Paper presented at the Association for Art History Conference 2019, University of Brighton
Panel: Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Urban Landscape
Abstract: In this paper I situate artists’ engagement with gentrification and housing struggles in the context of a broader demand to document ‘capitalist life’. I focus on two art interventions which respond to attempts to gentrify Glasgow’s East End, respectively centring stigma and gender. The first, In the Shadow of Shadow (2010), was led by Strickland Distribution in collaboration with Ultra-Red, a collective who intervene in sites of struggle through sound recording and critical listening practices. The second is Shona Macnaughton’s performance Progressive (2017) for which she appropriated official materials produced by regeneration projects, relating their language to her own heavily pregnant body. Following sociologist Kirsteen Paton’s account, I consider how these artworks can help us to move beyond displacement narratives to attend to the complexities of gentrification processes by privileging (frequently neglected) working class perspectives and by tracking attempts to construct neoliberal subjectivities. Furthermore, I contend that both constitute ‘social documents’, defined as a formation that aspires to chronicle, speak about or contribute to social phenomena. Asking what their portrayals reveal to be caught by the term ‘capitalist life’, I engage with the expanded view of the economy offered by the revitalised field of social reproduction theory (SRT). While social reproduction has historically been identified with domestic labour, more recent theorisations encompass the resources and infrastructures that brace the formal economy (Bhattacharya, 2017). Permitting a move from housework to housing, SRT brings new perspectives to neoliberal urbanism as well as the experimental social documents which address its contradictions. SRT is used here to prise open the difference between representation and committed, material implication.