Martha Rosler

Culture Class:Art, Creativity,Urbanism, PartIII

! Continued from “Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part II: Creativity and Its Discontents”in issue 23 and “Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I: Art and Urbanism” in issue 21.

PART THREE: IN THE SERVICE OFEXPERIENCE(S)

1. Jungle into GardenIn the not-so-distant New York past, tenementroofs, and even those of lower-middle-classapartment buildings – ones without doormen,say – were where women went with theirwashing and their children, in good or justtolerable weather, to hang the damp laundry onthe line, thus joining a larger community ofwomen in performing the necessary and normal,good and useful, labor of reproduction andmaintenance of family life. (The clothesthemselves, and the hanging of the laundry, weresignals easily interpretable by other women as towealth, status, moral character, and even maritalharmony.) For men, many an apartment roof heldthe lofts of racing pigeons, the raising of which isan intergenerational hobby. Before airconditioning, you went to the roof for solitude,and for some prized “fresh air,” and if you werelucky you could catch sight of the nearest bodyof water. The roofs of loft buildings, of course,served no familial functions. Roofs with gardenswere pleasant idylls for luxury penthousespaces, absent of the gloss of use value attachedto urban farming or green roofs.

Sketch of the proposed new Whitney Museum at the High Lineterminus, in the gallery district of Chelsea, New York City.

!!!!!!!!!!The new, and newly relaxed, attitude to the(apparently) natural world in New York – incontradistinction to a city like Helsinki, wherewildness is not appreciated1 – is reflected in theresurrection of the city’s High Line, a disusedelevated industrial rail line in lower Manhattan’sfar-west former industrial zone.2 Its salvage and

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John Sloan, Sun and Wind on the Roof, 1915. Oil on canvas.

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Camilo José Vergara, Detroit Skyline, View South Along Park Avenue, 1989.

conversion into a Chelsea park, with its(re)importation of frank wild(er)ness into the city,began as a quixotic effort by a couple ofarchitects but soon became a patrician project,and then a municipal one.3 It marks a furtherstep in the long transformation of urbanwaterfronts, formerly the filthy and periloushaunts of poor, often transient and foreign-born,workers servicing the ports into recreational andresidential zones beckoning the mostly youngand decidedly upper middle class. The water’sedge, which once figured as the dangerous dividebetween this-world and underworld, betweensafety and the unknown, now promisespleasurable adventures in travel or beach-going. !!!!!!!!!!In another register, the city has now decidedto embrace neighborhood community gardens,especially in places where the working class hasbeen effectively priced out, a contrast to the1990s when hard-line suburbanite mayor RudyGiuliani tried to destroy many of these oases(which he considered “socialistic”), oftenpainstakingly reclaimed from trash-strewnwastelands that had fallen off the city’s tax rollsand into public receivership, by selling off theplots to developers at bargain rates. The city nowalso permits the formerly banned keeping ofchickens (but never roosters) and bees anywhere

in the city.4 In my neighborhood, the still-slightly-gritty-but-on-the-way-to-becoming-hipsterland Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, someenterprising young women have started a well-publicized commercial rooftop “farm.”5 Otherincipient hipster neighborhoods are poised tocopy. Please try not to think of Marie Antoinette’sPetite Hameau, her little farm on the grounds ofVersailles, for creatives are not aristocrats, andpoor people too are finally allowed to keep suchanimals and grow cash mini-crops.

!!!!!!!!!!Though they may not be aristocrats,accustomed to hereditary rank and privilege,creatives belong to the first generation to have

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grown up within an almost entirely suburbanizedAmerica.6 US political scientist J. Eric Oliver, inDemocracy in Suburbia, spells out the linksbetween the suburban retreat to “private life”and the removal of conflict and competition overresources among urban groups:

When municipal zoning authority and otheradvantages of smaller size are used tocreate pockets of economic homogeneityand affluence, the civic benefits of smallersize are undermined. The racial bifurcationof cities and suburbs also has civic costs,partly through concentrating the problemsof urban areas in racially mixed settings. Bytaking much of the competition forresources and much of the political conflictthat naturally exists among members of aninterdependent metropolitan communityand separating them with municipalboundaries, suburbanization alsoeliminates many of the incentives that drawcitizens into the public realm.7

Thus we should read the “becoming creative” ofthe post-industrial urban core as the formationof a homogenous space drained of the incentivesfor political engagement. Philosopher andpolitical scientist Seyla Benhabib hascharacterized, and criticized, Hannah Arendt forthe limitations in considering the public in termsof agonistic and associational spheres. Theformer, Benhabib maintains, is out of step withthe “sociological reality of modernity, as well aswith modern political struggles for justice,”through its preference for theatricality, forpolitics as action undertaken at least partiallyfor its own sake and distinct from considerationsof instrumental reason. Even without takingsides, it is possible to read the decline of bothmodels of politics, of association and agonism, inthe new “creative sphere” of the upper-middle-class urban elite. The public stage of civic actionis increasingly coterminous with the preferencesof a specific class, preventing both associationand agonism – at least to the extent that eitherof those would be worthy of the term “politics.” Itis in this sense that we must consider thenewfound municipal enthusiasm for parks andpark-like experiences, and the sanctioning of“neo-hippie” chicken-keeping and urban androoftop farming, along with many of theexamples to follow, as bound up with the shift inthe class composition of the urban fabric.!!!!!!!!!!The greenmarkets sited around New YorkCity, the bicycle lanes, and the outdoor patiosbuilt in the middle of busy streets, express theconviction that the city is no longer a concretejungle but a cultivated garden enclosing a well-managed zoo or kindergarten, in which everyone

and his or her neighbor is placed on display, inthe act of self-creation, whether you choose tolook or not. The gardens, urban and rooftopfarms, water slides, and climbable sculpturesthat have replaced the modernist model of publicart works (which had itself displaced the state-sanctioned monumentalism of previous eras)must be understood as of a piece with theincreasingly suburban character of creative-class politics.

!!!!!!!!!!If we consider the issue in terms of the roleof art sited in public spaces, it would seemindisputable that the “public art” (or “art inpublic”) sector in the US has turned to aservice/experience model. The modernist modelof public art, which relied heavily on what wemight call abstractionist inspirationalism or onarchitectural or social critique, had elicitedincreasing incomprehension and annoyance fromthe wider public; its ship finally foundered withthe removal in 1989 of Richard Serra’s abstract,minimalist, site-specific Tilted Arc (1981),describable perhaps as an artful but rusty wall ofCOR-TEN steel, from its position in front of alower Manhattan federal courthouse.8 Incontrast, The Gates, Christo and Jean Claude’s2005 project for New York’s Central Park,underlined the role of public art as a frame fornarcissistic self-appreciation on the part ofbourgeois park-goers and city fathers, who maysee themselves perambulating through a proudand cohesive body politic. Further, watchingothers pace through The Gates permitted agrandiose self-recognition, in which participantssee each other and acknowledge the (rightful)presence of each on the grand stage with thefigure of Nature hovering o’er.9 This role offorming and framing the New York polis wasalready played by public gardens, like Brooklyn’sProspect Park and Manhattan’s Central Park, inthe nineteenth century; the modern history ofthe walk through a scenic landscape beginsmuch earlier, in the eighteenth century inWestern Europe at least, but the process now

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Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, Wildflowers, projected video loop, Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo, 2009.

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relies more prominently on presenting the civicworld as remade, however ephemerally, by art,and as art – but with that Kodak smile. Creativeadulthood means reimagining ourselves aschildren looking to have fun in our free time; thecity no longer embodies the formal relations ofthe adult polis but is viewed by many as a seriesof overlapping fantasies of safety and adventure,as Sharon Zukin has suggested.10

!!!!!!!!!!The appeal to Nature, to that which appearsas an “outside” to a society organized so thatthere is no outside, is part of the simulacraleffect that attests to the loss of distinctionbetween public and private spheres, and to theatomization of publics into individuals inBrownian motion, often conveniently invisible toone another, or, more properly, no moreconsequent than street furniture (which is whyChristo and Jean Claude’s project was seizedupon as municipally appropriate in allowing,temporarily and symbolically, the polity to comeinto view, pacing in orderly ranks through thecrown-jewel park).11 This is a step beyond theanonymity long remarked on as a simultaneouslyliberatory and alienating effect of city life,theorized by Georg Simmel in “Metropolis andMental Life,” an article of 1903 whoseacceptance came only much later.12 A furthersign of a breakdown in urban codes and ofurban/suburban boundary policing isrepresented by the casualization, eveninfantilization, of middle-class dress within citylimits that has gone hand in hand with thecomputer-creative nerds’ habit, starting in the ITshops and cultivated by management, ofdressing as though they were at the gym, atsummer camp, or on a hike.13 If the world of“nature” is fetishized, you can be sure a versionof the Übermensch is lurking somewhere in thebushes.!!!!!!!!!!As Giorgio Agamben reminds us,

Arendt had already analyzed the processthat brings homo laborans – and with it,biological life as such – gradually to occupythe very center of the political scene ofmodernity. … Arendt attributes thetransformation and decadence of thepolitical realm in modern societies to thisvery primacy of natural life over politicalaction.14

We see this substitution at work in the highlyevolved politics of contemporary consumerconsciousness. The selection of consumerproducts increasingly demands to be takenseriously as a political act, asking us to producea political self-portrait as we feed, clothe, andclean ourselves.!!!!!!!!!!There is also something fundamental about

the relation between gardening and thisemerging biopolitics, between gardening andmetaphors of rootedness and the uncomfortabledisplacements of modernity, the tearing away ofdeep, even unconscious connections tocommunity and place. The urban farmingmovement, a corner of the artisanal fever thatperiodically grips artists’ communities, potentlyexpresses a desire to return to a mythic,prelapsarian Eden of community and stability, ofpreindustrial, premediatic life, without the grit ofurban disconnection but with the authenticity ofGemeinschaft restored. This appealing dream isexpressed in the immortal refrain of JoniMitchell’s song Woodstock of 1969, written abouta historic event which career demands hadprevented her from attending:

We are stardust.We are golden.And we’ve got to get ourselves back to thegarden.

