Urban Curating

Assembling Art Collaborations

In recent decades, shifts in the art field and more generally in knowledge economies have led to projects such as those in C3West which rely on “temporary and episodic” patterns of collaboration (see Grabher, 2004; Lind, 2007). Contemporary visual art has become a mobile medium circulating through sites, rather than grounded “in” them. Attempts to theorize the relations between such collaborative art processes and the way they engage with publics have produced various conceptions including “new genre public art,” “relational aesthetics,” “dialogical aesthetics,” or “spatial aesthetics” (Bourriaud, 2002; Kester, 2004; Lacy, 1995; Papastergiadis, 2006). The real and presumed autonomy of art has been fundamentally challenged by such theorizations of the diverse arts interventions that stretch conventional notions of both art objects and spaces.

Cultural geographers, among other spatial theorists, have analyzed and assessed the political efficacy of such projects, explicitly reflecting on the intersections between aesthetic practice and locale (Foster & Lorimer, 2007; Miles, 2010), and even convening aesthetic projects of this kind (e.g., Driver, Nash, Prendergast, & Swenson, 2002). Massey and Rose’s (2003) report on public art in Milton Keynes reflects on audience responses to public art in the context of “new thinking about place and identity of place” (p. 2), while resisting essentializing relations between places and communities. Rather than being conceived as “a bounded entity that defines and is defined by a particular ‘community,’” Milton Keynes is theorized as a space of multiple influences and flows (p. 4), consistent with Massey’s influential writings on globalization and its reciprocal relation to the local (after Massey, 1991). Milton Keynes is understood in terms of “place as meeting place, the intersection of numerous trajectories of all kinds brought together in physical proximity” (Massey & Rose, 2003, p. 4). From this perspective, artworks actively contribute to processes that generate the changing qualities of a place. Public art is not simply an “insertion into the space/place; it will help produce that space, and it may do this both as a material object (if it is such) and as a set of practices” (Massey & Rose, 2003, p. 9). Public art can more actively “invite negotiation between diverse social identities” (Massey & Rose, 2003, p. 19).

Massey and Rose, in rejecting “the static, essential view of place that has characterized much public art advocacy” (Hall, 2007, p. 1383), invite a concern with the “multiple ways in which artists mediate relationships between site and artwork” (Morris & Cant, 2006, p. 863), more specifically, with how artists “draw attention to location, locale and sense of place” (Morris & Cant, 2006, p. 868). Such accounts recognize an increasingly complex, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral field: The production of site-specific artwork may take much of its shape from the mediation of nonartists, whether curators, participants, audience, or other collaborators. Artists’ processes also draw on accumulated knowledge and methods of being open to sites through collaborative reciprocity with many constituencies and stakeholders. By starting with process rather than place, this article tracks the intersections of cross-sectoral collaborative practices—its “interspaces”—drawing on elements of actor network and assemblage theory.

Interdisciplinarity, Interspatiality

An earlier article develops an analysis of C3West, tracing processes that assemble dispersed organizational arrangements between arts institutions, artists, and business partners across apparently incommensurable domains (Mar & Anderson 2010). Here we extend this approach drawing on Law’s notion of “method assemblage” to examine how such collaborative practices interact with (real and imagined) localities as they are conjured up and configured in particular aesthetic projects.

As mentioned above, modes of emergence of “the local” in collaborative arts projects are often conceived as an outflow of very specific interfaces between artists, institutions, other collaborating bodies and audiences. However, Latour (2005, p. 196) has argued that

[P]laces do not make for a good starting point, since every one of them are framed and localised by others . . . Circulation is first, the landscape “in which” templates and agents of all sorts and colors circulate is second. (p.196)

We will pursue this starting point of “circulation” to discuss how specific assemblages of spatialized elements arise through particular collaborative partnerships and forms of labor. In thinking such circulations, we identify the practices that are brought into play in and through collaborative art processes. This focus on the singularity of professional practice and engagement method is not meant to (re)privilege the centrality of artists’ intentionality: In such collaborations, artists’ work also mediates and is mediated by the strategies of others. Indeed our analysis of C3West will point to the high degree of contingency in relations with commercial partners, arts institutions, and other participants in the arts-based projects that have come to fruition under the distinctive banner of “culture, commerce, community” in the Sydney initiative.

