E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 192 Seiten
Reihe: Hatje Cantz Text
Zolghadr / Hain / Arsanios REALTY
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7757-5345-6
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification
E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 192 Seiten
Reihe: Hatje Cantz Text
ISBN: 978-3-7757-5345-6
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
How to transcend land grab economies, even by means of art? The reader REALTY moves from the safety of critique to the vulgarity of suggestions. The pandemic’s effect on mobility presents a historic opportunity. Rarely has criticism of our extractive artworld logic of one-place-after-another been louder. REALTY is a long-term curatorial program by Tirdad Zolghadr (*1973), initially commissioned by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. With the help of numerous artists and experts who contributed over 2017–2020, this reader revisits how contemporary art can contribute to decisive conversations on urbanism.
TIRDAD ZOLGHADR (*1973) is a curator and writer. He is currently artistic director of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee. Curatorial work over the last two decades includes biennial settings as well as long-term, research-driven efforts, most recently as associate curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, 2016-20.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Gemälde
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Ausstellungskataloge, Museumsführer
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Soziale Fragen & Probleme
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Installations-, Aktions-, Computer- und Videokunst
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Ethische Themen & Debatten
- Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien
Weitere Infos & Material
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface - Tirdad Zolghadr
Provisional Global Snapshots - Tirdad Zolghadr
Capitalizing Antigentrification - Suhail Malik
Financializing the Development of Urban Neighborhoods:1 Thoughts on the Relationship between Art and Gentrification - Laura Calbet Elias
The Community Land Trust: A Model for Berlin’s New Stadtbodenstiftung - Sabine Horlitz
The Land: From Pastoral Idyll to Sacrifice Zone - Marco Clausen
A Landscape Study - Katya Sander
Pigeon Towers and Donkey Paths - Marion von Osten
Was ist das Land? - Marion von Osten
What Is Land? - Marion von Osten
To “Conquer a Province Peacefully”? How the Seizure of Land on the Rivers Oder, Netze, and Warthe Drove a Government to the Brink of Ruin - Simone Hain
Rural Urbanization: Commodification of Land in Post-Oslo Palestine - Khaldun Bshara
Who’s Afraid of Ideology? - Marwa Arsanios
Land Reform: Utopia and Infrastructure: Historical Planning and Current Developments in Rural Brandenburg - Maria Hetzer
The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism - Bahar Noorizadeh
Redistributing Risk: Tuleva as a Case Study - Kristel Raesaar
A Speculative White Paper on the Aesthetics of a Black Swan World - Penny Rafferty
terra0: An Introduction - By Paul Seidler
Speculative and Practical Responses to Problems Bemoaned in the Provisional Global Snapshots - Tirdad Zolghadr
Biographies
CA 101
A quick comparison of archetypes is sometimes helpful. When Leonardo da Vinci settled in Renaissance Venice, he worked as a military engineer, designing canal systems with a lock mechanism that is still in use today. Centuries later, deep in the asphyxiating mass of the industrial city, the historical avant-gardes were less hands-on than Da Vinci but all the more confident in theory and vision. They reimagined their towns with an arrogant hubris that Benjamin later described as a “destructive character,” one that would have appeared equally preposterous to Da Vinci as to ourselves. Though the cabin fever pathos did simmer down a bit, the hubris remained until the 1970s. Creative visitors to faraway locations were both preposterous and hands-on enough to try their hand at agriculture, infrastructure development, sniper training, literacy campaigns, and propaganda. Take those late-modern icons—the Situationist flaneurs with their dérives and New Babylons, or the 1970s cool cats lounging in the cast iron lofts of a deindustrialized lower Manhattan. Even they are far removed from contemporary art’s take on its urban environs.
Something shifted over the last decades of the twentieth century. In its self-image, the bohemian virtue of art may live on, but in real life, contemporary art (CA) went from being an upshot of wealth to a source of wealth in its own right. Today, CA is a capillary network of formal and self-run venues which together embody a highly specialized skill set, a fiercely competitive job market, a distinct “moral economy” of indeterminacy,1 and an asset in the ongoing race between competing metropolitan “engines of growth.”2
In terms of its politics, CA embodies a strong sense of “ontological liberalism” (I owe this term to Victoria Ivanova)—a liturgy of individual aspiration on all levels; cultural, sexual, intellectual, economic. In terms of habitus, CA no longer occupies a niche where the critical intelligentsia consort with wealthy patrons, but is comprised, rather, of a sprawling cosmopolitan constituency mirroring the deterritorialization of art production itself. Despite these commonalities, and others besides, what is all-important to the field is its insistence that CA is not a field at all so much as a fluid assemblage of incommensurate communities of thought and action, beyond ideology or categorization.
Unnoticed values do tend to be the more tenacious ones. Wishful thinking aside, what are the really existing effects of our artscape within the cycles described in these pages? The metaphors are many. Artists are variously described as pioneers, parasites, a type of magical ointment, stalking horses, foot soldiers, shock troops, kamikaze pilots of urban renewal, revelers enjoying a last hurrah on the deck of the Titanic. Luckily, not all the terms for artists are quite as melodramatic. “Gentrification and the Artistic Dividend,” a 2014 study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (issue no. 80), describes the impact of the fine arts as “benign” in comparison to film and advertising. As argued by Marco Clausen, to overstate the impact of CA would indeed “culturalize” what is mainly the doing of policymakers and international finance.
