Re: [-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice

Kevin Hamilton <kham@uiuc.edu> · Sun, 9 Sep 2007 22:12:43 -0500

Yep, and that's a big part of why the notion of the "Intervention"  
deserves some scrutiny -
If I might answer my own question here a bit, I would offer that Art  
as a critical platform is of little to no use for the sorts of  
practices I might look at in relation to CSP. Art's critical  
faculties are, as I think you put it here Saul, too often in service  
of self-perpetuation.
Few of the projects I've looked at as part of my engagement with this  
thread's topic would gain much from being identified as Art. But  
there are some ways in which the category and the practices of Art  
have been helpful.
By some accounts, art has been useful to some as a means to achieving  
funding or institutional legitimation, which may then be used for a  
variety of ends. Small as arts funding may be, for example, art's  
identified role within the "creative city" may allow for funding of  
projects that might be otherwise quickly identified as counter to the  
Plans. That may not be a sustainable strategy, but it seems to work  
for a little while.
I would offer one other way in which Art has been useful to some of  
the projects we've looked at in our group here at Illinois. Art's  
expected pre-occupation with the sensory and the phenomenal has made  
it easier to include examination of bodily experience as part of  
action into specific places and spaces.
In a recent exchange here at Illinois, my colleague Ryan Griffis was  
asked about where the Art was in his tours of urban parking  
infrastructure. Ryan's response was to point to his examination of  
the aesthetics of tourism, which in his work we get to experience  
first-hand. But I would also point to the distinctiveness of Ryan's  
work as spatial, and differently sensory, compared to a solely  
textual examination of the same topic. Last Fall, on a van tour of  
Brooklyn's parking infrastructure, we got to experience firsthand the  
distance (by car) from the convenient, privately-owned parking near  
BAM to New York's only city-owned parking structure, way the way out  
on the fringes. Our tour group's experience of a specific structural  
condition - that of the management of auto-mobility by city planners  
- was mediated by a specific collection of rain, noise, waiting time  
in traffic, and visual progression through changes in  the windshield- 
view. We left with the phenomenon written into our senses and bodies,  
as well as into our textual brains (via an accompanying audio tour,  
and Ryan's ample knowledge base on the subject.)
[For more see http://temporarytraveloffice.net/hollywood/brooklyn.html]
Though I won't deny the material, sensory qualities of textual  
production and reception, I would argue that Ryan's multi-sensory  
engagement with his subject left us with a distinctively and  
diversely sensible encounter with a specific political condition.  
From talking to my colleagues in the Humanities, this is something  
that is easier to do when the word "Art" is anywhere near one's  
practice. It is also something for which artists are trained.
Kevin
On Sep 9, 2007, at 4:10 PM, saul ostrow wrote:
Seemingly at this point in history art is hardwired to function as  
an  emergent subject, that maintains and reforms itself through  a  
recursive critical application of  its own values system.  It is by  
means of this process its practices reach a specific  point of  
qualitative change - consequently, it is a practice that is self- 
reflexively committed to the revision, reformation or demise of its  
its own objective's in accord with the social, economic and  
cultural environment. As such it, as a system rather than its  
products is exemplary.
On Sep 9, 2007, at 4:38 PM, Kevin Hamilton wrote:
3) What about Art has been, or continues to be, useful to  
"Critical Spatial Practitioners"?

saul ostrow
Chair, Environmental Chairs Council
Chair, Visual Arts and Technologies
Head, Sculpture
sostrow@gate.cia.edu
EXPECT EVERYTHING / FEAR NOTHING