Monday 16th November 2009, 4pm, Barnes lecture theatre, Glasgow School of Art
readers, spectators, lurkers, and interlopers all welcome

FACILITATORS - Neil Gray (researcher & writer) & Leigh French (co-editor, Variant magazine)

OUTLINE - Leigh French and Neil Gray will look at the role of the artist in a time when 'creativity' is increasingly harnessed for urban growth agendas (property development and gentrification). The potential of ‘the arts’ to rehabilitate ‘unproductive’ urban space and stimulate the property market has long been established by gimlet-eyed developers (Manhattan, Shoreditch, Barcelona, etc.) and Glasgow's Merchant City is but one example of that now shopworn process. Despite increasing skepticism around hyperbolic 'creative city' claims, the creative city policy framework is still being applied by countless slow-learning cities worldwide.

Using the geographer David Harvey's analysis of the 'art of rent', we will outline the drive towards monopoly rents so typical of advanced capitalism. Harvey's thesis notes that cities are now routinely traded as commodities in themselves. 'Particularity' and 'uniqueness' (of places, spaces, buildings, culture, etc.) provide the 'marks of distinction' which are deemed to confer economic value on particular places in an era of fierce inter-city competition for inward investment.

We will map out how these tendencies have been instrumentally pursued in Glasgow's 'Merchant City' through the 'Arts-Led Property Strategy', as identified by Neil Gray in his writing for Variant & Mute magazines. Taking to task the guru of the Creative City thesis, Richard Florida, we will suggest that the emergence of a so-called 'creative class' has been wholly dependent on a 'supporting infrastructure' of an increasingly insecure and underpaid service class - Florida admitting as much himself.

After this critical introduction to the 'creative city', we will show some clips from the film-making collective 'The London Particular' (LP). LP films address the role of the artist in ongoing forms of gentrification in and around Shoreditch and the east end of London, and show a model of practice which challenges the specialised role of the arts practitioner by actively engaging with questions of place and social relations more often than not eschewed by artists.

We will finish with Harvey, who suggests that capital has always to appropriate and extract surpluses from local differences, local cultural variations and aesthetic meanings of no matter what the origin. This can often mean the retention, or courting, of apparently subversive or transgressive elements. The shameless commodification of everything is, after all, a hallmark of capitalism. Rather than pursue a counsel of despair however, the problem for oppositional movements or independent artists is, as Harvey argues, to use the validation of particularity, uniqueness, authenticity, culture and aesthetic meanings in ways that open up new possibilities and alternatives...

We want to suggest, as one example, that the video work of David Panos and Anja Kirschner works through these problems by reworking narratives around landscape, history and memory, to evoke different possibilities and meanings to the notion of 'creative entrepreneurialism’ advocated by city boosters and property developers...

SCREENINGS - The presentation will include a screening of ANJA KIRSCHNER & DAVID PANOS' POLLY II : PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS & excerpts from TRAIL OF THE SPIDER:

TRAIL OF THE SPIDER (2008)
Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American West (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.
The film recreates the panoramas of the Western on landfills, wastelands and gravel pits linked to the construction of the 2012 Olympic Park and features a large cast of actors and non-actors (many of whom are themselves residents of East London). Much of the film's dialogue is rooted both in historic sources and the collective experiences of the players and filmmakers (linked in many cases through political activism and friendship).
Download Trail of the Spider Reader here:
http://www.anjakirschner.com/files/trailpamphlet.pdf

POLLY II : PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS (2006, 30 mins)
Part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and part Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’, Polly II portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams. The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors, pirates, and former slaves. Alluding to Polly (1728) - John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggar’s Opera (1727), which resurrected the character of the robber Macheath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano (scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies) – POLLY II is populated by many of the characters made popular by Gay and Brecht. The film features the naïve and incorruptible Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and the greedy Peachum – fencer, thief-taker and king of the beggars.
Download Polly II Reader here:
http://www.anjakirschner.com/files/pollyreader.pdf
Watch the trailer here:
http://www.anjakirschner.com/files/items/pollytrailer.html

AND

A short from the London Particular : an open-ended urban research group which has been documenting, theorising and acting against regeneration and gentrification in East London since 2001.
’The streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen… “This is a London particular.” I had never heard of such a thing. “A fog, miss,” said the young gentleman.’ Bleak House
http://thelondonparticular.org

DISCUSSION - The event will focus on an open discussion of the issues raised by the films and the reading material.

