In Press, Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action
By Leah Modigliani
Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action
By Leah Modigliani
ORDER HERE
Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.
This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.
By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades
1. Acting Politically: Counter-revanchist Art in the Public Sphere
2: River Crossing: Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995)
3. The View from the Cell: Santiago Sierra’s Obstruction of a Freeway with a Truck’s Trailer (1998) in the Long Sixties
4. 24 Hour Placemaking: Heather Peak and Ivan Morison's I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same (2006) and Journée des Barricades (2008)
5. Reflecting the Commons at the Border of Enclosure: The Mirrored Repertoires of Euromaidan, Greenham Common and #NODAPL
Conclusion: Counter-revanchist Art and the Inauguration of Change
Bibliography
Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.
This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.
By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades
1. Acting Politically: Counter-revanchist Art in the Public Sphere
2: River Crossing: Lin Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995)
3. The View from the Cell: Santiago Sierra’s Obstruction of a Freeway with a Truck’s Trailer (1998) in the Long Sixties
4. 24 Hour Placemaking: Heather Peak and Ivan Morison's I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same (2006) and Journée des Barricades (2008)
5. Reflecting the Commons at the Border of Enclosure: The Mirrored Repertoires of Euromaidan, Greenham Common and #NODAPL
Conclusion: Counter-revanchist Art and the Inauguration of Change
Bibliography
Leah Modigliani, “Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs, History, and Re-enactment,” Mapping Meaning, the Journal 3 (Fall, 2019): 86-99. In the special issue "Archives and Photography," guest edited by Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Trudi Lynn Smith.
Click here to download or print a copy
Click here to download or print a copy
Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism
Manchester University Press
ISBN 978-1-5261-0119-8
Order Here
This analysis of the origins of the Vancouver School of Photo Conceptualism in the late 1960s until its development as an international success in the 1990s, offers an innovative interpretation of avant-garde practice as a discursive manifestation of settler colonialism that establishes and replicates white masculine power amongst competing social bodies in peripheral locations, thus unsettling the “spacelessness” associated with global contemporary art. Manchester University Press
Reviews:
'This scrutiny of the shibboleths supporting "Vancouver photo-conceptualism", more commonly reiterated than scrutinised, is telling. Modigliani opens up the possibility of new thinking rather than closing it down. For this reason, and because of her confident command of materials and sources, the book will reach the international audience avid for writing about the Vancouver School, its protagonists, photo-conceptualism, conceptual art of the late '60s, feminist deconstruction, regionalism v. internationalism and more.'
Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, The University of British Columbia
Christine Conley, "Leah Modigliani Engendering an Avant-Garde: The Unsettled Landscapes of Vancouver Photo-Conceptualism," RACAR 44, no. 1 (2019)
Spectre of the Future Accused, 2017
“Sleeping on a Volcano,” in ed. Megan Whitmarsh, special edition “Women on the Edge of Time,” Pastelegram no. 6 (Fall 2016).
Only a Foolish Opportunist Can Deny the Dark Realities of the Moment: A Presidential Address, 2016.
"The Snake and the Falcon," for Anarchist Studies 23,no. 2 (Autumn, 2015):
"Michael Snow's Visual Trickery," Prefix Photo 30 (Fall/Winter, 2014).
“The Thin Crust of the World: Patte Loper’s Dismantled Landscapes,” (Ithaca College: Handwerker Gallery, 2014).
"The Invisible Giant in the Room: Jeff Wall's Pictures of Women," Prefix Photo 28 (Fall/Winter 2013): 70-85.
“Letter to the Editor,” cmagazine 120 (Fall 2013): 8-9.
"The Vancouver Occupations of 1971," cmagazine 115 (Fall, 2012): 10-18.
Book review: Contemporary Art in North America, Black Dog Publishing, 2011. In Prefix Photo 26 (Fall-Winter, 2012).
"Collaborating on Conceptual Art: An Aesthetics of the Impossible," cmagazine 110 (Summer, 2011): 4-8.
Book review: Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices, ed. Marisa Jahn, YYZ Books, 2010. In Prefix Photo 23 (Spring-Summer 2011).
"Tandem Developments: The Historical Avant-Garde and Critiques of Capitalism," 2008 (unpublished).
"Painting Improved Breeds in the Age of Enlargement," 2008 (unpublished)
"Shape Shifting: The Changing Objects of Modernism and its Aftermath," Art Criticism 22, No. 2 (2007): 69-8
"Louis Vuitton and the Luxury Market After the End of Art," Art Criticism 22, No. 1 (2007): 91-104.
"Marketing the Mission: Commodifying San Francisco's Art, the 'Mission School,' and the Problem of Regionalism," www.stretcher.org, 2004.
Contemporary Art Reviews
Copyright 2020 Leah Modigliani. No reproduction allowed without permission.