A tribute and a review

On 8–9 May 2010, a deprived chengzhongcun (urban village) in the city of Hefei hosted a session of the Second Hefei Contemporary Art Biennale. In this article, we focus on the artistic practices and the online and offline discussions that they evoked. Drawing upon literature on citizenship, public art, public space and public pedagogy, we analyse the exhibition and its social and political potentialities. Looking at a case study in a country where fear of an aggressive crackdown is part and parcel of the psychology of urban protest, we reflect upon the pedagogical potential of public art in the struggle for equal rights to housing, education and urban space. By paying special attention to the geographical and the pedagogical dimensions of this extraordinary event, we demonstrate that public art can play a role in Chinese citizenship struggles.     

ADMINISTRATIVE DEFINITIONS OF ARTISTS IN THE NORDIC MODEL OF STATE SUPPORT FOR ARTISTS

This article considers the role of public arts policy in producing societal definitions for “art” and “artists”. It examines administrative definitions generated and used by the Nordic system of state support for artists and reflected in its administrative categories and structures of decision‐making. Using the concepts of “artistic field” and “artistic classification system” as starting points, the article focuses on the regulated and institutionalized interaction of the state and artistic fields in decision making, and on the administrative categories emerging from this interaction. Through this interaction, professional and administrative definitions of “art” and “artist” are closely intertwined in the four countries discussed. The administrative categories examined show considerable variation between the countries related to differences in the nature of this interaction. The definition power involved in state support for artists is related to the nature of this interaction, as well as to such factors as the legitimating arguments, objectives and criteria for the support.     

Why are artists getting poorer? About the reproduction of low income among artists

In the period 2006 to 2013, Norway has experienced a substantial increase in public subsidies to culture as well as a substantial increase in real income growth in general. This paper discusses different explanations for why Norwegian artists’ real artistic income has declined between 2006 and 2013, despite the positive economic development in Norway. We have based the study in particular on two comparable studies on the income and work situation of Norwegian artists in 2006 and 2013. We analyse and discuss why the artists’ real artistic income has declined during this period. We do not find a single, general, explanation for this, but the income decline does not primarily seem to be due to either an increasing number of artists or a decline in public scholarships to artists. Our two most striking findings are: (i) A substantial decline in most artists’ artistic working hours and a corresponding increase in artistically related and non-artistic working hours, and (ii) a tendency for artists to derive less of their income from the market, together with an apparent decrease in cultural consumption (spending) among Norwegians. These two factors – especially the latter – seem to be the major factors behind the decline in artistic income.     

Visual artists: counter‐urbanites in the Canadian countryside?

Professional visual artists have always enjoyed considerable latitude in the selection of a place of work and residence. Recent decades have witnessed their growing presence within the Canadian countryside. This paper seeks to provide an interpretation of this phenomenon by exploring two sub-objectives. First is to determine whether artists who establish themselves in rural communities can be considered to be part of the counter‐urbanisation movement, involving the relocation of urban residents down the settlement hierarchy. Second is to identify what types of migration are occurring and why. Our surveys of visual artists residing in the southern Ontario communities of Elora and Parry Sound reveal that most participants are part of a movement involving the decision to take up both residence and employment in a rural locale. We further find that the relocation of visual artists is driven to some extent by a strong attachment to natural landscapes. By way of conclusions, we briefly speculate about the broader population of urban residents. We remind ourselves that artists often have been harbingers of new movements and that today there are growing numbers of workers outside the artistic community who also have increasing latitude in regards to choosing where to live and work. Overall, our findings suggest that there is ongoing blurring of geographic boundaries—between space and place, between place of work and place of residence and, of course, between rural and urban.     

‘We don't do dots ‐ ours is lines’ — Asserting a Barkindji Style

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a ‘Barkindji style’ art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art‐making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the role of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to ‘belong to us’ is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art ‘styles’ and material culture from what is widely referred to as south‐eastern Australia.     

Management skills for artists: ‘learning by doing’?

Although artists must usually be self‐reliant when managing their business, an artist’s education typically concentrates on artistic skills rather than managerial knowledge. This paper analyses the current curricula of 154 art institutions (public and private), focussing on the so‐called DACH countries (Austria, Germany and Switzerland). The results show a deficit in the implementation of economic and, especially, business‐related topics in the education of artists at art universities and institutions. A glimpse at Anglo‐American countries shows that, unlike in Europe, art schools are more open‐minded about implementing economic content into their curricula.     

