Reimagining the Urban: Ying-Fen Chen

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Ying-Fen Chen, a PhD student in Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: A Vision of Site-Responsive Arts Collaborations in Communities

It had been a blue Monday for me before I arrived at the symposium, Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space, at noon. I had just finished a class in the morning and was still suffering from the flu. In the crowded auditorium, there weren’t many seats left, but I found one next to a stranger. After brief introductions, I lapsed into silence and wished the symposium end soon that I could go home to recover from my virus. Ten minutes later, in the third section of the day, I not only knew the name of the stranger near me, but had enjoyed a stimulating conversation with her about her vision—site-responsive community-led arts collaborations—against the gentrification phenomenon in Bay Area.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a manager for IN COMMUNITY Program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, facilitating community collaborations through the arts in SOMA, Mission, and West Oakland. Sometimes, she introduces artists to the communities, and sometimes, her group works with the residents, using arts to represent the minor ethnic groups’ histories, to bridge differences among multiple groups within a neighborhood, and to create a public space for the community. It seems a promising vision for combing arts and community work, avoiding a way that arts are often used by the capital in gentrification process. However, given my previous experience as a participatory planner in Taiwan, I know that the participation of arts in community often faces several problems, especially in low-income or minority communities: some selfish-interested artists easily get into conflicts with residents; arts may become a gate keeping some residents away who believe they cannot participate in the program without enough previous education; the sometimes ambiguous role of major actors can influence the result of the program, deviating from the original goal and undermining the community; the ownership of the arts after the program also brings different impacts to the community. Arts are a useful tool in community work, but we need to carefully consider these possible difficulties before we naively jump into the collaborations as an organizer, an artist, or a resident.

Accordingly, in Raquel Gutiérrez’s vision, the concept of “responsibility” is the most important factor in the success of the collaboration of art with communities. Although the way of being responsible is actually based on individual organizer, having no approach to follow, I still appreciate that Raquel tries to bring this concept and its practice to her vision of community work. But, more discussion and informed application is needed to develop and share this concept. Then, a promising and alternative role of arts will actively participate in community collaboration to achieve the goal of creating a livable urban space without the dominating influence of gentrification.

Reimagining the Urban: Kuan Hwa

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Kuan Hwa, a PhD student in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: "We?"

When Linda Rugg spoke of how “we” define ourselves in relation to the bay, who are the “we” to whom she refers? When Brad McCrea said that the bay is different for “us” as it was then compared to now, are these generations of people in the past and in the present even the same entity? What if some family, previously included in the “we” during the 1970′s, moved away from the bay area in the 2000′s?; would the “we” be substantively changed or does the “we” persist to inscribe those who no longer belong to an area but identify themselves as having once come from it? What would justify an invocation of the “we” to transcend a specific temporal collectivity and ideology? I just moved to the bay area. What justifies me to take claim over the bay as my home, and my inclusion in the “we” of the bay area?

When Ava Roy and Lauren Dietrich Chavez names the “we” in “We Players,” who is this collective invoked through their speech? For “We Players,” the collective pronoun in the title seems at first to refer only to the actors themselves, but in the dramatic performance being integrated into a site with audience participation, the “we” clearly refers to what Roy repeatedly called “the people” at the art event. The true extent of this collectivity is hard to measure, because the degree of transformation within the participants at the theater production has no such thing as a unit. What is the criterion to adjudicate the degree or kind of collectivity of the “we” in this case (was an adequate feeling of togetherness produced? Was a new kind of collectivity effectively achieved?)? Even if a demographic survey were to be taken of the participants, it would not ensure that a public had been formed. If photographs show that people convened, how is this any different from the plethora of photographs on twitter and social networking sites that expose people convening for the shopping mall on Black Friday, or from convening during traffic? I’m doubtful that people’s senses are attuned to others’ bodies and the surrounding environment only in the event of an aesthetic staging, or that a possibility of a new community needs to emerge specifically from this kind of event. As Brad McCrea seemed to authoritatively conclude, even poetic license is subject to the law (and when, at least in Western art history, is art ever independent of rich patronage or the institutional support of a hegemonic force?). At that point then, will art be necessary to fulfill the needs of the various “we” and the public it seeks; why? What is inadequate to all other forms of collective participation already in daily life (and already in dynamic change– education, the factory, the street, yoga studios…) that is somehow inadequate to the formation of a public for which Roy seeks, and why?

