Kerry Guinan

In 2014, the Auschwitz museum recorded its highest number of annual visitors to date, with 1.5 million people passing through the gates of the concentration camp to witness the architectural remnants of the Holocaust. Further east, at the Punchdrunk Theatre Company’s ‘Soviet Bunker’ in Lithuania, tourists of history pay a twenty-euro entrance fee for a distressing three-hour re-enactment of the KGB’s interrogation techniques.  In more recent history, at the World Trade Centre site in New York one can expect a queue of forty-five minutes for a ticket to the spatial void left behind by the 9/11 attacks. If trauma, as per Jacques Lacan, is characterised by its fundamental resistance to symbolic representation - by its utter incomprehensibility - then these determined pursuits of its innate and mysterious truth can ultimately only objectify it. In this paper I argue that such a practice depoliticizes trauma, which in its primary encounter is the political at its purest; an ahistorical moment in which the logic of the social order collapses and its substitute seems absolutely contingent. I take as my case study Artur Żmijewski’s ten-minute documentary-style film 80064 (2004) which depicts an Auschwitz survivor having his concentration camp number re-tattooed under the persuasion of the artist. 80064 does not, in spite of its own status as an art object, objectify the trauma of the subject. The film does not set out to illuminate the true nature of the horrors of the Holocuaust, but rather allows these horrors to agitate the continuity of social order. The trauma of the tattoo’s restoration impairs the structures of fascism, choice-orientated liberal democracy, and art itself, and therefore, I contend, produces a supremely political encounter for subject and audience alike.

In the last two decades the arts and culture have become a frequent facet of Dublin planning projects. This has manifested in the turn to ‘cultural quarters’ as a redevelopment strategy, in the new emphasis on high calibre urban design and in the proliferation of public artworks in regeneration areas. Nevertheless Ireland’s per-capita expenditure on the arts remains bottom in the European league, artists overwhelmingly earn under the national poverty threshold, and Dublin presently faces a major shortage in the supply of art facilities owing to the recent resurgence of its property market. The Impact and Instrumentalisation of Art in the Dublin Property Market therefore addresses the political substance of the turn to culture in Dublin planning, querying whether it provides a support for art’s intrinsic value or the mobilisation of art for regenerative purposes. Its case study is Smithfield, Dublin, an area designated to become a cultural quarter in the early 2000s. New research on Smithfield’s redevelopment analyses the roles of private developers, the community, and local independent art spaces - above all asking ‘who was the cultural quarter intended for and why did it fail?’ To support its inquiry, the paper includes new economic data detailing the impact the art organisation Block T had on residential property prices in Smithfield. Unravelling the problematic relationship between art and the neoliberal economy, The Impact and Instrumentalisation of Art in the Dublin Property Market intends to provide a critical foundation from which an alternative cultural vision of Dublin City can be formed.