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

Down by the sea: visual arts,artists and coastal regeneration

This paper takes a critical approach to the arts-led regeneration of Margate, south east England. It argues that regeneration policy has effectively utilised local characteristics to recreate Margate as an artful space, and has stimulated a local milieu of artistic and cultural activity. However, though the work of local artists is vital in producing Margate as a creative place, local artists are marginalised by policy interventions focussed on attracting new consumers and investors. Thus, this paper argues that a misplaced policy emphasis is failing to support the labour and social relations on which the interpretation of places as ‘creative’ is built, and arguably undermines the sustainability of an arts-based regeneration. This has implications for culture-led policy, calling for greater attention to be paid to the specific locations in which it is deployed, and to the networks of producers whose labour is critical to its success.     

Mourning the Un-mournable? Political Theology Between Refugees and Religion

Since the arrival, or the attempted arrival, of millions of refugees in Europe, the performances of the Center for Political Beauty – a Berlin-based collective of artists and activists – have had a huge impact on public and political debates about Germany's migration policies. In this paper, I analyze the performance “The Dead Are Coming” in which the artists buried refugees who drowned in their attempt to enter the European Union. Drawing on Judith Butler's political philosophy of performativity, I assess “The Dead Are Coming” as a “doing” rather than a “describing” of dignity. I argue that the integration of God into the practices of mourning enables both the activists and the audience to resist the differential distribution of dignity in Europe's migration policy. Ultimately, I advocate a re-thinking of political theology in which art learns from theology and theology learns from art in order to promote dignity under de-dignifying conditions.     

Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art—Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick—I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the ‘becoming’ of place.     

Bittersweet ambivalence: Austin’s street artists speak of gentrification

Both gentrification and street art are concerned with the conquest of urban space. Although historically, graffiti and street art have functioned to challenge the status quo, a growing appreciation for urban art unveils a far more collaborative attitude between some street artists and the elite. A familiar esthetic of gentrified terrains involves repurposing spaces that capture the urban experience. In some cities, urban redevelopment preserves original materials that capture that “urban feel” by highlighting exposed brick structures, rustic furnishings, industrial lofts, and urban art. In other cities, these styles are recreated consciously. This paper draws from in-depth interviews with street artists from Austin, Texas, one of the fastest growing urban landscapes in the U.S., to discuss street artists’ attitudes towards gentrification. Its examination of stories and personal narratives about gentrification shows the complexities of rapid urban expansion as perceived by Austin street artists, and concludes that street artists remain ambivalent towards gentrification. While street artists experience some negative effects resulting from gentrification, urban redevelopment also has another clear benefit for them: an expansion of their urban canvas. The growth of city space extends street artists’ creative playground, which advances the artists’ opportunities for paid work and exposure.     

Critical artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands

Something about the apparent romanticism of islands prompts creative reflections such as those comprising visual artworks in the Dis-covery exhibition touring Australia for 2 years from 2011. The exhibition forms the basis for this paper, written by its progenitor and curator—an artist, and its essayist—a cultural geographer. The curatorial premise was that islands and island cultures are at risk from global and multinational forces, as well as from amplified local impacts internal to the limits of their boundaries. In turn, the exhibition's aim was to trouble the layered cultural clichés that represent island conditions especially in terms of the romantic. Participating artists—all of whom have lived on islands—were invited to explore how islands and romanticism are both containers for disparate yet overlapping ideas, among them references to imagination, projected desire, unsatisfied longing, rising tides, exoticism, resource mining, militarism and marginalization. Drawing on conversations with the artists, and on their writings and works, this paper captures insightful reflections about islands, arts and the geopolitical imagination; reveals significant artistic interventions into the geopolitical spaces of islands; and underscores the productive relations that derive from critical and creative engagements between geography and art.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

重返巴洛克承上启下的时代

2011年7月15日～9月15日,由中华世纪坛与意大利文化遗产与活动部共同主办的“重返巴洛克那不勒斯的黄金时代绘画展”将在世纪坛世界艺术馆拉开帷幕,为中国的广大观众与艺术爱好者呈现意大利巴洛克时代的油画杰作。本次展览系那不勒斯卡波迪蒙蒂博物馆藏品展。40件300余年前的艺术精品,将令国内观众大饱眼福,更足以弥补国内艺术展对于17、18世纪西方艺术史作品引介的空白。     

