
Recently a multitude of artists' endeavours to creatively engage with the public space have become more aligned with the temporal than the spatial. This shift away from traditional notions of public space has allowed for an increasingly elusive, radically dispersed number of events and intervals to occur. Projects incorporating sitespecificity have also shown a greater preoccupation with so-called non-spaces and non-sites. Many such artworks can be characterized by their movement from the grandiose to the more intimate in scale. Practices rooted in institutional critique now foreground playfulness rather than pontificate, although nonetheless maintaining a concertedly premeditated approach incorporating multiple angles, vantage points, and media. Much recent art has been involved with a choreographic turn as artists stage, configure, and orchestrate their creative actions. This article discusses a variety of these projects including artworks by Mark Boulos, Harrell Fletcher, Sharon Hayes, Toby Huddlestone, Tino Sehgal, Jane Tsong, and The Yes Men.
5 The politics of creative performance in public space Towards a critical geography of Toronto case studies
Introduction on a sunny September weekend, parks in downtown Toronto's Queen West and Parkdale neighbourhoods became rowdy spaces for people in their mid 20s and early 30s to play tag, capture the flag and red rover. The Time out/Game on intervention invited 'participants and viewers to celebrate the spirit of the playground in and outside the park, while challenging our notion of playful space and submission to the rules of the game' (Balzer, 2007). Curated by Toronto artists and playwrights, these games were part of a broad range of interventions in the Play/Grounds participatory performance series that were part of the Queen West Art Crawl, a neighbourhood arts festival in Toronto's downtown Queen West neighbourhood. Some other performance interventions in this series included interactive, site-specific plays in the nearby boutique hotel and Toronto artist Jon Sasaki's installation in the local Salvation Army store, where the windows were taped shut and the space was filled with black light. The space was 'black enough for bewilderment, but just enough for your eyes to adjust so you could find your crocheted toaster covers' (Operation Centaur Rodeo, 2007) and the shoppers were given individual flashlights to shop that day. Funded by the local Parkdale Liberty Economic Development Corporation (PLEDC), the Parkdale Business Improvement Areas and Artscape, a non-profit organization that promotes affordable housing for artists as well as 'culture-led regeneration … stewarding creative communities, and playing a catalytic role in the revitalization of some of Toronto's most creative communities' (Artscape, 2008), the events animated the streets and brought people together in interactive performances that revealed complex layers, histories and narratives about the two neighbourhoods.
Urban fictions: a critical reflection on locative art and performative geographies
Digital Creativity, 2011
This article critically examines the mapmaking practices of locative art and explores its potential to produce alternative maps that respond to the spatial and social multiplicity of our urban fabric. Starting from a critique of traditional cartographic practice and how locative art shares its Cartesian anchorage and technological lenses, we investigate the conceptual challenges, methodological issues and technological constraints related to entangling geographic locations and social dynamics. We introduce our locative artworks Urban Fiction (2007) and Urban Fiction 2.0 (2011) that engage participants in corporeal negotiations of urban spaces to generate dynamic, fictional maps. Reflecting on these works allows us to examine the potential of locative media against a backdrop of technological advances and co-evolving social practices. Situated within post-colonial and feminist perspectives, we develop the notion of a ‘performative geography’ based on a generative mapping approach that understands maps as a dynamic process, rather than a fixed representation.
Who creates the narrative? The case of RE/F/r:ACE, a participatory media artwork in city space
2017
This paper discusses the roles of artist, author, participant and spectator within the context of participatory media art events, with reference to RE/F/r.ACE, a participatory video project developed by Andy Best-Dunkley, Merja Puustinen and Victor Khachtchanski. RE/F/r.ACE enables participants to easily contribute their own images as raw material to the ongoing flow of visual and audio narrative projected into the public city environment. Situating the project within an art historical context, the paper discusses the social and political coding of the architectonic urban environment, and the rules and norms relating to, and controlling, our everyday use of public space. When the notion of free “open to all” public space is under threat from ongoing commercialisation and gentrification of urban centres worldwide, RE/F/r.ACE is an example of one attempt to draw attention to this transformation in a creative, positive, and artistic manner.
