“Everybody hates a tourist”: la España rural as theme park

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Contributors

This essay investigates Lu Town, a theme park dedicated to the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) that was established in Shaoxing, China, in 2003. The theme park is a recreation of a fictional town that is an amalgamation of settings from some of Lu Xun’s short stories. The essay seeks to answer the following questions: What happens when the works of a complex and serious writer get popularized in the three-dimensional form of a themed space? Why would one build a theme park around this kind of writer, and how would you capture in a theme park the trenchant critique of rural or small-town social life and traditions in his works? What meanings are invested in this ‘leftist’ writer in a neoliberal ideological climate in which notions of class exploitation and class struggle have all but disappeared? In the process the essay presents a detailed description of the park, based on visits in 2004 and 2018, and an overview of recent changes undertaken to make the park more profitable in the competitive domestic tourist market. The authors argue that Lu Town, driven by commercial concerns, presents a positive, nostalgic representation of small-town Jiangnan life, one that is starkly at odds with the ironic and sardonic attitude Lu Xun often took towards it in his stories.

This paper is aimed to synthesize the cultural policies pursued by the Italian Public Administration at all government levels in the field of contemporary art. In a frame frequently changing its scope and name in the last decades - finally, the today MiBACT, the Ministry for cultural heritage and activities and tourism - the Plan for contemporary art has been, and still is, the main financial instrument for the acquisition of works of art to public property, despite the gradual reduction of the related allocations over time. Since the end of 2009, the Office in charge of Contemporary Architecture and Art, in particular its Contemporary Network, is aimed to connect both the range of activities and services carried out by the public administration at the State, the regional and local level and those performed by agencies, foundations as well as private persons. The coordination among these various entities and the differences in action and results realized in Southern and Centre-Northern Italy are focused as chief problems and primary targets of the Office undertaking, in view of improving the overall quality of the Italian cultural policy in support of contemporary art, and to profitably interact with the international scene.

This paper explores the adaptive reuse of the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, a 13-acre historical site located adjacent to downtown Toronto. It asks what our fascination with industrial ruins tells us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrification, the city as theme park and spectacle, post-industrialism, and the consumer preferences of the creative class. But it would be wrong to dismiss the Distillery District simply as a Disneyified version of industrial history. Whereas typical urban entertainment destinations are places that ‘synergize’ nationally branded products, chain restaurants, and multiplex movie theatres, the Distillery District is a site for serious theatre, art galleries, and local artisanal production. The image promoted by the Distillery District could be described as the commodification of decommodification. Drawing on the concepts of nostalgia and ruin, this article suggests that the Distillery District is best understood not only as a strategy for maximizing the returns on investment capital but also as a cultural response to globalization and de-industrialization. Este artículo explora la reutilización adaptable de la destilería Gooderham y Worts, un sitio histórico de 13 acres, contiguo al centro de Toronto. Se pregunta lo que nuestra fascinación por las ruinas industriales nos dice sobre las ciudades norteamericanas y europeas del siglo veintiuno. La transformación de la destilería más grande del mundo, a un destino de esparcimiento de lujo, ilustra muchas de las fuerzas que están reconfigurando las ciudades: la mercantilización, la elitización, la ciudad como un parque temático y de espectáculo, el postindustrialismo y las preferencias del consumidor de la clase creativa. Pero sería un error descartar el Distrito de la destilería como una versión de un campo de Disney de la historia industrial. En tanto que los destinos urbanos de esparcimiento típicos son lugares que ‘actúan en sinergia’ con los productos de marca, restaurantes de cadena y teatros múltiples de cine, el Distrito de la destilería es un sitio para teatro serio, galerías de arte, y producción artesanal local. La imagen que promueve el Distrito de la destilería podría describirse como la mercantilización de la desmercantilización. En base a los conceptos de nostalgia y ruina, este artículo sugiere que el Distrito de la destilería se entiende mejor no sólo como una estrategia para optimizar los rendimientos de la inversión del capital, pero también como una respuesta a la globalización y la desindustralización.

If we consider the aspects of British culture that might be expected to appeal most to tourists, what are the first things to come to mind? Conventionally it has been attractions such as ancient castles and pretty old cottages, beautiful coastlines and countryside, the Royal Family and ‘British tea time’. Many tourists also visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London and other big cities. Popular culture is also a driver for tourism in the UK, and is attracting fans of movies and television shows such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, keen to visit filming locations and theme parks. Some tourists wish to connect with the history of Britain’s music and youth (sub)cultures, and can explore, for example, the legacies of the Beatles and the ‘Swinging Sixties’, or the sights and sounds of punk rock. Visitors from overseas can also immerse themselves in the UK’s contemporary art, music and fashion cultures - at festivals and nightclubs, in shops and markets, and on ‘street culture’ tours - and these types of experience are growing in importance and prominence in Britain’s tourism economy. This article, then, will examine the evolving relationship between tourism, the creative industries, and youth/subcultures in the UK, and consider some of the arguments and issues arising from it, such as the extent to which this might be considered a positive and sustainable development.

