Production of Space - Lefebvre

"In his 1974 book, The Production of Space, French Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre outlines a theory of space in which he breaks with the geometric or architechtural understanding of the term as an empty area enclosed by a material shell and moves to an understanding of space as a social category and a means of production. . ."

"For Lefebvre, "space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things." His intricatey layered and dynamic model is based on the concept of social space, which he defines as follows: "Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others." Social space becomes "simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed)"

from the essay "Alternative: Space" by Martin Beck included in Julie Ault's "Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985"

Main Street to Shopping Malls

The commandeering of shared public spaces for marketing is part of a larger project to convert community space into marketplaces. The Basic idea is to elevate consumer obsessions over civic identity. Shopping Malls may represent the purest example of this dynmaic –a triumph of commercial control over the social messiness of Main Street.

A mall is aesthetically soothing, homogenized, and safe. Main Streets can be loud, motley and unpredictable.
Why does this matter? Because public spaces are one of the few places where strangers can meet and communicate in ways that do not involve selling or buying. It is a place where free speech - and all the civic and democratic benefits that flow from it - can flourish. Anyone can go to Main Street and speak their mind to strangers. That is not possible in most shopping malls.
Under a long line of U.S. Supreme Court cases, the first amendment does not apply to shopping malls because they are considered private, not public facilities. Now that most aspects of public life take place in the suburbs, automobiles, malls, and on television, there are almost literally no free public spaces left in which meaningful civic dialogue can occur. . .

from "Silent Theft, the private plunder of our common wealth" by David Bollier - pg 160

Blank Slate

"Many kinds of art are [designed] to induce a buildup and release of psychological tension, mimicking other forms of pleasure. And a work of art is often embedded in a social happening in which the emotions are evoked in many members of a community at the same time, which can multiply the pleasure and grant a sense of solidarity.

"Some reasearchers. . .believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth. Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing. . .and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends."

from: "The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker
from Chapter 20 'The Arts' pgs 401 - 420

Alienation and Dancing

Poets and Artists lose no occasion to inform us that our age is marked by man's alienation from his neighbors. Paul Halmos illustrates how alienation is mirrored in changing dancing habits. Dancing began as a choral enterprise involving the entire community.

. . .It effectively served to share the burdens and deepend the bonds of fellow feeling as well as providing catharsis through rhythmic communal rapture. Choral dances were still practices as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but no longer as the total communal experiences they had been. They were steadily replaced by couple dances in which the group was divided into individual couples. The cotillion-quadile type of square dances represented a link between the choral and the couple dances. Halmos believed that the couple dance may still serve sexual and matrimonial purposes, but these are not neccessarily communal purposes. The couples arrive en duex and rarely join others among the dancers.

from "Personal Space" Pg 60

the "Pub" (public space)

"In the pub there is a general freedom from anxiety–any man with the money can be certain of a welcome. Paul Halmos describes the pub of the period as "the only free, non-esoteric, non-exclusive, weatherproof, meeting place for the ordinary worker."

. . Sherri Carivan, an american sociologist whose doctors degree was based on her visits to San Francisco bars, describes public drinking places as open regions–people who are present wether aquainted or not, have the right to engage others in conversation and the duty to accept overtures from them. The concept was developed by Erving Goffman and goes beyond the obligation not to snub others, to the point where a person can not be offended when someone else approaches him/her.

from "Personal Space" Pg 122

An Unfashionable Audience

But what if the audience for art (who they are and what their relationship with the work might be) were considered as the goal at the center of art production, at the point of conception, as opposed to the modernist Western aim of self-expression? And what if the location of art in the world was determined by trying to reach and engage that audience most effectively?

from "An Unfasionable Audience" by Mary Jane Jacobs
pg. 50 of Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art

The Tourist

The destruction of industrial culture is occuring from within as alienation invades the work place. . .

Affirmation of basic social values is departing the world of work and seeking refuge in the realm of leisure. "Creativity" is almost exclusively in the province of cultural, not industrial, productions, and intimacy and spontaneity are reserved for social relations away from work. Working relations are increasingly marred by cold calculation. Tourism is developing the capacity to organize both positive and negative social senitments.

The Tourist (1968-72) / Dean MacCannell / pg. 6

Interesting enough, the generalized anxiety about the authenticity of interpersonal relationships in modern society is matched by certainty about the authenticity of touristic sites

pg. 14

It is a source of anxiety that our kind of society has the capacity to develop beyond the point where individuals can continue to have a meaningful place in it.

pg. 15