Writers attempting to articulate methods of “creative research” specific to collaborative and interdisciplinary arts practice have used craft metaphors such as “weaving” (Carter, 2004, p. 2) or “braiding” (Sullivan, 2005, p. 103) to depict the interface between different forms of knowledge, ways of working, and habits of different disciplines and sectors. These interfaces are rarely smooth: As Miles (2006, p. 990) notes, it is the very untidiness of collaborative interfaces that provides potential for new insights. Indeed frequently, creative activity may be generated out of noncoherences, conflicting rationales, or what John Law (2004) calls “mess.” In a particular application of actor–network theory, Law proposed a way of analyzing methodologies of scientific and other practices, grounded not in a priori structural categories, but in tracing emergent, contingent, and performative processes. Law’s notion of “method assemblage,” as the bundling together of a multiplicity of elements assembled without a preexisting plan, or “rules for determining good and bad bundles,” is particularly germane to our analysis of collaborative engagement because of its emphasis on “between” relations: attending not so much to “whole” entities, but to what happens in the “crafting” of boundaries between different entities (Law, 2004, p. 42).

This has implications for the spatiality of emergent collaborative engagements where new relations are being crafted. In what follows, we augment existing analysis of such processes by conceiving them as “interspatial,” to emphasize the translocational dynamics whereby “each location” comes to be “distributed in others” (Callon & Law, 2004, p. 7). What we shall call “practices of interspatiality” begin with an understanding of the porosity of given localities to receive “flows” from elsewhere (after Massey’s influential “extraverted” concept of place). From that point of departure, we go on to argue that interspatial practices are also enacted through the contingent assemblage of people, representations, and ways of working and thinking that are brought into play in creative labor. Curator Mirjam Westen (2003) commented on the Rotterdam-based C3West artist, Jeanne Van Heeswijk:

Heeswijk sees herself as an intermediary between a situation, a space, a neighbourhood and the people connected to these. . . . She generates “interspaces” [italics added]—contexts and crossovers within which new relations and connections can be established between groups of people, institutions and conceptual frameworks that are always different. (p. 24)

We are not suggesting that locations have no existing character independent of the specific circulations under examination. Accumulations of meaning attached to physical location are precisely what site-specific art engages with. ² What we begin with, however, are not those locations as such, but instead the art practices that bring into contingent engagement physical locations, knowledge domains, and organizational boundaries. Such practices, we argue, reassemble spatialized elements in distinctive ways through the organization of aesthetic elements (images, concrete materials, narratives, and performative styles). They do so within, or as part of, the negotiation and crafting of collaborative interfaces. Worded differently, our concern is with what van Heeswijk succinctly describes as “urban curating”—the practices out of which new relations and connections are brought into being in built or city space. It follows that “community” emerges, not as a fixed identity aligned to particular places (a conception which in any event has already been widely critiqued by Massey and others), but as a temporary gathering of forces and commonalities. “Community” is a milieu that enables the possibility of saying “we” within an indeterminable “chora,” to recall Nancy’s (1993, p. 84) usage, marking a space within which new forms can be realized. In contemporary art projects, this “community” can be conceived, then, via a process of actively peopling sites through an assembling and circulation of narratives, images, and discursive engagement (modes of address, invitations to participate, traversings, etc.).

In what follows, we detail the disciplinary practices of two contemporary artists working under the C3West umbrella of “culture, commerce, community.” Both projects were developed in relation to Penrith, a suburban area on the western perimeter of Sydney’s metropolitan area. By focusing on the strategies of two artists bringing to bear differing circulations intersecting with the same locale, we elucidate the dynamic of “interspatiality” at work in the making of these process-based art works. Indisputably, these tactics are linked to complex collaborative interfaces forged with powerful arts institutions, commercial partners, and other organizations in the C3West assemblage (Mar & Anderson, 2010). Our focus here, however, is neither on the character of power relations (horizontal and/or vertical) among entities to the C3West complex nor, more broadly, on the contribution of assemblage thought in the domain of contemporary visual art to the concerns of a “critical urbanism” (see, e.g., McFarlane, 2011). Instead—and consistent with assemblage analytics more generally—the purpose is to offer a thick description of the constellations of connection that emerge among artists, groups of people, artistic conceptions, and institutions in the (near and far) “interspaces” of this arts-based experiment. The C3West model attempts to embed the typically elitist world of contemporary visual arts, and its “autonomous” art object, within a wider constituency of arts production and reception, making for intriguing new milieux of liaison and curation. In generating new forms of association for artistic endeavor beyond gallery walls, C3West projects are interventions of a kind, provoking more open imaginings of urban futures and collectives.