Concrete examples of the effective role of CA within a specific redevelopment cycle are discussed extensively in this reader, but CA has a problem not related to net effect. Like the housing market, it is conceptually, psychologically, and economically premised on private ownership, as Andrea Phillips has noted. The race for individual achievement and reputational value is hard-wired into CA’s DNA, and its selection processes are administered by a steep hierarchy of gifted individuals. The conditions of production within this skewed meritocracy amount to a “permanence of ongoing necessity.” Thus the very idea of “social housing as a long-term commitment to equal access to democratically decided amenities,” says Phillips, runs counter to “the psychic, cultural, and, in the end, economically organized needs of artists.”3
Surely enough, as a field, we have learned to extract what is of interest—a topic, a story, a resource—and head for the next opportunity. Fly in, fly out (FIFO). As others have pointed out before me, once a “project” is completed, the expert moves on, whether they be artists, scholars, or investors. Which is why people mistrust the expert, and look to right-wing rootsiness instead.4 Time will tell whether the pandemic can introduce a lasting sense of restraint, but prior to COVID-19, this rampant extractivism allowed for a worldwide expansion of the art field at breathtaking speed—in the name of no other agenda than an expansion of the self-evident value CA putatively possesses.
The upshot of CA’s regimented wanderlust is a poverty of aspiration. It’s hard to go beyond gestures when you always have one eye on the exit. After so many blueprint opacities, is it possible to appreciate a clear-cut meat-and-potatoes position? Hardly. To invest in more grounded parameters is to risk being rooted, thus commensurable, thus predictable. Who in our field would ever want to risk cliché.
By way of example, let’s take a hypothetical biennial commission. The artist, working from afar, might request, say, a primary school—preferably in a demographically mixed neighborhood—to serve as both film set and exhibition site. Depending on the school, international attention can do more harm than good, so this type of thing would ideally be a careful, time-consuming affair. But regrettably, time is short. Incidentally, the biennial’s outreach team may have built a relationship over time with a nearby school. But its advice may not count for much. A principle aim of biennials, after all, is realizing the exchange value of found material. Rather than community welfare, what counts is the school’s architecture, iconography, history, ambiance—its ability to fuel the work’s spatial resonance and political narrative, whether “Marxist,” “decolonialist,” or otherwise.
Take, for instance, curator Kate Brehme’s doctoral research, which traces the increasing level of abstraction that marks the Berlin Biennale’s (BB) relationship to the city.5 At an early point in BB history, she says, off-site spaces were merely exciting “platforms.” Over time, they became “laboratories” for exhibition formats that aestheticized the spaces that hosted them. By 2014, the Berlin Biennale’s spectacle of transformation was cogent enough to redefine the very meaning and temporality of the locations it occupied, and to crown them sites of contemporaneity in and of themselves: opaque, ambivalent, indeterminate.
It’s a given to the vast majority of my colleagues that we should stick to this kind of art, regardless of the consequences. Why exactly should this particular pursuit of happiness be so self-evident? The success rate within CA is hardly enough to explain our sense of conviction. Career benefits are meager at best, especially in Berlin—the only capital city in the EU poorer than the national average.
At Berlin dinner parties or panel discussions where artists deplore that they are made to compete for scant resources with schoolchildren and refugees, I shut my mouth. I prefer not to mess with angry Berliners. But I do wonder where the sense of entitlement comes from. In German parlance, you will find a clue in the untiring reference to Zweckfreiheit der Kunst, art’s freedom from purpose. The continuance of the Euro-humanist tradition valorizes culture beyond use and function, even as we make our claims for decolonization, even as we scoff at Kant & Co. In practice, we uphold this tradition worldwide, almost without reserve. It frees us from the need to explain ourselves—beyond occasional lip service to the occasional populist, whom we privately consider a bigot. As more and more policy-makers ditch the autonomy of art in favor of service to urban development and other things, we need more than arrière-garde positions to see us through.
And CA does have more to offer. Thanks to the persistence of critique as our default attitude of choice, our recent inclusion within the corridors of power remains difficult to accept (whether in the context of international diplomacy, educational policy, city development, or otherwise). But CA is now in a better position than it likes to acknowledge. To this day, CA’s empowerment remains largely under-theorized. Throughout the recent creative city debates, I was surprised to find common ground between artists and architects. Despite the latter’s machismo, both professions like to identify both with the heroic trickster prototype, on the one hand, and the melancholic slave to capital, on the other.6 Neither of which imply a sense of accountability, let alone change. Fortunately, there are architects, artists, curators, and venues out there that do insist on the difference between what is suave and what is important: practices where the culture of systematic (self-)critique is demystified and carefully put in its place: once critique becomes a catalyst, it can be a ground that proposals can proceed from. (Proceed from—not dwell within.) As this...
