Borders, barricades, and walls have long served as tools and symbols of state oppression, functioning materially and metaphorically to delineate the distance between us and them, safe and unsafe. But could building a barricade ever contribute to constructive world-building? To answer this question, Leah Modigliani turns away from structures established by state forces and towards those created by artists and protesters. The practices that she analyzes contribute to Indigenous and feminist activist traditions of thinking about and using barricades as creative practices of resistance. Written with Donald Trump’s first presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic in mind, Modigliani’s book on the artistic appropriation of boundaries, walls, and their im/permeability is more apt than ever in light of escalating violence in Gaza and Lebanon, Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and the ongoing climate emergency. Modigliani’s case studies thread across China, Mexico, the UK, Ukraine, and the US. She puts instances of performance art and protest from the 1990s and 2000s in conversation with structures and discourses related to extractivism, access, gentrification, and development that have existed for far longer, and will continue to exist beyond our current moment.
The key terms undergirding Modigliani’s book are, of course, revanchism and counter-revanchism, the first of which she takes from critical geographer Neil Smith’s writing. Revanchism, which has its roots in the French word “revanche” (revenge), refers to aggressive attempts to regain lost territory, often through processes of gentrification and privatization conducted at the expense of poor, immigrant, and working-class communities.1 As Neil Smith and others have explained, revanchism names “the process of enclosing certain populations/resources/spaces in order to make them more pliable for the extraction of surplus value” (7). Revanchism, then, is a late capitalist strategy of urban restructuring that pushes vulnerable populations into ever-narrowing corners of the city to make room for the social and economic interests of the upper and middle classes. Counter Revanchist Art makes an important intervention in studies of critical geography and urbanism by foregrounding how artists and art interact with the built environment, as well as by calling attention to artistic realignments of space as commentaries on political and social conditions. Modigliani attends to how forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and climate disaster re-organize space. Her analysis dwells on the possibilities that artists discover as they repurpose the built environment to model alternative and transformative ways of being and engaging, while also revealing the constraining dynamics that underlie state-sponsored development projects.
The book contributes to the work of art historians and performance studies scholars who analyze similar aesthetic repertoires of direct action (the subtitle of Modigliani’s book is Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action). In the introductory chapter that lays out the context and themes of her book, Modigliani writes that artists negotiate the affordances and constraints of built environments to “perform, and thus potentially engender transformative experiences and behaviors for themselves and others” (12). The phrase “creative action” characterizes her case studies, which unite aesthetic practice and political commentary in their substance and themes. Of interest too is Modigliani’s reading of protest as performance, which provides a model for tracing the commonalities and shared concerns that continue to spread across anti-government and environmental protests today. Performance studies scholars often discuss creative action (including protest) in terms of embodiment and the contact between bodies and their material and non-material contexts. Counter Revanchist Art expands upon these discussions, concentrating on how artists and protesters use corporeality and creative action to stage a reclamation of space and to highlight the machinations of larger political and structural forces.
Several of Modigliani’s case studies foreground labor and trade, highlighting tensions between capital’s use of space and how bodies perform within those spatial arrangements. Chapter 2 takes on Lin Yilin’s 1995 performance Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, in which Lin builds, dismantles, and rebuilds a “wall” of stacked bricks along the length of a pedestrian crossing on Lin He road in Guangzhou, China. The artist’s laboring body underscores both the labor that goes into performance and the labor that goes into building a city. The tactile and metaphorical significations of brick circulate through the chapter on Yilin’s project, tying migration, labor, and ubiquity together. In Chapter 3, Modigliani analyzes Santiago Sierra’s 1998 performance Obstruction of a Freeway with a Truck’s Trailer in Mexico City, in which Sierra borrows a juice company’s truck, instructing its driver to use the truck to create a temporary traffic jam on a key ring road in Mexico City. Here, Modigliani turns to trade and manufacturing through the prisms and towers that populate Santiago Sierra’s spatial intervention, as well as the historic backdrop of Mexico’s preparation for the 1968 Olympic games. In both these chapters, trade and manufacturing emerge as factors that interrupt and frame the city in conjunction with the built environment. Additionally, the ephemerality of the performances in Chapters 2 and 3 interacts with the impermanence of their objects: Lin Yilin’s brick wall and Santiago Sierra’s obstruction of the freeway using a truck’s trailer. These impermanent performances and structures, in turn, are in tension with larger, more permanent structures such as the buildings on Lin He road and a highway sculpture by Gonzalo Fonseca that is also discussed in Chapter 3.
Entering, repurposing, and reorienting space are the book’s connective tissue, and disaster emerges as one way that space is reorganized. In Chapter 3, which focuses on Santiago Sierra’s art in relation to work by Gonzalo Fonseca, Francis Alÿs, and others, development and gentrification curtail public mobility, constituting a kind of disaster. In Chapter 5, climate disaster is the force that underlies the protests Modigliani analyzes. Chapter 4 takes a different approach to disaster, however, using the visual economy of Heather Peak and Ivan Morison’s pieces to explore how the chaotic and the monumental interrupt the flow of daily life. In her analysis of I Lost Her Near Fantasy Island, Modigliani links the piece’s spill of flowers to the flower tributes that followed Princess Diana’s death. The flowers hint at unseen catastrophe, a theme explored more directly in Peak and Morison’s Journée des Barricades in the form of a pile up of trash, the city’s “material regurgitation” (111). Both these works interrupt passersby and invite reckoning with unexpected spills of objects through the imagery and motif of disaster.
Part of the book’s strength lies in its consideration of a wide range of geographical areas, spaces, and objects alongside a similarly wide theoretical scope. Although Modigliani draws on distinct theoretical lenses—Freudian clinamen, Mbembe’s necropolitics, and the Deleuzian island, for example—her deft and thorough analysis ensures that these concepts remain in mind as we read varied case studies. As a critic working across art history, politics, critical geography, and urban studies who is an artist herself, Modigliani is well versed in the art historical legacies and artistic traditions that inflect both her chosen artworks and her engagement with them, including minimalism, the southern Chinese art scene, and the Situationist International. Modigliani’s theoretical fluidity, which brings in language from performance studies (such as Diana Taylor’s work on “repertoire”), makes this work a valuable addition in multiple fields, especially in relation to spatial politics and the ways in which bodies and nonhuman objects exist and interact with space and barricades.
As Modigliani’s artists and protesters show us, possibilities for alternative worldmaking and imaginaries lie in the everyday, and in co-opting the tools of control and surveillance to reveal their complicity in oppression and exclusion. A further step in studying artistic strategies of counter revanchism might center on ephemeral architecture: what roles do temporary structures such as refugee camps play in state co-option of land and bodies? Refugee camps and camps for internally displaced persons embody states’ necropolitical control over their citizens and their selective allocation and withdrawal of subjecthood. As such, artistic interventions that dwell on such ephemeral architectures would call for new ways of encountering (to use Amelia Jones’ term) state power in the everyday.2
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Endnotes
- D. Collins and B.M. Shantz,“Public Spaces, Urban,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchen and Nigel Thrift (Elsevier, 2009), 517-522.
- Art historian Amelia Jones proposes “encountering” as a revision of Simon O’Sullivan’s approach to art as a form of encounter that challenges subjectivity; to Jones, “encountering” signifies the action-oriented and relational process through which art, artists, and viewers encounter each other. Amelia Jones, “Encountering: The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art ‘Means.’” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 3 (2008): 18.
Shannon Constantine