Urban Arts

 
What are the urban arts, beyond the formal institutions of the culture industry? What types of activities would we include in that concept? We aim, here, to look beyond official, overtly funded artistic initiatives which are often a tool in intentional gentrification efforts. Instead, we are looking for more spontaneous, organic forms of creative expression. In official initiatives, the culture industry places its mark on the urban space, for instance in the construction of arts venues to draw suburbanites into the city, or the repurposing of historical structures into lifestyle or entertainment venues. While overt arts programs aim to foster the arts, they are also intended to reconfigure the city as a site of arts consumerism as an engine of economic growth. The commodification of creative expression overlooks the many ways in which city residents create their own aesthetic experiences and the social communities that bind these experiences together. Instead, can we develop a concept of the urban arts that focuses more on local, spontaneous, and social forms of creative expression? We might include, here, the narrative practices of street-corner culture, sidewalk boom box parties, the rhythms and choreography of people moving down city streets, and performative, embodied expression in dance clubs, movie theaters, parks, train stations, and other venues of sociability. We would also explore how the urban arts could be a means to take possession of the urban space, as a tactical form of self-assertion; and, as such, what value do we place on spontaneous, organic urban arts versus formal initiatives funded by state or city funds, for instance between graffiti versus officially supported murals painted on historic storefronts?

Mapping the Unmappable

In The City Lost and Found, Greg Foster-Rice explores how the Master Plans of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles changed in the second half of the 1960s, from an earlier model that focused exclusively on demographic data and technical infrastructure questions, to a later emphasis on quality-of-life issues. The Master Plan of New York, in particular, tried to highlight the city as it existed, rather than projecting an idealized vision of the city as it should be (i.e. what it would become once the plan was put into place). Even with this new emphasis, the purportedly more authentic experience of the city was captured only through photographic fragments. The serial but disconnected nature of the photographs implied that they were objective points of data, appropriate to the genre of a technocratic manual. In reality, they presented a highly choreographed vision of the city: if the images told any story at all, it was the story of the photographers who curated these arbitrary fragments into a simulacrum of ‘real’ everyday urban life. In this context, we ask the question: how can we convey historical, affective, and sensory experiences of the city in visible form on a map? In what ways could we move beyond the top-down, god’s-eye view privileged by city-planners and politicians, and instead represent the richer messier, more human experience on the ground? What kinds of aesthetic tools can we use to go beyond the illusory reality of photography, to capture a more ‘suggestive’ representation of experience?

Amplifying Voices

From the standpoint of reception history, we aim to amplify the voices of subaltern groups who do not have access to printed publications such as newspapers or memoirs to tell their story. Ego-documents and oral histories provide one method of amplifying these voices, but with the caveat that such sources are highly selective and often based on the happenstance of how the voices were recorded. Other techniques include teasing out testimonies from incidental sources, for instance court depositions in which common assumptions or viewpoints are expressed in the margins, or focusing on praxis over overt discourse: examining the circulation of material culture mobility patterns, sociability venues, visual culture, the appropriation of the built environment, to  name a few examples. What innovative techniques can we use to amplify the voices of the dispossessed in the city?

Decentering Vision

Urban thresholds are about access and affect. They are created through intangible sensory boundaries that insinuate who gets to go where and when, and with what kinds of expressive behavior. Even though the physical space of a city may ostensibly be open to everyone moving  within it, sensory and affective thresholds enable access for some pedestrians and not for others, creating insiders and outsiders, inclusion and exclusion. Vision is a powerful tool in creating urban thresholds, in particular the vision of the city planner, who lays out prescribed uses of the urban space, and the surveillance practiced by authorities and residents to enforce those norms. But urban thresholds also rely on sonic, kinetic, haptic, and olfactory cues, which feed into affective responses. Moving beyond the emphasis on visibility as a strategy of control, we ask how the embodied process of moving through an urban space creates a sense of entitlement to, or exclusion from, the full and free use of the city? What kinds of examples of urban thresholds can we identify, historically or today, in Newark, for instance in the four streets of the Grid?

City as Labyrinth

In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch developed a schematic classification of urban elements that make a city legible. He also implied, as a corollary, that legibility is synonymous with a ‘pleasing’ aesthetic atmosphere. The drive for legibility and its normative aesthetic vision both rely, though, on the exclusion of elements that disturb the planner’s sense of balance, for instance ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ in Lynch’s case. The construction of a desired atmosphere thus implicitly requires the control of both the aesthetics of the built environment and the aesthetics of the residents’ behavior. Behavior that is confusing or disturbing – in every sense of the term – is regarded as illegible. What seems like illegibility to the dominant strata may be legible to those ‘below’ and on the margins, though, as they inhabit these illegible spaces and these behaviors. Rather than illegible, such spaces and behaviors are anti-legible, carrying equal weight and right as the dominant strains of legibility. Can acts of anti-legibility be regarded as creative forms of endurance and persistence? Is there a danger of heroicizing anti-legibility as outright resistance and thus romanticizing the conditions of structural domination that create the necessity for survival strategies in the first place?