Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Representing the Monster City: Art History and Pathologies of Urban Development 1800–2007
Convenors:
Richard J Williams, University of Edinburgh r.j.williams@ed.ac.uk
Guillaume Evrard, University of Edinburgh
The city has always been an important art historical subject, but generally understood as a collection of finished monuments, or as an end point of rational processes of beautification. Of course a few places escape this view: the scruffy and heterogeneous outskirts of nineteenth-century Paris, for example, are now firmly part of the canon, thanks to T. J. Clark. But art historians tend to be drawn to cities at the end of their development, not the unruly monsters they are at the beginning.
Art history’s tacit assumptions about cities might be worth revisiting for the following reasons: (1) human settlement has become for the first time in its history become predominantly urban, rather than rural; (2) cities themselves are now objects of an unprecedented scale, with megalopolises of 20 or even 30 million (Chongqing, Tokyo, Mexico, Mumbai, São Paolo) increasingly common; (3) the geography of these cities makes a nonsense of conventional assumptions about centre and periphery; (4) they have quite unprecedented concentrations of poverty, as well as new extremes of wealth. The changing condition of cities has been extensively discussed in recent years by such diverse figures as Mike Davis, Sharon Zukin, Anthony King, David Harvey and Peter Hall, all of whom relate the monstrous urbanization now seen in the third world to the explosive growth of cities in Europe and North America 150 years ago.
But how might a discipline like art history engage with the idea of the city in such changed conditions? What might the analysis of art or visual representation contribute to the understanding of the city? What might art history contribute to such analyses over and above those of urban geographers or sociologists? What ethical basis might such analyses have?
Papers selected for this session look at both historical (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and contemporary topics. The imagined city in each case is, however, a monster: excessive, unplanned, and mostly out of control. It is this monstrous pathology, the fears and desires it might engender, and its relation to art history that are our subjects.
Speakers:
Stephen Kite (Newcastle University)
Watchful wandering – Ruskin’s synechdocal representation of Venice
Kitty Hauser (University of Sydney)
Scars, sores and rashes: Britain and the Beast
Celina Kress (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin)
Growing Berlin – How Tenement Buildings Devoured a Villa Colony
Paul Gladston (The University of Nottingham)
The Unbearable Blandness of ‘Being’: Artistic Representations of the ‘Monster City’ in Contemporary China
Cynthia Hammond (Concordia University)
Renegade Ornament: Urban Contestation and the Museum City
Jennifer A. Greenhill (Yale University)
Playing Beneath the Surface: William Holbrook Beard’s Inferiority Complex
Adam Brown (University College for the Creative Arts, Maidstone)
You Show Me Mine and I’ll Show You Yours: Views of Beijing and London under construction
Steven Gartside (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Pathologies of the Positive: Surface and Appearance
Barnaby Haran (University College London)
Taming the Tentacles of Skyscrapers in American Photography: Alfred Stieglitz and Ralph Steiner’s Sublime and Ridiculous Monsters