ABSTRACT
In this chapter I examine possibilities for art and architecture as critical interventions in urban societies. Looking selectively at visual practices from the 1970s to the present, I draw out two overlapping tendencies: work that involves the participation of others in its making; and work that, while not involving co-production, seeks to provoke active reception in exposure of social, cultural, and economic conditions. Permeating the chapter is Walter Benjamin’s insight (1934) that intervention can take place, and must, in the means of production. But I ask what that means, and whether the means of production includes the conceptual and linguistic categories through which we describe and prescribe a world. Looking to more recent critiques, I introduce texts by Peter Bürger, John Tagg and Rosalind Krauss before discussing Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Author as Producer’. In the second section of the chapter, I link Benjamin’s thesis to participatory and provocative art from the 1970s to 1990s, and a parallel history of radical planning, looking in particular at the work of Mierle Ukeles. In the third section I turn to provocation in the work of London-based artists Cornford and Cross, and in a project by the Lisbon-based group Extra]muros[. The emphasis in this chapter on cultural agency in social formations is complemented by that of Chapter 8 on environmentalisms. I begin here with an account by Chinese-American artist Mel Chin of his performance at the Dia Art Center, New York at 2 p.m. on April 25th, 1993, in which he draws an analogy between the actions of a sniper and those of a viral particle entering a bloodstream.
