Page - 23 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

23 introduction ance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century situates the “seismic wave of artistic and everyday protest” that Vienna experienced at the turn of the millennium (Fiddler 2018, 1) in terms of how it was “predicated on political history” (ibid., 3). She establishes that what gives the wide range of works she discusses their raison d’être and their artistic power is indeed their sta- tus as art that promotes or bears the traces of reaction and resistance to the politics of the FPÖ [Freiheitliche Partei Ös- terreichs] or to the political direction presented by the com- bined forces of the conservative right and the populist far right. (ibid., 2; italics added) Whereas Fiddler is guided in her research by the question of identifying the causes of protest against the government (ibid., 3), and she does an admirable job in outlining how objection- able the 2000–2006 coalition government’s strategies and poli- cies were, it is a particular tactic on the part of some politically astute, contemporary cultural practitioners that I am interested in here and how it has emerged from, and is part and parcel of, the city’s history of spatial politics.6 A crucial chapter in this history is that of Red Vienna. Not merely “one of the most extensive and significant large-scale ur- ban interventions in interwar Europe,” it was also, as Eve Blau has done important work on, “one of the most important ex- amples of the political deployment of architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, and of the instrumentality of architecture itself as an agent of spatial transformation” (Blau 2014, 179–80). In the af- termath of the war that brought an end to Vienna’s status as im- perial capital, the Social Democrats adopted “a comprehensive urban project that set itself the task of making Vienna a more equitable environment for modern urban living” (Blau 2016). They reshaped the city with “a broad set of social, cultural and 6 The “some” in this sentence is intended to echo the title of Victor Burgin’s Some Cities, while “tactic” is from the vocabulary of Michel de Certeau.