Here the garden is the part of the post-suburbanImaginary that governed the transition of theurban economy from industrial manufacturing toa high-end residential and commercial base. Ifwe can imagine each of the distinctive urbanspaces – industrial, residential, commercial – asmanifesting a certain politics, we canunderstand not only the cultural trends that havefollowed in their wake but also the widercharacterization of neoliberal consumercapitalism as an “experience economy.” !!!!!!!!!!As the vibrancy of interclass contention hasbeen quelled by the damping off of working-class politics, a sanitized version of an industrialurban experience (or some image of one) can bemarketed to the incoming middle class, whohave the means and the willingness to pay forwhat was formerly a set of indigenous strategiesof survival, of a way of life. The rooftop evacuatedby the laundry lines and the pigeon loft becomesan urban farm, trailing clouds of glory.!!!!!!!!!!The new Imaginary of New York City, like somany others’, is no longer a concrete jungle but acultivated garden, a place in which a gardenercontrols the noxious weeds and plants anddirects growth in marvelous and pious ways. LestI be taken for a romantic crank – or just an oldbohemian like Samuel Delany memorializing thedays when Times Square was simply The Deuce –I want to remind the reader that, if nothing else,as a female city-dweller I appreciate thenewfound feeling of probable safety in thestreets, especially after dark; but it is importantto discern (as Delany would wish us to) the termsof this exchange.!!!!!!!!!!

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Image from Paul Elliman & Nicole Macdonald's project on the Detroit Zoo, Future Park I: Teach me to disappear, presented at Casco Office for Art, Design andTheory, Utrecht, 2010.

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2. In the Service of Experiences

George Yúdice cites Jeremy Rifkin’s article from2000, “Age of Access: The New Culture ofHypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-forExperience,” describing the “selling and buyingof human experiences” in “themed cities,common-interest developments, entertainmentdestination centers, shopping malls, globaltourism, fashion, cuisine, professional sportsand games, film, television, virtual world and[other] simulated experiences.”15 Rifkinobserves:

If the industrial era nourished our physicalbeing, the Age of Access feeds our mental,emotional, and spiritual being. Whilecontrolling the exchange of goodscharacterized the age just passing,controlling the exchange of conceptscharacterizes the new age coming. In thetwenty-first century, institutionsincreasingly trade in ideas, and people, inturn, increasingly buy access to those ideasand the physical embodiments in whichthey are contained.16

One effect of this search for meaningful – orauthentic – experience is the highlighting ofauthenticity as nothing more nor less than thecurrency of the experience economy. We shouldnot be surprised to find a business/motivationalbook entitled Authenticity, with the subtitle“What Consumers Really Want.” Written byJoseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, consultantsliving in the small city of Aurora, Ohio, the book isthe successor to their previous book, TheExperience Economy: Work Is Theatre & EveryBusiness a Stage, of 1999.17 These and similarbooks are guides not just to the creation ofspectacles but for rethinking all business activityas gerundive, providing those fantastic, perhapstransformative, experiences we all supposedlyseek, on the Disneyland model. Urbanism itselfbecomes fertile ground for precisely thesetransformations. (Zukin’s Naked City: The Death

and Life of Authentic Urban Places illustrates thisthesis through considering three signal New Yorkneighborhoods.)!!!!!!!!!!The fraying of traditional ties evident in thepreferences and behaviors of the creative classalso points to the tendency to formidentifications based on consumerist, oftenephemeral, choices. Taste in lifestyle choiceswith no political commitment has hollowed outthe meaningfulness of taste – in art, music,furniture, clothing, food, schools,neighborhoods, vacation spots, leisure activities,friends – as a clear-cut indicator of theindividual’s moral worth (of the individual’s“cultivation,” to use an old-fashioned construct,drawn from gardening). (This is one more reasonwhy it is impossible to base a seriouscontemporary aesthetics on those of Kant, forwhom the faculty of taste could not be moreclearly separated from the “possessiveindividualism” that marks contemporaryconsumer choices. Kant, you may recall, in TheCritique of Aesthetic Judgment, developed atripartite system in which taste is clearlydemarcated from both reason and the urge topossess, or the “pornographic.”) Taste nowseems to be a sign of group membership withlittle resonance as a personal choice beyond acertain compass of selecting which token of therequisite type to acquire; perhaps that is whyDavid Brooks (ever a keen observer of tellingdetails while remaining completely incapable ofseeing the big picture), recognized that for thecreative class, choices must be understood asvirtuous. (That individual choices are made onthe basis of preferences already exhibited by agroup is not completely new, since members ofevery group and tribe are instantly identifiablefrom the top of the head to the bottom of thefeet, but the present context seems different,centering more on consumer acuity than onquality.) But virtue is not to be exhibited asvirtuousness but rather as dictated by someexternal force other than religion, such asecological awareness or putative health effects.Public institutions, and even royalty, have tried tobecome one with the people, exhibiting the samesentimentality through the public display ofgrief, joy, and family pride. Websites follow theexample of Facebook, with portrait photos ofeven distinguished professors and publicofficials; smaller art institutions show us theirstaff members (mostly the women) proudlyhugging their offspring or (mostly the men) theirdogs.!!!!!!!!!!In general, art institutions, particularlythose smaller ones that used to form part of thealternative movement, have furthermore marriedthe provision of experiences to the culture ofcelebration by turning up their noses at

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Keith Piacezny, Demolished byNeglect, Detroit, late 1980s.Image: Center for UrbanPhotography.

One of the houses included in the Heidelberg Project, Detroit. Photo DetroitDerek Photography.

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seriousness and critique, as reviewers, if notcritics, have as well.18 We can see the rhetoric,often vividly expressed, of service, on the onehand, and fun experiences, on the other, amongsmaller art institutions and initiatives. I offer afew excerpted examples, mostly from emailannouncements. They span the spectrum ofcontemporary exhibition venues from small,artist-run spaces, to larger, more establishedorganizations to the self-branding of cities.There are several core concepts that provide therhetorical touchstones in these self-descriptions. On the fun side, these range fromcross-fertilization in disparate “creative” user-friendly fields to an array of anti-puritanicalhooks that touch on energetic pleasure in love,dancing, or whatever, and, on the service side, tobringing culture to the lower classes, helpingheal the traumas of deindustrialization, andcovering over the catastrophes of war.!!!!!!!!!!My first example is an outlier: a publicrelations and events management company for“cultural projects” in New York and Milan, calledContaminate NYC, announcing a solo cartoon andmanga show at a place called ContestaRockHair,described as:

a brand created in 1996 by a group ofhairstylists who shared the passion forfashion characterized by a rock soul thatlinks music and art with the creation of hairstyles, fostering innovation andexperimentation. Today ContestaRockHaircounts 11 salons in Rome, Florence, NewYork, Miami, and Shanghai.19

One venerable New York artist-run institution,now positioning itself as a discursive space aswell as an exhibition venue, has “partnered” witha boutique hotel in strange ways and touts the“Peace, Love & Room Service Package,” fromwhich it receives a small percentage. Another1970s New York nonprofit (listing a hotel and sixother public and private funders), expresses its“passionate belief in the power of art to createinspiring personal experiences as well as fostersocial progress.” In the economically depressed1970s, its earliest programs “invigorated vacantstorefronts.” This strategy, in which propertydevelopers rely on artists to render the emptyless so, has today become formulaic andubiquitous in the US and beyond, making theconnection between art’s appearance on thescene and the revaluing of real estateembarrassingly obvious.!!!!!!!!!!Two further representatives of this trendstrike a more sober note. The first is also fromNew York: this relatively new group’s “coremission is to revitalize … areas … by bringingthoughtful, high-caliber art installations … to the

public….” A recent show in the formerly industrialzone, now “artists’ district,” of Dumbo usesconstruction materials crafted into “visualoxymorons that shift function and meaning inhighly poetic ways.”!!!!!!!!!!The second, a dockside location in southernEurope, listing a dozen corporate and municipalpartners and sponsors, “targets the need torehabilitate and revitalize urban spaces, withoutlosing their identity or altering their nature….” By“taking into consideration the location of theproject” in the docks, the art space

aims to expand art into non-traditionalspaces and promote the use of places thatpreviously lacked museum-likecharacteristics. … Without culture,societies cannot have a true civicconsciousness.

