Art in the City, the City in Art

Abstract

This thesis analyses art’s critical entanglements with the city’s order in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The central argument develops around artist responses to dichotomous urban conditions and the diverse strategies artists employ to draw attention to the powerful forces that organise cities. Art presents opportunities for unexpected encounters to emerge through the challenges it poses to a rational or functional order. It does this by unsettling or ‘making strange’ familiar routines and behaviours; demonstrating ways to dwell in the city differently; complicating urban processes and systems; and disrupting coded uses of space through actions that appeal to intuitive connections. The different expressions of art are not always rational or intelligible; rather they can be unpredictable, open-ended or elusive. Yet art can create a social interstice; a gap in everyday relations between consumers, commuters and strangers where possibilities for exchange can surface, other than those prevailing in the rational city concept. A critical appraisal of how art’s methods break with imperatives of rational order, functionality and productivity that materialises as an ‘urban reality,’ underscores this analysis. To analyse a dialectical relationship between art and the city, two principal research questions are posed. First, how is the city concept repositioned and re-problematised through art practices that interrupt its smooth functioning? Second, how might the possibilities afforded by unpredictable encounters with art transform our understanding of the ways we affect and are affected by the city? To understand how art problematises excesses of rational order, an investigation into urban systems and processes is needed. These have been analysed and critiqued by traditions of critical theory that complement or illuminate art’s volatile relationship to the city. The different strands of art discussed in the following pages rally against this order, ruffling the seamless flows of consumer and bureaucratic processes while setting up non-hierarchical micro-communities outside consumer culture. These artists show us how powerful the city is in our lives as a physical and mental construct. ‘Misusing’ the city for art’s purposes places this construct into sharp relief, making it evident and expressing, implicitly or explicitly, alternative ways of being, of resisting and of expressing difference beyond its hierarchical structure. Through a discursivity that situates ‘art in the city, the city in art,’ this thesis proposes how art can transform our understanding of what the city is or can be.