No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City
Senior Lecturer’s work on art, regeneration, ‘publics’ and state building the focus of survey publication by Mute Publishing.
Roman Vasseur, currently fractional Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, Kingston was Lead Artist for Harlow New Town, from 2007-2009. The town, entirely master-planned by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd employed primarily sculpture, including early works by Moore and Hepworth as part of a process of State Building with art at the core of its vision. Vasseur was responsible for curating a series of projects for the town under the title Let Us Pray for Those Now Residing in the Designated Area and assisted in the selection of an architect / developer team to redevelop the town’s core spaces and buildings. How the science –(fact)ion of a now worn utopian project marry with the (fact)ions of contemporary neo liberal development are discussed by the resulting project and this recent survey publication.
No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City
Published by Mute Magazine
Edited by Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles
Featuring projects and interviews with: Alberto Duman, Freee, Nils Norman, Laura Oldfield Ford and Roman Vasseur
As the Creative City model for urban regeneration founders on the rocks of the recession, and the New Labour public art commissioning frenzy it triggered recedes, Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater take stock of an era of highly instrumentalised public art making.
Focusing on artists and consultants who have engaged critically with the exclusionary politics of urban regeneration, their analysis locates such practice within a schematic history of urban development’s neoliberal mode.
Breaking down into a report and a collection of interviews, this investigation consistently focuses on the forms and, indeed, possibility of critical public art within a regime that fetishes ‘creativity’ whilst systematically destroying its preconditions in its pursuit of capital accumulation. How, they ask, is critical art shaped by its interaction with this aspect of biopolitical governance?
Available in softback only, 124 pages, 34 colour illustrations, 176 x 229 mm
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Biography:
Roman Vasseur is an artist living and working in London. He has exhibited at Jeffrey Charles Gallery (London), the ICA (London), KX Gallery (Hamburg) and most recently Die Neue Actions Gallerie (Berlin). He has contributed to conferences and panel discussions at such venues as Tate Britain, the ICA and the Arnolfini, Bristol. Vasseur has taught at various universities including IUAV, Venice, the Architectural Association, The Royal Academy schools and UWE, Bristol.