Mute Magazine Issue 29, February 2005
SPECIAL SECTION: (UN)REGENERATE ART
“Seeking to interrogate, critique or complicate the familiar rituals of public and community art, artists play the roles of urban ethnographers, activists, social historians and even social workers. Social engagement and psychogeographic immersion in the minutiae of the local grows so deep, so richly detailed, that some lose sight of the bigger processes in which artistic interventions take place. As social housing is sold off, services cut down, rents raised and actually existing communities displaced, art can seem like the worst kind of beautiļ¬cation, the smoke screen for acts of not so creative destruction…
Whether or not artists explicitly confront all this in their work, art is now clearly an essential component in the rebranding and social reengineering of cities, right up to the economic stimulus provided by international mega-musems like Guggenheim Bilbao or Tate Modern. Fostering ‘cultural tourism’, which might once have sounded like an insult, is now a regeneration priority. Dwarfed by the imperative of economic ‘rebirth’, art and artists subsist in the interstices of real estate speculation and redevelopment. Can art produced out of such an unholy conjunction critically engage with it?”
Articles include:
The Shape of Locative Media > Simon Pope sets some new co-ordinates, and salvages some old ones, for locative art
Mysteries of the Creative Class > Gregory Sholette on artist’s collective REPOhistory and urban renewal in New York
Explaining Urbanism to Wild Animals > Mark Crinson on artists working with collective memory and the post-industrial city