reconfiguring place: art and the global imaginary (2014)

28Reconfiguring Place: Art and the

Global ImaginaryL i n d a W i l l i a m s

IMAGINING PLACE

When the image is new, the world is new …

The Poetics of Space (Bachelard, 1958)

The familiar dwelling places of our lives such as houses, apartments, or even the most rudimentary shelters not only have the power to leave indelible traces in our thoughts and feelings, but as Bachelard once observed, are also subtly inscribed in the ways the body responds to the experience of space (Bachelard, 1969).1 Similarly, most of us have – in some shape or form – a world, and cities, of the imagination that shape our per-ceptions of place, and how we view the lives of others. That is to say, along with the rise of a socio-political global imaginary (Steger, 2008) most of us conceive an imaginary world picture. It is the kind of picture entail-ing some form of what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imaginative community’ beyond the prescriptions of nationalism (Anderson 2006). Such imaginary pictures also include the spatial contours of cities of memory and

ideas, drawn both from the actual experience of particular places, along with the affects of various cultural images of urban identity and persuasions of electronic media. The escalat-ing processes of socio-economic globaliza-tion, moreover, have led to the sprawling expansion of existing cities along with the rapid development of new ones. And hence to increasingly common experiences of urban place that often differ quite markedly from the prevailing imagery of cities with the kind of glamorous global profiles that attract international tourism.

Most people across the globe now live in cities, where a sense of physical presence in the world is made, and remade, on a daily basis; not only by how well the urban environ-ment has adapted to the pressures of growth and brisk social change, but also from the aesthetics of place. As Scott McQuire has explained so lucidly, the contemporary experience of urban space is also constituted by the technologies of the media city (McQuire, 2008). Hence the perpetual flow of information, images and capital that form

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the virtual architecture of contemporary cit-ies (Castells, 2000), are integral to the social processes of globalization, and provide many of the visual sources that continue to reshape the global imaginary. They are, however, not the only sources through which the image of the global is configured, and my focus here is to consider some of the other ways cultural conceptions of space are socially constructed.

The aesthetic experience of urban place is also shaped by the ways in which the fabric of the city itself is becoming increasingly homogenous, and this, in turn, has conferred a relatively new, shared perspective on how we might perceive the lives of many millions of others in cities across the world.2 Globalization, then, is in many ways synony-mous with new forms of urbanization, though the question of how both rural spaces, and the places commonly referred to as wilderness have been largely elided in contemporary debates on the aesthetics of globalization and cosmopolitanism, is an underlying concern of this chapter to which I will later return.

In the nineteenth century, writers such as Dickens could provide an indelible image of urban decay in a ‘Little Britain’ that bore all the characteristics of an idiosyncratically English urban character, and Dostoevsky could create a ‘St Petersburg of the mind’ firmly rooted in a specific time and place (Fanger, 1965). The twenty-first century city, by com-parison, must adapt to the demands of consum-erist cultures common to all contemporary urban societies. Hence the differentiation of place still evident in those semi-industrial nineteenth century cities aspiring to join an increasingly deregulated global economy, for example, is now gradually superseded by widely duplicated urban ‘brand’ sites that are outlets for identical consumer goods. Or, conversely, by the proliferation of privatized shopping malls that effectively erode the traditional role of the street or market square as public space (Sorkin, 1992). Further, all large cities now bear some similarity in appear-ance provided by the anonymous facades of corporate style modernist architecture, along

with buildings bearing the ubiquitous global logos and brand names that are the familiar signs of international late capitalism. Such buildings are derived from the early twenti-eth century Western architectural movement known as the ‘international style’, rather than the stylistic eclecticism of art deco architec-ture that was also influential in the early twentieth century. The international style is a functionalist aesthetic that has certainly lived up to its name in the ubiquitous towers of steel and glass evident in most cities across the world. It is an aesthetic blueprint that is particularly notable in the economically influential urban centres Saskia Sassen first described as ‘global cities’ (Sassen,1991) including the vast new megacities of Asia. Global cities, or at least large, central areas within them, often lack the intimacy of low-rise buildings on a more human scale, or references to local history and the slower pace of street markets and cafes, along with urban market gardens advocated by the recent development of CittaSlow, or slow city movement.3 On the other hand, global cities offer the social energy of a rapid daily pace, and sustain major cultural institutions such as substantial public museums and arts festivals in which the cultural imagery of space can be re-imagined and refashioned. Global cities also support less populist art forms represented by substantial companies for the performance of music, dance and opera that might otherwise collapse in smaller towns, or markets dominated by popular taste.

Such major cultural institutions in big cit-ies are typically housed in ‘landmark’ build-ings of considerable architectural distinction, notable either for their neo-classical elegance or for the dramatically contemporary urban profiles seen, for example, in the interna-tional work of architects such as Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind has designed many museums, along with buildings in major cities that are intended to engage pub-lic memory such as the Jewish museum in Berlin or his winning design for the recon-struction of ‘ground zero’ at the 16-acre


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world trade centre site in Manhattan. Before Libeskind won the commission for ground zero, David Harvey speculated on how designs for the site might respond to the pub-lic memory of those who died at the site, and was not sanguine about the role of capitalist developers who would

not be averse to combining their mundane commercial concerns with inspiring symbolic statements (emphasizing the power and indestructability of the political-economic system of global capitalism that received such a body blow on 9/11) by erecting, say, a towering phallic symbol that spells defiance. (Harvey, 2006: 137)

In place of the twin towers, Libeskind’s mas-ter plan features two rectangular pools with the names of the victims inscribed on their bronze perimeters along with waterfalls that appear to cascade deep into the earth. These are surrounded, or one might say ‘guarded’ by four new towers that form a spiral around the site. One of these, Freedom Tower, will be the tallest building in New York City, it is designed as a visual and symbolic counter-point to the Statue of Liberty, and is now nearing completion. The pools of Liebskind’s design certainly respond effectively to the human losses of 9/11, especially in the use of water as a sign of cleansing and healing of public grief. The towers too are unequivo-cally successful signs of defiance and asser-tions of a neo-liberal economy, especially in connection with the image of liberty as the enduring national icon.

The sweeping fluidity of Gehry’s designs for museums are widely celebrated for their sculptural qualities, yet it has also been remarked that these are buildings standing out from the city as architectural spectacle rather than integrated with it (Foster, 2001). Hence for all their sculptural eloquence, Gehry’s buildings can also be seen as prestigious local examples of a sophisticated architectural global brand rather than something that responds to specific urban identity as such. On the street, however, notwithstanding the way historical urban ‘features’ may be developed by urban planners or the heritage industry as

public or tourist spectacle, more consistently formulaic architecture involves the gradual erosion of local historical distinctions of place that may generate a more general erasure of public memory.

