Uncontained: The art and politics of reconfiguring urban space

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore (a vocabulary for) the potential effects of urban artistic interventions on the configuration of city space. It engages with a particular art project that took place in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2000. Through juxtaposing descriptions of the particular time space of the intervention with reflections on how the ensuing excess of spatial trajectories disrupts urban orders, I seek to illustrate the potential of art to reorganise what is visible and expressible, and ponder the question whether such ‘provocations in situ (…)’ can ‘recompose political spaces, or if they must be content to parody them’ (Rancière). Constructed as a dialogue between empirical narratives and conceptual reflections, the form and the style of this paper attempt to embrace the ambiguity and openness unleashed by the performance/installation in question and ‘to stay within the compass of [its] force and imagination’ (Taussig). Resisting interpretative closure and exacerbating spatial multiplicity, or so I will try to show, constitutes a powerful effect of politically engaged urban art.

Keywords:

• city space
• organisation
• political art
• aesthetics
• Schlingensief
• Rancière

Notes

1. For a book‐length protocol of the project, see Lilienthal and Philipp (2000); for a film documentary, see Poet (2005). All translations are mine.

2. The Volksbühne, housed in a massive building in the former eastern part of Berlin, emerged from the post‐unification turmoil as a controversial, experimental and therefore quite unique institution in the German theatre world (Guillet de Monthoux 2004; Beyes 2006; Beyes and Steyaert 2006).

3. The project’s manifold angles, in other words, serve as a warning to attempts to tie it down to a simple logic of effect. As the writer Jelinek has commented after the event, she would still twist her mind about how to be able to describe what has happened (2000, 163).

4. This is not a new strategy, of course. For example, a host of former East European artistic endeavours – where ‘explicit consent’ was a powerful way of foregoing state censorship and persecution while demonstrating an authoritarian regime’s working – engaged with this kind of artistic practice (see Arns and Sasse 2005). For a striking example, see Monroe’s book on the Slovenian art collective NSK/Laibach (2005).

5. Schlingensief originally wanted to call his intervention ‘First European Concentration Week’ but these connotations proved to be too much for the Festwochen‐organisers.

6. According to Sloterdijk, a society ‘hangs together’ through affective registers. Therefore, societies can be interpreted as large sculptures formed through affective material, and the Schlingensief intervention would have played a kind of social parlour game with ‘dark’ social affects – a game, however, that would be played all the time anyway (Sloterdijk 2000, 226–7).

7. The ‘police’ designates a certain way of ‘cutting‐up’ the world, of regulating how to perceive it, a systematic production of the given, a definition of how to take part. It is a system of circulation which covers all kinds of channels in the social body such as the administrative organisms of the state and the managerial ones of the market (Rancière 2002, 33 et seqq.).

8. Rancière’s somewhat shifting treatment of politics has attracted criticism: While positing a rather strict opposition between an established ‘police’ order and intermittent political acts of destabilisation and reconfiguration in ‘Disagreement’ (…) – a dichotomy that is perhaps debatably simple in itself (Hallward 2006) – his writings on aesthetics and art sometimes convey a blurring of this opposition. In the latter case, ‘Rancière increasingly uses the terms “politics” and “art” to refer to both distributions and redistributions of the sensible order’ (Rockhill 2009, 201, original emphasis). Sticking to the notion of politics proper as laid out in ‘Disagreement’, as I do here, helps to analytically distinguish between political ruptures and potential political effects of art.

9. In an interview, Schlingensief has claimed that calling the inmates actors would have been a kind of protection, since it would have conferred a certain ‘value’ onto them – a value that would not be granted to immigrants in our society (Kluge 2000, 139).