Abstract
This special issue of Visual Resources examines the ongoing debates about art and urban imaginary by connecting the city with its past and its present. Cities are constantly envisioned throughout history in diverse ways. In the global era, the reimagining of the city involves a process where art and the urban imaginary are recognized as far more mutually constitutive than ever. The globalizing cities necessitate the urban imaginary to restructure its transnational, historical, and cultural conditioning in terms of mapping the global hierarchy. Surely reimagining the city as a multilayered process is not simply a branding strategy. Not only are the cities structured in different forms of representation and imaginaries they are also themselves spaces of imagination and creativity. Hence urban imaginary and art are interwoven in countless ways in the city to reveal or conceal multiple stories. The five essays collected here propose new interpretations on the dynamic ways of producing urban representation interlaced with the contemporary art world, the urban visual culture, as well as its institutions, such as museums, biennials, exhibitions, and cultural events.
Andreas Huyssen significantly observed that an urban imaginary marked first and foremost the ways city dwellers imagine their own city as the place of everyday life.Footnote1 He proposed that the imaginary constructions of the urban was part of any city's reality rather than being only figments of imagination, informing what we think of a city, how we perceive it, and the ways we act in it. Nonetheless the urban is increasingly a significant issue after the 1970s. David Harvey wrote about the experience of space and time in the modern and late modern (sometimes labeled as postmodern) conditions, listing spatial organization and movement as important aspects of modernism having its greatest impact in terms of cultural change on the human experience of space and time.Footnote2 Harvey supposed that modernity was best experienced in the city, where it created geographically uneven development through simultaneous tendencies toward homogenization, fragmentation, and hierarchization. In her inspiring 1996 essay, Setha Low approached the city not as an institution—to be identified through population density, unique physical qualities or appearance, and styles of social interaction—but rather as a process attending to the social relations, symbols, and political economies that are manifest in the city.Footnote3 In her writings, the city is a necessary part of understanding the changing postindustrial, advanced capitalist, postmodern moment in which we live. Edward Soja goes further and places the city at the center of every kind of production,Footnote4 referring to space beyond the binary opposition of the real and the imaginary, and as both emphasizing the cultural force of the urban environment and its role in shaping everyday experiences.Footnote5 At this point, we think that art and institutions take on an increasing relevance in expressing our lived-in moments, as well as diverting our attention to the political and symbolic economies that contribute to the ways that the dwellers imagine their own cities. For that matter, we suggest a focus on the artistic manifestations of urban lives and everyday practices. We are interested specifically in the role taken by artistic production and its institutions, and their multifaceted ways of contributing to the processes of imagining the urban.
In particular, the global age marks the cultural turn, where both art and its world are progressively taking a role in understanding the imaginary correlations on the city. With the dematerialization and the globalization of the economic system, the city had to invent a new system of distinction—the global city had to create an image and brand itself in a way that would appeal to a fiercely competitive economy, to find a place in the new conditions of globalization. Today, branding the city through art connects its financial activity, tourism, and economic growth, where art and its institutions became components in (re)producing the political, economic, and symbolic economy of cities. Thus, it is possible to say that gradually museums, art biennales, art fairs, and even sometimes the artworks have replaced factories as the new standardized sources for creating the images of the city. Having said that, we think that the urban imaginary processes are not simply formed at an economic or political level; they are also products of resistant desires and imaginaries.Footnote6 We rely on art for its possibility of imagining the city in other ways. We take artistic production as a resource for understanding the daily experience of those who live in the urban environment, as well as its documentation, with the ways it makes the contestations within the dominant imaginaries visible. Hence we are interested in both the cultural policy of globalizing the city through art and its institutions, and the cultural politics of art and the creativity problematizing and revealing the contestations in this hard process of urbanizing under the conditions of globalization. Therefore, art remains a highly effective resource to understand and evaluate the urban as a process.