The concrete indications of such erasures of social memory and history are especially evident in the abundance of the so-called ‘non-places’ of supermodernity: the airports, supermarkets, corporate foyers or generic media spaces common to all big cities (Augé, 1995). These may seem to be places of bland neutrality, yet they are very likely the spatial correlatives of a model of globalization as a callous, unilateral process in which resources and agency play gradually, but surely, into the hands of a multinational capitalist elite (Bauman, 2000; Harvey, 2006). This refer-ence to ‘spatial correlatives’, however, is not to suggest that the material forms of the city are simply manifestations of global imagi-naries, but rather that the social production of space arises from complex forms of interde-pendence between the social imaginary and the concrete environment. And as Marc Augé suggests, the individual interpellated by such non-places is called to a form of anonymity only relieved by the digits of a personal credit card or identity document.

Despite the complex signs of local history in the layers of cultural representation from which given urban aesthetics arise then, such places nonetheless represent an unmis-takable global tendency towards a generic aesthetics of late modernity in the contem-porary urban fabric. And if it is the case that this tendency towards a generic aesthetics of place is the result of a geo-political hegem-ony that has been seen as a new imperialist form of socio-economic global ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000), then this raises the question of to what extent cultural resistance to this aesthetic monotony has been effec-tive. In this context, I propose that the two most significant countervailing narratives that have arisen in contemporary art are art-works derived from new forms of the cos-mopolitan imagination, and those that have developed in environmental art.



Given that the cities of late modernity are constantly growing and shifting with the way local histories combine with influxes of peo-ple of diverse nationalities, there is a counter-vailing view of the contemporary city which suggests that the flux and heterogeneity of its populations facilitated by the rapid com-munications of electronic networks are pre-cisely what is needed to undermine what has been aptly described as the McDonaldization of culture (Smart, 1999). On this view, the capacity for cultural resistance is said to lie above all in the cosmopolitanism that enables a shared recognition of differences in the experience of the world, and to the grassroots social shifts that reshape urban neighbour-hoods – especially those adapted by people who have migrated from foreign cultures. As Gerard Delanty is surely correct to observe, moreover, the recognition and translation of the values of foreign, and particularly non-Western cultures, also requires a measure of comparative self-reflective evaluation on the part of the host culture (Delanty, 2009). Insofar as cosmopolitanism is sufficiently robust to avoid complicity with the standard-ized forms of globalized modernity, it also has correspondences with the more differentiated model of global interdependencies that Shmuel Eisenstadt refers to as the global mul-tiple modernities forged by differences in economics, social history and culture (Eisenstadt, 2000).

Yet opinion remains divided on the cul-tural value of cosmopolitan hybridity, which is derided by some as a new cultural logic of late capitalism (Zizek, 1997) while by others is regarded as a complex, yet nonetheless plausible conduit to social transformation (Papastergiadis, 2012). And the question of whether the aesthetics of cosmopolitan and migratory cultures can provide meaningful alternatives to the socio-economic impera-tives of globalization has in fact emerged as one of the central critical problems of con-temporary art (Bal et al., 2011; Belting et al., 2011; Harris, 2011; Philipsen, 2010). These aesthetic issues pivot on the lack of cultural consensus over whether globalization is a

progressive or reactionary process. Though widely discussed, however, the issue of cos-mopolitanism, as I will go on to argue, is not necessarily now the most significant ques-tion redefining the global politics and aes-thetics of place in contemporary art since environmental art is focused increasingly on the much more serious issue of global cli-mate change.

Further to Bourdieu’s discussions on the social and institutional capital associated with art (Bourdieu, 1986, 1990), Lotte Philipsen has remarked that despite the claims of new internationalism in art, con-temporary art itself has a conceptual frame-work that is essentially a product of Western processes of modernity (Philipsen, 2010: 80–3). Though it clearly does not follow that Western culture therefore in some way ‘owns’ the discourses of contemporary art, it is important to remember that such art seeks to distance itself from the symbolic orders of the pre-modern regardless of whether those symbolic imaginaries are Western or not. Furthermore, despite the preference for the discourses of the postmodern in art criticism, neither does contemporary art, in my view at least, participate in a world-view that has made a profound epistemological break with the claims of modernity. In other words, rather than something that arises with a puta-tive condition of postmodernity and a general rupture with Western metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984) contemporary art, it seems to me, is formed by the longue durée of moder-nity which includes the crucial modern capacity to engage in innate critique. This is not to suggest a simple continuity between early and late modernity, but simply to say that in accord with certain positions on modernity in social theory (Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 1990) modernism as the cultural logic of modernity is now heightened and has accelerated into a reflective phase of late or liquid modernity.

The innate critique of modernity is coeval with its origins in early modernity. And this extends to how the spatial arts of nineteenth and twentieth century modernism engaged



intensively, though certainly not exclusively, with the codes and practices of representa-tion itself. In the twenty-first century, this process has shifted and has extended to sub-stantial critiques of the socio-spatial repre-sentations of modernity and globalization, especially recently in the revaluation of para-digmatically Western ways of knowing the world. Before focusing on the revaluation of conventional aesthetics of place in contem-porary art, however, I want to turn to con-sider how older constructions of global space also recur in contemporary culture.

IMAGES OF WORLDS AND CITIES

In the future, faster-growing economies will account for an increasing share of the total of world trade. A significant proportion of this new commerce will be ‘South–South’ trade among faster-growing regions – a modern resurgence of the old Silk Road. As this shift gathers pace, HSBC is well placed to help businesses and individuals seize the opportunities. (Stuart Gulliver, CEO, HSBC)5

In May 2012, the website of fine art auction-eers Bonhams of London carried the news that ‘Bonhams strike gold with glittering El Anatsui tapestry’.6 This referred to a world record price of £541,250 (US$ 850,544) for a work by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui: a glittering large scale tapestry woven from flattened used bottle caps called New World Map (2010). Bonhams, like most other European and American art dealers have long traded in the kind of traditional non-Western art that was largely categorized as ‘ethno-graphic’. Subsequently, the focus on invest-ment in contemporary art from non-Western cultures, from China, India, and most recently, Africa, has been more or less coeval with the heightened processes of neo-liberal economic globalization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At the level of the pro-duction of art, this is a cultural climate in which many artists are aware of the extent to which artworks exploring questions of local-ity will be critically assessed in the context of globalism and the complex intersections of

international cultural exchange. Such ques-tions are also aligned with the territorial terms of global art markets, and the alacrity with which post-colonial assertions of cultural difference are sucked up by the voracious thirst of cultural investment in the ‘next thing’, and hence absorbed into the global processes of neo-liberal economics.

