Art Metropole

#09932

Public 45: Civic Spectacle

Date

2012

Publisher

Public

Format

Periodicals

Details

Softcover

Size

19 × 24 × 2 cm

Length

239 

Description

Edited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher /

This issue of PUBLIC considers how large-scale events have challenged conventional understandings of audience, spectacle, and what it means to “view” art. The recent success of Nuit Blanche, for instance, breeds a paradox: in one night, the number of visitors often surpasses the attendance at major art institutions for an entire year. Despite such numbers, this popular exhibition format has so far yielded limited scholarship, which PUBLIC 45 seeks to engage. This issue on Civic Spectacle analyzes the greater context of performances that includes the time-honoured cultural forms of festivals and parades along with more spontaneous and oppositional events, such as flash mobs and activist interventions. Indeed, beyond Nuit Blanche, these types of civic spectacles respond to a situation of urban crisis: the loss of sustainable jobs as tourism and service industries replace manufacturing, the weakened political clout of cities as suburbs and exurbs become wealthier and more populous, and the challenges to retain a sense of community in the stressed circumstances of the downtown core.

Table of Contents

Editors’ Introduction

NUIT BLANCHE

‘Sleepless Nights: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Performance’, Heather Diack ‘Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics’, Siobhan O’Flynn PROJECT: ‘NIGHTSENSE,’ Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick ‘City of Night: Parisian Explorations’, Catherine Howell ‘Halifax’s Nocturne versus(?) the Spectacle of Neoliberal Civics’, Max Haiven

CITYSCAPES

‘Street Light: Manhattanhenge and the Plan of the City’, Andrew Wasserman ‘The Screen Politics of Architectural Light Projection’, Abigail Susik PROJECT: ‘Ali&Cia’s Urbanophagy Ceremonies’, Simon Cohen and Alicia Ríos ‘Spectacular Infrastructure: The Mediatic Space of Montreal’s “Quartier des spectacles”’, Joel McKim PROJECT: ‘ The Freee Collective Don’t Want You!’, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan ‘“A Massive Multi-Faceted Screening Room”: LA Freewaves Curates Hollywood Boulevard’, Matthew Reynolds

PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP

‘Urban Playground Antics and the Redefining of Public Spaces’, Carmen McClish ‘Digital Productivism: New Participatory Mass Culture’, Philip Glahn ‘Essences of Social Change: City Fusion, Interculturalism and the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, Charlotte McIvor PROJECT: ‘Public Dreaming and the Transgression of Neoliberal Borders’, Eric Moschopedis ‘“Choreographies of Nationhood”: Performing Aviation as Spectacle’, Fiona Wilkie ‘Participatory Art at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad’, Lois Klassen

COLUMN

‘Seeing Through Spectacles’, Ian Balfour

REVIEWS

Khvay Samnang, Untitled, Brian Curtin ARTocracy: Art, Informal Space, and Social Consequence: A Curatorial Handbook in Collaborative Practice by Nuno Sacramento and Claudia Zeiske, Jonathan Baxter Er

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