Examinations of the relationship between art and capitalism tend to centre the production and circulation of commodities, creative labour conditions and artistic critiques of globalisation. Here, I instead focus on artists’ attention to the social reproduction infrastructures that underpin capitalist life. How are artists and art – particularly social or participatory practices – positioned within struggles staged on these terrains? More specifically, I address the place of creative positions and practices in the rapidly expanding tenants’ movement. In recent years, as real estate and rent have become principal sites or tools of capitalist expropriation and extraction, the historical prioritisation of industrial over residential politics has been contested. Meanwhile, contemporary art’s part in the shifts associated with gentrification and regeneration agendas has come under sustained scrutiny. This chapter tracks community involvement with these debates and their material fallout in East Los Angeles. It attends to how organisers, artists and marginalised communities grapple with the hazards and complexities at play in their relationships and interactions as they seek to advance an explicitly anti-capitalist struggle where the political horizon exceeds housing provision to centre the relations of social reproduction and the ways in which capital both exploits (via rent) and wages war against (via capitalist real estate development) those relations.
Publisher’s page: https://www.routledge.com/Art-and-Capitalism-A-Contemporary-Perspective/Child/p/book/9780367689292