Berlin is experienced in the framing discoursesof creative-industry gentrification, especiallyafter a 2007 report in Der Spiegel rated it asGermany’s top “creative class city,” based onRichard Florida’s “3T” indices: Talent,Technology, and Tolerance.20 So far, Berlin hasbeen slow to embrace becoming “the hippestdown-to-earth booming urban spot for thecreative industries,” as described by the BerlinMEA Brand Building, advertising itself as“dedicated to luxury, fashion, art, cosmetics andaccessoires [sic].” A Wall Street Journal article of2010 mocks artists’ and bohemians’ unhappinessover the arrival of Soho House, one of a string of“ultra-hip private social clubs” because manyBerliners, “proud and protective of theiranarchic, gritty brand of cool,” are “stubbornlywary of gentrification symbols.” Berlin’s SohoHouse is in a former Jewish-owned departmentstore turned Hitler Youth headquarters turnedEast German Communist Party building, a historythat fuels people’s indignation over the arrival intown of a members-only club.21

!!!!!!!!!!As it once did in the repurposing of Germanreal estate contaminated by recent world history,the transformation of cities newer to theconquest of urban space can raise the eyebrowsof those to whom such things may matter. TheNew York Times, writing of the Podgorze districtin Krakow, Poland, an infamous Jewish ghettounder the Nazis that was subsequentlycommercially orphaned in the postwar years,gushes about new restaurants springing upalongside “an ambitious history museum in therenovated [Oskar] Schindler Factory” and otherpromised museums nearby. “The award forprettiest real estate goes to Galeria Starmach,one of the most celebrated contemporary artgalleries in Poland … an airy white space in a redbrick former synagogue.”22

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Historical information panel from the Soho House Club.

!!!!!!!!!!But keep smiling! Mourning is consigned tonew art-like spaces, such as complex architect-or artist-designed sculptural memorials andother secular pilgrimage shrines, such asmuseums of remembrance. In other words, thosewho wish to engage in mourning are directedthere rather than to actual religious structures orto more general-purpose museums. Meanwhile,those established museums wish to makethemselves seem less like mausoleums andgrand palaces and more like parks and gardens,going beyond the typical decor of the past, ofvast floral lobby vases and discreet landscaping,toward pavilions and bamboo structuresproduced by a host of artists or journeymanarchitects in museum backyards and on theirroofs. This happy-face effort is but a short stepbeyond their efforts to justify their right to fundsfrom skeptical municipalities and donors byattracting, through various programsadministered by education departments, visitorsfrom outside their normal ambit, therebyassuming not only the role of service provider butthat of a pedagogical institution (often onepitched to lower grade levels).23 No longerpermitted to take the old-fashioned view and tosee themselves as a locus of individualizedcontemplation of worthy aesthetic objects,museums have increasingly taken responsibilityfor the entirety of visitors’ experiences,shepherding them from the shop to the artworks, with their enfolding printed and recordedand virtual texts, to the café, while also

beckoning to those formerly excluded populationgroups and informing them about the manifoldrewards that museum-going might offer them.

3. Detroit: I Do Mind DyingDetroit is a city imagined by some as an urbanwasteland reverting back to prairie. Over the pasttwenty-plus years, many projects have tried toengage with Detroit’s long slide from an iconicmetropolitan vanguard of the eponymous Fordistassembly-line production to a severelydistressed relic. As the fastest-shrinkingmetropolis in the US (it is at its lowest point in100 years, having dropped from the fourthlargest in 1950 to the eleventh in 2009 and losinga quarter of its population in the interim) andlong past hoping for salvation from itsRenaissance Center, postindustrial Detroit ispresently trying to school its residents on how togrow small gracefully.24 The city has beenshrinking for a long time, as suburban, mostlywhite, flight took hold from the 1950s onwardand as the auto industry ceased to be the mightybackbone of the US economy, dispersing itsproduction to low-wage locales in the US andelsewhere and greatly reducing its employeeranks.25 Detroit’s history as the quintessentiallyFordist industrial city (Ford is the carmaker thatpioneered the moving assembly line) is worthconsidering. Not only is its history of workerorganizing and union struggles long anddistinguished, the city government also had anumber of socialists for a good amount of time,until their support base disappeared and citygovernment was beset by corrupt politicians. Theinfamous Detroit riot (some would say uprising)of 1967, while rooted in the inequalities of race,nevertheless included some racial solidarity.26

Lowell Boileau, panorama of part of the ruins of Packard Motors,Detroit, n.d.

!!!!!!!!!!Detroit has a long and distinguished culturalhistory as well, most prominently in music – jazz,classical music performance, R&B, and morerecently, the Motown sound, hip-hop, and DetroitTechno.27 But the elite, publicly supportedmainstream institutions, including the venerableDetroit Institute of the Arts, the Detroit OperaHouse (home of the Michigan Opera Theatre),and the world-famous Detroit Symphony, arestruggling for audiences and support; this year,the Symphony’s musicians, after a contentioussix-month strike and the cancellation of 75percent of the season, accepted a 23 percent pay

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cut, and the Opera House now holds amegachurch service every Sunday.

!!!!!!!!!!As the locale of a new television cop show,Detroit is the very image of post-Fordist urbanabjection.28 Written off the register of civilizedAmerica, suffering from dreadful crimestatistics, inadequate policing, and municipalcorruption, the city has recently called forthunbidden an extravaganza of projects attemptingto establish the authentic street cred of bothparachuting artists and local activists. As in thecase of New Orleans, some cool people arepresently moving in – people who fit under therubric “creative class.” Some of the renewedinterest in Detroit stems from an analysis of thecity as both the model failure of (urban)capitalism and a fertile ground for the seeds ofthe future. Some other observers seem to revel inthe opportunity to pick over the ruins in a kind ofextended rubbernecking, but with thesometimes-unspecified hope that the outcometakes place in the vicinity of the art world.29

Others still seem interested in pedagogicalopportunities, whether for themselves or others.As is the case everywhere, many new arrivals arelooking for cheap rent, for places to live and workcomfortably, as Richard Florida has noticed; asFlorida also tells us, where hipsters go,restaurants are sure to follow. The New YorkTimes asks, “How much good can a restaurantdo?” and reassures us that

in this city, a much-heralded emblem ofindustrial-age decline, and home to acripplingly bad economy, a troubled schoolsystem, racial segregation and sometimesunheeded crime, there is one place wheremost everyone – black, white, poor, rich,urban, not – will invariably recommend youeat: Slows Bar B Q.30

Opened in 2005, the restaurant has, according toits owner, artist and real estate scion PhillipColler, “validated the idea that people will comeinto the city.” The reporter comments, “Anywherebut Detroit, the notion that people will show up

and pay money for barbecue and beer would notbe seen as revolutionary.”31 !!!!!!!!!!Detroit is home to many worthwhile publicand community projects off the art world radar,such as the long-standing urban farmingmovement partly spearheaded by beloved radicalactivist Grace Lee Boggs, now ninety-six yearsold.32 Boggs works with establishedcommunities of various income groups, using thecollective growing, planting, and harvesting ofcrops and flowers as a basis for unity and civicmobilization, and as a way to draw in children;planting and harvesting remain a potentmetaphor for self-application, communal effort,and the likelihood of a future. In a city likeDetroit, neighborhood groups proliferate.

Cadillac Motor & Fleetwood workers' strike, Detroit, 1937.

!!!!!!!!!!People have been making art about Detroit’stroubles for a long time, especially through themedia of photography and film: see for example,Newsreel’s Finally Got the News (1970) andMichael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989).33 CamiloJosé Vergara, sociologist, photographer, andcogent chronicler of the ills of US cities from the1980s on, photographed and wrote aboutDetroit.34 In the 1980s, the local group UrbanCenter for Photography outraged officials andcity boosters by turning a grant they had receivedinto a public project called Demolished byNeglect, which included posting enlarged photosof burned-out homes and decrepit theaters andother grand spaces on outdoor sites.35 !!!!!!!!!!Detroit is the site of artist-NGO do-gooderprojects in the sphere of urban relations, someworthy, some hardly so. In the past few months Ihave met artists from around the world who havemade the sad precincts of Detroit and environstheir subject. Some of the projects restcomfortably within the tradition of salvageanthropology, such as the Canadian artist

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Union Square, New York City,2010.