Reimagining the Urban: Photostream

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Graduate student Megan Alvarado Saggese took pictures of the event, which can be seen on her photo stream here.

Reimagining the Urban: Kate Mattingly

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Kate Mattingly, a PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Connectedness

Before the symposium began, a cluster of people on the waitlist stood next to the balcony. Their view of the floor below looked something like this. Threads held tiny pieces that resembled straws or mini-bones and were constantly waving, but at first glance, the mobile appeared motionless. It took a moment to notice these pieces were in motion, and even closer inspection showed that tiny weights (visible in the picture below) ascended and descended just below the ceiling, mapping the mini-bones’ movement in vertical axes.

If I could choose not a keyword but a key-image, it would be this sculpture. It captured the interconnectedness of shifting landscapes that were broached during “Reimagining the Urban.”

The word “connectedness” comes from the phrase “an intimate connectedness,” which I heard Shannon Jackson say just before Session IV. It seemed prescient. Brad McCrea of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, then spoke about ways in which his work involves a delicate coordination of four elements: environmental issues, historical preservation, real estate development, and social justice. I thought of an image Dr. Jackson had used earlier of “picking up a corner of the rug” and looking at a situation from a certain perspective.

When the rug is pulled too sharply by one of McCrea’s four “corners,” the others shift. This reminded me of reading Jamie Peck’s “Struggling with the Creative Class,” in particular his critique of Richard Florida’s proposal: “The less creative underclasses have only bit parts in this script. Their role is secondary and contingent, in economic terms, to the driving and determinant acts of creativity. Their needs and aspirations are implicitly portrayed as wrongheaded and anachronistic, their only salvation being to get more creative. And the libertarian politics that envelops the creativity thesis, in as far as it concerns itself with the underclasses at all – for the most part these are portrayed as servants of the creative class, or the stranded residents of ‘hopeless’ cities – peddles only voluntaristic and usually moralizing solutions.”[1]

Dr. Peck shows how a lack of attention to equitable distribution plus a privileging of certain forms of creative action (namely those that benefit gentrification) can de disastrous for certain communities. This recalls a question posed to Raquel Gutierrez after Session III by someone who had worked in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and who faced the dilemma (paraphrased): “are we working in these places to benefit people who live in these neighborhoods or to benefit people who want to change these neighborhoods into more exclusive places for upper and middle classes?”

Gutierrez acknowledged the interconnectedness of ethics and poetics in artists’ projects, the “complicated” environments she works within, and the possibility that each of us gravitates toward a different place on the spectrum of priorities between social justice and aesthetics. Throughout the day, I found myself thinking about cities as mobiles, constantly shifting, negotiating ever-moving variables. A tricky task emerges when qualitative differences transfer into quantitative data: the mini-bones fluctuate at seemingly random intervals/these weights chart their movement vertically.

Other phrases stayed with me: the examination of our “ever-increasing levels of connectivity” and what they enable and foreclose in a “hyper-individualistic” world; the definition that “design sits somewhere between art and technology;” the importance of meeting people where they are, and the phrase “radical conditions of possibility.”

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[1] Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 29.4, Dec. 2005,  p. 759.

Reimagining the Urban: Alec Stewart

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Alec Stewart, a second year PhD student in Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Revitalization (=Gentrification?)

Kicking off the Reimagining the Urban symposium, Margaret Crawford spoke of a real estate development boom in San Francisco that has contributed to an exodus of roughly 10,000 artists from the city. This familiar narrative is one of rising real estate prices forcing the working classes out of neighborhoods such as the Mission while yupsters move in, bringing with them expensive restaurants, high-priced boutiques, and exclusive national chains. A similar process is occurring on a larger scale in the Mid-Market area, where over40 active real estate projects will bring several million square feet of new office, residential and retail space—not to mention new entertainment and dining options—into a previously “seedy” neighborhood. It is hoped that these infrastructure investments will provide the amenities desired by the so-called “creative class,” “revitalizing” the Mid-Market neighborhood while driving San Francisco’s economy forward.