However, this process is twofold with simultaneous mingling. Art shapes the urban, but the global conditioning of the city, with its new set of relationships, affects art practice and the art world as well. In the global era, cities, real or imagined, or both, not only become a crucible for art, but the city intrinsically also becomes an act of aesthetics. In this regard, we are inspired by the concept of urban imaginary as it emphasizes specifically the imaginary as one fundamental aspect of the urban experience, and as a means to reveal the new dynamics of the art world and its practices.
In 2013, we cochaired a session on the urban imaginary and the cities at the annual College Art Association Conference in New York City. Our aim was to discuss the current situation of art production and its institutions in the ways they contributed to the different perceptions of the city as well as the ways to live and act in it. We were observing that the city was increasingly the place for any kind of art production. We thought that approaching the city and art from various perspectives, including a variety of cities, especially the ones which were discussed less, would contribute to the recent discussions in understanding the state of art and institutions. We were interested in discussing how art, art industry, and the urban imaginary informed each other.
The papers in this special issue of Visual Resources were selected as they examine cities as sites of imagination, focusing in particular upon the interplay between art and the formation of global and local imaginaries, documenting the contemporary world. Case studies from Shanghai to Liverpool, from Tokyo to Istanbul, exemplify various local dynamics and conflicts of becoming a global city. By focusing on the interpretations of visual forms within the urban imaginary, the articles center the city as a discursive field of today's visual experience. The articles in this issue thus tell different stories about urban imaginaries and art and the art world itself written by authors from a variety of backgrounds, such as art history, literary studies, and art production.
In fulfilling this goal, Gabriel Gee, focuses on the role played by artistic practices in the alternative constructions and imaginations of transindustrial cities of Britain. He discusses the city as interstitial space where global trends and reactions to it are affecting both daily experiences and the space of action for aesthetics. In his paper, Gee pursues the visual language of the new urban condition of Britain, where artistic practice becomes a privileged locus of aesthetic intervention to create an alternate urban order.
We, as editors, preferred to focus on the tensions of the city we live in: Istanbul. In our paper, we interpret the challenge of Turkey's largest city with globalization trends through the spectacular expansion of the art world. This is parallel with the immense reconditioning of the city that creates contestation zones in which artistic practices have emerged as reactions, exposing ways of surviving in the city. In a city where issues, such as tourism, consumerism, public space, democracy, and identities are tightly interwoven, we suggest that the evolution of the art world in Istanbul depends on the new strategies adopted for the new image of Istanbul, while at the same time producing multiple urban imaginaries that make the contestations within this process visible.
Alexander Lamazares presents similar issues of another globalizing city, São Paulo. He discusses the uses of urban space in the context of globalizing urban life in one of Brazil's major cities and the ways street art contributed to the transformation of urban space into a network of diverse urban dwellers. As the streets retexture the urban imaginary as public spaces of leisure, it also transforms the ways street art is performed. From pichação to Vídeo Guerrilha, while street art reflects the urban dynamics in the city's urban landscapes, it also becomes a document of contemporary visual language of a constant tension between opposite realms: global–local, private–public, and the individual–collective.
Similarly, Kathryn Kramer focuses on the constant relationship between artistic production and streets of the city, dwelling upon the revival of nineteenth-century flâneurie. Kramer points out that the twenty-first-century artists have embraced the old walking practice and its visual language to understand and document the globalizing and urbanizing century. Focusing on Shanghai, she states that flâneurie is quickly absorbed by creative industry clusters in Shanghai's globalization project, while at the same time creating a new visual language for contemporary conditions, establishing a multisensory connectivity among world cities.
As an artist, Bettina Lockemann creates the sources of visual documentation of urban imaginary of Japanese cities through her photography. The challenge of Japanese cities in the globalizing projects becomes the source for Lockemann in her photographic project Contact Zone. Similar to Kramer's flâneurie, Lockemann documents the new urban fabric catching the ephemeral, sensorial, and emotional affect. Representing an alternative image of the Japanese city as a geographical space of cultural encounter, the city becomes her site of imagination while she adds new textures to Japanese urban imaginaries as a contemporary artist.
