Ities Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 1

Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 1 Locality, Regeneration & Divers[c]ities Edited by Sarah Bennett John Butler Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 1 Locality, Regeneration & Divers[c]ities intellect TM BRISTOL, ENGLAND PORTLAND, OR, USA Edited by Sarah Bennett and John Butler First Published in Hardback in 2000 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862,Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK First Published in USA in 2000 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA Copyright ©2000 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 Yazdani Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon Copy Editor: Peter Young Set in Joanna A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-827-6 / ISBN1-84150-046-1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press,Wiltshire Contents Series Introduction 5 Malcolm Miles Foreword 7 Keith Patrick General Introduction 11 John Butler and Malcolm Miles Contributors 15 Section One – Women in Space Public Art: Between Public and Private 19 Jane Rendell Memory and Identity in the Urban Landscape: 27 A tale of two Barons Sally J Morgan Regeneration or Reparation: Death, Loss and Absence 41 in Anya Gallacio’s Intensities & Surfaces and Forest Floor Judith Rugg Section Two – Divers[c]ities Tracing Gazes:Three Aspects of Paris 53 Ron Kenley Vistas of the Post-Industrial City 59 Malcolm Miles Kidnapping the Bijlmer 71 Floris Paalman Art Neighbourhoods, Ports of Vitality 79 Jesús Pedro Lorente The Snowflake in Hell andThe Baked Alaska: 99 Improbability, Intimacy and Change in the Public Realm Jane Trowell Section Three – On the Ground Window Sills:Art of Locality 113 Sarah Bennett and Gill Melling Colour Matching the Chameleon 129 Peter Dunn The Barry Job:Art, Sentiment and Commercialism 139 John Gingell Civic ParticipationWorkshops in Sant Adrià deBesòs: 153 A Creative Methodology Antoni Remesar and Enric Pol Series Introduction This is the first volume in the series Advances in Art & Urban Futures.The series is a vehicle to disseminate research and discussion papers from seminars and symposia organised by the Art & Urban Futures Research Unit, in the School of Art & Design, University of Plymouth. It aims to contribute nationally and internationally to the advance of practical, critical and theoretical understandings of the relation of art to the development, regeneration and sustainability of cities. The series will be multi-disciplinary in content, including, with a balance which varies from yolume to volume, contributions from specialists in art and design, architecture, urban design, the social sciences and philosophy.Art and design will be represented by both practitioners and academics. This multi-disciplinarity, and the related theory, criticism and practice, reflects the complexities, and excitement, of current debates around the futures of cities as the primary form of human settlement and primary location of cultural production and reception. The first volume, co-edited by Sarah Bennett and John Butler, includes papers from seminars during 1999 and 2000 at the University of Plymouth (Exeter School of Arts & Design), the University of Barcelona (through Public Art Observatory, a prject of the Thematic Network of the European League of Institutes of Art) and at Bath University. The volume includes entirely new writing, and makes a significant contribution to debate by problematising conventional categories and boundaries, as between public and private space, and conventional identifications, such as that of public space with a public realm of democracy. It includes papers with a contextual breadth, as well as those which investigate specific problems and practices. Future volumes will reflect, in varying ways, the research questions of the Unit, on art’s relation to urban futures, the commonalities and differences of relevant discourses and critical frameworks, the cultures of non-metropolitan cities, and the implications of research on these questions for pedagogy in relevant fields. Each volume will have two co-editors, changing each year, and will be published annually in December. Finally, my thanks to Sarah Bennett and John Butler for bringing this first volume together, despite the pressures of time and institutional life; and to all the contributors for their texts and participation in the events from which the volume is derived. I hope there will be many more. Malcolm Miles Series Editor,and Reader in the School of Arts & Design,University of Plymouth 5 Foreword Putting emphasis on my own recollections of the past two decades makes this a somewhat subjective introduction to the theme of art, locality and regeneration. Nevertheless, I suspect my experiences of a rapidly changing situation in one specific locality – the east and south-east of London – are symptomatic of a wider and more general pattern that has linked the nature and direction of art quite precisely to the infrastructure of urban planning and regeneration. Buildings, and particularly buildings that have undergone regeneration, have played a significant role throughout my working life. As a first year student at Camberwell School of Art, I was set to work in an annex that had begun life a century before as a school. Shortly after graduating, and having wisely reflected on the folly of becoming an artist, I nevertheless progressed to my own working space in one of the recently vacated warehouses in Wapping. Later, as the property developers moved in, I moved further east, signing a lease on a 20,000 sq ft slice of a former Victorian sweet factory in Cable Street, a site that shortly thereafter became home to some 120 artists. My involvement in that project floundered at the first rent review, but undaunted a few years later I found myself running an international art magazine from what was once the Peek Frean biscuit factory in Bermondsey and subsequently the site of several of the most interesting artist-led shows of the past decade. Traditionally the poor relations of the graduate world, collectively artists have long demonstrated a canny ability to identify and colonise those urban peripheries vacated by industrial collapse. Colonisation by the bohemian-chic, however, almost inevitably triggers a spiral of development that ultimately sees the artist as loser, continually forced into seeking new pastures. My point, however, is not simply to underscore the commonplace of shifting demographics. My own experience of the London scene has suggested that property and location not only furnish an environment for artists to practice in, but in many cases have had a direct influence on the nature of the work produced and the manner in which it has been displayed.And by display,I include not only the physical environs in which art is exhibited, but the more nebulous philosophical context that determines our address to the art object. At Camberwell I first came across Gleizes’ and Metzinger’s claims regarding the impunity of a work of art that retains its integrity whether in a drawing room or cathedral. With hindsight, that remark strikes me as wholly appropriate to the ethos of Camberwell itself, whose Victorian annex made no concessions to its new role as an art school and whose students were not encouraged to consider their immediate environs germane to the art they produced.The building merely provided a roof over the naked models in the life class and corridors for the storage of dusty plaster casts of Greek antiquity. 7 Arriving in Wapping in the early eighties was quite a different experience. The Wapping studios were largely artist-run and free of the trappings of a hierarchical bureaucracy. Here were artists like Alison Wilding whose work seemed to be determined by the lingering industrialism of London’s recently defunct docks and could be seen in direct relation to the confines of her studio space. Wilding would shortly after be linked to artists like Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow, both of whom worked in and were similarly indebted to equally down-at-heel former-industrial studios across town in Brixton. But if those studios provided a particular environment for making art, the other half of the equation was display. By the early eighties it was already an established tradition for the various studio groups to hold annual open studio exhibitions (some of the first and most significant were held at the Stockwell Depot in the late sixties). In the Wapping shows artists took charge of their own destiny, fundraising and organising publicity, assured of substantial audiences by dint of the sheer number of exhibitors. But while many artists refurbished their white-cube studios to resemble miniature galleries, there was an odd pride taken in those shambolic openings which couldn’t have been further from the professionalism of the West End. In retrospect, this naivety appeared underpinned by a shared belief that the real business belonged uptown, that somehow this annual invasion was tolerated only if the event was ultimately construed as an outing for family and friends. Once the developers had forced us out of Wapping, I became involved with the running of Cable Street, one of the larger complexes of its kind in London. But while Cable Street succeeded in providing relatively affordable studio accommodation, its outlook was still rooted in the naiveties of Wapping.The building itself allowed art to be produced, artists to meet, and studio exhibitions to take place – it even established its own gallery in the years after my departure – but except in the most incidental sense the building didn’t contribute to the structuring of attitudes towards the work manufactured under its own roof. Although a far cry from Camberwell, the art produced there could almost have been made and exhibited anywhere.

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