Stage 5 | Cultural Assemblages: Music as Urban Phenomenon (or Performing Vienna: City of Music)
Stage 5 Design Studio ARC8050 – Semester 1 Elizabeth Baldwin Gray Cultural Assemblages: Music as Urban Phenomenon (or Performing Vienna: City of Music)
*please note that there is no requirement of familiarity with music to take, or indeed be successful in this studio*
Music Diagram of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste by Elizabeth Baldwin Gray
Semester 1 (ARC8050): Mapping the City of Music; Disrupting the Tourist’s Gaze Henri Lefebvre and “the right to the city”: Sociologist and Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre argues that space itself changes with the advent of modernity: space is “not only produced by the forces and relations of production and property,” but also “a political product, a product of administrative and repressive controls, a product of relations of domination and strategies decided at the summit of the State.” The alienation of space, like that of “everyday life,” is not inevitable, however, but instead can be resisted. “Real alienation can be thought of and determined only in terms of a possible disalienation.” “In Lefebvre’s opinion,” Japhy Wilson explains, “the increasing political significance of the state-led production of space necessitates a form of revolutionary action that is explicitly oriented against the state and toward the subversion of abstract space, based on the contradictions internal to it.” The public performance art that characterised Berlin Dada in the 1910s and 20s, for example, is in this sense a model of the kind of collective appropriation Lefebvre recommends, a form of what he calls “disalienation,” reclaiming the physical space of the city from the political powers that control it and, even if only temporarily, returning that space to its inhabitants. In Berlin, especially, a city worth contrasting with Vienna, Dada aimed at political upheaval. As Hans Richter observed, Berlin Dada had “a very different tone from Dada in Zurich or New York.” “In Berlin they had a real revolution,” defined by “reckless onslaughts” carried out there. Does a city such as Vienna, with its reputation for conservatism, have a potential for such public demonstrations? How can architecture and your conception of space encourage such ‘disalienation’ among its inhabitants and visitors? Situationists and the Dérive: The Situationists of the 1960s encouraged randomised movement throughout the city which was anti-production and anti-consumption. Is such movement through the city possible? 1