Monika Berenyi’s project archiving the poetry ofthe 1960s and 1970s Detroit through the DetroitCity Poetry Project: An Oral History.36 SeveralDetroit projects have taken place in New York orhave been instituted by New York–based artists.In 2009 a small nonprofit on New York’s LowerEast Side held a show called “Art of the Crash:Art Created from the Detritus of Detroit.”37

Another project, Ice House Detroit, by anarchitect and a photographer based in Brooklyn(though the photographer was born in Detroit),consisted of laboriously (and expensively, it turnsout) spraying one of Detroit’s countlessabandoned houses with water in the dead ofwinter to make it visible and undeniablyaesthetic.38 Back in New York, a young artisthaving a solo show at the Museum of Modern Artlast year showed her symbolic set of photopanels entitled Detroit. “The thing you have tounderstand about Detroit is that ruin ispervasive. It’s not like it’s relegated to one part oftown... It’s everywhere.” The artist (who has alsovisited New Orleans) “internalized all that decay,but she also uncovered hopeful signs ofreinvention, like a group of artists turning anabandoned auto plant into studio spaces,” writesthe New York Times.!!!!!!!!!!Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman,

artists based in Oslo, have been doing projects inDetroit (Bergman’s home town) for a decade incollaboration with institutions in Detroit andOslo. They will be running an“artist/poet/scholar” residency called INCA:Institute for Neo-Connotative Action, out of acenter-city apartment they own. Salinas andBergman have made animated-text films basedon audio recordings of local community andpolitical activists (including Grace Lee Boggs)and on the history of DRUM, the Detroit chapterof the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,centered on the Newsreel film Finally Got theNews.39 !!!!!!!!!!The Netherlands also sends art students toDetroit, but in much larger numbers and throughregularized institutional channels, under theauspices of the Dutch Art Institute, incollaboration with the University of Michigan, anelite public university.40 The university has set upa Detroit center, accessible only to AnnArbor–based students with swipe cards. Back inAnn Arbor, about an hour’s drive from Detroit,artist Danielle Abrams teaches a course called“Why Does Everyone in Ann Arbor Want to MakeWork in Detroit?” During the 2010 OpenEngagement conference sponsored by the Artand Social Practice program at Portland State

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University in Oregon, Abrams’s studentsexplained that they didn’t go to Detroit to “fix it”but rather “to get to know the community: itshistory, its people, and movements”: “The citywill teach you what you need to know.”41

Abrams’s students did not produce art projectsbut rather “research and communityengagement.” !!!!!!!!!!A pair of young Australian artists receivedfunding from an Australia Council residency inChicago to do a month-long project in Gary,Indiana, an industrial satellite of Detroit andsimilarly in ruins. In conjunction with theneighborhood activist group Central DistrictOrganizing Project they planted a communitygarden and painted an all-but-abandoned housewith an absentee owner. They also recorded localinterviews for a planned film interspersing theinterviews with clips from the 1980s Hollywoodmovie The Wiz.42

!!!!!!!!!!The imperative toward a manifestation ofsocial concern and respect, if not engagement,pervades most of the projects I have learnedabout. If some of this sounds like missionarysocial work in a third world city that is part of afirst world nation – much like the Ninth Ward inpost-Katrina New Orleans – other projects are,like the MoMA artist’s, framed in romantic, andsometimes futuristic terms (and what is futurismif not predicated on loss?). Let me invoke themotif of melancholy. Only through the act ofmourning something as having been lost can themelancholic possess that which he or she maynever have had; the contours of absence providea kind of echo or relief of what is imagined lost,allowing it to be held. In this respect, most art-world projects centering on decaying places likeDetroit are melancholic monuments to capital, inthe sense of depicting both the devastation leftin its absence but also the politics it provoked.Detroit was home not only to one of the greattriumphs of capitalist manufacturing but also toone of the great compromises between capitaland labor. To be upper middle class andmelancholic about Detroit is to firmly fix one’spolitical responsibilities to a now absent past;mourning Detroit is a gesture thatsimultaneously evidences one’s socialconscience and testifies to its absoluteimpotence. (Looking at Detroit also helpfullyeases the vexed question of one’s effect on one’sown neighborhood in another city somewhereelse.)!!!!!!!!!!Such melancholia has nourished a post-apocalyptic futurism. A recent exhibition atCasco, the public design space in Utrecht, by aLondon-based graphic designer and a Detroitfilmmaker, seeks “to imagine a post-capitalistcity,” focusing on Detroit’s abandoned zoo, “notsimply to witness the failure of a civilization in its

state of ruin, but to encounter an abundant eco-system of flora and fauna that has since evolvedthere.”43 An associated lecture by a Scottish-born, Detroit-based professor of urban studiesargued that Detroit is a place “where a model ofopen spaces or, to use a term that comes up a lothere in Detroit, the urban prairie, starts to comeinto play.”44 (The architect of the Ice Houseproject had similarly told Dwell magazine that“Detroit is a place with a lot of potential at themoment, and there are a lot of individuals thereworking on innovative projects, such as the re-prairie-ization of inner city Detroit, urbanfarming, materials reuse and redistribution,densification of certain areas, and widespreadarchitectural reuse.”45) !!!!!!!!!!The decidedly local Heidelberg Project,Tyree Guyton’s 25-year effort of decorating houseexteriors in an impoverished neighborhoodcentering on Detroit’s Heidelberg Street, fits intothe “outsider art” category. Unlike, say, theinitiative of artist-mayor Edi Rama of Tirana topaint the downtown buildings of this destitutecity in bright colors, captured by the Albanian-born artist Anri Sala in Dammi i colori, Guyton’sproject has not had a high level of art-world ormunicipal traction.46 A group of Detroit-basedartists going by the name Object Orange,however, achieved a brief moment of attention in2006/2007 when they painted abandonedbuildings in Disney’s “Tiggerific Orange” color,hoping, they finally decided, to have the city tearthem down and reduce the blight and dangerthey posed.47 !!!!!!!!!!I mention these projects on Detroit not topraise or to criticize them in particular butbecause they represent a movement within art,and architecture, to institute projects in thelarger community, in the built environment or inreference to it, surely as part of the “go social,”community-oriented imperative. Is ittroublesome that such works stand incontradistinction, implicit or explicit, to“political art,” to work directly concerned withaccess to power? Here it is helpful to invoke NewYork urban theorist Marshall Berman’s phrase,the “collision between abstract capitalist spaceand concrete human place.” Community groups,and community artists, are tied to a concretelocale and thus cannot stand up to those incommand of capital, which is defined by itsmobility. But even more, community groups arecomposed of members tied to each other,whereas itinerant artists remain always on theoutside, functioning as participant observers,anthropology style. Some, like Harrell Fletcher(or, earlier, filmmakers Nettie Wild and BeniMatias), have found communities where theyexpected only to do a project and leave, but haveinstead moved in.48

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Comptoir des Cotonniers storefront, Soho district, New York.

!!!!!!!!!!In other cities, such as Barcelona, generallypresented as a model of humanisticredevelopment, driven by the relentless push ofmunicipal “renewal,” but also notable for its“push back” of local housing initiatives, youngactivist students work on resistance andreformation campaigns within working-classcommunities under pressure of gentrification,adding some visibility and perhapsorganizational strength to local neighborhoodgroups. Detroit has no such worries.

4. Public Practice, Social PracticeI do not know whether to be more pleased orapprehensive about art-world artists engagingin, as the sign on the door says, “social practice.”Certainly these essays into the world beyond theart world, which can include any of a spate ofpedagogical projects in ordinary communities,feed the instincts of a sector of artists, a sectorconstantly reborn, to do something “real.” It isworth noting, following Mierle Ukeles, thereplacement of the term public art by socialpractice.49 The emphasis on personal qualitiesand social networks will most likely give rise toprojects that center on the affective. I haverehearsed some of the difficulties of theseefforts. I have also alluded, throughout this

essay, to the relatively easy co-optation of artistsas an urban group in cities that simply allow usto live and work in ways we find conducive to ourconcerns – a pacification made easier by theexpansion of the definition of the artist and theadvancing professionalization of the field. Babysteps in the formation of community initiativesare treated as deserving of the moral (andprofessional) equivalent of merit badges, for ageneration raised on images and virtualcommunication and lacking a sufficient grasp ofthe sustained commitment required forcommunity immersion. These projects cancapture the attention of journalists andmunicipal authorities, all speaking the samelanguage and operating against a backdrop ofshared class understandings. (This is preciselythe situation Sharon Zukin described in LoftLiving, which, we should recall, is a case study,using Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, of thetransformation of undervalued urban space intohighly valuable real estate, a condition revisitedin the more recent Naked City, in order to addressthe process at a far more advanced stage alongthat course.50) But it renders invisible the patientorganizing and agitating, often decades long, bymembers of the local communities (a process Iwitnessed first-hand in Greenpoint, Brooklyn).

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Work for creatives. Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

!!!!!!!!!!My concerns start here but extend a bitfurther, to the desire of young artists, now quiteapparent in the US, to “succeed.” Success ismeasured not especially in terms of theassessments of the communities “served,”though that may be integral to the works, butthrough the effects within the professional artworld to which these projects are reported.Success, to those whom I’ve asked, seems tomean both fame and fortune in the professionalambit. I am not alone in my disquiet over the factthat this particular rabbit seems to be slidinginside the boa, as “public practice” isincreasingly smiled upon by the art world,particularly in those demonstrationextravaganzas called biennials, which appear toreside in cities but whose globalized projects canin fact be easily disclaimed as one-offexperiments.51

!!!!!!!!!!One problem with my critique of RichardFlorida’s thesis stems from the insufficiency ofsimply pointing out the obfuscatory conflation ofthe category “artist” with the larger economicgroup he has called “the creative class,” forartists increasingly have come to adopt thelatter’s entrepreneurial strategies. Witness onlythe increasingly common tactic of raising projectmoney through social media and related sites

such as Kickstarter or PitchEngine, in which theappeal to an audience beyond the professional isoften couched in the language of promotion. Likeresume writing, now strongly infused with apublic-relations mentality, the offerings arelarded with inflated claims and the heavy use ofsuperlatives.52 One should refer here to themanifold and repeated discussions of the artistas flexible personality in the post-Fordist world,forced to “sell” oneself in numerous proteandiscourses; a literature that encompasses suchwriters as Brian Holmes and Paolo Virno (I havebriefly cited this literature in an earlier essay, inrelation to the questions of the political andcritical art53). Paolo Virno writes:!!!!!!!!!!

