If the 1990s saw the re-appearance of critical art practice in the public sphere through a re-engagement with radical politics and a revival of art squats, the first decade of the new millennium saw the fetishisation of creativity in service to capital accumulation, producing the problems of how to maintain radical and innovative creativity under pressures of recuperation through projects which enrolled artistic imagination and energy in biopolitical governance. In that decade, culturally innovative art practice was able to lay a self-compromising claim to social legitimation and to access state funding through its role as a catalytic factor in urban regeneration. With the onset of economic recession and the political response, the very continuity of such art practice comes into question as state funding disappears and those spaces that opened up on the leading edge of neo-liberal cycles of neglect and regeneration become subject to state repression acting in corporate interest. Following the avante-garde of the later twentieth century, the art squat as a nomadic, temporarily autonomous social space is corporeal, embodied, consisting as much in performative lifestyle as in the production of traditional artefacts. The art squat has thus played a major part in reconstructing the social identity of the artist and the social milieu of ‘art’ in recent decades. Through a comparative study of a representative sample of art squats including Tacheles in Berlin and Schijnheilig in Amsterdam, this paper questions their future between governmental recuperation and repressive obliteration.