For Bonhams, the fact that El Anatsui him-self acknowledged the processes of eco-nomic and cultural exchange underpinning histories of colonialism and globalization did not go unnoticed, and was something they decided was of interest for buyers perusing their pre-auction website so they could fol-low the artist’s view on how he conceived his image of the world:

I thought of the objects as links between my continent, Africa, and the rest of Europe. Objects such as these were introduced to Africa by Europeans when they came as traders. Alcohol was one of the commodities brought with them to exchange for goods in Africa … I thought that the bottle caps had a strong reference to the history of Africa.7

If El Anatsui has been well paid for his vision of global processes of exchange in a way that would not have been possible in the colonial period he refers to, it does not of course imply a shift in the more fundamental pro-cesses of economic exchange between Europe and Africa.

Another contemporary image of the world map was presented at the 15th Biennale of Sydney in 2006, in an installation called World Map by the Chinese contemporary art-ist Ai Wei Wei.8 Ai Wei Wei’s installation required a deliberately labour intensive pro-cess of cutting 2,000 layers of cotton cloth into the contours of the world map: an approach to art making the local press under-stood as hinting at China’s status as a source of cheap workers for the fabric industry, whilst the artist himself commented on how the technical problem of holding the layers of the map together represented difficulties in national and international unity (Creagh, 2006). Ai Wei Wei was the art consultant on



the national stadium constructed for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008: now known as the ‘Bird’s Nest’ and widely celebrated as a global icon. He has also gained interna-tional recognition for installations and web-based artworks including those criticizing the Chinese government’s position on democracy and human rights. Ai Wei Wei was arrested in Beijing in 2011, then held in solitary confinement for 81 days and subse-quently remains under intense state surveil-lance. The ways in which the state authorities sought to silence Ai Wei Wei have only served to reinforce the international esteem with which he is regarded as an artist com-mitted to the courageous critique of political oppression in China, though there is notably less widespread discussion of the critique of international forms of political oppression which are also suggested by his work. With his World Map in the Sydney Biennale for example, there were no responses from the Australian press questioning Western depend-ency on the inexpensive products of exploita-tive labour relations in China, or with Australia’s general reluctance to comment on other forms of Chinese political exploitation, such as those in the violent transgression of the national borders of Tibet.9

Indeed, with the exception of a relatively small number of cultural cognoscenti, many people visiting any of the many global bien-nales of contemporary art are very likely mainly trying to come to terms with what ‘art’ is supposed to be in the first place. This is, however, how art speaks to the wider public since it appeals to the viewer through the processes of art itself, rather than using art as a means of proselytizing political messages. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, contrasts between the innate poetics of art and the desire to make it widely intelligible are tensions faced by many contemporary artist wanting to address a public beyond the art world (Williams 2013). Ai Wei Wei’s stacks of cloth posed an innovative challenge to aesthetic preconceptions in ways that might at least have frayed the edges of an imagi-nary cartography of a world with clearly

demarcated boundaries. It is likely most of the spectators of his installation would have been wearing clothing bearing the label ‘Made in China’ (that is, clothing often made in sweatshop conditions), though the question of whether any viewers drew such inferences largely depends on the affective potential of the artwork itself. The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra also invites viewers to reflect on the ways international labour relations are approached in his installations. Though his work is more confrontational in the way he expects viewers to think about the immigrant workers to whom he has paid the minimum wage to be ‘enclosed’ in the installation in sealed boxes or bricked in behind walls for days. In either case, however, the realization of the human costs of neo-liberal globalization is still an essentially secondary reflection on the initial aesthetic experience of the artwork itself, which is to say on its immediate capac-ity to reconfigure the meaning of images and spatial experience.

The ways the stability of national borders could be questioned through reconstructed images of the world was also explored by the Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström, whose World Map (1972) bore some resemblances to the earliest version of a navigational global map by Mercator in the sixteenth cen-tury age of European global expansion and colonialism. Mercator’s cartographic projec-tion of 1569 enabled the oceanic trade routes that established Europe as a global power, yet in Fahlström’s twentieth century map the oceans have shrunk and the lands closest to the equator (which were given a symboli-cally small scale by Mercator) are now much enlarged by the artist and are saturated by the imagery of poverty, oppression and geo-political struggle based on four centuries of western capitalist monopoly. If Mercator’s perspective exaggerated the size of countries furthest from the equator, later attempts to correct these inaccuracies such as the Gall-Peters projection of 1973 also included dis-tortions that nevertheless prompted further debate about the political dimensions of modern cartography.



The iconographic traditions of the map of the world are salutary reminders that all maps, images and models of the globe are essentially heuristic abstractions. If the cultural and politi-cal imaginaries evinced by such abstractions are made obvious in imaginative artworks such as the ‘marvellous’ map of the world made by the French surrealists in 1929, for example, it is nevertheless an image of the world seen from the perspective of the global north. This is a semiotic preference that is also seen in scien-tific maps and even in the popular photographic images of the world seen from space. And up until relatively recently the scientific project to provide reliably objective representations of geographical space also shows other ways in which global maps have been shaped quite significantly by specific social and cultural conventions. Imaginary or metaphoric abstrac-tions of space, moreover, are not limited to global imagery, since cities too, with their var-ied architectures and conventions of urban design, their gardens, and even the extended rural spaces upon which all cities are depend-ent, are also formed by the long, often con-tested, histories of cultural representation.

In distinction from the ways architecture and some public art projects are bound by the imperatives of function and budgets, the poetics of art can instantly refashion globally contested places in ways that can influence a more general spatial imaginary. This is clearly the case in the surrealists’ map of the world where the imperialist nations of 1929 are simply banished by the stroke of a pen, whereas places rich in the realms of the sur-realist imagination such as Ireland, or Mexico appear as large landmasses. Russia too, looms large over the top of the world perhaps as a subversive surrealist gesture towards Trotsky’s exile in Mexico, and his rejection of the Stalinist view of art as the servant of the nation state. Similarly, when from 1971–9 Alighiero Boetti asked the skilled Afghani embroiderers of Kabul to make his Mappa series of global maps in tapestries, he was interested to find the women embroidering them simply left Israel off the map because it was not recognized by the Taliban regime.

