Archive for June 2012

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[ecrea] PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle / Now available

Wed Jun 27 17:51:19 GMT 2012




PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle

Now available



Edited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, PUBLIC 45: Civic Spectacle 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.



Seventeen articles and projects in this issue are organized into three themed sections. “Nuit Blanche” considers iterations in Toronto, Paris and Halifax. Addressing how these events give prominence to insomnia, social media, urban poetics and neoliberal “civility,” the articles outline distinctive affective states and their ethical implications. The second section, “Cityscapes,” scrutinizes the material conditions undergirding these massive public art events—the buildings and streets that are appropriated and transformed by artists and residents, even symbolically devoured, as in Ali&Cia’s urbanophagy projects. The last section, “Performing Citizenship,” focuses on questions that could be said to inform many of the articles throughout. What kinds of subjectivities and political positioning do civic spectacles ask participants to embody? What range of responses ensue? The authors here focus on both officially sanctioned spectacles (the Olympics) and examples of resistant public actions (DIY technoculture).



Articles by Heather Diack, Philip Glahn, Max Haiven, Catherine Howell, Lois Klassen, Carmen McClish, Charlotte McIvor, Joel McKim, Siobhan O’Flynn, Matthew Reynolds, Abigail Susik, Andrew Wasserman, and Fiona Wilkie.



Projects by Simon Cohen and Alicia Ríos, DisplayCult, The Freee Collective, and Eric Moschopedis.



Reviews by Brian Curtin, Jonathan Baxter, Lewis Kaye, and Marc James Léger, and a column by Ian Balfour.



240 pages, 100+ colour images

Print ISSN: 0845-4450
Online ISSN: 2048-6928



Available in select newsstands, bookshops, libraries, and online: http://www.publicjournal.ca/45-civic-spectacle/



ABOUT

PUBLIC is a bi-annual interdisciplinary art journal based in Toronto founded in 1988 by the Public Access Collective. It is committed to existing as an intellectual and creative forum, providing a space for in depth perspectives on the theoretical and critical issues that intersect with art and visual culture.



PUBLIC gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and York University.





Aleksandra Kaminska

Managing Editor

PUBLIC Art Culture Ideas

Toronto, ON

(public /at/ yorku.ca) | www.publicjournal.ca

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