SPACE AND PLACE IN URBAN CULTURE
When we think of art as an integral part of the construction and transformation of urban culture, we find the public space as the main stage of this event. The public space, as José Pedro Regatão defends, is "a territory of political character that reflects the structure of the society in which it operates." (Regatão, 2007). This way, we may think the crisis of social structure as being the responsible for the identity crisis of public spaces, which may lead them to what is called "non-places”. These correspond to a functional logic that creates a contractual level of social relations, in contrast to the concept of place, which brings together space, culture and memory. Places are reservoirs of memory. They cover a dual visible and invisible landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn is a landscape architect that defends the place as private, "a tapestry of woven contexts: global, disclosed and lasting and ephemeral, local and reveal, now and then, past and future..." (Spirn, 1998). Addressing concepts such as space, public space, place, home and urban art, we intend to understand how art is responsible for social transformation in communities and what’s their place within them. Placing art in city public spaces will enable a dialogue between the collective and the individual, often prompting personal memories to enable the appropriation of space/place city.
The Invisible City: Collaborative Artistic Practices in Historic Public Spaces
The international journal of the arts in society, 2011
This contribution aims to share and discuss different forms of intervention in public spaces relating art to the transformation of contemporary cities. The analysis of several emergent forms of creation allows discovering, through the artistic field, variousways of expression and socio-economical dynamicsshaping andmodifying the contemporary urban landscape.The paperintroduces a study related to the creative spatial practiceswhich detonate processes of empowerment of communities by means ofrecovering thememory and the dominance ofthe place.Through the case ofthe International Urban Art Exhibition, an ephemeral and open air festival based on the outskirts of Barcelona this paper shows different practices of re-appropriation that encourage creative participation of several social agents by collaborative and site-specific projects in some public spaces (publicwashing places) with different communities.
Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking
This chapter will introduce the role temporary spatial objects/architectures can play in claiming space in parts of neighbourhoods for both civic use and social empowerment harnessed towards placemaking. This chapter will argue if temporary spatial objects/architectures can harness citizen-led placemaking and how it might become a tactic to resist privatised enclosures in urban areas. This chapter will use two historical contexts of temporary spatial objects/ architectures embedded in fields of architecture, site specific performance and art; the Soviet Agitational Propaganda Vehicles (Agitprop trains) of the 1920s and the Fun Palace by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price of 1960s. Two selected London case studies of temporary spatial objects/architectures by public works collective will offer the contemporary position of such structures within the neoliberal neighbourhood of London. This chapter argues for temporary spatial objects/architectures to act as what Flood and Grindon (2017) call 'disobedient objects' in placemaking projects that battle against waves of city-development, supported by capital interests moving at a high speed.To this end this chapter explores how temporary object/architecture in its disobedience creates agency within a locality encouraging chance encounters and organic formation of communities.
Reconfiguring Place: Art and the Global Imaginary (2014)
The SAGE Handbook of Globalization Edited by M. Steger, P. Battersby, J. Siracusa, Sage Publications, London. , 2014
Making a Scene: Place-Making Imagination, Artistic Production, and Narratives in Urban Space
Invent-L Conference ���Imagining place���, Gainesville, Florida, February, 2007
My thoughts start from a deliberate misreading of the conference title.���Imaging Place��� slides easily, perhaps too easily, into ���Imagining Place���, by adding just two letters,���in���, and hypostatizes into ���Place-Making Imagination���. Imag (in) ing place���inserted as a minor note, hardly anything. Imagination produces images, we might think, and so the misreading is slight at best, and well within the spirit of the conference. But we should not slide too easily here. This small addition, this interruption into imaging, may suggest more than appears ...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.