In 1967 the American artist Jasper Johns based his global Map painting on Buckminster Fuller’s radical Dymaxion air-ocean image of the globe. Based on an icosahedron, it was a global image that resisted distortions of scale or domination by hemispherical perspective and opened up a view of the world in which it was possible, for example, to trace the long history of human migrations across con-nected land masses.

As Fuller’s work indicates, strikingly imaginative configurations of the world have not always been confined to the domain of art, and this was also the case in pre-modern times. The European picture of the world, for example, was often imagined as a disk-shaped image surrounded by sea that extended to a peripheral zone where civilization ended and the unknown realms of barbarians, myth-ological beasts and monsters began.

For the Greeks the world was centred in the omphales, or navel of the world in Delphi, and extended beyond the Mediterranean into the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. These were the strange lands of the barbarians, or barbarous: the Scythians, Africans, Persians or Celts who had not expe-rienced Greek language and culture. Similarly, the Roman conception of the Orbis Terrarum was configured as a disk with Rome at its heart and the barbarian lands at its outer edges. And later, as can be seen in the largest extant late medieval map of the world – the English Mappa Mundi of c. 1285, the world-view is again circular. This map, however, was painted after the violent Christian cru-sades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries when Europeans sought to conquer the holy lands, and hence Jerusalem was then placed at the centre of the world. There is also a place in the east, at the top of this map, and at the very edge of the world for the Garden of Eden, which is surrounded by a ring of fire and is hence as separate from an unredeemed world as the land of mutant beings which lies on another periphery beyond the Nile. If the imagery of a ‘new world’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held considerable exotic appeal for the European imagination



of place, it was, as is well known, by then also quickly adapted, and subsumed into the European maps that became primary images of world domination.

The images of the world in pre-modern maps bear certain basic semiotic resem-blances to pre-modern representations of the city in classical antiquity, the medieval period and the modern city-states of the renaissance, insofar as they also depict a cir-cular format in which the city is enclosed, and fortified by walls that protect it from the world beyond. The Greek city in particular provided the key to the European image of the world beyond, as Henri Lefebvre explained so eloquently:

Around the Greek city, above it, there is the cosmos, luminous and ordered spaces, the apogee of place. The city has as centre a hole which is sacred and damned, inhabited by the forces of death and life, times dark with effort and ordeals, the world. (1996: 88)

It has been pointed out that the Greek stoic philosophers resisted the authority of the polis and in this sense were the first cosmo-politans (Papastergiadis, 2012: 81). It is also the case that in pre-modern European culture in general, tales of wonder about exotic places and strange cultures continually reshaped the Western imagination. The silk road especially was an ancient pathway for many fables of strange places, and it is thought that the book retelling the story of Marco Polo’s journey to the distant East in the late thirteenth century greatly inspired Columbus in his voyage to the ‘new’ world (Landström, 1967).

The contemporary nostalgia for an era when freedom of movements across various countries was still possible sometimes takes on ‘blue sky’ moments as in the utopian turn in Rasheed Araeen’s long-term project for the creation of Mediterranea. Araeen, a lead-ing writer of the influential journal Third Text, is also a respected artist who first began to plan Mediterranea in dialogue with the French philosopher Etienne Balibar in 2006 to reconfigure the modern cartographies that

have restricted migration and inhibited transcultural dialogue. Araeens’s colourful map shows how the coastal counties of Africa, Asia and Europe could be joined by their shared proximity to the sea rather than nation states, then reconnected to the old silk road as a path to the far East. It is difficult now to imagine the social consequences if the boundaries of the European Union and other national frontiers were dissolved in this way, especially given the long genealogies of the conflicts between Christian and Islamic states, and the hard won separation of church and state in the West. But Araeen’s image is an invitation to imagine the social possibili-ties engendered by reconstituting some of the more liberal spatial conditions before such differences became entrenched.

The nostalgic figurations of an earlier world without national borders and the cul-tural appeal of lands beyond Europe, how-ever, should also be considered in the context of colonization as it first arose in the pre-modern era. After all, Europeans witnessed imperialist missions at least from the time of Alexander the Great, the massive Roman empire, the Ottoman Muslim empire, and various other kinds of colonialism that devel-oped with the rise of Western imperialism. Though as Bauman has observed, these early forms of colonial expansion in turn bear a very different image of the global than one derived from the transnational corporations that are now eroding the power of the nation state (Bauman, 1990: 176).

The long traditions of how the Western imaginary was shaped by ideas of lands and peoples beyond Europe is too complex to go into here, though like the histories of cosmo-politanism itself, curiosity about the margins of the world provided a minor, though sig-nificant countervailing vision to the dominant view of Europe as the centre of the world. Nonetheless, the early European pictures of the world have clear semiotic correspond-ences with coeval images of European cities. And the spatial contours of the city as an insular, usually fortified structure, despite the countervailing traditions of cosmopolitanism,



was without doubt the one that prevailed in Europe for many centuries.

The walled, circular city, as Foucault made clear, was the means by which pre-modern and early modern societies were defined by a form of binary spatial logic against certain conditions of exclusion (Foucault, 1975, 1982, 1986). For Foucault, the regulation of disease and sovereign monopoly of violence were the means by which the city defined the conditions from which citizens were required to distance themselves. Weber shows how pre-modern oriental cultures in India and China too shared this image of the fortified city united under a sovereign military with mixed social classes, though he argues that the relative inflexibility of the hieratic socio-religious order of oriental cultures restricted the development of civic collaboration in the East (Weber, 1958: 91–104). Lefebvre con-tends that Islamic cities did not provide the same potential for class struggle that devel-oped from the way the Western cities were aligned with the monarchic state (1996: 119). But in any case, the Western model of the city is the one which has now gained global dominance.

From classical antiquity the Western spa-tial logic of exclusion extended to the strange territories at the edge of the world, and from the city interior to its rural periphery, and hence to the wilder places beyond regarded as inferior to the civilized regimes of the city.

