Art and the Global City

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Gates of New York—Christo and Jeanne Claude

Figure 1.2. Gates of New York—Christo and Jeanne Claude

Figure 2.1. Mayakovskii Metro Station, Opened September 1938, Architect A. Dushkin

Figure 2.2. Kropotkinskaia Metro Station, Opened May 1935, One of the Oldest Stations of the Moscow Metro System—Architects A. Dushkin and Ya. Likhtenberg

Figure 2.3. Revolutionary Square Metro Station, 1938, Architect A. Dushkin

Figure 2.4. Komsomolskaia Station, 1952, Architect A. Shchushev

Figure 2.5. Komsomolskaia Station, 1952, Wall Mosaics, Painter/Artist Pavel Korin—Alexander Nevskii, 13^th Century Kievan Rus’ Grand Prince, Depicted on Horseback

Figure 2.6. Akademicheskaia Metro Station, October 1962, Architect Y. Kolesnikova, Caterpillar Column Minimalist Style

Figure 2.7. Mendeleyevskaia Metro Station, December 1988, Architect Nina Aleshina

Figure 2.8. Victory Park Metro Station, 2003, Mosaics/Paintings by Zurab Tsereteli←xi | xii→

Figure 4.1. KUNSTMUSEUM, Bochum 2014, metal pipe, cement (6.466×180 cm (L×D)), Ruhrtriennale 2014, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Bochum, Germany 29.08.2014 – 12.10.2014. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Figure 4.2. PASSAGEWAY No. 1, 2005–2007 (1500 × 200 × 230 cm (L × B × H)), WEISSE FOLTER, K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 17.03.2007 – 15.07.2007. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Figure 4.3. CUBE HAMBURG 2007, Hamburg 2007, mixed media (14 × 14 × 14 m (L × W × H)), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany 23.03.2007–10.06.2007© 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Figure 4.4. BONDI BEACH, 21 BEACH CELLS, Sydney 2007, metal mesh, air mattress, sunshade, garbage bag (20 × 20 × 2,5 m, each cell 4 × 4 × 2,5 m (L × W × H)), Kaldor Art Projects, Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia 28.09.2007 – 21.10.2007. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Figure 5.1. Federation Square, Melbourne, Victoria

Figure 5.2. Harmony Square, Dandenong, Victoria

Figure 5.3. Yagan Square, Perth, Western Australia

Figure 6.1. Trey Derbes, Tour Dogs, Issue 1

Figure 6.2. Justin Matthew, Pray photozines, 2018

Figure 6.3. Mark Murrmann, Cig Machine, part of the City Slang series

Figure 6.4. Ofir Barak, Tour Dogs, Issue 46

Figure 7.1. Text visualization of words associated with the festival

Figure 7.2. Text visualization of words associated with the precinct

Figure 7.3. Demographic profile of festival survey respondents

Figure 7.4. Passion Arts Projection Mapping

Figure 7.5. Add Oil Machine projection on Lennon Wall, Admiralty

Figure 9.1. Two bananas chasing apple off boundary of Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia. Author photo (4 Aug 2018).

Figure 9.2. Public Rally organized by Citizens for Melbourne in front of the Yarra Buiding. Author photo (19 Sep 2018).

Figure 10.1. Testing Grounds. Cheap, movable and flexible infrastructure. Image by Bree Trevena

Figure 10.2. Testing Grounds. Precinct is largely outdoors and cut off from main pedestrian thoroughfares. Image by Bree Trevena←xii | xiii→

Figure 10.3. Collingwood Yards. Entrance from Johnston Street, Collingwood. Image by Bree Trevena

Figure 10.4. Collingwood Yards. Public plaza. Image by Bree Trevena

Figure 11.1. F. Griswold, “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway),” New York Evening Sun, March 20, 1913.

Figure 11.2. The crowd at White Night Melbourne February 22, 2014.

Figure 12.1. David Silver—Manhattan 2011

Figure 12.2. Gary Gumpert—Berlin 2010

Figure 12.3. Gary Gumpert— Aups, France 2015

Figure 12.4. Leo Jeffres—Cleveland, Ohio 2020

Figure 12.5. Gary Gumpert—Toronto 2019

Figure 12.6. Peter Haratonik—Chicago 2012

Figure 12.7. Susan Drucker—Toronto 2018

Figure 12.8. Gary Gumpert—Melbourne 2016

Figure 13.1. Entrance to Exhibit, “Wall of Respect: Vestiges, Shards, and the Legacy of Black Power” at Chicago Cultural Center, 2017

Figure 13.2. Exhibit room with “mock-up” of the “Wall of Respect”—enlarged photo and recreated newsstand for public chalking

Figure 13.3. Section of Casa Aztlán’s front mural from 1990s with Aztec design and symbols of Day of the Dead (skull) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (rose)

Figure 13.4. “Re-imagined” front mural on former Casa Aztlán building, 2017

Figure 14.1. This public art installation of welding mask became a landmark in Mullae, South Korea

Figure 14.2. Art studios are found in old factory alleys in the Mullae neighborhood

Figure 14.3. Old metal factory buildings are now being used as hipster restaurants and cafes as a symptom of gentrification

Figure 14.4. Metal factories, up-scale cafes and restaurants, and art studios coexist in old factory alleys in Mullae

List of Tables

Table 8.1: Cross tabulation of presence of rural elements and application of beauty filter

Table 8.2: Cross tabulation of presence of rural elements and types of background music

Table 8.3: Distribution of video with rural elements across five urban space types

Table 8.4: Relation between number of viewing and space types for video with rural elements

Table 8.5: Relation between number of “like” and space types for video with rural elements

Table 8.6: Relation between number of “comment” and space types for video with rural elements

Table 8.7: Relation between number of “sharing” and space types for video with rural elements

Table 8.8: Relation between “downloading” and space types for video with rural elements

Acknowledgments

This book derived from an international conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University’s downtown Communication School’s campus. We thank Peter Haratonik (Art Institute) and Daniel Makagon (DePaul) for hosting this group, and their incredible hospitality while we all converged on Chicago in November of 2019—soon after, in consultation with the group, the volume was conceived.

