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The Mashup Reigns on Facebook

Mashup Image from Facebook

Mashup Image from Facebook (*Note the black bars through the eyes were my own addition)

“Mashups combine views, data, and logic from existing Web sites or applications to create novel applications that focus on situational and ephemeral problems” .  This statement from Maximilien, Ranabahu & Gomadam (2008: 32) in IEEE Internet Computing refers to an open and programmable Web 2.0 where programmers, designers and architects work in relation to one another to develop fluid data-mediation, process mediation and user interface customization solutions.

But there is another world of audio, video and even these visual mashups which proliferate on Facebook:  collages which rework representations and expected meanings.  With ‘Wilderness Downtown‘, the band Arcade Fire shows what can be done in an interactive digital mapping mashup -  This notion of the mashup draws on 1960s US countercultural interventions of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to rework politics and gain attention in the context of 60s mass media.  Mashups were part of a tactic of political and media pranksterism.

Youth engaged in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are acutely aware of visible signs of age and grade of their peers. I entered as traveler in a foreign land, the land of high school youth aged 14 to 18.  As part of a project on community building and neo-liberal economics in the Global North, I worked with high school students on a photography project picturing place, home and community in Fort McMurray Alberta Canada: ‘Where is Fort McMurray‘.  Organizing the project and communicating through Facebook, the usual stuff came up: pictures of their cats, their friends and their family trips to typical vacation spots from this northern oil city. Then I came across the mashup above – a kind of calling card image – and stopped in my tracks.  How did they make it? Where did it come from? Shock and awe to say the least.

(Continued)

Elevated Park: The Highline NYC

Highline NYC (Thanks to Highline.org)

The High Line was originally constructed in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. Section 1 of the High Line is open as a public park, owned by the City of New York and operated under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Friends of the High Line is the conservancy charged with raising private funds for the park and overseeing its maintenance and operations, pursuant to an agreement with the Parks Department.

When all sections are complete, the High Line will be a mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. It features an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, combining meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. Fixed and movable seating, lighting, and special features are also included in the park.

Access points from street level will be located every two to three blocks. Many of these access points will include elevators, and all will include stairs.

View the High Line Design.

Highline NYC (Thanks to Highline.org)

Book Review: Modernism and the Marketplace

Alissa G. Karl. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. 2009. New York: Routledge. 183 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-98141-5

Reviewed by Paul Crosthwaite, English Literature Research Group, Cardiff University (UK)

This outstanding study explores the engagement of Anglo-American women writers of the modernist period with a global capitalist system increasingly orientated towards the consumption of desirable commodities. Situating the authors she analyzes against a meticulously sketched backdrop of early twentieth-century socio-economic history in Britain and the United States, Alissa Karl shows how long-prevailing theorizations of modernist culture as high-mindedly antagonistic towards the vulgar machinations of the marketplace (such as those associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School) misrepresent the ambiguous blend of attraction and repulsion that characterizes many modernist encounters with the seductions of consumer capitalism.

marshalfieldwindows

Window shopping at Marshall Fields, Chicago, 1910

One of the chief strengths of Karl’s book is its insistence on approaching commodity consumption not as an autonomous activity contained by the four walls of the grocer’s shop or department store, but as an economic phenomenon inextricably woven into the global capitalist network and determined by an array of power structures. In the introduction, Karl describes how her thinking on these issues evolved over the course of her research:

When I began this project, I set out to examine the conceptualization, function, and impact of consumer capitalism in women-authored modernist texts …. I soon discovered that it was not possible to discuss adequately the ideologies and operations of consumerism without considering the ways that consumerism and modernism alike interfaced with procedures of capitalist economies more broadly, with the classed hierarchies that organize capitalist cultures, with shifting but still active nation- and empire-building, and with racial and ethnic dynamics of societies in demographic flux.” (4)