Revitalization is a word frequently used by city officials, business improvement districts and other civic boosters in cities ranging from DC to Portland to describe their efforts to pave the way for young creatives and their lifestyles. I think it is related to, if not synonymous with gentrification. In Mid-Market, it refers to the A.C.T.’s conversion of a boarded up porn theater into an arts school and performance venue and the arrival of numerous arts foundations from pricier parts of town (like the Mission). It means numerous new condo towers and office buildings. And it will be fueled by collaboration between arts institutions and developers in creating comfortable ‘eco-systems’ for tech workers, makers, hackers, and food truck aficionados.

Such partnerships are central to the revitalization strategies being deployed in the Mid-Market area. Forest City’s 4 acre, 1.7 million square foot 5M Project highlights but one example of this phenomenon, where the economic utility of an arts organization is demonstrated through its interactions with a large real estate developer. In exchange for financing and a venue for its activities, Intersection for the Arts lends its curatorial expertise to Forest City, which deploys it for the benefit of its tenants and corporate bottom line. This relationship may be “mutually exploitative,” as Andy Wang and Deborah Cullinan suggest–Wang’s Forest City clearly views it as a solution to an image problem, while Cullinan’s Intersection for the Arts sees it as a means for survival. San Francisco’s sophisticated tech employees are turned off by blatantly formulaic Starbucks and other chains, says Wang, and it is for this reason that Intersection for the Arts is indispensable. As it programs 5M’s public facing spaces with popular events such as Off the Grid and live jazz concerts, it plays a strikingly similar role to that of a business improvement district. Both seek to enliven public spaces with memorable experiences that attract talented workers and middle/upper-class consumers.

In any gentrification narrative there are winners and losers, and surely absent from visions of a revitalized Mid-Market are dilapidated single room occupancy hotels and the homeless. Where are they in this story? And what will become of the artists and arts institutions currently moving to the neighborhood to do the city’s economic development/revitalization work? I’d wager that–as in the Mission–they too will be shown the door as the local real estate market heats up.

San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, recently noted  that, “without that culture of San Francisco and the arts, I don’t think the technology workers would actually want to be here.”[1] In light of this acknowledgement, should the city of San Francisco do more to support the arts given its clear role in economic development? How can the city, developers and arts institutions better incorporate homeless and low-income people into decision-making processes that impact their neighborhoods? How can artists and arts institutions be liberated from their role in cycles of neighborhood revitalization and displacement?

[1] See: John Coté and Marisa Lagos, “Arts Groups Sparked Mid-Market’s Rise, Mayor Says.” http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Arts-groups-sparked-Mid-Market-s-rise-mayor-says-4864615.php

Critical Time: Claudia La Rocco

On November 21, the Arts Research Center will present Critical Time: Claudia La Rocco In Conversation with Shannon Jackson, which will focus on the role of the critic in the landscape of time-based art practices. In advance of the event, we've asked her for some reflections on this topic. La Rocco is a poet and critic whose recent collaborations include projects with the choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, the performance company Findlay//Sandsmark, the visual artist Brett Goodroad, and the composer Phillip Greenlief. 

“We’ve had the right piece in the wrong theater.”

That’s something I keep thinking about. The choreographer and director Annie-B Parson (of Big Dance Theater) said it to me once in an interview.

I get calls sometimes from publicists asking me if they should pitch a work to dance or theater or visual art critics. Usually they want to pitch it to performance critics. But, well. Those are in short order. Gotta pick a genre, folks. Better pick right.

The whole notion of crossing forms. As if we were entering enemy territory. I was in a performance recently and a dancer thanked me for “crossing the line.” As if I had entered Gaza.

If you assume (a big assumption, but let’s just go for it) that a critic can write (and by write I also mean think), then really the only question remaining is, can she look? Is she able to be in the present and see what’s in front of her and deal with it from her inevitably limited and biased and fragile point of view?