This was also a cultural tradition that largely perpetuated the idea that the non-human world beyond the city walls was not only inferior, but also something separate from the everyday life of the city. Hence the roots of the notion that the bio-political regimes of the city are now somehow more or less independent of the world outside were very likely formed at a time when the actual walls of the city were emblems of the protec-tion against the uncivilized world beyond. It was a fundamentally instrumentalist way of thinking about nature in particular that was consistent with theological conventions in ontological dualism. And this corresponded well enough with the cultural imagery of a

civilized, Christian world surrounded by the barbarian monsters of the European imagina-tion commensurate with the colonial expan-sion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also furthered a view of civilized human subjectivity as something somehow distinct from nature that, as Norbert Elias explained, was reinforced both by the inter-nalization of emotional restraints required of individuals in the city and the new Cartesian logic of the early European Enlightenment (Elias, 2000).

Even when the rural was hailed as a noble alternative to the potential corruptibility of life in the city, as Raymond Williams observed of images of nature from the per-spective of English cities, writers (like artists) often reinscribed the distinctions between the city and the country in ways that significantly shaped ‘structures of feeling’ which reinforced the traditionally binary logic between the human and nonhuman worlds (Williams, 1973).

In many ways the enduring binary spatial logic of the early city has parallels in the exclusionary processes of globalization itself, since just as within every city the wealthy are able to open many doors that are not available to the masses,10 there is still a sense in which the West, before the rest, has different means of access to the world in general. Having acknowledged this, how-ever, it is crucial to recognize that these con-ditions remain unstable, as Lefebvre observes:

The dialectic of the urban cannot be limited to the opposition centre-periphery, although it implies and contains it … Thinking the city moves towards thinking the world (thought as a relationship to the world) … (and) globality as totality. (1996: 52)

The circular spatial contours of early and pre-modern cities, along with early cellular images of the world, though dominant, were not the only semiotic codes that informed the early aesthetics of globalization. They were to some extent offset by a countervailing cultural logic of cosmopolitanism that has



become a major theme of contemporary art. The cultural traditions that offered a counter-vailing imagery of nature also provided a less anthropocentric approach to the world than those that prevailed, and this has now extended to new models of global space in environmental art. The old images of the city have obviously shifted considerably in the contemporary world, though the shadow of the old binary spatial logic still falls across new ways of imagining global spatial bound-aries in contemporary art. This produces tensions in the ways contemporary art comes to terms with globalization that will be the focus of the following discussion.

TRAVERSING BOUNDARIES

What interests me more than politics or art is the way the boundaries defining certain practices as artistic or political are drawn and redrawn. (Jacques Rancière, 2007: 256)

As we have seen, El Anatsui, Ai Wei Wei and Fahlström extended the standard semiotic code of the world map to reveal processes of economic globalization. Yet their artworks are also part of the institutional framework of the global art ‘industry’ which in its celebra-tion of novelty and transnational cultural currency is virtually indistinguishable from other forms of global commodity capitalism. El Anatsui is now a much sought after ‘name’ by investors, and Fahlström’s anti-capitalist maps are also coveted collectors’ items. Ai Wei Wei’s work was not for sale, but could still be framed as part of the required interna-tional cultural capital of biennales: the kind of ‘art scenes’ which along with a ‘creative’ class, are now regarded as essential to the public images of economically successful cities (Florida, 2005). And as is often pointed out, art groups with alternative, or indepen-dent views are soon adopted by the main-stream, and international ‘art scenes’ such as those in Shanghai, New York, London or Sydney share the same discursive frames of reference and very similar fashions in taste (Gielen: 2011: 85). It has even been suggested

that art in the context of ‘biennalism’ is not in many cases all that different from other forms of general spectator amusements like football (Roelstraete, 2011: 95). And whilst this seems to me to underestimate the affec-tive power of art as a means of potentially transformative experience, it suggests a familiar enough dilemma to warrant a gen-eral shift in contemporary art over the last ten years or so towards so called ‘relational’ art. The term relational art is derived from Nicolas Bourriaud’s much quoted essay on relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002) and is now sometimes used almost interchangeably with a number of other contemporary art genres that refer to globalization, including post-colonial migratory culture, art as urban political activism, or art in public space. It could be argued, of course, that for a number of social theorists art and aesthetics have always been socially relational, and Bourriaud has been criticized for a simple model of social relations that ignore the complexity of the conflicted, sometimes violent relations of actual social practices (Bishop, 2004). Further, as Stewart Martin’s insightful cri-tique makes clear, relational aesthetics aspire to subordinate the capitalist relations to objects by a dynamics of relations between people. A laudable aim perhaps, but one that naively avoids the more fundamental prob-lem that ‘Capitalist exchange value is not constituted at the level of objects, but of social labour, as a measure of abstract labour’ (Martin, 2007: 378). So, effectively, by shift-ing the focus of art away from objects to relations between people, there can be no guarantees that relational art has moved for-ward in addressing the social-relational structures of neo-liberal globalization.

Art-critical fashions aside, however, there are numerous examples of art that question capitalist values of exchange quite deftly in ways that explore the less visible boundaries of global space. As early as 1970, for exam-ple, the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles took advantage of a local bottle recycling scheme to make a work called Insertions into Ideological Circuits in which he inscribed



Coca-Cola bottles with messages like ‘Yankees go home’ next to statements of his aim ‘To register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circu-lation’ and then re-circulated these bottles for people to purchase. At a time of political dictatorship and repression in Brazil, Meireles took his deliberately anonymous strategy fur-ther with The Currency Project (1970) where he also stamped written appeals for democ-racy onto banknotes before re-circulating them. Miereles’ project effectively traced the shifting boundaries of globalization as they emerged in social space by entering the city through its processes of exchange, yet it was also a process that extended to everyday material objects such as the bottles or bank-notes people could hold in their hands. More recently the international arts collective Super-flex made a video work called The Financial Crisis (2009) in which the viewer’s under-standing of the global financial crisis is approached through a 12-minute narrative session with an imaginary hypnotist. By call-ing viewers to imagine themselves as invis-ible hands, powerful financial brokers, and contented workers the artists attempt to pro-vide a ‘therapeutic’ guide through financial disaster. It is a theatrical form of deception that is at once amusing and disturbing, espe-cially in the ways it appeals to the feelings of fear and vulnerability that arise with the indi-vidual’s inability to control how fluctuations in global financial transactions can destroy basic forms of human security.