Infiltrating Tales: Sylvie Blocher/Campement Urbain, The Panthers of the Future/The Future of Panthers (2008)

Since 2007, French multimedia artist, Sylvie Blocher, has been working in partnership with the football club and hospitality enterprise Panthers Entertainment Group, known as “Penrith Panthers.” Panthers is an important social focus for the Penrith area, claiming more than 50% of Penrith residents as members of its club (G. Matthews, personal communication, June 16, 2008). Panthers is also a major stakeholder in a planning proposal to develop a substantial section of riverine land linking the club to the Penrith city center, known as the “Riverlink Precinct Plan” (the planning for which is ongoing at the time of writing). Blocher’s work engaged with this aspect of Panthers’ enterprise. More broadly the work aimed to present a vision of possibilities for Panthers and for Penrith—in both architectural/planning and social terms. This is consistent with Blocher’s interest in pursuing locally engaged and politicized art practices that nevertheless avoid formulaic political strategies and “encourage different ways of viewing and understanding the world” (see http://www.sylvieblocher.com).

For this project, Blocher worked with the collective, Campement Urbain which includes her partner, François Daune, an architect. In working with diverse groups internationally, Blocher and Daune have developed distinctive participatory strategies. They first engage in an “infiltration” into social groups and locations, followed by the development of what they describe as a “dispositive approach”: “We don’t have truth, or a strong solution . . . we propose a sort of system that people can take . . . and work with us.” The aim is to “find a new way to do links, or to cross the system.” Developing a framework for such a transversal practice entails the deployment of “fictions”: “You need also what we call ‘parole’—a contextually unique address to the audience in the moment” (S. Blocher & F. Daune, personal communication, March 7, 2008).

Blocher’s work with Panthers had a definite strategic and performative aspect, attempting to convince Panthers, ING Real Estate Australia (their financial partner), and Penrith City Council (the local administration responsible for planning matters) that Campement Urbain should be part of the planning and design team for the Riverlink Project. This was quite literally a “crafting of boundaries,” a method assemblage in Law’s terms working in the “mess” of conflicting rationales and operational styles to make new kinds of connections. Campement Urbain developed aesthetic propositions that performed a double work, as an aesthetic product and as a strategic intervention in the organizational arrangements that would take the project forward.

A video work presented to an audience at Penrith’s Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Center in July 2008 represents the strongest condensation of Blocher’s ongoing project at the time of writing, and was a crucial moment in progressing the work and building relationships. It exemplifies the way in which aesthetic work and its social mediations are closely intertwined. The presentation was staged before an audience including staff from Panthers, Penrith Council, and ING, as well as our research team, Art of Engagement. ³ The DVD and accompanying verbal performance by Blocher and Daune functioned both as a “report” on the project’s development to that point, and as an aesthetic experience, making use of three different narrative devices (see below), as well as an extended dialogue responding to audience questions.

The presentation functioned simultaneously as cinema, performance art, lecture, and sales pitch. It at once critiqued the existing Riverlink proposal while seeking to inspire hope in the possibilities at hand. This was done by using images and fictional devices or “artificial myths” (Carter, 2004, p. 11) to bring out “difficult truths” that could not be so directly expressed through the disciplinary languages of conventional planning or architecture. The presentation bypassed the technocratic, bureaucratic, and procedural norms of planning processes, with their privileging of objectivity and evidence, by aestheticizing these procedures and provoking new ways of thinking about them.

Blocher had been entranced by marketing manager Max Cowan’s account of Panthers as an organization striving to establish a strong sense of communal attachment to Penrith. In Panthers she detected a utopian potentiality that led her to seek direct involvement in planning the future for the club and its vision of the broader Penrith constituency (Blocher, The Panthers of the Future/The Future of Panthers proposal statement, 2007, p. 2).

The first element of the presentation, Fairy Tale for Adults, is a fictional account developed out of the “network of little experiences” that Blocher acquired while visiting Penrith and interviewing local volunteers (S. Blocher & F. Daune, personal communication, March 7, 2008). A filmed dialogue between a mother and daughter presents a fable or fairy tale about an unnamed mythical place (quotes are henceforth in italics). The first words spoken by the child: Once upon a time at the other end of the world was a land, position “the land” as distant, far away—the distance amplified by being set in the past tense. A distance is immediately established, enabling a narrative movement between a network of spatialized elements and figures iterated in the tale. The narrator then zooms to a specific location in this distant land:

to the west of a harbour city famous for its “magnificent pearly music box”, that nestles beside a river and the Pink Mountain. . . . At the bottom of the mountain was a gathering of buildings, houses and roads like everywhere else around the great road.