The four chapters that follow make good on the ambitious terms of the project’s remit. The first chapter considers how the fiction of Jean Rhys registers the ways in which “consumerism links the evolving strategies of actual colonization (economic, military, political) with those of the metaphorical (but no less material or real) colonization of women’s bodies through commodification, fetishization, and visual appropriation” (17). Karl shows how Rhys’ heroines – émigrés to London or Paris from colonized territories or other exotic locales – attempt to utilize consumption and display in order to fashion what they imagine to be metropolitan identities; the effect, however, is to turn themselves into commodities to be possessed and exchanged by domineering, paternalistic men. The book then turns to Virginia Woolf, to examine the co-construction of consumerism and imperialism in The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Here, Karl argues that Woolf sees the practices of British imperial domination as not merely confined to the upper social echelons – in the exercise of state and corporate power – but as continually replicated and intensified ‘on the ground’ in the everyday consumption of goods that bear the imprint of distant exploitation. Woolf’s response, however, is a complex – and symptomatic – combination of complicity and critique.

Chapter 3 analyses two prominent memoirs of modernist literary culture: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (1956). Karl skilfully articulates the ways in which Stein, the avant-garde poet, and Beach, the pioneering bookseller and publisher who first brought James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into print, did not simply reject the consumer marketplace, but rather challenged a standardized mass culture from within the market itself, positioning their wares as radical, daring commodities for a discerning, niche audience. The final chapter focuses on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, the loosely autobiographical tale of an American woman of white European and black West Indian parentage. Karl argues compellingly that Larsen’s protagonist, Helga, uses consumerism as a strategy through which “to negotiate the discrepancies of racial identification and class positioning in order to forge a unique position for herself” (120). Commodities and consumerism “appear to offer the latitude of choice against the economic formations of race” (120), but, proving in fact to be inseparable from rigidly hierarchical social structures, they turn out to merely embed Helga’s predetermined place on the social scale.

Drawing on the detailed readings of modernist texts offered in her four chapters, Karl’s concluding Coda makes persuasive and intriguing connections to contemporary culture, indicating how many of today’s anxieties and debates about consumption, commodification, branding, and corporate power were rehearsed during the modernist period, and asserting a strong case for the relevance of modernist texts in understanding the intoxicating and troubling consumer landscape of the twenty-first century.

As Karl notes in her introduction, there has been a recent turn in modernist studies towards “geography and transnationalism,” a turn which troubles “the national and temporal parameters of modernism” (3). Modernism and the Marketplace, with its deftly rendered panorama of globalized economic relations and spatially expansive modernist texts, makes a brilliant contribution to this vibrant field of study. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel write influentially of modernism’s “geocultural consciousness” (qtd. in Karl 4); Karl’s book provides one of the best analyses yet of this mode of writing, thought, and experience.

Works Cited
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Eds.) 2005. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Book Review: A Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea

Marta Traquino, A Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea [The Construction of Place in Contemporary Art]. 2010. Ribeirão, Portugal: Húmus Editions. 172 pp. ISBN: 9789898139320

Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

Fluxus_Marching-Piece_1977

“Marching Piece” performance by George Maciunas. Flux Snow Event, New Marlborough (Massachusetts), 1977.

Contemporary artworks have addressed space in a variety of ways, often subtly and thought-provokingly, yet these important interconnections between art and spatial conceptions have not always been adequately recognised or explored in depth. As both an art critic and an art practitioner, Marta Traquino advances an original reflection on the construction, use and meaning of space in contemporary art. Indeed, Ms Traquino’s book illuminates a series of significant visible and invisible similarities between, on the one hand, a series of geographic and social theoretical conceptions of space and place and, on the other, a series of artworks belonging to the traditions of installation, performance, site-specific artworks and what is commonly, although vaguely, referred to as ‘public art’. In this context, the notion of ‘public’ plays a crucial role. Examining quite a few art exhibitions and events, one notices in them a complex co-presence of a ‘space of the public’, i.e. the space occupied by the audience (which includes how the artwork ‘reaches out’ the audience, and how the latter relates or reacts to the artwork), and a ‘public space’, i.e. the heterogeneous, visible and living space that hosts the art event, in which the artwork locates itself and upon which it seeks to act.