The pianist and the dancer standprecariously balanced on a watershed thatdivides two antithetical destinies: on theone hand, they may become examples of“wage-labour that is not at the same timeproductive labour”; on the other, they havea quality that is suggestive of politicalaction. Their nature is essentiallyamphibian. So far, however, each of thepotential developments inherent in thefigure of the performing artist – poiesis or

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praxis, Work or Action – seems to excludeits opposite.54

The alienation this creates is so all-pervasivethat although the alienation of labor was amuch-studied topic in mid twentieth century, thecondition has settled like a miasma over all of usand has disappeared as a topic. At the sametime, while some artists are once again occupiedwith the nature of labor and the role of artists insocial transformation, Continental theorists havefor most of the past century looked at socialtransformation through the prism of art andculture. The focus on culture itself as a means ofcritiquing and perhaps superseding class rulehas a long lineage. Perry Anderson has pointedout that Marxism on the whole was inhibitedfrom dealing with economic and politicalproblems from the 1920s on, and whenquestions concerning the surmounting ofcapitalism turned to superstructural matters,theorists did not, as might be expected,concentrate on questions of the state or on law,but on culture.55

Poster for the Festival of New Ideas found on the New York subway.

!!!!!!!!!!While public practices are entered into theroster of practices legible within the art world,they are entered as well into the creative-classthesis, in which they will, along with the muchlarger group of knowledge-industry workers,transform cities, not by entering intotransformative political struggle but rather toserve as unwitting assistants to upper-classrule. !!!!!!!!!!Two near-simultaneous New York Cityinitiatives, occurring as I write, provide insight onthe way this plays out, the first from the artists’vantage point, the second from the point of viewof the powers-that-be. An ambitious conference,at a not-for-profit Brooklyn gallery describingitself as “committed to organizing shows that are

critically, socially, and aesthetically aware,” isannounced as follows: “In recent years manyartists have begun to work in non-art contexts,pushing the limits of their creative practice tohelp solve social problems.” Offerings range frompresentations on “artists embedded in thegovernment, industries, and electoral politics” tothose operating beyond the cash economy. Theannouncement further elucidates:

[W]e hope to further the possibilities forartists to participate in the development ofsocial policy. Artists, art historians,museum professionals, academics, policyexperts and government officials willconsider how the art making process cancontribute to social change as well asencourage elected officials, communityleaders and the general public to think ofartists as potential partners in a variety ofcircumstances.

In direct counterpoint is the Festival of Ideas forthe New City, in Manhattan, initiated by the NewMuseum and sponsored by Goldman Sachs,American Express, Audi, The RockefellerFoundation, and New York magazine, amongothers, and with thanks to local businesses,socialites, and a clutch of New York Citycommissioners:

[This festival], a major new collaborativeinitiative ... involving scores of Downtownorganizations, from universities to artsinstitutions and community groups,working together to effect change ... willharness the power of the creativecommunity to imagine the future city ... .The Festival will serve as a platform forartists, writers, architects, engineers,designers, urban farmers, planners, andthought leaders to exchange ideas, proposesolutions, and invite the public toparticipate.

It comprises a conference, the inevitable streetfestival, and “over one hundred independentprojects and public events.”56 The conferenceproper is described (in the inflated vocabularythat we have seen some smaller institutions alsoadopt) as including:

visionaries and leaders – includingexemplary mayors, forecasters, architects,artists, economists, and technologyexperts – addressing the Festival themes:The Heterogeneous City; The NetworkedCity; The Reconfigured City; and TheSustainable City.

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These two events suggest the two registers ofpublic projects, of the creatives remaking theurban world, which only appear to be followingthe same script. While artists look for themessianic or the merely helpful moment, aimingfor “social change,” the institutional productionis centered on various trendy formulas for the“future city.” (Yet the institutional event hassecured the participation of most of lowerManhattan and Brooklyn’s project and nonprofitspaces – including some of those whose pressreleases figured in the present essay – no doubtfiguring that they can hardly afford to take apass.)

!!!!!!!!!!For the business and urban planningcommunities, culture is not a social good but aninstrumentalized “strategic cultural asset.”Consultant and former UK professor of urbanpolicy Colin Mercer writes of the “strategicsignificance of intellectual property-basedcultural and creative (content) industries inurban business communities” that can “work inpartnership and synergy with existing/traditionalbusinesses to enhance footfall, offer, brandingand opportunity for consumption and diversity of

experience.”57 Mercer notes that thecharacteristics of urban life that formerly drovepeople to the suburbs – such as diversity anddensity, on the one hand, and, on the other,vacant old factories and warehouses considered“negative location factors in the old economy” –are “potentially positive factors in the neweconomy because they are attractive to those[the “knowledge-based workers of the neweconomy”] who bring with them the potential foreconomic growth.”58

!!!!!!!!!!Mercer’s paper is, of course, a reading ofFlorida’s thesis; he writes:

This is not an “arts advocate” making theargument. It is an urban and regionaleconomist from Carnegie Mellon Universitywhose work has become very influential forurban and regional policy and planning inNorth America, Europe and Asia ... becausehe has recognised something distinctiveabout the contemporary make up ofsuccessful, innovative and creative citieswhich ... take account of ... what he callsthe “creative class.”59

Indeed. Florida’s paradigm is useful for cities –especially “second tier” cities, if Alan Blum iscorrect – looking to create a brand and publicityfor the purposes of attracting both capital andlabor (the right kind of labor, for service workerswill come of their own accord). As I suggested inan earlier installment, it is of little importancewhether the theory pans out empirically, since itserves as a ticket of entry to renewed discoursesof urban transformation. If and when it hasoutlived its use, another promotional package,complete with facts and figures, will succeed it,much as Florida’s urban conversation has largelyreplaced the more ominous “zero tolerance” and“broken windows” theories of the problematicsof urban governance – a replacement that hasbeen necessitated by lower crime statistics andperhaps from the success of evacuating ordepoliticizing poor and working class residents. Iam more concerned with the point of view of thebroadly defined creative classes, especially ofartists and other “cultural workers,” although Iremind myself that immaterial and flexible laborlink the creatives and those implicitly deemeduncreatives, which in the US seems to have led toa wholesale standing down from organizationand militancy. !!!!!!!!!!But, from a policy point of view, as UKurbanist Max Nathan remarks,

Everywhere, culture and creativity improvethe quality of life; iconic buildings and goodpublic spaces can help places repositionand rebrand. But most cities – large and

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small – would be better off startingelsewhere: growing the economic base;sharpening skills, connectivity and accessto markets; ensuring local people canaccess new opportunities, and improvingkey public services... .60

Let me, briefly, take this discussion back to HenriLefebvre. Lefebvre, as I noted at the start of thisessay, in Part I, had posited that the urbanrepresented a qualitatively new stage in theevolution of society, from agrarian, to industrial,to urban. Thus, he reasoned, future mobilizationsagainst capitalism would have an urbancharacter. This troubled Manuel Castells, who,writing as a structuralist following Althusser,preferred to focus on the ideological function ofthe city – its role in securing the reproduction ofrelations of production – rather thanapproaching the city as an essentially newspace, one, moreover, that might be construed asendowed with quasi-metaphysical features forthe production of both alienation andemancipation. As urban theorist Andy Merrifieldwrites:

While the city, in Lefebvre’s dialectic,functioned for capitalism, it actuallythreatened capitalism more; now, inCastells’s dialectic, while the citythreatened capitalism, it somehow hadbecome more functional for capitalism.Indeed, the city, Castells writes, hadbecome the “spatial specificity of theprocesses of reproduction of labor-powerand of the processes of reproduction of themeans of production.”61

The relative clarity of European class politicscould allow Castells to write that Gaullistattempts at urban renewal were

aimed at left-wing and in particularCommunist sectors of the electorate. ...Changing this population means changingthe political tendency of the sector ... .

Urban renewal is strong where the electoraltradition of the parliamentary “majority” isweak.62

Zukin’s interpretation of urban events is similarbut tailored to American conditions. The weakand often antagonistic relation of the US studentmovement, through the 1960s and 70s, toworking class life and culture helped produce apolitics of cultural resistance in the newlydeveloping “creative class” that was cut off,culturally, physically, and existentially, fromtraditional forms of urban working classorganization. Although artists, flexible serviceworkers, and “creatives” more generally may notbe the source of capital accumulation, it isinarguable that the rising value of the builtenvironment depends on their pacification of thecity, while the severing of relations to classhistory – even of one’s own family in manyinstances – has produced at best a blindness,and at worst an objectively antagonistic relation,to the actual character of urban traditions of lifeand of struggle. What often remains is anostalgic and romanticized version of city life inwhich labor is misperceived as little more than acovert service function, for the production of“artisanal” goods, for example, and the creationof spaces of production and consumption alike(manufacturing lofts, workshops, bars, taverns,greasy spoons, barbershops) obscured by anostalgic haze.