The tale brings out characteristics of this location through its narration of its peripheral relation to the Big City, and its spatial conformity (as characterized by a law against curved lines).

The narrative space is marked by a number of landmarks which form a network within the tale, reinforced by the iteration of these figurative elements in a way that gives them a “mythic” significance. One prominent figurative landmark is The Huge and Unique Mall, a place of compensatory consumption, as well as violence, particularly among young people: The teenagers would go fight under the Huge and Unique Mall from six to midnight.

Another landmark is The Big Oval, an oval space where people ran in every direction after an oval ball—the only spot that bypassed the rules of straight lines. Here, visual homologies are employed to assert a relationship between physical form and social arrangements. The exceptional role given to the football club reflects Blocher’s interpretation of Panthers as a “utopian project” (S. Blocher, The Panthers of the Future/The Future of Panthers proposal statement, 2007, p. 2). The most prominent natural landmark is The Pink Mountain, with its curves like the hips of a young and pretty man, in contrast to the straightness of the planned environment. The Pink Mountain and its pairing with “the beautiful river” function to valorize the environmental setting for the later planning scenario.

The location referred to in Fairy Tale is never named, although it was obviously Penrith to the audience. This fictional tale created both a distance and an intimacy, enabling the speaking of “difficult truths.” The fable form allowed complexities to emerge along with iterations of various spatialized figures. With its stylized language and distance from professional discourses or technical details, strong judgments (about, e.g., suburban isolation and mass consumption) could be made without recourse to rational argumentation.

Fairy Tale also incorporates figures of power and rule corresponding to the spatial scales brought into play: the Grand Vizier is the mayor of the city, the Grand Pasha is the prime minister, and the Chief of the Big Oval is the chief of the Panthers, as Blocher explains. These “characters”—at once fictitious and identifiable to the audience—operate within Fairy Tale to indicate the differing power centers and scalar dynamics of this unnamed location. Panthers is cast as an alternative source of power and potentiality to the “grand” powers. Through mythic speech and allegory, politics is both distanced and brought close—the narrative of these different rulers set up a nested space of contention that Campement Urbain will attempt to reconfigure through an invitation to work together.

Fairy Tale for Adults also draws on many spatial analogies that connect Campement Urbain’s narration from afar to the locality of Penrith. The story interweaves spatial references and condenses scales: unlike a classic fairy tale that is spatially contained, we could characterize Fairy Tale for Adults as “interspatial” narrative. By this term, we mean to evoke the way Fairy Tale for Adults inserts within its fiction a network of spatial references that frame the unnamed locality in a topology of relations. We argue that these are “interspatial devices” that enable the narrative to pursue a series of movements between referential figures that position the locality in a network of other places and spatial qualities.

Urban Scenario (the second section) refers directly to the “real” Penrith and its urban environment, including the Riverlink plans. Urban Scenario is hardly a standard planning presentation, however. It maintains a mythic element, drawing an analogy between Panthers and its animal icon: It is a black panther. It is lively, agile and strategic. . . . hired to protect the Penrith club, because forever rugby has been the place of social cohesion for citizens across the world. The Panthers are identified as “utopian pragmatists” who have provided Penrith through their sporting club with social links, friendship, pride, and dignity.

Like Fairy Tale for Adults, Urban Scenario retains its distance from the present context. A male American voice-over is accompanied by (noncorresponding) images of car parks that form a counterpoint to the narration. Urban Scenario presents a planning proposal without explicitly mentioning “Riverlink,” instead referring to “The Panthers Lot”:

A site located between the highway and the city, between the stadium and the residential area, close to the river. . . . A peaceful place with birdsong, a view of the mountain, the wind and the electric lines. A living material for the future.

