The Urban Canvas
Los Angeles Utopias: Escape to LA
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Pederson Converse
This paper begins with a revised social history of Los Angeles focused on its original foundation by Spanish, Mexican, Native American, Mestizo, and African pobladores in the 17th century. Images and representations of the city will be analyzed via film and literature, with particular attention paid to the underrepresented neighborhoods that exist beyond the scope of white Los Angeles proscribed by Reyner Banham and other urban theorists throughout the 20th century. The real Los Angeles can be seen clearly through the imaginary territory of science fiction, a literary and cinematic genre that is directed towards the future, but tells us about the past. Considered simultaneously, the doubled direction of this genre can tell us much about the present and also offer a radical solution to the issues of gentrification and displacement facing artists and minority communities in Los Angeles and other cities. Through the theoretical application of conceptual architecture and early modern ideas of North African pirate republics to the dreamland of the movies, the future city of Los Angeles will be proposed as a new Utopia to be populated by voluntary prisoners. Serving as the foundation of a new Eden, it would be a place of salvation and redemption for all, offering the promise of the seizure and equitable redistribution of property and capital, radical equality in terms of individual rights, the ability to achieve sovereignty in negotiations with governments of nation/states, and absolute democracy in terms of leadership and social relations.
Cutting Up the City: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Urban Commons
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeffrey Colgan, Jeffrey Escoffier
The traditional narrative of 20th Century New York urban living has often concerned itself with the antipodal philosophies of urban planner Robert Moses and critic Jane Jacobs. This binary conception of American urban life contrasted Moses’ radical projects to remake NYC to suit the automobile with Jacobs’ admonishments that quality of life required small, organic neighborhoods of diverse inhabitants and independent businesses. These philosophies, however, were no longer applicable in 1970s NYC. In a new city characterized by crisis, ruins, and abandonment, a fundamentally new way of conceiving of the urban realm was required. The artist, activist, and ‘un-builder’ Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the first to explore and embody an alternative—and he remains a representative figure of the unique culturo-political ferment of 1970s NYC. This paper argues that Matta-Clark’s art, actions, and writings express his vision of the de-industrializing metropolis as a city of possibility and that his approach to the urban realm rejected a clean image of historical continuity in favor of the radical discontinuity of times of disaster. We claim that he accepted the city as it was, presently, for him—dirty, contested, and struggling—and devised strategies for reclaiming dignity amidst a ruinous landscape. A key cultural instigator and advocate for a particular type of urban commons, Matta-Clark was more than an artist and activist; he was, in his unique manner, both an urban planner and urban philosopher—his work embodying Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the ideal city as the “perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants.”
Cultural Infrastructure and Labour in the City: Sustaining Art under Precarity and Urban Transformation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Rowe
Many cities around the world, especially those of metropolitan scale, are undergoing transformation. The reclamation and redevelopment of de-industrialised inner-city spaces is creating pressing problems for arts and cultural practitioners. These producers and exhibitors of diverse cultural forms were once able to operate, albeit precariously, in relatively inexpensive working and living spaces in transitional urban zones. The combined impact of property booms and gentrification has been to displace many of them, while its ripple effect is being felt across suburban and even peri-urban creative contexts. These disturbances in the urban cultural ecology affect mutually supportive communities of practice who tend to live precariously but are deeply committed to their cultural and social communities. This paper draws on survey and interview research for the Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP 130100253) Recalibrating Culture: Production, Consumption, Policy, which is focused on the organisation of cultural practices and lives in Greater Western Sydney, Australia. It also considers and analyses some relevant findings of three commissioned research projects: Mapping Cultural Venues and Infrastructure in the City of Sydney Local Government Area and Planning Cultural Creation and Production in Sydney: A Venues and Infrastructure Needs Analysis (Sydney City Council), and Cultural Creation and Production in the Inner West LGA: A Case-study Needs Analysis (Inner West Council). This research directly addresses questions concerning the arts in social, political, and community life, emphasising the key role of cultural policy and planning in sustaining communities of arts and cultural practice that are confronted by late-capitalist urban economics.