5. Artists Seeking Inspiration – OrConsolation

Anthropologist David Graeber writes with somebemusement on a conference of several centralfigures in Italian “post-workerist” theory –Maurizio Lazzarato, Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, andJudith Revel – held at the Tate Modern in Londonin January 2008. Graeber professes to beastonished that neither the speakers nor theorganizers have any relation to art, or even muchto say about it (except for a few historicalreferences), although the event was sponsoredby a museum and the hall was packed. He callshis review “The Sadness of Post-Workerism, orArt and Immaterial Labour Conference,” becauseof what he describes as a general feeling ofgloom on the part of speakers, traceableprimarily to Bifo, who at that moment haddecided that “all was lost.”63 Graeber seems tofind a certain congruence with the perpetualcrisis of the art world and the difficulties of post-Fordist theorizing, especially since he findsLazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor to berisible. He decides that the artists present haveinvited the speakers to perform as prophets, totell them where they are in this undoubtedhistorical rupture – which Graeber finds to be the

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perpetual state of the art world. However, hediagnoses the speakers as having, for thatmoment at least, decided that they too have lostthe future.!!!!!!!!!!I am far from prepared to take this to meanthat artists have lost the future. It is not of minorconsequence that this sort of conference is astaple of the art world (Graeber probably knowsthis too). Philosophy fills in for previous sourcesof inspiration, from theology and patrons’preferences to the varieties of scientifictheorization or political revolution. A recentSwedish conference asks, “Is the artist a role-model for the contemporary, ‘post-Fordian’worker – flexible, creative, adaptable and cheap– a creative entrepreneur? Or the other wayaround – a professionalized function within anadvanced service economy?”64 A questionperhaps worth asking, and which many,particularly European, critics and theorists,along with some artists, are inclined to ask. Hereis something to consider: the cultural sphere,despite relentless co-optation by marketing, is aperpetual site of resistance and critique.Bohemian/romantic rejectionism, withdrawalinto exile, utopianism, and ideals of reform areendemic to middle-class students, forming thebasis of anti-bourgeois commitments – and noteveryone grows out of it, despite the rise offashion-driven (i.e. taste-driven) hipsterism.Sociologist Ann Markusen, in a kind of balance ofLloyd’s critique of the docile utility of bohemiansas workers, reminds us that artists areoverwhelmingly to the left on the politicalspectrum and engage at least sporadically inpolitical agitation and participation.65

!!!!!!!!!!I am also not inclined to follow Debord orDuchamp and give up the terrain of art andculture. Certainly, celebration and lifestyle maniaforestall critique; a primary emphasis onenjoyment, fun, or experience precludes theformation of a robust and exigent publicdiscourse. But even ruckuses have their place asdisruption and intervention; some may see themas being less self-interested than social projectsbut as full collective projects, while fun remainsa term that refers to private experience. There isno reasonable prescription for how, and in whatregister, to engage with the present conditions ofservitude and freedom.!!!!!!!!!!Brian Holmes has likened the dancebetween institutions and artists to a game ofLiar’s Poker.66 If the art world thinks the artistmight be holding aces, they let him or her in, butif she turns out actually to have them – that is, tohave living political content in the work – theartist is ejected. Although Chantal Mouffeexhorts artists (rightly, I suppose) not to abandonthe museum – which I take to mean the art worldproper – there is nothing to suggest we should

not simultaneously occupy the terrain of theurban.!!!!!!!!!!! This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the thirdHermes Lecture at Provinciehuis Den Bosch on November 14,2010, arising from a suggestion by Camiel van Winkel toconsider the work of Richard Florida. I thank Stephen Squibbfor his invaluable and edifying assistance during the researchand editing process and Brian Kuan Wood for his editing helpand infinite patience. Thanks also to Alexander Alberro andStephen Wright for their helpful responses to earlier drafts.

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Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual andvirtual – especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the “national securityclimate,” connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,are excavations of history.

!!!!!!1In the course of designing a citygarden in Helsinki, I learned thatcity planners worried I would failto distinguish the urban from therural via the forms and types ofplanting. Finland has too muchcountryside for their liking, itappears.

!!!!!!2Advanced societies in thetwentieth century saw theapparent conquest of diseasesassociated with dirt and soilthrough improved sanitation andgerm-fighting technologies.Fresh air movements againstdisease were importantelements of urban reform,opening the way for renewedefforts to enlarge the playgroundalready provided to the middleclass and extended to theworking class in the early part ofthe century.

!!!!!!3Paris already had such arepurposed industrial rail line,the Promenade Plantée, whosetransformation into a park beganin the late 1980s.

!!!!!!4Poultry keeping was banned inNew York City in an effort toextirpate the remnants of thefarms and farm-like practicesthat survived in far-flungcorners of the city, such asGravesend, Brooklyn, or StatenIsland. New York City, likevirtually every municipality, hasdetailed laws on the keeping ofanimals, whether classed aspets, companions, or livestock,including those held forslaughter. Pets were a matter ofcontention, banned frommiddle- and working-classapartment buildings, until the1960s. Animals classified aswild are banned – the category“wild animals” defines theuncivilized zo"sphere; ergo,people who keep them are not“virtuous” but decadent or“sick.” New Yorkers may recallthe incident a decade ago inwhich Mayor Giuliani, asuburbanite longing to join theranks of the cosmopolitan,hurled personal insults(prominently and repeatedly,mentioning “an excessiveconcern with little weasels”) at acaller to his weekly radioprogram who wanted ferrets tobe legalized as household pets.The call, from David Guthartz ofthe New York Ferrets’ RightsAdvocacy, prompted a famousthree-minute tirade in whichGiuliani opined, “There’ssomething deranged about you.The excessive concern that youhave for ferrets is something youshould examine with a therapist,not with me.” Seehttp://www.concordmonitor.com/article/from-giuliani-come s-revealing-rant andhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqmbbPRDyXY&feature=related.

!!!!!!5See http://rooftopfarms.org /.

!!!!!!6

Here one is tempted to offer afootnote to Lefebvre’s mid-century observations on theurban frame (see Martha Rosler,“Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I: Art andUrbanism, e-flux journal, Issue21, http://e-flux.com/journal/view/190), to take account of theblowback onto the urbanparadigm of the neoliberalattributes of exurbia that wehave classed under the rubric ofsuburbanization. Asneoliberalism takes hold, evenlong-standing democraticprocesses of public decision-making, such as town meetingsthat obtained in small towns,succumb. As to the question ofaristocracy, the figure of thearistocrat – especially the one inratty old furs and draftymansions – has haunteddiscussions of the art world, forartists are still disproportionallyinfluential for the culture atlarge, while some reaphandsome financial gain fromthis excursion and others simplystand around.

!!!!!!7J. Eric Oliver, Democracy inSuburbia (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001). Ratherthan town meetings, one moretypically finds the retreat to thebackyard and the country club.

!!!!!!8The work was installed in 1981,having been commissioned bythe Art-in-Architecture Percentfor Art Program, under theauspices of the federal GeneralServices Administration, whichalso oversaw its removal. Theevent is interesting because itcalled upon a probablymanufactured split between“the ordinary public” (thevictims of the art) and thepitiless elite sectors of the artworld – manufactured becausethe campaign for the removal ofthe work was in fact spurred byan aggrieved judge, Edward Re,of the arcane United StatesCustoms Court. The followingliterature on Tilted Arc may beuseful: Janet Zweig, Notes andComments column, New Yorker(Mar. 27, 1989); Harriet F. Senie,Tilted Arc Controversy:Dangerous Precedent?(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2001); GreggM. Horowitz, “Public Art/PublicSpace: The Spectacle of theTilted Arc Controversy,” TheJournal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 54, 1 (Winter 1996) (“anearly version of the strategy ofcensorship-as-liberation us edby regressive political forces inother antidemocratic projects,”8); and, by Serra’s wife, TheDestruction of Tilted Arc:Documents, eds. Martha Buskirkand Clara Weyergraf-Serra,(Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 1990). For an immediate,partisan view, see the film TheTrial of Tilted Arc (1986),centering on the hearingsrelating to the removal of thesculpture.

!!!!!!9“The Gates is the largest artwork

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since the Sphinx,” begins apromo site’s appreciative article,seehttp://wirednewyork.com/parks/central_park/christo_gates /.Mayor Bloomberg, a man knownto tout the arts for theireconomic potential, inauguratedthe work by dropping the firstcurtain. The artists call thefabric color “saffron,” a colorfuland exotic food spice but not theorange of the work. A lovelyarticle on children’s responsesto the work – upper-middleclass, upper class, and workingclass – includes the following:“Subsequent visits havesomewhat altered her view. ‘Idon't like the look of them but Ilike the way everybody is at thepark and happy,’ she said,making her the ideal experiencerof the work.” Julie Salomon,“Young Critics See ‘The Gates’and Offer Their Reviews: Mixed,”New York Times, February 17,2005. Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/arts/design/17kids.htm l.

!!!!!!10See Sharon Zukin, Naked City:The Death and Life of AuthenticUrban Places (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010).,discussed in part II of this essay.

!!!!!!11A further consideration of thisproject and its municipallysanctioned follow-up, OlafurEliasson’s Waterfalls (2008),would have to point to theinsistence of these projects onthe power of the artist, and hisgrant-getting, fund-raising , andbureaucracy-besting prowess,with urbanized nature as theground. In other words, theintellectual labor of the artist isdisclosed to cognoscenti but thespectacle suffices for themasses. This problem was partlyaddressed by Eliasson in a radiointerview describing thescaffolding of the Waterfalls asan homage to (manual) labor, atheme not otherwise muchnoted in his work.