This aestheticized description bypasses the technical detail of planning documentation. The ascription of an “empty centrality” maximizes the potential of a space that blurs natural and urban environments, open space and density, sociality and solitude. Rather than a specific proposal, Campement Urbain literally opens up a constellation of possibilities named The Golden Galaxy:

A Galaxy is a gathering of multiple stars in the same solar system. Gold is a colour that fits with the Blue Mountains. Gold is rare and sought for. It is also the conducting metal of certain microprocessors. It is stainless and never disappears. By transforming it, it becomes the memory linking the past to the future. . . . A green city, a landscape city, an ecological city. A new geography in which streets are valleys, canyons are rivers, in which roofs are hills, gardens or promenades, in which activities, shops and entertainment centres are caves. In which the gatherings of buildings are islands and lagoons linked to bridges, sea walls and sometimes boats. . . . A spectacular site of events and experiments that attracts the citizens of the region, investments, innovating companies of the 21st century, developing activities on the basis of the Panthers program.

The Golden Galaxy—analogous to Blocher’s earlier video works Men in Gold and Golden Valley—evokes a contrast to the technical language of master plans. Allegory creates both a parallelism of discourses and a production of “meaning something other to what is said” (Law 2004, p. 157). For Law, allegory is an integral way of dealing with noncoherence and difference secreted in most kinds of method: in art it is explicit. The name Golden Galaxy marks the project as utopian in its “cosmic” scale and tone. Campement Urbain’s architectural rhetoric valorizes both the intimate scale of bodily experience, while also partaking of the grandeur of the mountains, the sky, even the cosmos. All the scales will be worked upon in order to never abandon the bodies in the big empty and cold monuments. In condensing scales, The Golden Galaxy amplifies (rather than constrains) a field of possibilities.

The Golden Galaxy can simultaneously “reflect all scales” precisely because it is not a fixed descriptive plan, but a fluid array of utopian possibilities in circulation. Its driving dynamic is one of what we are calling “interspatiality” in which scale is a mobilization by actors rather than a “well ordered zoom” (Latour, 2005, p. 185). As Francois Daune later reflected, “you can think that all those territories always include another territory, and you have to find a way to do very interesting links between these different territories” (F. Daune, audience discussion, July 23, 2008).

The invoking of architectural scale leads us to again reflect on the interpenetration of spatial references in Campement Urbain’s presentation. First there is the framing of relations between regions pointing to the relative size—physical and imaginary—in these tales of sprawl and marginality of suburb vis-à-vis metropolis. Then there are the stories of lack in relation to global processes—resulting in loss of culture, uniformity, and the loss of locally significant ritual. The metaphor of the Golden Galaxy aims to project a new zone of centrality/concentration centered on the Panthers Lot. As visual artists/designers, they are licensed to play with scale and perspective to generate ambiguous juxtapositions. Assembling all these elements as “fictions” is an interspatial tactic. The combination of story, utopian boosterism, and visual examples works to invite the crafting of new arrangements—spatial, communal, and political—precisely through their inclusion in the design team.

The final section, A Think-Tank of Possibilities, extended the constellation of possibilities by providing a visual montage of architectural examples from all over the world. The montage of international examples presented a vertical garden of urban spaces that think about those who use it. The catalogue of architectural images projected visionary planning possibilities from “out there,” destabilizing cultural norms about built structures and opening up a space for speculating about the local built environment. As Latour (2005, p. 175) remarks, “when you put some local site ‘inside’ a larger framework, you are forced to jump.” The movements between spatialized forms created an energizing surprise at juxtapositions of other possibilities. Juxtaposing the relative fixity of the Panthers lot with a montage of architectural elements in diverse locations invited the audience to be open to an interspatial circulation where “each location is distributed in others” (Callon & Law, 2004, p. 7).

Campement Urbain’s mode of working in Panthers of the Future contributed to this assembling of multiple sites: They worked largely from Paris, researching Penrith via the Internet, pulling together analogical narratives that drew other locales into their framing. The practice of working across physical distance generates a constant translation. This is compounded by working on a number of dispersed projects simultaneously. In this sense, Blocher’s work could easily be subsumed into the “easyjet syndrome” (O’Neill, 2005, p. 5) where transient and nomadic artists’ practice seems to preclude any “meaningful long-term exchange.” Others such as Papastergiadis (2006), however, valorize “art on the move,” and how movements—of travel or exile—may generate productive new aesthetic conceptions. But we might also follow Latour in a “refusal of a priori logics of scale” in favor of a notion of distributed scale, that is “the many local places where the global, the structural and the total [are assembled], or where ‘locals are localized’ and ‘places are placed’” (Latour, cited in Oppenheim, 2007, p. 478).