It has been 20 years since the term first entered the critical and practical performance vocabulary. The intervening years have brought about a different audience sensibility. Performers and techniques once considered part of the theatrical fringe have become decidedly mainstream. Philip Glass now makes scotch ads while Robert Wilson and Spalding Gray have become fixtures of public television (Gray is even available on home video). The stylistic and methodological innovations wrought by these practitioners are also becoming more familiar. Actor/ audience relationships that were daring and novel in 1968 are now commonplace. The growth of performance art during the past decade, and its steady emergence into the mainstream of aesthetic consciousness, has served to make environmental theatre a more complex and less straightforwardly theatrical enterprise. This article will explore the evolving nature of environmental performance in the theatre by examining four contemporary environmental productions, their relationships to one another, and their connection to the larger tradition of environmental performance. The shows discussed by no means represent a comprehensive survey of productions utilizing environmental staging, but they do provide a representative sample of the directions taken by contemporary artists. Environmental theatre has meant many things to many people since Richard Schechner first applied the term to the experiments of the late I96os (see plate i). At the very least, it implies nonfrontal staging and a flexible approach to the actor/audience relationship (see Aronson I977). The concept has also been largely associated with the avant-garde, although the past decade has seen the increasing use of environmental techniques in the commercial theatre. Today's environmental productions lack the urgent political and artistic agendas that typified such efforts in the '6os. They are also more reliant on the eclectic, smorgasbord-style blending of techniques and traditions that typifies much postmodern performance. There is also a very definite shift in focus from engagement to entertainment in the pieces themselves. Terms such as theme park, carnival,

Contributors

The Convergence Potentials of Collaboration & Adaptation: A Case Study in Progress

Curating after the Global: Roadmaps for the Present

This introductory chapter presents and critically discusses the various themes underpinning this book. Firstly, it provides an examination of the notion of ‘contemporary art’, including an overview of the existing definitions and debates in the current literature. Secondly, this chapter discusses the nexus between tourism and contemporary art by providing an overview of the past studies conducted on cultural and heritage tourism. In this section, the various themes underpinning the different parts of the literature on art tourism (e.g. identity, authenticity, commoditisation and capitalism) are considered. Thirdly, a discussion on the relationship between tourism and Asian contemporary art is presented, which also includes a part problematising and questioning terms like ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian art’. Finally, an overview of the different chapters that constitute the backbone of this collection is offered alongside the four themes around which the book is structured.

In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that theDictionary of South African English on Historical Principlesreveals that in South African English the wordmaiddenotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collectionLiving, Loving and Lying Awake at Night(1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novelPlaying in the Light(2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.

The Art and Artifice of Peter Greenaway Anthony Enns Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. It is significant that the subtitle of Alan Woods’ new book, Being Naked Playing Dead, is not “The Films of...” or “The Cinema of...” but rather “The Art of Peter Greenaway.” “Artist” is certainly a more accurate description of Greenaway’s occupation than “filmmaker”; while he is widely known as one of today’s most brilliant and unique filmmakers, he has also worked in the mediums of painting, installations, experimental television, and opera. Woods’ subtitle not only indicates this fact, but also makes clear that Greenaway’s films must be considered in light of his wider body of work, and, more importantly, that his work must be considered within the context of contemporary art rather than contemporary cinema. As Woods points out: “Greenaway’s cinema requires a critical analysis which is not restricted to cinema, but draws its terms and concepts and examples both from the history of Western painting since the Renaissance... and from a base within the very different world of contemporary art practice” (87). Through his in-depth understanding of salient issues in contemporary art and his ability to decipher the wealth of influences and references at play within the works themselves, Woods distills the complexities of Greenaway’s art into a cohesive aesthetic theory, an outline for a “new cinematic language.” He constructs a fascinating portrait of Greenaway’s working method as well as illustrates a potentially new method of film criticism. Part of what makes Greenaway’s films unique is the way they address the medium of film itself. Greenaway is obsessed with the difficulties of representing reality on film, and this problem becomes focused on representations of the body. As Greenaway explains: “[there are] two phenomena I have never been able to suspend disbelief about in the cinema—copulation and death” (52). Copulation and death are the two subjects addressed by Woods’ title, and they are particularly significant to Greenaway because they mark the limit of representation, the limit of film’s ability to represent the physical world. According to Woods, naked bodies, which are ubiquitous in Greenaway’s films, are linked to mortality: “Our interest in the nude, he suggests, is more than sexual: it is also to do with our knowledge of our own mortality. Many of the bodies he shows us are dead, or at least... acting dead” (162). It is paradoxical that Greenaway’s method of addressing the artifice of film is actually a project of connecting viewers to something more genuine: the experience of their own bodies, their mortality, the human condition. Greenaway recognizes the inability of “dominant” cinema to convey this experience because of its strict adherence to narrative; narrative is unable to remind people that they are mortal, and this is why Greenaway advocates a new cinema, a “cinema of ideas, not plots.” Jorge Luis Borges once said that the short story did not necessarily require a plot, but rather a “situation,” and it is this word that appears in Woods’ text in place of plot: “the situation, however artificial, becomes difficult to bear because it must be thought about rather than consumed/resolved through narrative” (201). Narratives fail because they resolve tension, whereas Greenaway uses tension to evoke thought. Narrative relies on character identification, on the viewer’s empathy with the plight of the protagonist, but Greenaway rejects such a notion: “Empathy... prevents us from dealing with, facing up to, what is really real” (176). This repositioning of the viewer in relation to the work of art is almost Brechtian, except that Greenaway’s project does not encourage political awareness so much as an awareness of the operations of nature; according to Woods, Greenaway disrupts narrative from a “Darwinian standpoint.” However, it would be wrong to interpret Greenaway’s emphasis on nature as an attempt to evoke a spiritual or a transcendent experience. Woods describes Greenaway’s use of cinematic artifice as an attempt to combine Brechtian as well as Baroque theatricality (the Baroque aesthetic combines soul and body, the spiritual and the material): “It is not spirituality which is co-existent...