Art, aesthetics, the poor and homeless in urban space.
The Smith article "Homeless/global; scaling places" is about space and scale. These are things essential to every person in the world as we all physically inhabit and utilise spaces. Smith speaks of space at scales of body, home, community, urban, regional, national and global. He suggests space as meaningfully separate and opposed to time based meaning, which has long been recognised as meaningful and political. Smith claims that space has been belittled and neglected and that language sufficient to express the changing and dynamic empowered natures of space are insufficient and stagnating rather than liberating and appropriate.Smith in his article relates examples of homelessness and space in the New York urban environment through the Tompkins square park riots (around late 1980's) and the Homeless Vehicle designed by Krzytof Wodiczko. These examples encompass modification, re-claiming, representation and creation of space and serve to bring together art, aesthetics, the poor and homeless in urban space.Scale as well as space is produced in socially constructed ways and involves levels of body, community, region, and nation. Smith suggests four aspects the social interconnectedness of scales to be;
Space has different meanings for the individual and homeless community and surrounding region. The homeless are particularly aware of space as they live in a different space to those who inhabit houses or economically owned space or pay rent. By this I believe Smith refers to their reclaiming of space for living in and their presence as an assertion to the changing nature of space and questioning of public and private/ ownership. Being poor and or homeless means existing on the fringes or in conflict with a capitalist society, reacting to it. Recognition of the changing nature of space and scale within the New York urban environment is meaningful and political and warrants consideration as such. Living there creates a use of space other than the leisure and relaxation and changes the context available for other activities to take place in. The scales of body, household, community and globe are in this example broached in contest. It is not clear or constant but political and created. Being restricted from means of capital and consumer competition reducing social acceptance and power, and access to resources. This was a disempowering and isolating process of manipulating space and scale. Using the shopping trolley as a base the vehicle allows basic needs such as sitting, transport, sleeping, shelter and washing while there is storage space below. Being seen as threatening and out of place makes their assertion of space all the more recognised and thus notable. It is those with capital who attempt to govern and own the so-called public space. Aesthetics being that which pertains to a sense of beauty or the science that deduces from nature and taste the principles of art (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1990). People may have felt uninvolved and disrespected in terms of what was to be made of this "public space'.
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Acceptance Essays
