ABSTRACT
Creative underground practices cover an array of resistant concepts, activist causes, social spaces and lifestyles which have already been set out in relation to notions of utopia and art manifesto, avant-gardism and autonomy, counterculture, subculture and counterpublics. The focus in this chapter is twofold. First, it applies Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to bohemias that historically emerged in counterpublic urban spaces which is detailed initially in relation to the first UK Bohemia. The term ‘bohemianism’ has become a trope for the lifestyle of modern artists, which today has been reconfigured as a more business-like postmodern and inclusive neo-bohemianism. The notion of heterotopia highlights the complexity of counterhegemony, a Gramscian conception that has been revised in light of diversity and postmodernism, as initially set out by Stuart Hall. This analysis has been criticized for its incoherency, diffusing politics and rejecting an organic essentialist process. Second, the chapter presents four vignettes of underground creative practices, small case studies or ‘takes’ of everyday resistant artistic formats which are collectively oriented to some degree. They are from various historical periods, countries and cultures, and are of varying length, depth and breadth; these cultural practices have resisted, to varying degrees, institutional and market control. It includes the Russian Futurists from the historical avant-garde and Situationists from the neo-avantgarde, as well as youth-oriented counterpublics which have positioned resistance in more popular terms, as represented by beat and punk subcultures.