In order to explore the interweaving of art and space, Marta Traquino brings together a scholarly genealogy of spatial theorists and some of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. By doing so, she reveals how a fruitful dialogue between these two streams of thought and practice might be developed. In the first part of the book, she draws on the spatial theories of Henri Lefèbvre, Marc Augé, Anthony Giddens, Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey and John Urry, stressing how the elements of ‘excess’, ‘compression’ and ‘mobility’ transform contemporary spatio-temporal experience. However, these same characteristics also seem to confirm the centrality of experience in the definition of social spaces and places. From this point of view, art and experience form a well-established couple. Yet while theoretically this intimate connection had been already noticed by pragmatists philosophers, it is in art movements such as Fluxus that the integration of the spectator into the process of creation of the artwork itself reaches its logical end-point.

The experiential perspective thus enables us to observe the inherent dynamism in the constitution of social space. A series of artworks from the late 1950s through the 1960s, which include for instance Allan Krapow’s ‘environments’ (1957-58), Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966), Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #2 (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), are discussed in details by the author, who notices that these artists reflexively highlighted how space is performatively produced and discursively represented. Other recent artists who have critically worked on what Lefèbvre used to call ‘spaces of representation’, specifically through large-scale artworks, are also reviewed: these include for instance Lawrence Weiner (Smashed to Pieces, 1991), Krzysztof Wodiczko (The Tijuana Projection, 2001), Susan Hiller (The J-Street Project, 2002-05) and Beat Streuli (with his late 1990s and early 2000s series of huge photographs of ‘strangers’ in public places).

One of Traquino’s central claims in her book is that place corresponds to an inhabited and lived type of space where the body represents the measure of an emplaced subjectivity always imbued with memory. A range of artists have elaborated on such an insight, focusing on either the body at a small scale, like Bruce Nauman in Square Dance (1967-8), or outdoor interventions on a larger scale, like Ian Hamilton Finlay at his Little Sparta garden (1966) and Gordon Matta-Clark with his famous house cuts (Splitting: Four Corners, 1974). According to Traquino, the Fluxus movement in particular has set an ‘open path’ in contemporary art as regards the reflection on the experience of emplacement. Fluxus’ motifs of ‘globalism’, ‘experimentalism’, ‘humour’, ‘simplicity’, ‘specificity’ and ‘presence’ all seem to revolve around a relational and phenomenological take on the artistic event. In particular, Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Ay-O instantiate the search for new types of ‘relations in public’ – to employ Goffman’s category – which question official and institutional definitions. This way, Fluxus art was designed to operate inside ‘social interstices’ which would challenge the common – and, mostly, taken for granted – ordering of space.

Contemporary artists such as the Istanbul-based Oda Projesi collective and the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk inherit many of the Fluxus’ early insights and resolutely proceed along a trajectory Traquino describes as ‘from public space to lived places’. But the institutional context in which contemporary artists operate and the public funding of site-specific artworks, installations and performances also give rise to contentious actions, in some cases even self-defeating ones. In the last sections of the book, Traquino critically reviews a series of cases in which some more or less pronounced ‘detachment between theoretical presuppositions and actual practice’ became visible. The case of Lisbon’s Expo ’98 is extensively discussed. In this as well as other cases, the limits of contemporary public art’s self-legitimation can be ascertained. As the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko acutely put it: ‘To attempt to “enrich” this powerful, dynamic art gallery (the city public domain) with “artistic art” collections or commissions – all in the public’s name – is to decorate the city with a pseudo-creativity irrelevant to urban space and experience alike; it is also to contaminate this space and experience with the most pretentious and patronizing bureaucratic-aesthetic environmental pollution’.

About the author as critic:
História da Arte: Marta Traquino
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea I
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea II – Do espaço ao lugar: Fluxus
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea III – A arte como um estado de encontro

About the author as artist:
Que cor tem agora o céu?
Guest Artist – Marta Traquino
What colour has the sky got now?

Space and Culture Issue 13(3) – August 2010

The new issue of the journal is now out! Abstracts are linked below.