Observable in this collection of essays are a variety of approaches in understanding and defining the city, such as the “globalizing,” “global,” “world,” “interstitial,” and “contestation zone,” all of which confirm the plurality of the perspectives and the concepts pronounced in recent years when discussing the city. Categories, such as “western” and “non-western,” “industrial” and “postindustrial,” “global” and “globalizing,” or “historical” and “new,” point out the particular rather than the universal while at the same time focusing on the interplay between the globalized urbanization and the formation of urban imaginaries, relevant to processes structuring the sociospatial transformation in the contemporary world. This plurality of approaches also reveals that stability has never been reached in the globalizing processes, which affects the world beyond the east and the west, north and the south; the effort in defining and redefining today's experience is continuous.
In fact, this movement in defining the city seems to be the only constant, which becomes very apparent to us by focusing on art. Certainly the hosting of mega-events, the spread of urban spectaculars, and the festivalization of the art world have become inevitable issues for the urban imaginary discussion in the contemporary world. However, case studies in the articles point to ruptures in the “homogenized” global culture, generating intense conflicts and contestations, which become apparent through the diversity of visual representations and artistic practices. The dynamics of the global city and the various imaginaries provide the basis for a plurality of art worlds that coexist and compete in order to be part of the mapping of new art regions with transnational character. Within this multiplicity, the notion of urban imaginary seems to be remaining as a constant, providing a common language between diverse art worlds and the intrinsic interplay between urban imaginary and art creating a common visual lexicon, which may serve to translate the new condition of art. At the same time, the multilayered dynamics between urban imaginary, art, and the city point to the crisis in art history, which still is based on the Eurocentric model of evolutionary, hierarchical, and categorical writing. By analyzing the variety of ways in which artists imagine their city, we can identify the cracks and biases in the dominant urban imaginaries. Accordingly, diverse urban imaginaries envisioned by artists become a valuable agent to analyze contemporary artistic practices and to reveal the dynamics of the current art world, e.g., ways of production, dissemination, documentation, museumification, and historicization.
Additional information
AYŞE N. EREK is an art historian and an assistant professor at Yeditepe University, History Department, in Istanbul, Turkey. She recently conducted her post-doctoral research at the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies of Humboldt University in Berlin and was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology at the same university. Her research project “City Between History and Change: Reinventing the City through Visual Representation” focuses on the representations of space and the city in contemporary artistic production and exhibition practices, under the current regimes of culture and politics in Istanbul and Berlin. She has written extensively on contemporary art and urban visual culture and has been a member of the editorial board of the quarterly Istanbul, a journal on urban transformation, architecture, and art in Istanbul. Her publications and reviews include “Signs Taken in Wonder: Searching for Contemporary Istanbul” in The Journal of Architecture (2014) and “Güncel Sanatta Kentsel Mekân: Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Banu Cennetoğlu ve Sarkis'in İşleri Üzerinden Bir Değerlendirme” [Urban Space in Contemporary Arts: An Evaluation through the works of Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Banu Cennetoğlu, and Sarkis], in Sanat Yazıları (2012).
AYŞE H. KÖKSAL is an art historian and an assistant professor in the Industrial Design Department at Özyegin University in Istanbul, Turkey. She held a Fulbright Fellowship as a visiting researcher at the Department of Art History,Tufts University (near Boston, Massachusetts) and she was a visiting scholar at the Deparment of Art History, Technische Universität Berlin. Her forthcoming book is an inquiry on the sociocultural history of the first modern art museum of Turkey and its relations with the art world in the long durée. Her recent publications include “Museums as a Transnational Space for National Identities,” in The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, edited by Andrea Meyer and Benedicte Savoy (2013) and “National Art Museums and the Modernization of Turkey,” in National Museums: New Studies From Around The World, edited by Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Bugge Amundsen, et al. (2011).
Notes
1 Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.
2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
3 Setha Low, “The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 383–409, at 384.
4 Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice: Globalization and Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
5 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publications, 1996), 11.
6 Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, “Retext(ur)ing the city,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 5, no. 3 (2001): 350–62.