READING LIST - Whilst not obligatory, for a fuller understanding of the work referenced and to better facilitate the discussion we recommend familiarising yourself with some of the following -- but we realise time is of a premium, so please feel free to dip in-and-out of it and if stretched please just read the parts with which you feel most engaged:

THE ART OF RENT: GLOBALIZATION, MONOPOLY AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF CULTURE
David Harvey
The Art of Rent introduces a clearer description of the political dimension of cultural and symbolic production. He manages to link intangible production and real money not through intellectual property, but by tracking the parasitic exploitation of the immaterial by the material domain. The key example is Barcelona, where there is the clearest connection between real estate economy and the production of culture as social capital. The success of Barcelona as an international brand has been produced by its cultural and social roots and is continuously fuelled today by a cosmopolitan and alternative culture: but that collective product is exploited first and foremost by real estate speculators. Harvey introduces the concept of collective symbolic capital (a concept taken from Bourdieu) to explain how culture is exploited by capitalism. The layer of cultural production attached to a specific territory produces a fertile habitat for monopoly rents. The brand of Barcelona is a “consensual hallucination” produced by many but exploited by few. The condition of creative workers (and of the whole society) is a vicious circle: they produce symbolic value for the real estate economy that squeeze them (as they suffer the housing prices in Barcelona). Furthermore, Harvey helps us to understand Richard Florida’s model: the so-called “creative class” is nothing but a simulacrum of the collective symbolic capital to raise the marks of distinction of a given city.
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001966.php
(16Beaver is the address of a space initiated/run by artists to create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects. It is the point of many departures/arrivals.)

‘Glasgow’s Merchant City: An Artist Led Property Strategy’
Neil Gray
The potential of ‘the arts’ to rehabilitate ‘unproductive’ urban space and stimulate the property market has long been established by gimlet-eyed developers. However, rather than submit to boosterist overstatement it's more useful to contextualise the competitive creative economy mantra as the afterbirth of a wave of self-defeating entrepreneurial urban strategies which preceded it. Yet, despite increasing skepticism around hyperbolic 'creativity' claims, the creative city policy framework is still being applied by countless slow-learning cities worldwide. Despite the austere and worsening fiscal climate and the collapse of commercial property markets, and the strong correlation between inequality and 'creativity', Glasgow City Council continue to act oblivious or unconcerned...
http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/mechantcity34.html

The Creativity Fix
Jamie Peck
Cogent critique of architect and popilariser of the 'creative class' thesis, Richard Florida's best selling primers on the 'creative economy'. Peck lays bare that Florida's creativity script facilitates revamped forms of civic boosterism alongside the gratification of middle-class consumption desires; lubricates flexible labour markets and gentrifying housing markets; and relegitimizes regressive social redistributions within the city.
http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/creativityfix.html

Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city
Benedict Seymour
In areas like London's Shoreditch and its peers around the globe, the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core coincides with continued – or intensified – infrastructural decline. Rather than an unfortunate side effect of the real estate market, gentrification is an openly pursued policy objective where 'creative entrepreneurialism’ is identified as key to reviving inner cities. Gentrification takes from the poor and gives to the rich; anything residually ‘public’ will either be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot. The question remains, is the current crisis a reprieve or a new assault, and who will win this time?
http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/shoreditch34.html

Additional online reference material - If you would like to follow up on any of the issues raised, we recommend also looking at:

Mute magazine's:
Creative City in Ruins:
"Post-Fordist State planners, developers, and their entrepreneurial service arm have debased the meaning of 'creativity' to a shallow pretext for the further looting of cities and public wealth. The cookie-cutter aestheticisation of selective zones of our cities (tourist promenades, waterside public art, creative quarters), is a mere fig leaf covering the acts of enclosure and exclusion that cultural regeneration entails. As the sensibilities of the Creative Class are sensationalised, courted, and monetised, the creative possibilities of the dehumanised majority narrow. But as the recession bites, there are signs that dreams of the Creative City are crashing, as the public purse-strings tighten and the financial sector's ability to underwrite the creative industries weakens. In this issue we  examine that possibility, explore artists' creative sabotage of their own regenerative co-optation, and philosophically examine what
'expression' might actually be."
http://www.metamute.org/pod/mute_vol_2_12_the_creative_city_in_ruins

Framework: the Finnish Art Review's:
Immaterial Civil War. Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism
Matteo Pasquinelli
"We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it."
–William Gibson
In the visegrips of Dr. Satan
"Conflict is not a commodity. On the contrary, commodity is above all conflict."
–guerrigliamarketing.it
http://www.framework.fi/6_2007/locating/artikkelit/pasquinelli.html

Click here to download poster PDF

To receive an e-mail informing you of events and when the magazine is posted online, join the on-line forum by sending a blank e-mail to: variantforum-subscribe@topica.com

http://www.topica.com/lists/variantforum