Tracing the associations between artists, planners and engineers with and within the materials of our environment, this book introduces the relational theory of ‘art worlding’ as a way of coming to know our organic continuity. Through a series of ‘sculptural’ ethnographies of the making and doing of art in urban and rural contexts, the author re-orientates the art-planning relationship in recognition of art practice as a mode of inquiry and way of knowing. Methodologically innovative, the book traces public art as practice and integrates artistic practice within planning research. Inspired by the classical pragmatism of John Dewey the fieldwork illuminates the opportunity afforded by the art-planning relationship in understanding relational continuity at differing scales. It introduces a new paradigm for the field of public art and for art and planning practice more broadly.
Art Worlding: Planning Relations will appeal to sociologists and social anthropologists with interests in art, as well as artists and art scholars, and those working in the fields of urban and rural planning, urban regeneration, art and ecology, curating, public art, and cultural management.
Chapter 1 From Public Art to Art-Planning
1.1 Pavements and Stuff
1.2 Growth, Participation and The Network
1.3 Art School Training
Chapter 2 What Practitioners Say About Practice
2.1 Methodological shift
2.2 Dualities in speech
2.3 Towards a new commissioning paradigm
Chapter 3 The office: Human Scale
3.1 The office laboratory
3.2 Tracing the mundane workaday
3.3 The social construction of construction
Chapter 4 Holy Island: Going Beyond
4.1 Experiential knowledge
4.2 Crossing the tide
4.3 Trans-actional knowing
Chapter 5 Kultivator: Comprehensive Activity
5.1 Work space building
5.2 Doing and undergoing farming work
5.3 Organic participation
Chapter 6 I used to Make Sculpture: A Language of Practice
6.1 Associated living
6.2 A Circular story
6.3 Happenings at the human scale
6.4 Happenings below the human scale
6.5 Art-Planning pragmatism
Biography
Julie Crawshaw is Senior Lecturer in Arts at Northumbria University, UK, and co-investigator of Creative Fuse North East.
‘Vividly written and filled with fascinating insights, Art Worlding is a careful and timely study of the practices of artists and regeneration practitioners. Inspired by John Dewey’s philosophy of art and drawing on a wide range of rich empirical cases, Julie Crawshaw makes a completing argument about the relational capacity of art-planning practices dissolving all set disciplinary boundaries. A remarkable ethnography, a useful rethinking of culture-led regeneration, and a vital intervention in anthropology, art studies, urban studies, and beyond.’ Albena Yaneva, Professor of Architectural Theory, University of Manchester, UK
‘This is a fascinating monograph. Through the making and doing of art, Julie Crawshaw authoritatively proposes original and exciting narratives for understanding places, and for making and doing spatial plans as well. The book shapes new dialogues not only as regard the positionality of art within development narratives, but also between the disconnected worlds of urban and rural knowledge’. Menelaos Gkartzios, Reader in Planning and Rural Development, Newcastle University, UK