!!!!!!12Georg Simmel, “The Metropolisand Mental Life,” in TheSociology of Georg Simmel ed.Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, Il: FreePress of Glencoe, 1950).Originally published as DieGroßstadt und das Geistesleben(Dresden: Petermann, 1903).

!!!!!!13Here consider the relationshipbetween street fashion, workingclass attire, and middle-classenvy of these. In addition, beforeyouth-culture demands in the1960s loosened most dresscodes (prompting outragedbusinesses to post noticesannouncing “No Shoes, No Shirt,No Service”), it was illegal towear “short shorts” and otherforms of skimpy dress on NewYork City streets.

!!!!!!14Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign Power and Bare Life(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1998), 3–4.

!!!!!!15Quoted in Yúdice, TheExpediency of Culture: Uses ofCulture in the Global Era(Durham: Duke University Press,2003), 196. (See Part II of thepresent article.) Jeremy Rifkinsubsequently published a bookwith the same title as his article.See Jeremy Rifkin, Age ofAccess: The New Culture ofHypercapitalism Where All of LifeIs a Paid-for Experience (NewYork: Tarcher, 2000).

!!!!!!16Rifkin, Age of Access, 54.

!!!!!!17Joseph Pine II and James H.Gilmore, Authenticity: WhatConsumers Really Want (Boston:Harvard Business School Press,2007) and The ExperienceEconomy: Work Is Theatre &Every Business a Stage (Boston:Harvard Business School Press,1999). Aurora is a tiny town ofabout 13,000 residents, inNortheastern Ohio, near Akron.Do visit Pine and Gilmore’s fun-loving website,http://www.strategichorizons.com/index.html. Rifkin citestheir first book: “Managementconsultants B. Joseph Pine andJames Gilmore advise theircorporate clients that ‘in theemerging Experience Economy,companies must realize theymake memories, not goods,’”Age of Access, 145.

!!!!!!18Two reviews, by two womenreviewers, from one day’s NewYork Times Arts section makethis point. They sharply contrastthe old, “culture is seriousbusiness,” mode and the new,“culture ought to be fun” mode.A senior, front-page reviewer in“Cuddling with Little Girls, Dogsand Music,” writes skepticallyabout crowd-pleaser YoshitomoNara’s show, at the formerlystaid Asia Society, that it “addsnew wrinkles to the continuingattempts by today’s museums toattract wider, youngeraudiences, and the growingemphasis on viewerparticipation.” A few pages on, in“A Raucous Reflection onIdentity: Jewish and Feminine,” ajunior reviewer writes, “Don’t beput off by the yawn-inducingtitle of the Jewish Museum’s'Shifting the Gaze: Painting andFeminism.' The show is apuckish, punchy look at thewomen’s art movement [thatdraws] inspiration from MarciaTucker’s ‘Bad Girls’ survey of1994.” There is nothingparticularly raucous in the worksshe describes. Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/design/10nara.htm landhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/design/10shifting.html. The art journalist JerrySaltz, based at a localpublication, earlierdemonstrated his lack ofrecognition of the atmosphere ofexclusivity, high seriousness,and sobriety typically projectedby high-art institutions

(definitively analyzed by PierreBourdieu) by wondering in printwhy people do not visit gallerieseven though they do not chargeadmission. The need to abrogatethis forbidding atmosphere isnot what is at issue here, but theemphasis upon “the museumexperience,” or experiences,represents a new managementimperative.

!!!!!!19Seehttp://www.contaminatenyc.com/?tag=contesta-rockhair.

!!!!!!20See http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,510609,00.html.

!!!!!!21Vanessa Fuhrmans, “BerlinBroods over a Glitz Invasion,”Wall Street Journal, August 20,2010. Seehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383312394581850.html.

!!!!!!22Rachel B. Doyle, “Krakow: AddArt, Stir in Cachet,” New YorkTimes, August, 29, 2010. Seehttp://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EED81E31F93AA1575BC0A9669D8B63.

!!!!!!23See part II of this essay.

!!!!!!24Or not very gracefully. InFebruary of this year, the stateof Michigan ordered the Detroitschool superintendent to closehalf of Detroit’s schools,swelling class size to sixty insome cases. See JenniferChambers, “Michigan OrdersDPS to Make Huge Cuts,” DetroitNews, February 21, 2011. Seehttp://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/02/michigan_orders.php. The library systemmay also be forced to closealmost all its branches; seeChristine MacDonald andRoNeisha Mullen, “DetroitLibrary Could Close Most of ItsBranches,” Detroit News, April15, 2011. Seehttp://detnews.com/article/20110415/METRO/104150371/Detroit-library-could-close-most -of-its-branches#ixzz1JcLCtB fD.

!!!!!!25The auto industry began sitingsome of its factories in thesuburbs and small townssurrounding Detroit, and autoworkers followed them there;however, black auto workerscomplained they were kept inDetroit at the dirtiest, leastdesirable jobs, while the unionbosses were complicit with theindustry.

!!!!!!26See Dan Georgakas and MarvinSurkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying:A Study in Urban Revolution(London and New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1975; Cambridge,MA: South End Press, 1998).

!!!!!!27

Berry Gordy’s Motown Recordsitself departed long ago; theBelleville Three had moved on bythe 1990s, although the DetroitElectronic Music Festivalcontinues.

!!!!!!28Seehttp://abc.go.com/shows/detroit-1-8-7.

!!!!!!29Fascination with ruins is a longstanding and deeply romanticfacet of mourning andmelancholy; currentmanifestations include well-established tourist pilgrimagesto sites like New York’s formerWorld Trade Center but also aninterest, no longer disavowed, inimages of accidents, death, anddestruction, and sometimes up-close, well-supervised, andpreferably well-funded short-term visits to the safer edges ofwar zones of various sorts.

!!!!!!30Melena Ryzik, “Detroit’sRenewal, Slow-Cooked,” NewYork Times, October 19, 2010.The article opens, “How muchgood can a restaurant do?” andlater comments, “To make surethe positive change takes hold,Mr. Cooley has parlayed the goodwill of his barbecue joint into arestless pursuit of community-building.” Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/dining/20Detroit.html.

!!!!!!31Ibid.

!!!!!!32Boggs’s most recent book,written with Scott Kurashige, isThe Next American Revolution:Sustainable Activism for theTwenty-First Century (Berkeley:University of California Press,2011). Among her other booksare Revolution and Evolution inthe Twentieth Century (1976) andLiving for Change: AnAutobiography (1998). In 1992,she co-founded the DetroitSummer youth program; havingmoved with her husband Jamesto Detroit, where she expectedthe working class to “rise up andreconstruct the city,” sheadapted instead to a city in avery different phase. “I think it’svery difficult for someone whodoesn’t live in Detroit to say youcan look at a vacant lot and,instead of seeing devastation,see hope, see the opportunity togrow your own food, see anopportunity to give young peoplea sense of process ... that thevacant lot represents thepossibilities for a culturalrevolution.... I think filmmakersand writers are coming to thecity and trying to spread theword.” Democracy Now! radioprogram (April 14, 2011),archived athttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/14/roundtable_assessing_obamas_budget_plan_state.

!!!!!!33Moore is from Flint, Michigan,the site of the historic sit-downstrike of 1936–37 that led to the

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empowerment of the UnitedAuto Workers as the solebargaining representative ofGeneral Motors workers; theRoger of the title was RogerSmith, the head of GM at thetime and the executiveresponsible for huge workerlayoffs that led to the near-totaldevastation of Flint. Credits forthe film Finally Got the News are“A Film by Stewart Bird, ReneLichtman, and Peter Gessner,Produced in Association with theLeague of Revolutionary BlackWorkers.”

!!!!!!34See Camilo José Vergara, TheNew American Ghetto (Newark:Rutgers University Press, 1995).

!!!!!!35Parts of this project wereincluded in the exhibition “HomeFront,” the first exhibition of thecycle “If You Lived Here” that Iorganized at the Dia ArtFoundation in New York in 1989.

!!!!!!36This project, two years in themaking (2008-2010), willcontinue through the auspices ofWayne State University withsome further collaboration withBerenyi and with EasternMichigan University. Seehttp://monikaberenyi.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/detroit-city-poetry-oral-history-proje ct-2010-2011.

!!!!!!37Seehttp://www.fusionartsmuseum.org/ex_crash.htm.

!!!!!!38See Donna Terek (columnist),“Detroit Ice House Is Really AllAbout Art,” Detroit News (Feb. 7,2010); andhttp://detnews.com/article/20100207/OPINION03/2070309/Detroit-Ice-House-is-really-al l-about-art, which includes avideo of the project. Fundingwas sought via Kickstarter. Thecreators describe the project as“An Architectural Installationand Social Change Project” ontheir blog,http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/ (now seeminglyinactive), detailing their Detroitactivities, a forthcoming filmand photo book, and the manymedia sites that have featuredtheir project.

!!!!!!39Personal communications.Bergman supplied these links:http://www.ubu.com/film/aa_wildflowers.html andhttp://www.alejandra-aeron.com/new_center.html. See alsohttp://www.alejandra-aeron.com/wildflowers.html.

