Collaborative challenges: Negotiating the complicities of socially engaged art within an era of neoliberal urbanism

Abstract

This article provides a close and practice-led investigation into the complexities and complicities of politicised collaborative art within an era of neoliberal urbanism. In addressing these complicities from a practice-led perspective, the paper provides a nuanced account of the social functions of art based on critical perspectives relating to issues of urban politics as well as politics of collaboration, participation and representation. Reflecting on experiences with facilitating socially engaged artistic projects in Basel, Monthey and London, I demonstrate the challenges faced when struggling to adhere to the artistic aims of providing transformative experiences, while at the same time working within various neoliberal and institutional constraints and expectations. Rather than succumbing into totalising narratives about how art practices are inevitably instrumentalised as they become part of neoliberal structures, logics and ambitions, the paper emphasises the need to think more carefully about the politics of this practice in terms of how it constantly negotiates and reflects the subtle power relations that exist between artists and their collaborators in urban contexts.

The spark, the spread and ethics: Towards an object-orientated view of subversive creativity

“…This bench plays into the recent literature around subversive creativity, a literature that mobilises a particular articulation of creative practice to critique normalising and centralising forces. From an urban perspective, this subversion has been based on a critical engagement with groups such as the Situationists International and their playful resistance of the city as spectacle (Mould, 2015; Pinder, 2005), but has also included more organised urban artistic and interventionists projects (see Harvie, 2013; Sachs Olsen, 2017). Within this broad field, creative practice is conceptualised first and foremost as a means of political action to subvert – and navigate the appropriative forces of – the capitalist city (de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017).…”

Contemporary art and the geopolitics of extractivism in Turkey's Kurdistan

“…While my empirical focus was initially on architecture rather than art, during my fieldwork I got to know Tekin, visited relevant sites with him, including his native neighbourhood on the Tigris, and eventually became a close collaborator of the independent artist-run initiative he co-founded in the city in 2017. If this story resonates with the growing interest in critical insights obtainable through collaborations between geographers and artists (Hawkins, 2019;Sachs Olsen, 2018;Tolia-Kelly & Raymond, 2020;Wylie & Webster, 2019), in my case, collaboration constitutes less an empirical source than the reciprocity through which I have related to the artist and his hometown; it informs my methodological-political premise rather than analytical credibility or legitimacy. In fact, the argumentation below draws significantly from my own "creative critical interpretation" as a method that avoids "assuming the power of art" and acknowledges scholarly analysis' impact on the "relevance and effects" of artistic practice (Ingram, 2011, p. 218).…”

“…However, since such techniques are also mobilised by the very technocrats and profiteers driving neoliberal urbanisation, artists' proficiency in them is also considered potent for challenging this mobilisation (Hawkins, 2010;Vasudevan, 2007), not least by creating concrete opportunities for its subversion in urban spaces (Barry, 2013, pp. 86-92;Dawkins & Loftus, 2013;Sachs Olsen, 2018). At scales larger than the urban, the neoliberal geopolitics of conflict have involved wars waged or endorsed by Western powers in the name of spreading democracy throughout the post-Cold-War world and establishing global peace.…”

Ghostly murals: Tracing the politics of public art in Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley

“…As public art has predominantly been investigated with regards to its revitalizing socio-economic effects in processes of culture-led urban development and regeneration (Cartiere and Zebracki 2016; Hall and Robertson 2001; Mathews 2010; Pollock and Sharp 2007; Zebracki 2012), public artworks are often functionalized to facilitate policy objectives such as social cohesion, the celebration of diversity, spurring of urban growth and pacifier against displacement (Chang 2019; Sachs Olson 2017). In that sense, public art is often geared towards constructing consensus between heterogeneous urban communities (Miles 1997).…”