We now turn our descriptive focus to a project with a different strategic approach to its engagement with Penrith, in its “curating” across sectoral boundaries. Again our aim is not to evaluate the artists’ work as such (which would constitute a separate task involving research into the perceived and actual impacts of C3West projects). Instead of offering a critique of such projects (if something so assuredly univocal were possible in the disparately invested field of contemporary visual art), our purpose, after Farias and Bender’s (2010) reading of assemblage heuristics, is to elucidate the templates and agents brought into “interspatial” circulation in the making of generative forms of association linking the domains of art, business, and community.

Subliminal Activations: Ash Keating, Activate 2750 (2009)

Ash Keating’s Activate 2750 differs from Panthers of the Future in many respects, including its mode of assemblage, although both projects shared the same Western Sydney site. Activate 2750 was conceived as an “ephemeral site-specific project” in the Penrith postal code district of 2750 (A. Keating, Activate 2750 proposal statement, 2008). Public art events were staged over 12 days in February to March 2009. In what follows, we outline the project’s singularity in terms of collaborative arrangements, the nature of its audience address, and the “method assemblage” adopted. Keating’s waste installation at postcode 2750 and his mobile waste creatures can themselves, we shall argue, be conceived as interspatial entities that strategically reassembled waste materials and elements from Keating’s environmental projects elsewhere (Keating, 2009a).

Keating’s project developed out of a partnership with SITA Environmental Solutions, a major recycling and waste management firm operating several waste management facilities in Western Sydney, including a recently opened plant near Penrith. Negotiations between SITA and C3West had identified public education about waste management and treatment as the basis for an engagement that could artistically register at the local scale an intensifying global concern with overconsumption. Although a number of artists’ proposals had been rejected, Ash Keating was considered uniquely qualified in relation to this particular working interface, having had firsthand experience of working as a waste auditor in the waste management industry. For Keating, the techniques of visual monitoring of waste composition have been a constitutive element of his art practice: Waste auditing entails a “whole visual analysis” in Keating’s own words (A. Keating, personal communication, November 12, 2009). At the same time, Keating’s work features a strong environmental critique: The politics of waste has been the core concern in his artistic career (Gardner, 2007). From his “inside” experience in waste auditing, Keating had a feel for the workings of recycling and waste management facilities, even having worked in the plant near Penrith. He was able to develop a proposal that engaged more strongly with SITA’s core business by actually using waste material from SITA’s new facility in Penrith.

A collaborative network provided the platform for Activate 2750’s circulations of people and materials to be mobilized. SITA provided access to waste sites and considerable operational and transport resources. Penrith City Council, although not an official partner, provided vital infrastructural support for the project: Some 28 Council staff were involved in various capacities (C. Butler, personal communication, August 13, 2009). Keating worked with several close collaborators including project assistant Russ Kitchin and filmmaker Alex Kershaw. In addition, he assembled a team of some 20 local volunteers, artists, and performers drawn from Western Sydney educational and art institutions, who performed much of the labor of design, construction, and performance for Activate 2750.

Keating’s proposal to SITA presented Activate 2750 as a “waste festival that would activate the city centre” (Keating, 2009a, 2009b). There were two elements of this “activation.” The first was a fixed installation composed of waste material normally destined for landfill, “dumped” for a week in the central civic space in Penrith (alongside the council chambers, library, and arts center). The choice of site for the installation was based on its proximity to the City Council (where industrial and planning decisions are made), a cultural center (the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre), the mall as “an epicentre of consumption,” and the railway station that is the main commuter link to the city of Sydney. For Keating, because of these proximities, “an interruption in that space” would generate public engagement well beyond the art scene.

The second element of Activate 2750 was a series of processions of mobile sculptures mounted on shopping trolleys, again using waste material propelled by “waste creatures,” performers wearing costumes made of fabrics normally consigned to landfill. The siting of the mobile processions also drew on Keating’s working experience in the region:

I’d seen exactly what Penrith had to offer . . . you’ve got the super store areas, that line of the main road coming in from the freeway, and then you’ve got the old main streets that are sort of struggling to survive, and then you’ve got the huge shopping mall in the Westfield.

Keating had formed an analysis of land-use patterns derived from his knowledge of the circulations of waste materials between industrial sites and particular kinds of industries, sites of consumption, and the waste flows following this consumption. He recognized these flows as similar to areas in Melbourne and Adelaide where he had seen older retail areas displaced by malls and industrial sites turned into Super Store retailing (A. Keating, personal communication, November 12, 2009). Keating chose Penrith over another suburban center because of his particular view of the way that consumption is organized: “(t)he suburbs are circled around these places and people are pushed to consume in that manner.” Interestingly, there is some similarity to Blocher’s narrative, which also focused on the same “Huge and Unique Mall”: Both framings share a critical view of consumption as a powerfully spatially concentrated social force.