We especially thank the two key organizers of the conference, Gary Gumpert and Susan J. Drucker; their friendship, collegiality and academic support for Maggie and I has been so invaluable over the past thirty years—we thank them for their perseverance and editorial encouragement. Dr. Gumpert’s advice at the early stages of this project were critical in moving it forward to a published book volume.

We also wish to thank our authors from diverse and inter-disciplinary academic arenas—urban communication specialists, media scholars & historians of art and culture. Their diligence and patience with our editorial queries and stylistic commentary has helped to symbiotically enrich the experience; and we thank them for sharing with us their academic acumen and wonderful, analytical and evidentially-rich case studies.

We particularly want to thank our editors, and the editorial assistants, and production crew at Peter Lang publishers (New York/Oxford) for their consistent help and encouragement of our book through the contract, review and production ←xvii | xviii→process. We appreciate also the subvention from the Urban Communication Foundation (Dr. Gary Gumpert, President) who made it possible for us to expand the number of artistic/photographic representations in the book. We also wish to thank the helpful suggestions of the outside, anonymous reviewer who made us rethink our introduction and afterword, as well as highlight major themes that our authors accentuated.

Introduction: Urban Space, Art and Global Cultural Transformations

The Global City has increasingly become a place where artists, and their creations, are a central communicative fixture in the urban landscape, and thus an important subject of analysis for interdisciplinary scholars interested in public culture and communication. Besides the activities of artists themselves, the urban environment is filled with artifacts such as advertisements (past and present), public art, graffiti, and artistic exhibitions. The urban arena is also the site for a host of new media that traverse, and represent, the global city, in addition to expressing individual and collective urban experiences and visions. This volume looks at different facets of art in the city through three over-arching prisms: public space and art, new transformative media in the city, and lastly the historical, social and political context of urban art. This volume has assembled scholars from around the globe (from the US to Australia to East Asia) whose point of academic intersection and departure is (and what has been defined by the Urban Communication Foundation as) the “communicative city.”

“Communicative Cities” is a growing concept and idea that was initially articulated by a varied group of communication scholars, inter-disciplinary academics (historians and sociologists) in cultural studies, designers, planners, lawyers, and architects in a series of meetings that focused on the extraordinary growth and transformations of the urban landscape in the past several decades.¹ This volume therefore brings together a host of academics (communication specialists, sociologists, historians and cultural theorists) who seek to expand that definition of the ←1 | 2→urban communicative city by looking at the role that art and public culture plays communicatively in the rapidly expanding global landscape. Through critical attention to communicative actions and physical interventions in the urban landscape by artists, architects, planners, museums, and cultural centers, the authors of this volume expand our understanding of the ways that, as Victoria Gallagher and Margaret LaWare (2007) have argued, art in urban spaces not only inhabits public spaces, but also creates and illuminate those spaces. Art in public spaces calls together audiences as spectators, and in the process creates opportunities for individuals to engage with other members of the public. Further, art invites judgment; art invites response and sense-making. In other words, art can transform an audience’s relationship to and perception of an urban space—its materiality as well as its social history. As Gallagher and LaWare (2007) highlight, the way art in urban spaces is engendered (and evolves) is inextricably linked to the struggles, aspirations and human endeavors that make, as cultural critic and theorist Henri Lefebvre (1991) would argue, urban space so layered and heterogenous.

Art, new social media, and the rhetorical strategies of those engaged in urban artistic endeavors make up a critical element in the everyday multi-variegated fabric of cultural life in the city. Spanning four continents (North America, Europe/Eurasia, Asia, and Australia) and multiple cities from Chicago (and New York) to London (and Hamburg & Moscow) to Singapore (and Seoul & Melbourne), these case studies, based on primary research in the urban arena, focus the reader’s attention to the evolution of art in public spaces and the rhetorical power of new artistic visions and conglomerations in the urban landscape. These chapters also highlight the restoration and revitalization of past and peripheral artistic visions that become relevant and meaningful communicatively to new generations and new audiences.

The authors of this volume demonstrate the importance of urban art in creating new publics, even within distinct socio-historical contexts, that transcend social, political and cultural divisions, as audiences gather with renewed attention to and appreciation of the city’s materiality, beauty and history. Audiences may gather together to enjoy light shows that transform public squares, or they may engage in protest, urging new publics to engage simultaneously in social resistance and preservation of public space. The city can offer traces of the past for those who are attentive—the names of former businesses still apparent under whitewash—inviting re-examination of a place’s historical roots. Building exteriors can additionally become screens for messages of hope and perseverance as, for example, the text messages from around the world projected on buildings in Hong Kong to encourage and invigorate demonstrators against China’s control.