Fall 2019 Syllabus – Art & Politics in the City

IDSEM UG 2103

Art and Politics in the City (1): Conceptual Landscapes

New York University

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Instructors: Profs. Florencia Malbrán and Alejandro Velasco

Contact: Prof. Malbrán: fmm234@nyu.edu; Prof. Velasco: av48@nyu.edu

TH 2:00-4:45PM: NYC Time

TH 3:30-6:15PM: BA Time until 1/7

TH4:00-6:45PM:BA Time from 11/07

Location: NYC (ARC LL04); BA (Borges)

Course Description

This course, the first part of a two-semester sequence,* uses enhanced videoconferencing to bring students in New York and Buenos Aires together to examine how urban arts and politics intersect in the Americas: How are art and politics understood and expressed differently and similarly in these two American metropolises and why? How do shared aesthetic features of public art in the city reflect the global circulation of urban creative modes? What do we learn about local politics from looking at the art and writing on a city’s public spaces? In the fall, teams of students in both cities will conduct field work in selected neighborhoods to help create a coded database of murals, graffiti, performances, and installations. Then, drawing on readings in the history, culture, and politics of each city, as well as on theoretical work in art criticism and urban studies, we will analyze how social and political processes like gentrification, inequality, and planning generate and reflect creative political expression as captured in our database. In the spring, students will learn to use and to interpret Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and data, drawing on publicly available census, electoral, and planning records from each city, to generate digital maps finding links between art, politics, and demographics as drawn from the systematic analysis of our database of urban arts. The year will culminate with the online publication of transnational, collaborative projects that explore what the art and writing of city streets reveals about urban life in 21st century America.

* While students are encouraged to enroll in both semesters of the course, with at least one of the semesters spent in NYU Washington Square and the other in NYU Buenos Aires, this is not required and each semester can be taken as a standalone course.

Learning Objectives

Students will learn about the contested meanings of “public art,” examining through both an aesthetic perspective and a place-based perspective what constitutes art and how specific contexts inform different appreciations of the works in question.
By engaging with art criticism and developing a practice of discussing public art pieces through layers of production, location, context, medium, intent, and others, students will learn how to “read” public art.
By reading contemporary histories of both New York and Buenos Aires, in particular how both government and non-government actors have made use – whether through cooptation or elimination – of public art, students will learn to integrate historical process into their analysis of contemporary phenomena.
In reading urban political theory, students will learn about the politicization of space and how “right to the city” language has come to shape contemporary debates on the balance between public and private, and how artistic expression contributes to that debate.
Students will also learn about the impact on public expression of laws and planning priorities on what constitutes “public space,” and how legality alternately constrains some forms of creative expression and promotes others, while providing new opportunities for political engagement and understandings of citizenship in urban contexts.
Students will learn to use social scientific methods of collecting and interpreting demographic and electoral data, as well as data visualization tools for the purposes of conducting multi-layered analyses of place, politics, and population.

Grading/Requirements

Participation/Attendance throughout 20%

Street/Public Art Documentation weekly 15%

Public Art Analysis essay (individual) 7 Oct, 28 Oct, 19 Nov 30% (10% x3)

Art Historical Analysis (group) 21 November 20%

Group Presentation 5 or 12 December 15%

The full class (both the NYC and BA sections) will meet via internet once weekly, and each session will consist of two parts. One part will be devoted to discussing shared reading assignments in a plenary session, and students will be graded on their individual participation in these plenary discussions.

During the other part of the weekly class session, five student groups of four people each – two students in both NYC and BA respectively – will meet in the assigned classroom via skype, google chat or a comparable platform and spend about 45 minutes collaborating on the major research project for the course. Namely, students will produce a course website cataloging street art and graffiti and analyzing their intersections with local politics in both cities. The final 20-30 minutes of each session will be reserved for the groups to provide updates to, summarize findings for, raise questions to, or solicit feedback from the plenary.

Each group will choose a geographically finite area, previously determined by the instructors, in both NYC and BA. Once they have determined their area of focus, each group will generate the following content and be assessed both as a group and individually based on the strength of their contributions:

Art historical analysis: This 10-12 page paper asks each group to conduct research on the areas or neighborhoods that they have selected (so each four person group will produce two 10-12 page essays). It will include locating and reading city guides, sections of monographs, academic journal articles, or newspaper/magazine articles specifically addressing that neighborhood/area, if available. In addition, students will also engage in unstructured, casual conversations with area residents, businesses, and visitors to develop a sense of the area as it currently exists, as well as to develop an idea of what major or minor issues seem to be most in the minds of area residents and others. Finally, by conducting web searches of city newspapers about their area or neighborhood, and by developing a habit of periodically reading local press, students will report on both city wide political context and any local political happenings. In particular, by researching the most recent local elections, students will identify the various political parties, candidates, and issues at stake. The idea is for the pair of students who is not in either NYC or Buenos Aires to serve as the target audience/reference/peer reviewer for the other pair of students. So while the entire group will be responsible for both essays and be graded collectively as a group, each paper will be mainly researched and written by the pair of students in the respective city.