!!!!!!40According to its website,http://detroitunrealestateagency.blogspot.com/2009/12/speaking-for-detroit.html, “t heDetroit Unreal Estate Agency ...is aimed at new types of urbanpractices (architecturally,artistically, institutional ly,everyday life, and so forth) that

came into existence, creating anew value system in Detroit. Theproject is an initiative byarchitects Andrew Herscher andMireille Roddier, curator FemkeLutgerink, and Partizan Publik’sChristian Ernsten and JoostJanmaat. In collaboration withthe Dutch Art Institute and theUniversity of Michigan,generously funded by theMondriaan Foundation andFonds BKVB.” I note that, bychance, Andrew Herscher is thearchitect who provided a veryworkable partnership on plansfor the building my students andcollaborators and I developed atUtopia Station at the VeniceBiennale of 2003. Another Dutch residency in pilotphase is the Utrecht-basedExpodium International ArtistsResidency Program: EuropeanPartnership, with Detroit. “Thegoal ... is to enter into a long-term collaboration with Detroitby creating an expandingnetwork ... to exchangeknowledge about urban models,shrinkage and social, politicaland artistic developments inurban transition areas. Detroitbased cultural initiativesrespond creatively to the city’scurrent situation and set to playa vital role in the redevelopmentof Detroit. It is this conditionthat has our special interest.Information gained through thisplatform provides vital input forthe Expodium program here inthe Netherlands.” Seehttp://www.newstrategiesdmc.blogspot.com.Recently, fifteen students fromthe Netherlands participated inthe Detroit City Poetry Projectpresentation at the DetroitMuseum of Contemporary Art(MOCAD); seehttp://detroitlife313.com/headlines/radio/detroit-life-r adio-w-john-sinclair. Why does theNetherlands send its art,architecture, and students tostudy cities, towns, andneighborhoods – includingDutch ones – considered to poseintractable problems? One maysurmise that the Dutch, whoseem fully engaged with thecreative-class-rescuehypothesis, are hoping thatartists and architects will assistin urban research andmelioration and further helpthem found a new consultativeindustry: a Dutch urban advisorycorps (this last solution – urbanconsultation – was proposed tome as an answer to my question“Why?” by Salomon Frausto,Head of ArchitecturalBroadcasting at the BerlageInstitute in Rotterdam).

!!!!!!41See http://historyofartandsocialpractice.tumblr.com/post/633884270/shotgun-review-the-role-of-the-art-institution-in .

!!!!!!42The Wiz is a version of TheWonderful Wizard of Oz (1900),journalist L. Frank Baum’simportant putatively allegoricalchildren’s book about rural farm-dwellers translocating to up-to-date metropolises and of a still-

fascinating mid-century musicalfilm The Wizard of Oz (1939),based on the Oz tales; this laterversion of 1978 has a largelyAfrican American cast andfeatures Detroit-born MichaelJackson.

!!!!!!43Seehttp://www.cascoprojects.org/?entryid=376.

!!!!!!44Ibid.

!!!!!!45Seehttp://www.dwell.com/articles/ice-house-detroit.html. Whilevacillating between claiming itas an “architectural installation” and as a social changeendeavor, the project’s authorssuggest that the house will be,virtuously, disassembled and theland donated perhaps to acommunity garden.

!!!!!!46Guyton has had some degree ofsuccess as a local, indigenous,non-elite artist of choice andwas included in the 2008 VeniceArchitecture Biennale as well asgarnering other attention. ForSala’s project, seehttp://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=80261&searchid=14785.Rama’s project, as part of hismayoral endeavors, has had adifferent trajectory. According tothe UK’s Architecturefoundation, Rama’s actionsconstituted “an aesthetic andpolitical act, which promptedsocial transformation, and muchdebate, through its visualizationof signs of change.” During the2003 edition of the TiranaBiennial, Sala and Hans UlrichObrist invited Olafur Eliasson,Liam Gillick, and DominiqueGonzalez-Foerster , among otherartists, to “turn residentialblocks into unique works of art”;see http://vimeo.com/8254763.The project continued, and in the2009 iteration included façadecontributions from Tala Madani,Adrian Paci, Tomma Abts, andothers. However, the TiranaBiennial 2009 website notes thatthe exhibition would criticallyaddress the city’s moment ofdevelopment “through ‘wild’urbanization, fast capitalinvestments and within thehorizon of a neoliberal context,[expanding] into the domain ofarchitecture and processes ofurbanization.” Seehttp://www.tica-albania.org/TICAB/.

!!!!!!47Although the mayor derided thegroup as vandals, a number ofthe buildings were subsequentlytorn down. See Celeste Headlee,“Detroit Artists Paint TownOrange to Force Change,”National Public Radio radiobroadcast, December 7, 2006.Good magazine uploaded a videoof the project to YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQwKkK1bggY. One of thegroup comments: “This didn’tstart out as this social crusade;

it started as an artisticendeavor.” (That’s what they allsay, if they have any art-worldsense; see Part II of the presentarticle.)

!!!!!!48For Fletcher’s testimony, seeBetween Artists: Harrell Fletcherand Michael Rakowitz (New York:A.R.T. Press, 2008).

!!!!!!49The term “interventionism”streaked like a comet across theart world firmament but seemsto have been largelyextinguished.

!!!!!!50Zukin, Naked City.

!!!!!!51I attempted to draw attention toboth this trend’s promises andits perils with the work entitledProposed Helsinki Garden inSingapore at the latter city’sbiennale earlier this year. Theproject attemptedsimultaneously to articulate acommitment to public practiceand a serious, not to say critical,examination of it. Too often, indiscussing art, one finds theequation of criticism withrefusal, allowing the absence ofone to indict the reality of theother.

!!!!!!52Facebook itself takes the form inwhich shouting into the windsmall self-promotionalmessages to an appreciativeimaginary public is encouraged,and in which the occasionalopenings for the genuineexchange of ideas seem to snapshut in an instant. At the otherpole from the particularlanguage of promotion are thegrant-writing discourses,Orwellian in their Byzantineinapplicability to most artists orprojects you might know, butwhose categorical imperativeshave only escalated over theyears. In the UK, the categoriesfor art institutions and academicdepartments are mind-boggling,but everywhere thisinstrumentalized languageframing instrumentalizedprojects is infecting the terms inwhich art exhibitions are laidout.

!!!!!!53See http://e-flux.com/journal/view/107.

!!!!!!54Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity andRevolution: The Political Theoryof Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory, inRadical Thought in Italy: APotential Politics (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1996), 188–209.

!!!!!!55Perry Anderson, Considerationson Western Marxism (London:Verso, 1979), 75.

!!!!!!56Seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVRHAWiJieY andhttp://www.youtube.com/watch

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?v=JMjaGVCQS70&NR=1.

!!!!!!57Colin Mercer, “Cultural Planningfor Urban Development andCreative Cities” (2006), 2–3. Seehttp://www.culturalplanning-oresund.net/PDF_activities/maj06/Shanghai_cultural_planning_paper.pdf.

!!!!!!58Here, Mercer is quoting a 2004report put out by Partners forLivable Communities, whichadvises many BusinessImprovement Districts, or BIDs,with cultural elements. (A BID isa public-private partnership, astep along the path toprivatization of urban publicamenities and spaces. In NewYork they saw their genesisduring the fiscal crisis of the1970s.) Mercer also points outthat “knowledge based workers”make up half the work force ofthe European Union.

!!!!!!59Ibid., 2. Mercer’s enthusiasmpresumably factored into hisown decision to leave academiafor consulting work.

!!!!!!60Max Nathan, “The Wrong Stuff?Creative Class Theory andEconomic Performance in UKCities.” See http://cjrs-rcsr.org/archive s/30-3/NATHAN.pdf.

!!!!!!61Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism:A Marxist Tale of the City (NewYork: Routledge, 2002), 125.

!!!!!!62Manuel Castells, The UrbanQuestion: A Marxist Approach(Boston: The MIT Press, 1979),317.

!!!!!!63David Graeber, “The Sadness ofPost-Workerism, or ‘Art AndImmaterial Labour’ Conference ASort of Review (Tate Britain,Saturday 19 January 2008).”Available athttp://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/graeber_sadness.pdf, http://www.scribd.com/doc/38093582/The-Sadness-of-Post-Workerism-David-Graeber, andhttp://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080713130247120.

!!!!!!64Seehttp://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/default.aspx?id=13909 an dhttp://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/%20default.aspx?id=13914.

!!!!!!65Ann Markusen, “UrbanDevelopment and the Politics ofa Creative Class: Evidence fromthe Study of Artists,”Environment and Planning A 38,no. 10 (2006): 1921–1940;Richard Lloyd. Neo-Bohemia: Artand Commerce in thePostindustrial City (New York:Routledge, 2006). See part II ofthe present article for a furtherdiscussion of these authors’

works.

!!!!!!66Brian Holmes, “Liar’s Poker,” inUnleashing the CollectivePhantoms: Essays in ReverseImagineering (New York:Autonomedia, 2008). Firstpublished as “Liar’s Poker:Representation ofPolitics/Politics ofRepresentation” in Springerin(January 2003). Seehttp://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1276&lang=en.

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