Other artists have also commented on the less visible boundaries of global space such as the way time and space are compressed and segmented by the rationalist regimes of late modernity. In a work called Escapement (2009), for example, the Raqs Media arts collective in New Delhi focused on the con-temporary compression of time and space heightened by global digital technology. Their installation comprised 27 wall clocks set to the differing time zones of various cities, accompanied by a sound loop con-taining temporal references such as alarms or the electronic sounds of dial-up Internet

connections. Rather than the clock hands pointing to numbers, however, they point to words on the clock faces describing various emotional responses to time such as ‘fatigue’, ‘anxiety’, ‘nostalgia’ or ‘duty’ – common responses to clocks experienced by people across the world, especially in the workplace. The measurement of labour as time also has local implications in this work, since New Delhi is an urban hub for the round-the-clock call centres developed by multinational companies. New Delhi’s industrial satellite town, Gurgaon, in par-ticular has recently been developed to include several big new call centres, their walls lined with clocks, where poorly paid employees work long shifts to call people across the world. Some of the clocks in Escapement that are set at the same time zones also call attention to the different cul-tural attitudes to time in cities sharing zones of longitude like London and Lagos for example, while other clocks point to entirely imaginary spaces such as the fabled cities of Shangri-La or Babel, home to all global languages. Nevertheless, the clocks of Escapement largely convey the impression that the global turn to a rationalization of time is commonly felt as a form of temporal commodification and a Taylorist imposition on the rhythms of everyday life. We have seen how artists such as Ai Wei Wei and Santiago Sierra have explored the exploita-tive conditions of labour exacerbated by globalized cost-efficiency and the rationali-zation of time, and the Chinese artist Ni Haifeng invited a more interactive approach to this problem with a work called Para-Production (2008). In this work the artist brought the waste products of Chinese man-ufacturing back to Europe instead of the usual finished products. These were amassed in a huge pile, and viewers were then invited to make them into a tapestry, a pub-lic gesture in accord with the deliberately open-ended approach to the geo-political turn in art exhibited at ZKM in Karlsruhe where the exhibition was seen to assume ‘the form of an essay and, much like an



essay, raise(s) themes and problems for debate’ (Zijlmans, 2011: 9)

One of the most consistent themes of glo-balization and culture has been a concern with the impermeable spatial barriers of national borders and the politics of global mobility and displacement, recently described as the geo-aesthetic dimension of contemporary art. (Barriendos Rodrĩguez, 2011). Though sceptical of the capacity of the contemporary art system to enable a dis-interested politics of transcultural representa-tion, Barriendos Rodrĩguez still sees the new openness to difference as an aesthetic field in which artists can work strategically across conceptual borders (2011: 328). Video art in particular has been used extensively to invite audience participation in the narratives of people, sometimes refugees, who have passed through many national borders often to find even more insuperable cultural barri-ers on arrival.

The actual physical sites of national bor-ders are often chosen for performative art-works by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. In a work called The Green Line (2004), for example as Israeli soldiers were constructing a separation fence, Alÿs dribbled a Green Line of paint along the armistice border of Jerusalem following an older geo-political line that had been inscribed on a regional map in green pen by Moshe Dayan in 1948. In another work of 2006 called Bridge/Puente Alÿs attempted a ‘rehearsal’ of trans-national collaboration by working with local fishermen on both sides of the dangerous 90-mile stretch of sea between Havana, Cuba and the shore of Key West in Florida. Alÿs filmed their attempts to connect 150 boats across the sea, which if not quite a bridge, at least acted as a rehearsal for an imaginary bridge. This was followed by a later collabo-rative work with local teenagers in an attempt to traverse the straits of Gibraltar in 2009 with toy boats.

Involuntary voyages of migration, on the one hand, as is widely known from the his-tory of the European slave trade have also been pathways to human misery. The long

European colonial voyages to Australia on the other hand, may have had a different pur-pose, but also resulted in human suffering that continues into the present. The contem-porary Australian artist Gordon Bennett does not flinch from exploring the legacies of this earlier phase of global colonization in art-works that ‘adapt’ various Western styles of representation to confront the primary his-torical moments of European invasion: its most overtly violent periods, and the way it continues to shape the present. Though Bennett’s works have been justifiably well received critically, however, Australian Aboriginal ‘desert’ paintings have a much stronger international market despite their participation in the kind of pre-modern sym-bolic imaginary that though visually compel-ling, probably very few understand.

The cultural conflicts that arise with global borders are a complex and difficult imagi-nary terrain in which different cultural per-ceptions of gender play a significant role, especially in relation to the question of the status of women. This has been explored by a number of artists, including the Iranian expatriate artist Sherin Neshat whose photo-graphs and videos trace how women have experienced the charged encounters between the cultural codes of dress and behaviour common to Western cities and those pre-scribed by Islam. The heightened black and white contrasts of her photographic series Women of Allah (1993–7) especially, included intensely poetic images exploring the ways Eastern textual traditions impact on women.11 Neshat herself is often the subject of these works and is dressed in traditional black chador which signifies both a sign of resist-ance to Western imperialism and an instru-ment of female disempowerment. Her bare hands, feet and face are often inscribed by Persian script and are combined with images of modern weapons, not only as icons of resistance to the West, but also as a sign of the violent contestations of gender in which she sees the bodies of women as the primary battleground (Sheybani, 1999). Neshat’s video installations such as Turbulent (1998),



Soliloquy: West/East (1999) typically con-trast images of cities in the East and West on opposite walls and have a similarly subdued use of colour that heightens their poetic intensity. Neshat enacts the ways women have restricted access to the public spaces of both Eastern and Western cities: in the alien-ating crowds of the West, and in the claustro-phobic enclosures for women in Eastern cities dominated by minarets.12

The utopian impulse in art gives further shape and meaning to the possibilities that lie beyond the social injustices of both repressive nation states and the callous processes of neo-liberal economic globalization. The realist elements in art, however, can simply amplify visions of human suffering that are not in any sense redemptive, and the tragic vision sits somewhere precariously between darkness and hope. Hence the outcomes of many stories of how people approach encounters between East and West, or the transitions between the old ways and new, are unknown in ways that are thrown into sharp relief by the ways con-temporary art is adapting to how globalization reconfigures both local space and the cultural possibilities of cosmopolitanism.

Nikos Papastergiadis has made the insight-ful point that Enlightenment models of cos-mopolitanism presume ‘the necessary triumph of reason over the faulty, fleeting and flighty genius of the imagination’ (2012: 88) yet as he observes, the cosmopolitan vision is also at its most vivid when the shifts between the local and the world are in transi-tion. The problem of globalization requires the reconfiguration of the concept of an entire world, and this requires both reason and imagination. And although it is true that contemporary art works most powerfully through affect and feeling, it is also shaped by the legacy of the western Enlightenment, and not only at the level of innate critique.

The ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art, or to reconfigurations of the cultural imagi-nary, are based on an essentially humanist sense of global interdependence. But these humanist visions also bear the signs of an older way of thinking about the world which

I have suggested have their basis in the spa-tial model in which the core of the city is privileged over its periphery, and the non-human world is relegated to the margins of civilization. This social construction of space, however, must now contend with the imperatives of reason and scientific consen-sus on the problem of global climate change. And I would now like to turn to a discussion of how the spatial imaginaries of contempo-rary art have begun to respond to this histori-cally unprecedented shift in the perception of global space.

OUTSIDE THE BOUNDARIES

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Climate change will impact on the global poor in more immediate and profound ways than on those of us in wealthy countries since ‘those who contribute least to global warm-ing are both facing the most severe conse-quences and have the least capacity to cope’ (Burgmann and Baer, 2012: 3). And as we have seen, contemporary art is concerned with issues of social injustice that often focus on actual national borders and other imper-meable barriers to social equality, so it is likely that it will also respond to migrations caused by climate change. The added com-plication of how the viability of such national borders might shift in relation to climate change is suggested by Robyn Eckersley’s view that ‘only the state can tackle the eco-logical myopia of the market’ (2004: 82). Yet Eckersley also acknowledges that all nation states are committed to growth in ways that are bound up with international capital, and



these are the crucial ‘contradictory impera-tives’ that prevent decisive action in the mit-igation of climate change (2004: 102). Such difficult contradictions, moreover, may well be intensified by the grass-roots activism that has undoubtedly influenced national policies on climate change, particularly if they gain momentum by consolidating global networks of communication and solidarity (Burgmann and Baer, 2012). So whilst it is clear that climate change will heighten global injustice, it also has potential as a catalyst of change. Hence the prospect of what Ulrich Beck described as a ‘world risk society’ (Beck, 1999) threatened by global climate change has the potential to galvanize a global imag-inary that enables us to think beyond the exigencies of time and place

Art collectives such as the British based Cape Farewell project (Buckland et al. 2006) and individual artists have begun to support global grass-roots activism in response to climate change. A case in point was when the British artist John Quigley travelled to the Arctic with a team from Greenpeace to make Melting Vitruvian Man (2011): a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic humanist image of Vitruvian Man (c.1487) which Quigley copied and inscribed on a massive scale on the surface of the icecap. The giant figure gradually began to melt, and this process was documented in aerial photographs. Hence, this definitively humanist figure that repre-sents the concept of man as the measure of all things gradually melted and lost definition on the polar icecap. Quigley’s figure of man deteriorated in a way that called into question the contemporary status of the image of the human as something separate from the non-human world, whilst also dramatizing the anthropogenic causes of global warming.

In a further example, the issue of how the use of carbon-based fuels exacerbates global warming was a process highlighted quite liter-ally by the French art duo HeHe in their effective urban environmental art work Nuage Vert in Helsinki during February 2008. The artists took advantage of the fact that the coal-fuelled Salmisaari power station

is located in the centre of Helsinki, which meant that when they used laser tracking to project a green light onto the toxic vapour coming from the chimneys of the plant, this could be seen by everyone in the city. During the event, the public responded by decreas-ing their electricity consumption and partici-pated in ‘growing’ the green cloud.13 Nuage Vert is a good example of what could be called fast track environmental art, or the kind of art that makes a simple point very effectively to a wide public without becom-ing didactic. Public art, however, like archi-tecture, is often compromised by function and urban policies or simply by financial restraints, and artists must also respond to contextual histories of local space. These are issues that a complex international environ-mental artwork such as the Australian-based Spatial Dialogues (2012–14) project has encountered in dialogues between artists in Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo about the important role of water in these cities.

Like artists addressing themes of cosmo-politanism in art, environmental artists face the problem of how the poetic qualities of art may be compromised by art that insists it is ‘about’ environmental issues and hence instructs the viewer rather than offering the spatial correlatives of new imaginaries.

Contemporary art has, on occasions, the capacity to effectively deconstruct and replace spatial correlatives of how multina-tional companies cross national borders to impose their global brands on the city. Artists in Ho Chi Minh City, for example, collabo-rated with the Superflex international art collaborative to produce an exemplary work of this genre with Flooded McDonald’s (2009). These artists reconstructed a perfect replica of a generic McDonald’s ‘non-place’ in a swimming pool, which they then slowly flooded with water and filmed. The film can be seen on You Tube, but is also often pro-jected onto gallery walls.14 Whilst the con-nections between multi-national agribusiness, global climate change and rising sea levels are clear enough in this work (Williams, 2011: 13), its 20-minute projected video loop



is particularly effective because it is actually quite amusing to watch Ronald McDonald waving involuntarily before slowly sinking beneath the deluge of water as the burgers, shakes and fries are reduced to mush.

Humour is generally under-valued by artists dealing with processes of globalization, which is not to imply, of course, that environmental degradation should in any way be seen as a bad joke, but rather that humour is an effective way of condensing a great deal of serious critical reflection on human folly into an entertaining artwork. There are no aesthetic rules, more-over, insisting that serious art and political critique cannot be entertaining. The culture-jamming activists The Yes Men are a good example of how humour and entertainment can be used to great political effect, particu-larly in the way they set up fake websites for multinational companies with exploitative practices they dislike.15 These websites have led to them receiving invitations to present at conferences as the official ‘representatives’ of multinational companies or to address main-stream media (such as CNN or the BBC). They are quite convincing in their performances and this infuriates the global companies they send up, as is clear from the preamble to their latest film The Yes Men Save The World.

Further to the contradictions in global sys-tems of profit when markets expand to the point where production outstrips demand, James O’Connor identified a second contra-diction of capitalism as the over-exploitation of resources exacerbated by a consumer-based economy that leads to the destruction of the environment (1998: 317). That such a contradiction presents the possibility of a potentially irredeemable demise for the cur-rent global financial system is a difficult enough problem, given that the ones who will suffer most immediately will be the world’s poor. But it also presents a much more pro-found problem in the context of the emerging global extinction events which could com-pletely transform our current understanding of what it means to be impoverished.

