Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

Abstract

In this article I discuss 1980s New York cinema through the conceptual lens of landscape, drawing in particular on the interconnected but separate traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque. While the former mode of representing landscape is idealizing (the shepherd/nymph-motif), the latter with its origins in the period of the enclosures of the English countryside tends to aestheticize poverty and dispossession. This distinction can productively be deployed in relation to tensions between glamorization and exploitation in 1980s New York cinema, which often dealt with the themes of rent, eviction, and unemployment in postindustrial settings. Focusing in particular on Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981/2000 and Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985), I argue that the current nostalgia for a pre-gentrified and less regulated New York in popular culture is dependent on these idealizing and aestheticizing tendencies insofar that they conceal or prettify some of the darker aspects of the period.

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

“…One such scale concerns post-industrial urban space and its financial commodification. Art is considered complicit in the concealment of existing socio-economic conflicts this commodification requires and in the production of new ones resulting from it, where complicity derives not simply from artists' presence in gentrifying neighbourhoods but rather from the formal, representational, and performative techniques they employ (Andersson, 2017;Harris, 2012). 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.…”