

Cities in Crisis



Hollevout writes how the Fluxus Tours were also a representation of the shift in the art world from the critique of art to the critique of everyday life. The numerous artists who are mentioned in Wandering in the City that follow an almost Surrealist Dada like games of chance where artists have someone else direct them to random locations, or the idea of flipping a coin to decide where to wander to next.



"As you know my exhibition 'Information' is primarily concerned with the strongest international art movement or 'style' of the moment which is 'conceptual art,' 'art povera,' 'earthworks,' 'systems,' 'process art,' etc. in its broadest definition.
The exhibition will demonstrate the non-object quality of this work and the fact that it transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture, photography, film, drawing, prints, etc."




With the construction of the Congress Expressway in the 1950s cutting right across the city. “The new system tied the city and suburbs together and cut great holes in the cityscape bringing dramatic demographic changes in its wake.” To describe the expressway construction as cutting holes in the cityscape is visually drastic way of describing the effects that the highway had on the city. Chicago a city that had developed
up because of the railroad was now shifting away from this form of transportation of goods to trucking because of the government’s investment in the country’s highway infrastructure. The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway continued to segregate the city separating whites and blacks. The expressway was constructed through “poor and working-class white and minority neighborhoods.” The areas surrounding the Dan Ryan Expressway were predominately populated by blacks when it was constructed. In the 1960s, Daley’s support from the black population began to slip with the increasing civil rights movement throughout Chicago and the country.
Photographer Richard Nickel collected photographs throughout Chicago, with an immense focus on photographing Louis Sullivan’s architecture before it was torn down or while it was being torn down. It was clear that Nickel’s found beauty through the photograph of buildings during their “death”.





People go to a metered parking spot in a city and create a park within the confines of the space for people to utilize for the time that it is up. In Deutsche’s essay Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization’, she looks at how things like parks and historic preservation of buildings were used as disguises of the ugly parts of urban redevelopment, that was really gentrification. She goes on in subsequent essays to discuss the role public art had on public space, such as beautifying, being socially responsible and functional.
In her essay Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum Deutsche discusses the work of Haacke’s that was meant to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum is 1971, but was canceled at the last minute. The piece was of photographs of numerous tenement buildings and empty lots in sums of New York City, as well as charts laying out real estate transactions, which showed connections between some of the museum’s board of trustees. Deutsche saw the work’s censorship as an example of the museums’ exclusionary qualities and how institutions such as the Guggenheim have created the slum environment through numerous actions. Not only that but the museum art environment, such as artists, galleries, and the building of museums raised rents in this slum areas forcing people out of their homes.