In contrast to the static installation, the processions of shopping trolley sculptures through various retail spaces—malls, high streets, and superstore car parks—were momentary interventions, using visual irony to challenge the spectacle of overconsumption and waste. The procession built on earlier “waste creature” performances such as Label-Land in Seoul, where Keating worked with a team of students to fashion costumes from the offcuts for brand labels disposed of by the garment industry, and the Timuran project in the earthquake-stricken Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, where Keating worked with young people to intervene in a waste-strewn lot and create a new aesthetic space. Activate’s processions developed from repetitions and variations of Keating’s method—the interception of waste materials, the auditing of waste into its visual components, the fashioning of waste creatures, and the staging of interventions in relevant public spaces to highlight questions of waste and overconsumption (see label-land.blogspot.com). The artist’s method can thus be seen as an evolving interspatial engagement with project sites in Melbourne, Seoul, Yogyakarta, and by extension other places shaped by” the bigger issue beyond waste, which is excessive production and consumption” (A Keating, personal communication, November 12, 2009).

The same artwork may also produce divergent localizations for different audiences. A video version of Activate 2750 endows the ephemeral events with a more permanent form but shorn of its relation to site and context. A DVD produced with filmmaker Alex Kershaw was meant to document the process of making and staging the event (Keating & Kershaw, 2009): It shows the collection of materials from waste management plants, the assembling of the works and their performance, the dismantling of the works, and the return of the waste to processing plants. As an aesthetic production, the video does more than simply document: It renders a silent subterranean world that parallels (and feeds off) the visible public world. In the DVD, Keating and his helpers appear in character as “waste creatures” emerging from giant rubbish piles in the eerie ambience of the waste disposal plants in the dead of night. They assemble debris into new forms for the installation and waste processions, then return to reintegrate with the primordial waste as the installation is dismantled. It is as though these “ghostly” creations of waste “haunt” the public visible world only to return to an apparently primordial state. Keating used the term garbage ghosts to describe the spooky atmosphere of the slow processions, particularly through the old High Street area, now something of a “ghost town” (A. Keating, personal communication, November 12, 2009). However it is interpreted, the filmed Activate 2750 generates another visual space entirely: Reference to any location is absent apart from a brief flash of a street sign that subliminally locates the action in a place—which could be any place. There is disjuncture in these versions of “the work,” between the ephemeral performances taking place very deliberately in carefully chosen sites, and the “placeless” video artifact able to circulate in the contemporary art circuit. An artwork is never entirely situated in any one place however: It is always to some extent a virtual artifact. Reference to site and location, though not incidental to the art process, is clearly highly provisional.

The “output” of Activate 2750—artworks as well as other public communications—while emerging via a circulation of actions and materials through a specific collaborative network does not—and cannot—constitute a single vision of locality. Within the collaborative network of Activate 2750, a number of circulating interspaces become visible (although we have focused here largely on the artist’s trajectory). As we have seen, the artist is working to develop aesthetic conceptions through engagement with many sites in a career trajectory that generates different “platforms” for this work. Meantime, the arts institution attempts to extend its geographic reach beyond the cosmopolitan center to generate “new publics.” The commercial partner is attempting to extend goodwill to its constituency in Western Sydney where it has important contracts. The City Council attempts to manage its public spaces and community relations while fostering new forms of cultural involvement for its citizens. The collaboration operates through dispersed working relations, synchronizations and asynchronizations, presences and absences. The artwork that emerges is neither the result of an entirely consensual agreement between the collaborating partners, nor can it be understood simply as a process emerging from flows within an agentless network. The process entails the development of artwork through a specific “method assemblage,” and the building of relationships with diverse localizing effects—whether that locale is viewed from the streets of Penrith, from a distant art gallery where the video work is playing, or from a corporate office where a local development is discussed in terms of national and transnational business plans. Within our analysis, there is no “shaping” of the space (e.g., Penrith or the site) by any outside force as such, just a constant circulating movement Latour would describe as “the transported presence of places into other ones.” For Latour (2005), “what has been designated by the term ‘local interaction’ is the assemblage of all the other local interactions distributed elsewhere in time and space, which have been brought to bear on the scene” (p. 194).