Maps,Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century

While the history of cartography has freed itself from debilitating debates over the scientific and artistic status of maps, considerations of the relationship between art and cartography have continued to focus largely on pre‐modern maps, avoiding critical examination of twentieth‐century art and science in cartography and leaving intact the impression that these followed distinct paths in the modern period. In this paper, however, I have drawn on theoretical work in Science Studies and taken account of modern art's separation from aesthetics to suggest that an examination of art and cartography in the twentieth century should focus on mapping practices rather than on maps as such. A summary overview of modern‐art movements and selected works indicates a continued, if critical, engagement of avant‐garde artists with cartography, and the examination of more popular newspaper artwork produced in the context of the intensely modern visual culture of mid‐twentieth century Los Angeles indicates a similarly close connection between modernity, art and cartography.     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

Cutting the cake: the Congress of Vienna in British,French and German political caricature

Although the Congress of Vienna was not a main topic for political caricature, it was anything but ignored. During the first five months of 1815, while monarchs and diplomats were deliberating on Europe’s future, caricaturists in Great Britain, France and the German-speaking states depicted the Congress as a major or minor subject in 20 satirical prints. Together these caricatures provide a multi-perspectival view of the way contemporaries assessed the diplomatic deliberations taking place in Vienna. To obtain an insight into this important part of contemporary public opinion on the Congress, the corpus of graphic satire was submitted to close scrutiny in two ways. Firstly, a context analysis ascertained the artists who produced them; how the prints were published and brought to public attention; and for what audiences they were intended. Secondly, a content analysis explored the political messages that the caricatures on the Vienna Congress tried to convey and the persuasive techniques that were applied to visualise these points of view. Notwithstanding different national origins and opposite political views, the message is a negative one: the satires denounce the territorial greed of the Great Powers and their disregard for the demands and aspirations of the peoples they seek to incorporate.     

‘It's a public,I reckon’: Publicness and a Suburban Shopping Mall in Sydney's Southwest

Traditionally, public space has been perceived as an integral part of fully functioning liberal democracy. Yet much research argues that public space is in decline due to regimes of neoliberal governance paralleled with a growth in quasi-public spaces such as shopping malls, casinos and gated communities. It is argued that these new spatial forms posit a commercialised, sanitised and ultimately exclusionary urban form in place of more egalitarian, engaging and ultimately democratic public spaces. Increasingly, however, urban research has questioned the veracity of the claims made about the nature of traditional public space as well as investigating the marginal and contingent nature of publicness as constituted by and enacted in a variety of places. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopic space, this paper reports on a qualitative study based on focus group interviews conducted with users of a suburban shopping mall in Sydney's southwest. The research uncovers both a more complex and less overtly deterministic publicness than has previously been identified in such spaces. From these findings the paper argues for a conception of publicity which moves beyond the zero-sum game approach endemic in much work in this area to one which analyses the qualitative effect quasi-public spaces are having on the nature of publicness in the Australian context. The paper concludes by arguing that a rethinking of publicness allows room for the emergence of a more progressive public ethic.     

The question of national identity and the institutionalisation of the visual arts in Grenada

ABSTRACT. This article argues for a close relationship between national identity and the institutionalisation of the visual arts in Grenada. Art, which is intrinsic to all humans, predates its institutionalisation: it is only institutionalised in societies with a strong sense of national identity. In order to explain the role of national identity in the formation of national art, the article begins by examining the period following World War II, when Grenada – still under British colonialism – was undergoing intense social and political changes. To understand these changes, the analysis of the stratification system is paramount. The article delineates three groups on the basis of the value systems developed historically: the elite, the masses and a small, growing middle class situated between these two groups. The works of three prominent Grenadian artists illustrate the argument that institutionalisation of art requires a strong sense of national identity, and through this process the artistic development of a society occurs. Furthermore, understanding this process requires a focus on the ways in which social and political groups or classes impeded the development of a national identity, preventing the institutionalisation of the arts.     

A mosque event: the opening of a purpose-built mosque in Copenhagen

This paper explores the opening of a purpose-built mosque in Copenhagen, treating it as a case of cross-cultural encounters in urban public space. The encounters explored, then, take a specific form; they are mediated through the architecture and materiality of the mosque and the symbolic signs and public imaginations attached to it. And they are connected to a specific event – the opening of the mosque. In the first part, a conceptual framework is presented bringing together literature on three notions: encounters, visibility and the event. Following this, the paper explores the opening event, the public debate that surrounds it, the process leading up to it and some reactions in the months that followed. The paper concludes by showing how the opening event expresses several paradoxes. The controversies over the visibility of Islam in public space push stereotypical imaginations and Islamophobic feelings to the extremes. At the same time, however, they bring together different groups in unprecedented ways and create new constellations over political, religious and cultural boundaries.