Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action

This book explores how artists respond to global inequalities through public artworks that take the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, theorizing their responses as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centers. It utilizes Neil Smith's writing on the revanchist city as a theoretical framework and presents case studies of artworks in China, the USA, the UK, Ukraine, and Mexico, drawing from various fields to model interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. The book is accessible to a wide range of readers and appeals to scholars and graduate students in art history, performance studies, visual culture, and urban studies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 188 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the profound responses of artists to global inequalities through the lens of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s. It theorizes these artistic manifestations as cultural expressions of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centers. This groundbreaking work is the first to examine artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. It explores how artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviors, actions, and constructions in and on the actual existing conditions of the street. The author employs the influential writing of late critical geographer Neil Smith on the revanchist city as a theoretical framework to understand how contemporary artists create the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces.

The book is organized into chapters, each serving as a case study that analyzes artworks that have adopted the form of walls and barricades in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Mexico. By drawing upon a diverse range of fields such as art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies, the author situates the art in a broader context of the humanities, aiming to model interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work.

Collectively, these case studies unveil how artists' local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come. Through the use of plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book aims to be accessible to a wide variety of readers, including scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art, geography, and political science.

Weight: 530g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032195117