Probably the answer, even for the best of us and even at the best of times, is almost always NO. That’s what makes criticism so intensely maddening. It’s also what makes it human (try as we might to pretend otherwise). Welcome to the club. Or something.

Another thing, is that people who have seen way too much and people who have seen way too little—well, those people speak the same language(s). (I’m not sure I agree entirely with that sentence, with its logic, but I hope that you, dear reader, know what I mean, even if I don’t entirely.) That is, they’re like members of the extreme right and left. They converge. There is no forest, only the tree. There is only, from afar, the forest.

Ok, well, that paragraph didn’t entirely work.

But it’s important to remember that critics aren’t really special creatures. If they were allowed more often to be failures, if they were celebrated for it, I don’t think that would be the worst thing in the world.

As usual, as with art, as with everything, you might say it comes down to the economy.

Or, to what person you want to catch a drink with after the opening.

And there is, beyond all of this nonsense, that “impossible moment of being alive.”

I still can’t put it any better than Eileen Myles. With any luck, she’ll be at this talk, too.

Well, no, I can’t imagine she will be. But that reminds me of something Eleanor Antin said at a recent talk about Eleanora Antinova, as she prepared to delve into her creation’s words: “I hope Antinova will come.”

Yes.

Don’t we all.

And then when she doesn’t, well, somebody still has to say something.

Unless we all made a gentlemen’s agreement to lay off for awhile.

A speaking and writing sabbatical. Or something.

ahem.

(my syntax is already rejecting this idea)

(the right piece: the wrong theater).

Creative Time 2013: Margaret Crawford

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts partnered once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees were asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Two words that I hate: placemaking and vibrant. Yet I constantly hear these buzzwords in urban planning and design, public art and arts funding, often paired, implying that the first invariably leads to the second. Although I would be happy to blame Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” thesis (see my previous ARC keyword) for popularizing them, this definition of “successful” urban spaces has a much longer history. Both words can be traced back to the 1960s, a key moment in American urbanism, when a new set of values appeared that inverted the dominant view of cities. In 1961 Jane Jacobs dismissed in a single sentence the entire history of 20th century planning. Instead she celebrated the life of the sidewalk in her Greenwich Village block. A decade later William H. Whyte documented the social life of midtown public plazas and vest-pocket parks. Both aimed their descriptions, defining public space as feel-good, human-centered urban experiences, at white suburbanites, hoping to attract them back to the city. Surprisingly, in Manhattan, where race was a key metric by which white people evaluated urban space, neither mentioned race at all. Both also ignored the radical redefinition of public and private spaces that civil rights activists were demanding at lunch counters, on buses, and with massive marches. Their followers, such as the Project for Public Spaces, codified Jacobs’ and Whyte’s observations into a theory of placemaking that underlies many current efforts to create pleasant and lively experiences for tourists and affluent residents. They define successful public spaces as those untroubled by the tensions and politics of race, class, ethnicity, gender or age.   

The latest inheritor of this tradition is Mayor Michael Bloomberg. During his term he closed Broadway to traffic, started a public bike program, installed miles of bike lanes, and sponsored the High Line and other parks. But can placemaking efforts and vibrant public spaces offset other forms of spatial restriction directed at specific publics, such as “Stop and frisk” laws that largely target minority residents? Should placemaking hide the less visible realities of an increasingly gentrified and unequal city where, as the New Yorker recently reported, there are more homeless people than at any time since the 1970s?  This is a question that placemaking advocates have yet to answer.

Creative Time 2013: Kate Mattingly

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts partnered once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees were asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Kate Mattingly, graduate student in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: demonstrate

Listening to speakers during the Creative Time Summit today, a keyword emerged that was not so much repeated throughout the afternoon (like “vibrant” or “grassroots,” both of which deserve more attention and analysis) but present through the presentations’ modes and priorities: demonstrate.