In the last twenty years or so contemporary artists have followed shifts in philosophy and

critical theory reassessing the status of our relationship with animals (Baker, 2000; Wolfe, 2003), and this is aligned with a new field of scholarship in human-animal relations.17 This turn to the animal has recently extended to the issue of global species extinction, a dark new aesthetic of loss and profound nostalgia. If the prevailing global view of non-human others is summed up well enough by Mary Mellor’s phrase ‘parasitical transcendence’ (1997:191), the spatial correlatives of this view are simi-larly bound by the conventional urban spatial logic of inclusion and exclusion in which the spaces of industrialized animal production and slaughter, for example, are relegated to the margins of the city, and hence to the periphery of the social imaginary.

It is true that many companion animals live in cities, along with those in zoos or global media networks conveying a perpetual stream of images of the non-human world beyond the city. It is also the case that gardens, market gardens and other green places exist in the contemporary cities, especially in cities like Stuttgart with its green roofs, or in other cities with urban forests. But just as urban taps sup-ply water, or supermarket shelves provide food, these are basically the products of an instrumentalist approach to nature, or the idea of nature as a ‘resource’ which is generally imagined, in Tim Morton’s phrase, in a place somewhere ‘over there’ (Morton, 2007). This is a form of categorization that somehow elides the scientific case for the human body as a part of nature, as well as separating nature from its relations with the social, and hence one that avoids the recognition of unforeseen consequences of those relations in ecological degradation and loss of biodiversity.

Perhaps in some ways it could be said that this model of nature is analogous to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of an ‘absolute space’ of nature, or ‘first nature’ before it is trans-formed by socio-historical production. Particularly since Lefebvre wrote at a point in the mid twentieth century when nature and culture still remained distinct enough catego-ries for him to remark on how little of this kind of primary space was left:



Natural Space is disappearing […it] has not vanished purely and simply from the scene … everyone wants to protect and save nature … at the same time everything conspires to harm it. The fact is that nature will soon be lost to view … lost to thought … True nature is resistant, and infinite in its depths, but it has been defeated, and now waits only for its ultimate violence and destruction. (1991: 30–1)

And as David Harvey has observed more recently, there is now nowhere in global space that is not subject to regimes of late capitalism. Yet as Lefebvre reminds us ‘space is not a thing but rather a set of relationships between things’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 83). And though from certain contemporary eco-theoretical positions his model of nature pays too little attention to the ontological status of a non-human world independent of human discursivity, it is through his emphasis on the relational and social production of space that Lefebvre makes his most valuable observations on the city, and to the human capacity to transform concepts of nature. On this view, space is not an essence but rather active, operational and instrumental, it is anything but neutral, and hence very little else is more profoundly contested.

I suggested earlier that the roots of the notion of a bio-political regime of the city as somehow more or less independent of the world outside were very likely formed at a time when the actual walls of the city were emblems of the protection against the uncivi-lized world beyond. These relations arose in classical antiquity in the disparities of power evident in how provincial economies were regarded as entirely subsidiary to the eco-nomic requirements and political will of the city. If the medieval monasteries to some extent ameliorated the idea of the inferiority of rural life, the subsidiary status of rural economies was nonetheless sustained in medieval principalities with their exacting tithe systems and serfdom, and consolidated in the early modern model of the city where what lay beyond the city walls was not only uncivilized, but essentially marginal to the life of the city. These were the dominant spa-tial correlatives of a Western social imaginary

in which cultural cosmopolitanism provided a countervailing tradition.

An even more fundamental social imaginary defined the human as an ontologically distinct category from the rest of the non-human world. The counter-narratives that critiqued this image of the human were evident by the time of Montaigne in the sixteenth century, and contin-ued in later cultural movements. This was espe-cially the case with romanticism, which despite Morton’s view of its complicity with modern instrumentalism, formed important countervail-ing cultural images. The contemporary develop-ment of such traditions in environmental art effectively participates in an innate critique of the dominant spatial logic of modernity, and arises in the nascent cultural formations of envi-ronmentalism in response to global climate change. More than any other cultural formation, the development of the arts and critical theory in response to global climate change will require new ontological models, and are likely to be the most crucial cultural signs of a reconfigured global imaginary, and hence of a possible recon-figuration of global space.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1 In what ways are human processes of globaliza-tion constituted by the non-human world?

2 From the perspective of global cities, how do we view the ways in which the life of the city is depend-ent on the non-urban spaces beyond the city fringe?

3 In what ways does environmental art communi-cate the findings of science and the problem of global climate change more effectively than the publication of scientific data?

NOTES

1 Lefebvre too, developed a theory of ‘Rhyth-manalysis’ in response to how bodies respond to urban space. (Lefebvre, 1996: 219–40)

2 It should be noted that there have been several major art exhibitions on the theme of the global city including the large travelling exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–9) and others at the Tate Modern such as Century City (2001) and Global Cities (2007).



3 CittaSlow developed out of the slow food movement that emerged in resistance to the McDonaldization of food culture. A city popula-tion of fewer than 50,000 is required for full membership, though larger cities are admitted as CittaSlow supporters.

4 http://www.hsbc.com/news-and-insight/2012/connect ing-customers-to-opportunit ies (Accessed December 11, 2012).

5 http://www.bonhams.com/press_release/10510/ (Accessed January 5, 2013). The privately owned Bonhams is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious auctioneers of fine art and antiques. Based in London, it has offices throughout the world.

6 http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/19513/lot/167/ (Accessed January 5, 2013).

7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/biennalesydney/ 6398372297/ (Accessed January 10, 2013). In response to a meeting of heads of state in 2011, the Australian press did remark that China was in a position to laugh off Australian concerns with China’s record on human rights. Available at: <http://www.smh.com.au/world/china-laughs-off-human-rights-concerns-20110426-1dv4k.html.> http://www.theage.com.au/national/beijing-officials-laughed-off-australian-concerns-20110426-1dv7a.html (Accessed January 12, 2013).

8 This is the central question of Lefebvre’s Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1996).

9 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BseB8EL01_A> (Accessed January 5, 2013).

10 Neshat’s first feature film, the award winning Women without Men (2009) in many ways extends the narrative themes of her artworks.

11 Helsingin Energia is now at the forefront of energy companies responding to environmental concerns by providing updates about energy consumption on-line.

12 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V62898 zojKU> (Accessed January 7,2013).

13 The website <http://theyesmen.org/ > (Accessed January 5, 2013).

14 http://blip.tv/visionontv/the-yes-men-fix-the-world-full-film-3940882> (Accessed January 5, 2013).

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reconfiguring place: art and the global imaginary (2014)

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