Art in the City, the City in Art

Art in the City, the City in Art examines an interplay between emerging forms of urbanity and the strategies of post-war movements and contemporary practices that developed alternative modes of visual and public engagement in urban spaces. The book analyses a tension between discourses on the modernisation of cities that stressed rational and functional order and the role of art that provides contrast to the rigidity of rational systems and an imaginative deviation from the structures of urban life. Moving between theory and praxis, the book explores the methods artists have used to scrutinise the city as a physical and mental construct through which lives and possibilities are shaped or defined. A three-part framework: hardware, software and networks is developed to demonstrate how artists have grappled with the conditions of an urban system. The practices of the Situationists, Fluxus and happenings from the mid-twentieth century are discussed, with performance and conceptual practices from the late-twentieth century and street art, urban interventions and participatory practices in the early twenty-first century. Artistic strategies of shock, performative embodiment, culture jamming, hacktivism and participation are situated as disturbances and switches that throw the urban system into sharp relief. Art provides a momentary catharsis that risks escape from the hyper-valorisation of rational order. The book queries how spontaneous and playful interludes in the city create spaces through which new expressions emerge, implicitly or explicitly, beyond the urban system.

Art in the City, the City in Art offers a new approach to interdisciplinary studies of art and urbanity. A strong focus of this book delineates how the city-as a concept, system and structure-is made visible through artistic practice and in turn challenged or interrogated. Students, researchers and professionals with interests in the interplay of art and modern city planning will discover a new perspective on how urban conditions and issues have been addressed through artistic practice. The book is designed to intersect with an evolving discourse in the urban humanities field through its exposition of the city's default construct that is interrupted and reimagined through visual art practices.