4 - Making Do

Summary

Regardless of the artistic motivations, visions and stated engagements, the practices of initiating and sustaining these art spaces reveal the degree to which place-making is characterized by practically oriented, at times opportunistic, motivations more than artistic goals. While the stated art space concepts may transcend the physical confines of a rented room, struggling with everyday banalities like rent reveals the ways that their activities are determined and shaped by basic political and economic structures and norms. Therefore, while the art spaces may conceive of themselves as islands, they are also situated within a legal context and rental market. Indeed, this exposes the complex relationships that obfuscate the possibility of direct causal relationships between artistic intention and place-making practices.

The place-making practices of these art spaces help to substantiate the claim that creativity has indeed been elevated to an ‘imperative’, empowering new actors in the realm of inter-urban competition (Peck, 2005). In the analysis of the place-making, power is understood as an enactment: a representation of an ‘assemblage of political power that is defined by its practices, not by some predetermined scalar arrangement of power’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2007: 1171). Analysing place-making in these terms requires accounting for the conditions that give rise to this empowerment. The ubiquity of the creativity discourse and the perception of creativity as a resource (Yúdice, 2003), entangled with both uncertainty and positional awareness, create an enabling condition (Peck, 2017) for art spaces: it increases the value of creative capital in which artists are able to trade and also establishes a need for them to do so. In other words, identifying their projects as an art space means something for their monthly rent. Their place-making practices powerfully show how creative capital is exchanged for financial and political capital in dealing with banal realities like negotiating contracts.

Through the qualitative lens, however, it is possible to see that there is a much broader range of possibilities, resources and strategies that do not fit into this creative capital explanation. This range of activities curtails the centrality of creative capital, defined by its exchange value, and moves towards a variegated resource perspective, based on activities like commercial diversification and financial transfer.