Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Scott A. Berzofsky

How can artistic/activist practices respond to urban conditions of exclusion and inequality? Since the 1970s, urban redevelopment in the United States has been dominated by a neoliberal ideology that promotes privatization, deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from the provision of social services. As a result, urban resources such as public space, affordable housing, health care, food and education are increasingly transformed into private property. Against the neoliberal privatization of resources in the city, my work is dedicated to reclaiming public spaces and building relationships based on cooperation, solidarity and sharing resources in common. This thesis attempts to situate my practice as an artist and activist within a broader historical and theoretical framework. Part 1 defines the seemingly archaic terms "enclosure" and "the commons." Parts 2 and 3 update these terms for the twenty-first century, addressing the "new enclosures" of neoliberalism and the emergence of the alterglobalization movement. In parts 4 and 5, I describe the conditions of the neoliberal city and examine a specific case study in East Baltimore. Part 6 introduces the concept of "the right to the city." Part 7 presents an overview of my own formation as an artist and activist committed to the project of reclaiming the commons. Finally, in part 8, I reflect on the first phase of the Occupy movement and consider its potential to reconfigure the boundaries between art, politics, urbanism and everyday life.

Art and Activism in the Neoliberal City

Reclaiming the Commons

Melissa Lo

This thesis takes as its subject a remarkable anatomical atlas produced between 1831 and 1854: the Traite complet de l'anatomie de l'homme. Authored jointly by anatomist Jean-Marc Bourgery and artist Nicolas Henri Jacob, the Traite proposed a re-visioning of the ideal body at a moment when the very notion of such a body was undergoing transformation on two fronts: aesthetic philosophy and medicine and surgery. Because of their transverse cuts through skin and viscera, and their equal treatment of proportions and surgical interventions, the treatise's lithographic plates challenged the stability of the ideal body, whose form had typically been exemplified by classical Greek statues (and their fragments) and heavily circulated through the disciplines of art history, archaeology and academic artistic practice. At the same time, the images smoothed over the tattered edges of the pathological specimens that had become the subject of much research, teaching, and treatment in the 19th-century Parisian medical school and clinic; consequently, the images were rendered null for medical theory and surgical practice. Through an investigation of five of the Traité's plates, this thesis underscores the fraught incommensurability of these images while also taking seriously how both anatomist and artist invested in the potential of representation to bridge the gap between the ideal and the dead.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

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