Street/Public Art documentation: Student groups in each city will collect time-stamped and coded images of street art/graffiti that they will periodically upload onto the web based platform above. This will require students to habitually walk around their selected area/neighborhood not just documenting street art/graffiti that they see, but registering (through updates on the platform) any changes to street art/graffiti they have seen. For instance, if an item is painted over, or a new one goes up they had not seen before in the same area. Additionally, students will research past public art projects that were installed on their selected area/neighborhood but are no longer on view due to their ephemeral nature (e.g. Rachel Whiteread’s Water Tower in SoHo – 1998; Pipilotti Rist’s Open my Glade in Times Square 2000; Marta Minujín’s Partenón de Libros in downtown Buenos Aires – 1983; and Leandro Tartaglia’s La esquina indicada in Chacarita, Buenos Aires – 2010-12).

Individual essays: Over the course of the semester, students will individually produce three short (approx three-page) analytic essays on a piece of street or public art that they have documented in their area, considering in particular its aesthetic features vis-à-vis others in the area, its production (authored or anonymous), its status (legal or illegal), its message (abstract or direct), its political content (explicit or implicit), and its context (demographic, political, etc). Students will also ask passers-by for their opinion on the piece, and incorporate those reflections into their analysis as pertinent.

Group Presentation: At the end of the semester, each group will have 20 minutes to present to the class as a whole, and to receive feedback on, their preliminary analyses of how art and politics intersect in their respective geographic areas. This presentation should draw on the various elements that have gone into the construction of the database corresponding to your designated city area – street/public art documentation, history/culture/politics essay, individual essays. What connections, relationships, correlations do you see when you visualize the data? What patterns if any did you find? What proved surprising in the data? What proved predictable? Also, what questions linger in your mind (and in particular, what advice do you have for the next group of students who will document your designated area focus on)? Indeed, you should frame your presentation less as a finished product and more as an invitation to pose questions to your fellow classmates, and to solicit feedback about what the data may reveal. This feedback will be the first step towards the work students will produce the following semester, culminating in multi-modal projects comparing and contrasting NYC and Buenos Aires.

Required Readings

The following books are required and available for purchase/download electronically and on reserve at Bobst*

Rebecca Biron, ed. City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America. Durham: Duke U Press, 2009.
Alison Young, Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime, and the Urban Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Norman Mailer and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti. New York: It Books, 2009.
Japonica Brown-Saracino, ed. The Gentrification Debates: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010

* Buenos Aires students, please only acquire the Young and Mailer/Naar texts. There are copies of the Biron and Brown-Saracino texts for use at the NYU Buenos Aires site library.

Academic Integrity

Students in Gallatin courses belong to an interdisciplinary community of artists and scholars who value honest and open intellectual inquiry. This relationship depends on mutual respect, responsibility, and integrity. Failure to uphold these values will be subject to severe sanction, which may include dismissal from the University. Examples of behaviors that compromise the academic integrity of the Gallatin School include plagiarism, illicit collaboration, doubling or recycling coursework, and cheating. Please consult the Gallatin Bulletin or Gallatin website (www.gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/policies/policy/integrity.html) for a full description of the academic integrity policy.

Late Submissions/Incompletes

Students can ask for extensions and will receive them at the instructor’s discretion, though any late submission will incur a half grade drop unless the delay results from documented medical reasons or family emergencies. Only requests made in advance of the deadline will be considered. Assignments submitted late without previously alerting the instructor will not be graded. The last day to submit any pending work granted an extension is 17 December. If you anticipate being unable to meet this deadline, you should contact the instructor immediately and request to receive an Incomplete, which will be granted at the instructor’s discretion and only with a previously approved plan to complete outstanding work.

Extra Credit

Over the course of the semester, the instructors may make extra credit opportunities available to students. These may include attending relevant talks, performances, films, expositions, etc. Students are also encouraged to recommend any events that strike them as relevant to the course. Each extra credit opportunity will add one point to a student’s final grade, with no more than three points possible.

Religious Observance

Students observing a religious holiday during regularly scheduled class time are entitled to miss class without any penalty to their grade. This is for the holiday only and does not include the days of travel that may come before and/or after the holiday. Students must notify their professor and the Office of Academic Support in writing via email one week in advance before being absent for this purpose.

Academic Accommodations

Academic accommodations are available for students with documented disabilities. Please contact the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-998-4980 or see their website (http://www.nyu.edu/life/safety-health-andwellness/students-with-disabilities.html) for further information. Students with disabilities who believe that they may need accommodations in a class are encouraged to contact the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at (212) 998-4980 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. For more information, see Study Away and Disability.