Conclusion: The Labor of Interspatial Assemblage

As more socially engaged visual artists seek to develop platforms for connection and contact between people and institutions, the changed relation between art and society requires new modes of analysis and conceptualization. The above case studies point to the singularity of ways in which artists develop modes of creative research stretching across disciplines, sectors, and settings, in an attempt to generate “something else” that is increasingly oriented to “non-art” outcomes. Specifically, we sought to situate two art projects in a more extensive and thoroughgoing analysis of what Yúdice (2003) calls “collaboration,” emphasizing the manifold forms of labor entailed in a “multipurpose, multiaudience, multilabored event” (p. 328). ⁴ It is in this traffic across sectors that locality is diffusely negotiated, as we have tried to demonstrate in an analysis that starts not with place, but with art-making processes in all their networked circulation. The purpose in so doing has been to elucidate the “interspaces” or points of crossover within which artists make new and often interscalar connections between different and sometimes unlikely, groups of people, institutions, and paradigms.

The “interspatial” nature of the above projects is reflected in part in the terms artists use for their ways of working. For Campement Urbain, “infiltration,” which aims to “produce another perspective,” is also “a new way to do links.” Art techniques as well as the performance of the persona of the artist were means to short-circuit the conventions of planning, architecture, and local governance discourse. Blocher could work with professional architects in a much more fanciful way: “We use the art field because I can say anything” (S. Blocher, Artist’s talk, Museum of Contemporary Art, February 20, 2010). Campement Urbain created urban “fictions” operating at many scales (like the Golden Galaxy) to establish a contextual mode of address (“parole”) in relation to a specific situation. In this case, Campement Urbain was strategically attempting to re-craft organizational relations in order to open up new collaborative opportunities.

For Ash Keating, the “auditing” then “interception” of waste streams, the diversion and transformation of materials, and then the “disruption” and “activation” of sites and publics are practical methods within an ongoing art trajectory. Keating’s interspatial work seems to be the more corporeally (rather than discursively) invested, having taken and translated a particular kind of bodily labor into his art practice, and tested it in other life spaces and sites. Keating’s immersion in waste seems almost pure habitus, embodied in the figure of the waste creature who establishes a performative identification with waste products. Keating’s “elemental” concentration on waste materials also means that the social and cultural specificity of the locale (postcode 2750) does not have the centrality it has for Campement Urbain, who explicitly craft a mode of political address to invite a collaborative urban planning venture. It is hardly surprising that artists differently “craft” projects: This is self-evident. Our point is rather that analyses of collaborative interfaces involving sites and complex collaborations across “disciplinary” lines, are usefully conceived in an open-ended way as assemblages of sets of objects and relations temporarily brought together. This accords with Manuel DeLanda’s notion of an “assemblage” as a temporary co-functioning unity stitched from many elements that are nevertheless “not bound together . . . through any intrinsic connection to the other elements with which they are co-assembled” (see Bennett, 2007, p. 4).

C3West, as it has been operationalized in Sydney, Australia, has attempted to develop a way of inserting such engagement professionals into a nexus of cultural institutions, commercial firms, and local communities. It is the last of these entities, “community,” that proves the most elusive in conceptualizing the C3West model of culture, commerce, community. Locating “the community”—as if there are determinate groups who share a singular identification to a place—is, as is by now well known, increasingly problematic both analytically and empirically. A community is not a separate entity to be acted on, as many contemporary arts institutions themselves agree (see the Australia Council for the Arts’ 2009 publication on “producing communities” that are forging narratives of identity, resilience, cohesion, resistance, etc.). Equally, it is too easy to dismiss community as a mobile representational construct deployed cynically in the image of vested interests (whether corporate, political, or ideological). From the perspective of this account and its arts focus, it might be helpful to proffer the suggestion that “community” is an engagement interspace itself, the fabric that is crafted in the partnership of collaborators and those who variously and disparately participate. It emerges within the aesthetic project as, in the terms of the C3West artist Jeanne van Heeswijk (personal communication, April 10, 2007), a “resculpting” of horizons and circumstances by parties to the collaboration. In this sense, communities are “gatherings” that are brought into being, momentarily given form and shape in and through the interaction. As “curations” themselves—potentially, though not necessarily, emancipatory in relation to alternative futures—they generate new associations, activities, artifacts, and affects in the arts-making process itself.