Vast, vibrant, sprawling at times, claustrophobic at others, but always affectingly so, ‘There goes the neighbourhood’ was arguably the most important artist-driven project to take place in Sydney in a long while. In addition to a major exhibition at Performance Space, the project, organised by local artist collective You Are Here, took in a series of residencies, discussions, a substantial publication and a re-enactment of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull at local artist space Locksmith. All of this was intended to provide a critical perspective on transformations underway in the inner-Sydney Redfern area within the context of international responses to the global phenomenon of urban gentrification.
The project took its title from a 1992 single by Body Count, the all black hardcore band fronted by hip hop artist Ice T. For T and his cohorts, the state of the neighbourhood in question was a spatial metaphor for the band’s then-audacious gesture of fusing the lyrical content of urban, black gangsta rap to fast, aggressive, suburban white skate metal. As the title of You Are Here’s undertaking, it could not be more appropriate, for not only was ‘There goes the neighbourhood’ preoccupied with a certain spatial politics rooted in Australian race relations, but it also proposed a co-articulation of art and activism as significant in its potential (and its problematics) as Body Count’s synthesis of two racially coded pop-cultural idioms.
Any notion of activist art, of course, immediately poses the question of the function of the gallery, the reduction of properly political activity as representation, and the drafting of art into the service of communicating ideology. But this, as theorist Gerald Raunig put it while in Sydney recently, is to miss