Shanty Town

November 13, 2006 1:30 PM

Shanty Town. An installation at The Lab 101 Gallery.
posted by Armitage Shanks (6 comments total)

Interesting project. Any idea why they chose it? I could not find any motive/challenge/assignment.
posted by Cranberry at 3:35 PM on November 13, 2006

While the art is urban/hip/cool being around real poverty just fucks the whole thing up for me. I´m not trying to derail, but only adding how I see it. Is this a result of a detachment from poverty?
posted by iamck at 4:49 PM on November 13, 2006

Artists have always romanticized pain and strife. Still, this is a nice modern take on it.
posted by tehloki at 7:35 PM on November 13, 2006

Here's a brief article and a rather intriguing catlogue with more pictures. It looks like a fun exhibit. But I didn't find out much that would address the theme as cranberry sought or much that would speak to your comment iamck. I didn't take ithe exhibit as a comment on poverty as much as I did on the idea of a collective or community working together.

But then a little searching bears out your point. There does seem to be an an art trend to romanticizing substinence, I guess. This article - Thriving On Adversity: The Art of Precariousness - addresses this theme:
"Works such as Potrč’s and Alÿs’ point to a widespread interest, among artists and curators, in the precarious existence of shanty town dwellers and of the millions of people across Third World cities whose mode of livelihood Mike Davis has described as ‘informal survivalism.’[1] In order to address the apparent contradictions suggested by these works and by their appeal to official sponsors and institutions, I would like to sketch out some characteristic features of this trend and some of the problems it raises. Rather than providing a systematic overview, I will look in particular at the ways in which artists and curators have theorised this growing interest, and explore a few of the perils and promises that precariousness holds for contemporary art today."
posted by madamjujujive at 8:05 PM on November 13, 2006

Hmm. This installation is somewhat reminiscent of a group of avant-garde British artists who are known collectively as 'the Blue Peter School'.

You may be familiar with some of their installations or their conceptual work. I suppose their meditation on popular media, Tracy Island is their best known piece, but their earlier and more visceral work such as Pet's Birthday Cake is also becoming more widely appreciated.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:31 AM on November 14, 2006

I realize the artists' consciousness-raising intent, but from the gallery photos, Shanty Town looks more like a suburban elementary school project with cute students, colorful paints, cold drinks, and tasty snacks. The reality appears to be far, far removed from the Lab.

I have scant real-world experience with poverty. As a young boy, I lived in Haiti briefly, but decades later I can still smell Port-au-Prince's shanty town as we drove by. Perhaps the installation needs some urine, feces, rotting garbage, and filthy green mosquito-laden water splattered on it to dirty things up a bit.

In an article about the United Nations report, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, slum conditions are summarized:

And what exactly is a slum? UN-HABITAT attempts at a definition by describing a slum household as "a group of individuals living under the same roof that lack one or more of the following conditions: access to safe water; access to sanitation; secure tenure; durability of housing; and sufficient living area".

...slum life often entails enduring some of the most intolerable housing conditions, which frequently include sharing toilets with hundreds of people, living in overcrowded and insecure neighbourhoods, and constantly facing the threat of eviction. Slum dwellers are also more likely to contract water-borne diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, as well as opportunistic ones that accompany HIV/AIDS. Slum life, therefore, places enormous social and psychological burdens on residents, which often leads to broken homes and social exclusion. Although the common perception is that slums are breeding grounds for crime, the report shows that slum dwellers, in fact, are more often victims than perpetrators of crime.

I (fortunately) have not lacked the basics, nor have I lived under any such conditions. What about the artists of Shanty Town?
posted by cenoxo at 11:59 AM on November 14, 2006