Recoveries and Reclamations

Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 2 Recoveries and Reclamations Edited by Judith Rugg Daniel Hinchcliffe Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 2 Recoveries and Reclamations intellect TM BRISTOL, ENGLAND PORTLAND, OR, USA Edited by Judith Rugg and Daniel Hinchcliffe First Published in Hardback 2002 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862,Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK First Published in USA in 2002 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA Copyright ©2002 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdoni Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon – Toucan Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Set in Joanna A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-828-4 / ISBN1-84150-055-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press,Wiltshire Contents Series Introduction 5 Malcolm Miles Foreword 7 Jane Rendell General Introduction 11 Judith Rugg and Daniel Hinchcliffe Contributors 15 Section One – Issues of Regeneration and Cultural Change Regenerating Public Life? A Sensory Analysis of Regenerated 19 Public Places in El Raval, Barcelona Monica Degen Utopia from Dystopia: 37 TheWomens PlayhouseTrust and theWapping Project Judith Rugg New Urban Spaces: 49 Regenerating a Design Ethos PaulTeedon Section Two – Artists’ Reclamations/Ecological Spatial Actions Art, Science and Ecological Enquiry: 61 The Case of American Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting Kirk Savage Three Rivers – Second Nature 67 The River Dialogues Tim Collins Seeing Through Place 77 Local Approaches to Global Problems Malcolm Miles Skinningrove:A photo Essay 91 Malcolm Miles Section Three – The Unseen Public Space Collective Assemblages, Embodiment and Enuciations 107 Helen Stratford From Birmingham to Bogota: 119 Tracing the Metaphor of Submerged SpaceThrough the Architecture of 1960’s Birmingham and the Artistic Practice of Doris Salcedo Jane Calow Section Four – Identities and Communities Differences, Boundaries, Community: 131 The Irish in Britain Mary J Hickman Renewing Methodologies for Socio-Cultural Research 141 Global Refugees, Ethno-mimesis and theTransformative Role of Art Maggie O’Neil and Bea Tobolewska Series Introduction This is the second annual volume in the series Advances in Art & Urban Futures.The series is a vehicle through which to disseminate research and seminar papers from events through the past year at the University of Plymouth and elsewhere.The aim, as last year, is to contribute to critical understandings of the relation between art practice, cultural theory and the ways in which cities and their cultures are shaped. The theme of this volume, edited by Judith Rugg of the University of Plymouth and Daniel Hinchcliffe of Bath University,is Recoveries and Reclamations. Since the volume collects material from a range of contexts, and seeks to present a trans- disciplinary approach, the theme is necessarily open-ended.The connecting strand it offers, however, is that of regaining something in a world in which it seems much is lost or taken away – whether public access and bio-diversity regained in post- industrial landscapes, or identities re-wrought through cultural practices. If the structures of power and money responsible, for instances, for social deprivation and industrial pollution are global, a question which arises is how local actions might address this, and how the local might impinge on the global. In diverse ways such questions have been approached during 2000-01 in seminars at the School of Art & Design in Exeter (University of Plymouth), and in a collaborative event with Newcastle University. What emerges is that conventional disciplinary frameworks are inadequate to the task, and that new frameworks are required for a post- globalization world.This volume offers what might be seen as notes towards such a discourse, and something of the same theme will continue in volume 3, titled Cultures and Settlements, due for publication in 2003. Volume 1, and the series, was launched at a symposium organised by John Butler, Sarah Bennett and Gill Melling of the University of Plymouth, supported by the European League of Institutes of Art, in Exeter in November 2000.This volume continues the international scope of the series by including texts from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. I would like to thank the editors for seeing the volume through to publication, Jane Rendell for her foreword, Nicola Kirkham for her careful and invaluable assistance and attention to detail, and all those who have contributed texts and participated in the seminars and other events at which the papers were first presented. Malcolm Miles Series Editor,and Reader in Cultural Theory in the School of Arts & Design, University of Plymouth 5 Foreword Art is often viewed as the form of cultural production least invested in maintaining the status quo, as the route to different possible futures. But art does not simply offer a chance to work in ways that more mainstream activities do not. It is not that art, by definition, is a place where it is possible to be radical and critical, but rather that someone somewhere has made this their choice. Certain artists do choose to value critical engagement over commercial success; but this is not to say that all artists are politicized. While there are many who are critical of aspects of contemporary society, a certain cynicism is also rife. At best this cynicism may foster an intelligent critique of cultural institutions, at worst it can act as a paralysis for change. I think it would be fair to say that politicized artists do occupy key roles in bringing about change. In engaging in the not-yet, in choosing to raise questions rather than provide answers, in creating uncertainties rather than pronouncing the truth, they maintain a special relation to the future. Time is very much to the fore in this book; as well as the future, a number of texts involve ‘bearing witness’ to the past. Recoveries and Reclamations locates time within the dialectical triad – space, time and the social – long favoured by Marxist geographers and philosophers, such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and Doreen Massey. Many of the authors in this book have written about art works and cultural activities in ways which reference space, time and the social as key co-ordinates in critical art practice. The making of history, the processes of remembering and forgetting, are considered to be intrinsically involved with place making and taking. Social awareness is framed in terms of time and space. Becoming aware is a social process, one that involves others in critical discussion, but it is also a temporal process, involving the writing of multiple histories, and a spatial process, situated in contested and diversified ‘public’ realms. Theoretical debate in a number of disciplines has influenced the ways in which space is understood by many of the writers here. The notion of the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’, a critical device developed by cultural geographer Soja, has been particularly influential in suggesting an inter-active relation between people and places: that people make places and places make people. Psychoanalytic theory and feminist philosophy has shifted the ways in which we conceive of the relationship between the ‘internal’ space of individual subjectivity and the ‘external’ space of the surrounding environment in terms of a series of boundaries between private and public, inner and outer, subject and object, personal and social. Such discussions have allowed the reconceptualization of my own thinking about art as social space. 7 Understanding art as a form of critical spatial practice is especially valuable in engaging with work that takes place outside the gallery. Although the gallery is a valuable social space in its own right, the possibilities offered by operating in diverse sites can prove more challenging. Often run in tandem with gallery-based initiatives, such projects seem to produce work that reference debates concerning the relation of art to design and architecture, as well as fine art to social and community art. The editors identify two actions as central to the development of discussion around urban futures: recovery and reclamation. For something to be recovered it must have already been covered. But oddly recovery itself does not cover, but rather seeks to uncover, to bring to the surface or into the light, to make present events and stories that have been lost over time.‘Officially’, this is the job of historians for whom the writing and rewriting of history is an attempt to recover the past by finding evidence, establishing and interpreting facts. Such actions seek to bring order and make sense of the world, but they are also potentially destabilizing since the addition of new stories involves retelling much of what we already know,but in new ways. Unofficially,we are all historians, we make history every moment of our lives, private and public. In public there is more at stake, social relations are more complex or as Lefebvre would say ‘overt’. Designers and planners have operated for centuries as history makers often in the service of dominant regimes of power, and increasingly we see artists placed in this role.The question we must ask is: how it is possible to subvert forms of domination and suppression?

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