Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011

This article argues that Dada induced an ‘anti-public’ against the bourgeois public sphere. Against the idea of ‘the public’ as a collective noun for extant individuals, the idea of anti-public entails the belief that a truly universal public can only emerge from the partisan position of the excluded. A truly universal public emerges out of the negation of the current coordinates of culture. Dada embodies such a position of universality by occupying the position of the excrementally excluded of culture: the position of ‘the philistine’, as theorized by Beech and Roberts. This reasoning on negation and universality draws on the contemporary Marxist philosophy of Badiou, Lecercle and Žižek.

The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city, recently staged ‘21st Century: Art of the First Decade’. The gallery spaces were replete with a commissioned slide by Carsten Höller, an installation of Rivane Neuenschwande’s I Wish Your Wish (2003), a table of white Legos, a room of purple balloons and other participatory or interactive artworks designed to engage multiple publics and encourage audience participation in a variety of ways. Many of the featured projects used day-to-day experiences and offered new conceptions about art practice and what they can elicit in their public – raise awareness about local issues, help audiences imagine different ways of negotiating their environs or experi-ence a museum in a new way. At times, the bottom floor galleries resembled a theme park – adults and children playing with Legos and using Höller’s slide.

This article examines the benefits and limitations of such artistic interventions by relating the GoMA exhibition to Brisbane City Council’s campaign of ‘Together Brisbane’ (featuring images of Neunenschwande’s ribbons); a response to the devastation brought to the city and its surrounds in January 2011. During the Brisbane floods, GoMA’s basement was damaged, the museum closed and upon reopening, visitor numbers soared. In this context, GoMA’s use of engaged art practice – always verging on the ephemeral and ‘fun’ – has been used to project a wider notion of a collective urban public. What questions does this raise, not only regarding the cultural politics around the social and participatory ‘turn’ in art practice, but its use to address a much wider urban public in a moment of crisis.

The notion of the public sphere, as elaborated in western European and Anglo-American academic discourses, has been largely associated with the emergence of liberalism and civil society. Even those theories that critique Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere for its ignorance of the politics of exclusion and inclusion, nevertheless rely on the notion of the public sphere as an arena in which identity finds representation: the public sphere here is constituted as a battleground for recognition and representation of identities within the already established structures of legitimization. Developed in radically different circumstances from those of western Europe and North America, in countries where state socialism prevailed, the notion of the public sphere calls for a different conception and identification with the state. By questioning the notion and its conceptualization in a post-Soviet context, this article discusses the practices of the group ACT in Armenia in 1994–96 and the ways in which these practices construct a public sphere not by transgressive acts of refusal and criticality but through the affirmation of the existing state. ACT’s practice calls for a different mechanism of identification of the public sphere with the state than that applied in western democracies. The article situates the discussion of artistic practices of the conceptual artist’s group ACT within the discourses of the newly instituted state after the independence of 1991, in order to articulate a notion of the public sphere developed outside of the formation of the bourgeois notion of the public sphere in representative democracies in the former West.

Between the 1990s and the financial services crisis of 2008, new public spaces were regularly included in urban redevelopment schemes in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Following the report of the Urban Task Force, and the invention of the new category of social exclusion, new public spaces were seen as producing social cohesion. Like public art in the 1980s and 1990s, new public spaces represented a cosmetic approach to a range of deeper-rooted urban ills, but were a low-budget, highly visible alternative to dealing with problems of infrastructure and wealth distribution. This article asks what issues emerge from an investigation of new public spaces, what histories are co-opted by their advocacy, and whether public spaces have ever housed a public sphere of social self-determination. It asks whether a proto-public sphere is found in the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whether or not the idea of a public sphere is reflected in Millennium Place, Coventry, a new public space that is the site of a participatory art project by Jochen Gerz: The Public Bench. All this is put into focus by reference to the worldwide appearance of Occupy in 2011, which might have been an ephemeral public sphere.

TOOTH FOR AN EYE: A CHOROGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE IN ORLEANS PARISH, DEBORAH LUSTER (2011) Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 64 pp., 29 illustrations ISBN: 1931885966, h/bk, $75

‘PROJECT CABRINI GREEN’, BY JAN TICHY, 28 MARCH–29 APRIL 2011, CHICAGO, IL, USA

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: FILIP GILISSEN’S IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE ON, A 2011 SINT-LUKAS BRUSSELS UNIVERSITY COMMISSION, AND OTHER RECENT WORKS

‘MAKING THINGS PUBLIC: ATMOSPHERES OF DEMOCRACY’ 20 March–7 August 2005, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany

ALSO A BOOK MAKING THINGS PUBLIC: ATMOSPHERES OF DEMOCRACY, BRUNO LATOUR AND PETER WEIBEL, (2005) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1072 pp., 550 coloured illustrations ISBN 9780262122795 (hardback), currently out of print

GARETH LONG, ‘WHO INVENTED THE DESK?’ THE APARTMENT, VANCOUVER, 4 SEPTEMBER 2010 – 1 MARCH 2011; ARTIST’S TEXT; ONGOING PUBLIC WORKSHOPS AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS; ONGOING SERIES OF ARTIST’S PUBLICATIONS

GOING PUBLIC, BORIS GROYS, (2010) New York: Sternberg Press, 168 pp., ISBN 9781934105306, paperback, £10.95