I’m not sure if the format of the summit, its brief but animated snippets of projects and ideas, generated this tendency to emphasize what the artists, professors, writers, critics, and educators consider essential and worthwhile. Making the benefits of a project or concept the priority of a talk is laudable, but one after the other these presentations took on a similar tone. I started to wonder where reflection on such projects can happen, or where do we discover when things don’t end up as expected or planned? If an element of indeterminacy is shared among many projects that are grouped under the “social practice” umbrella, why can’t a sense of unpredictability exist as part of these reports? What about unexpected results and relationships?

The verb “to demonstrate” suggests a display of skills that are mastered or proof of knowledge learned. As a dancer I have watched and participated in my share of lec-dems (lecture-demonstrations) during which some technique or form of dance is explained and showcased. In public spaces, “to demonstrate” takes on an explicitly political tone: to make oneself heard and seen. All these connotations relate to what I saw today at the summit, and this makes the event an important occasion to highlight ideas, outcomes, and practices that are happening today and shifting individual and collective thinking. Demonstrations are important and can rally support for various causes.

My question becomes what does demonstrating allow and what does it foreclose? Who are we demonstrating for? Do the summit’s audiences need to be convinced of the worth of these projects and research? Could other outcomes be generated by extending the lengths of some presentations so we can learn about the arcs, blind-spots, or pitfalls of some works? If similar words appear in multiple presentations can we pause and consider their different valences?

To me, a demonstration suggests more of a pedestal to display one’s ideas than an incubator to explore a concept. When we demonstrate can we, at the same time, allow for tensions, for disagreements, for failures?

I was inspired by many of today’s speakers, particularly Rick Lowe, who acknowledged the slippery slope of “impact.” Like demonstration, the word “impact” necessitates similar questions: for which groups of people? How is it measured? Is it synonymous with a project’s value? I also liked Lowe’s response to a question about how to know if a project is working: “The project hasn’t become real because we haven’t encountered tensions,” he said. Later he added that he senses how people are responding to a project “intuitively,” which, to me, defies quantifiable analysis.

If an experience evades easy display or demonstration, how can we not diminish its value or even its necessity? 

Creative Time 2013: Lauren Kroiz

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor in History of Art at UC Berkeley.

In this list of terms, I’m particularly interested in dislocation. Unlike “art” and “place,” which I think of as solid nouns and things in the world, “dislocation” invokes the action of dislocating. I wonder about the obscured verb’s subject, object, and their relation. Is what I experience as urban flux, mobility and vibrancy always also the cause of dislocation for someone else?  Can there be movement without displacement? 

I’ve spent much more time thinking about the relationship between art and dislocation in cities of the 20th century than the 21st.  At the risk of perpetrating my own historical displacement of this year’s theme, I’d like to consider a series of sixty paintings Jacob Lawrence finished in 1941 to explore the notion dislocation. 

You can see the odd numbered panels in this Flash experience from the Phillips Collection:

http://www.phillipscollection.org/migration_series/flash/experience.cfm

and should be able to access the even numbers from Lawrence’s MoMA record:

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3418

Entitled The Migration of the Negro, Lawrence’s paintings envisioned the early twentieth-century movement of more than a million and a half African Americans from the rural South to northern industrial centers. Early panels chronicle the difficulties faced by blacks in the South, from boll weevils to lynchings. Middle panels illustrate the opportunities found in northern cities, but also show improved housing becoming increasingly scarce and dilapidated. Bombs explode from the homes of migrants who try to move to new parts of the city.  Lawrence suggests the ways violence limited class and racial mobility in the urban North as it had in the South. Ultimately Lawrence envisions the results of the Great Migration as mixed; his migrants contract tuberculosis in the crowded city, but also exercise the right to vote. 

I’m thinking of Lawrence because his abstracted forms and narrative show African Americans dislocated from the South by white racism and the failure of Reconstruction, but that’s only half of a story that also includes active agency.  African Americans moved themselves North to new economic, political, and cultural opportunities and challenges. Lawrence dramatizes the complex links between dislocation and mobility in this early twentieth-century context.   

Artists probably can’t take too much “credit” for gentrification or control it (Lawrence couldn’t even keep his panels together). But, I wonder if it is possible for art use its irrationality to hold two views. Can we preserve the utopian promise of urban mobility even as we critique the dislocation caused by that movement?