Class Schedule

(subject to Change; Guest dates are tentative and may need rearranging to accommodate the availability of our speakers; Additional guests may be added to the schedule as pertinent)

**29 August (BA Only): Course Intro

Graffiti Tour (TBC)

5 September (NYC/BA): Course Intro

Hands-on training with Survey123 application (Geo-tagged image/data collection tool)

Guest Instructors:

Dr. Andrew Battista (GIS Area Librarian, Bobst Library)

Dr. Jenny Kijowski (Educational Technologist, Gallatin)

12 September (NYC/BA): The City as Imaginary

Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: UC Press, 1984: 91-111.
Nestor Garcia Canclini, “What is a City?” InCity/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America, ed. Rebecca Biron. Durham: Duke U Press, 2009: 37-60
Julio Cortázar, “Graffiti”

19 September (NYC/BA): The City as Canvas

Team/Beat assignments

Anne Pasternack and Lucy Lippard, “Thinking About the Public in Public Art: Tom Eccles and Tom Finkelpearl with Anner Pasternak,” in Creative Time: The Book: 33 Years of Public Art in New York, Princeton: Princeton Arch. Press, 2008 (10 pp)
Aruna D’Souza, “Open Casket. Whitney Biennial, 2017,” in Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018. (50 pp).
Harriet Senie, “Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc: Art and Non-Art Issues” Art Journal (Winter, 1989). (5 pp)
Minujín, Marta. “Destruction of My Works in the Impasse Ronsin, Paris” and “La Menesunda.” In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde,” ed. Inés Katzenstein, 59-61. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004. (5 pp)

**24 September (BA Only): Guest Lecture: Estela de Carlotto

26 September (NYC/BA): Focus Buenos Aires

Adrian Gorelik, “A Metropolis in the Pampas: Buenos Aires, 1890-1940” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005: 146-159 (13 pp)
Daniel James, “October 17^th and 18^th, 1945: Mass Protest, Peronism, and the Argentine Working Class,” Journal of Social History 21, no. 3 (1998): 441-61 (20 pp)
Andrea Giunta, “The Avant-Garde Between Arts and Politics” in Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s. Durham: Duke U Press, 2007: 243-280 (37pp)

3 October (NYC/BA): Focus New York

Lynne Cooke, “From Site to Non-Site: An Introduction to Mixed Use Manhattan,” Mixed Use Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.
Robin Kelley, “Looking to Get Paid: How Some Black Youth put Culture to Work,” Yo Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997: 43-77
Loretta Lees, “Super-Gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York” in Japonica Brown-Saracino, ed. The Gentrification Debates: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010: 45-50

October (NYC/BA): The City as Struggle

**17 October (NYC ONLY): Museum of Street Art

24 October (NYC/BA): Mid-Semester Presentations

Mid-semester group presentations; data collected to date

31 October (NYC/BA): Art(ists) in Motion

Sharon Zukin, “The Creation of a Loft Lifestyle,” in Japonica Brown-Saracino, ed. The Gentrification Debates: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010: 175-184
Richard Lloyd, “Living Like an Artist,” in Japonica Brown-Saracino, ed. The Gentrification Debates: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010: 185-194
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, “Rare Photos from 1966 Show the NYC Subway in Full Color,” Gizmodo, 17 December 2014.
“Christopher Morris’s 1980s NYC Subway Photos,” Juxtapoz, 11 December 2014.

7 November (NYC/BA): Art(ists) in Motion (cont’d)

Oliverio Girondo, “Poems to be Read on a Trolley Car,” in Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke U Press, 2000: 251-254
Marcy Schwartz, “The Writing on the Wall: Urban Cultural Studies and the Power of Aesthetics.” InCity/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America, ed. Rebecca Biron. Durham: Duke U Press, 2009: 127-144 (17 pp)

Guest Presentation: Amy Hausmann, MTA Curator, New York

14 November (NYC/BA): Street Art and Politics

Norman Mailer and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti. New York: It Books, 2009.
Matt McCormick, dir. The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal. Rodeo Film Company, 2005. (16 mins)
Jane Jacobs, “Staging Difference: Aestheticization and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Cities” in Jane Jacobs and Ruth Fincher, eds. Cities of Difference. New York: Guilford Press, 1998: 252-279.
Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia. “Jorge Macchi’s Fractured Narratives of Buenos Aires.”

21 November (NYC/BA): Street Art and Politics (cont’d)

Alison Young, Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime, and the Urban Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2014.

**28 November (BA ONLY): Zona Sur/PiedrabuenARTE Tour

Guest Instructor: Ariel Pradelli (Argentine Architect)

5 December (NYC/BA): Group Presentations

12 December (NYC Only): Guest Presentation (TBA)