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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017
Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2017
Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2017
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Art and the Public Sphere: From controversy to opinion formation in the making of contemporary art
By Mel JordanAbstractW. J. T. Mitchell first coupled the terms ‘Art’ and the ‘Public Sphere’ in 1992 in the title of his edited book Art and the Public Sphere (1992). The volume was based on the one-day symposium Art and Public Spaces: Daring to Dream.1 Mitchell’s conception of Art and the Public Sphere is specifically addressed by his editorial ‘Introduction: Utopia and critique’ and is further developed in his chapter in the same volume, ‘The violence of public art’. Mitchell’s pairing of public sphere theory with public art is based on a semiological account of artworks; thus he places significance on the interpretation of the meanings constructed from artworks and how various speculations on an artwork’s ‘meaning’ generate conversations in the public realm. I argue that this emphasis limits the way in which we consider the production and function of art because it forces a type of ontological engagement with public art that foregrounds the question ‘what is art of?’ rather than ‘what does art do?’. Mitchell’s account can be considered a public sphere insofar as it causes discussion in the public realm; however, I believe that there is more to be gained for art’s social and political significance if we consider how art functions for opinion formation. I propose that art also operates towards the construction of culture and society rather than simply reflecting upon it. And following Georg W. Bertram, I consider Walter Benjamin’s formation of ‘critical practice’, which proposes that critique is essentially a change of practice as opposed to a negation of society.
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Art, politics and the public square: From decoration to declaration!
More LessAbstractThe term ‘public art’ has long conjured images of modernist sculpture as baubles for the British new towns or monuments to historical figures. Efforts to revisit the term and reassess its associations have made visible a new heterogeneous public art that engages with space, place and identity in new and diverse ways. Whilst these revisions subvert the traditional idea of public art as creating fixed, permanent structures, what remains in common with the public art of the past is the urban as a suitable site. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s fluid understanding of the city as an oeuvre, this article looks to the relationship between art, the urban and its material: the social. This article contributes a critical reading of the implied politics of three contemporary public art practices through returning to consider the political figure of the virtuoso (whose historical site is the public square) in Hannah Arendt’s writings and revived in Paolo Virno’s critique of neo-liberalism. Arendt’s understanding of the term is explored in relation to three public art projects: Tahrir Cinema (2011–present), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Chalk (1998–2006) and Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) to propose that these works constitute contemporary political practices within the public realm.
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‘A strong curatorial vision for the neighbourhood’: Countering the diplomatic condition of the arts in urban neighbourhoods
By Janna GrahamAbstractIt is by now common knowledge that the arts are complicit in projects of urban redevelopment, dispossession and gentrification. Where accounts of this process in the United States and the United Kingdom have often focused on artists’ occupations of studios and gallery spaces in low-income areas, or on the public art commissioning process, more recent trends extend the artists’ role in gentrification more directly. Artists are now commissioned to engage in community visioning and engagement activities, efforts to naturalize the development narrative, and art projects that support the policing of bodies seen to be unruly or undesirable to the process of gentrification (itself re-branded as ‘regeneration’). This article looks at the multifaceted role that artists and arts organizations play in the development and dispossession process, describing them as having produced a ‘diplomatic condition’, in which artists and arts organizations are used to massage and assuage conflicts, while a systematic war is waged on poor and working-class communities. Far from innocent, artists and arts organizations have increasingly been called upon to leave the comfort of what Tariq Ali describes as the ‘extreme centre’ to more actively take sides. This article draws from a situated ethnography of my work at the Centre for Possible Studies, an arts and research space in London’s Edgware Road neighbourhood, and readings from a number of recent struggles aligning artists and residents differently, including Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights Community, and the Southwark Notes Campaign in London’s Elephant and Castle Community. It questions what role artists and arts organizations could play to counter such a diplomatic condition.
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Exercises in the curatorial open form: On the example of exhibition Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times
By Kuba SzrederAbstractThis article aims to discuss curatorial methodologies developed during the exhibition Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times,1 curated by Sebastian Cichocki and myself at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in early 2016.2 Making Use attempted to survey art in the expanded field of art, constituted by a plethora of alternative art-sustaining environments and a constellation of plausible art worlds. As I will argue, these art worlds facilitate the application of artistic competences in spaces not traditionally devoted to art. Such art worlds create their own value systems, promoting aesthetic idioms and politics of art as an alternative to the ideologies that dominate the mainstream art world, with its pretences of autonomy, commodification of artistic objects and urge to reproduce its own hierarchies. With Making Use as my example, I will argue that the tectonic shifts in the social and ideological composition of the art world, related to the emergence of alternative environments that sustain art, undermine existing curatorial methodologies and promote the development of new ones. In this context, I will refer to Making Use as an experimental process that tested the methodology of the curatorial open form, which uses techniques such as reporting, exhibition as action (verbs versus nouns) and the open archive to present practices unfolding in the expanded field of art. I will argue that the curatorial open form contributes to the development of new institutional models, responding to the general transformation of public sphere.
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Address: Critical irony, neo-authenticity and humour in the art we call public
More LessAbstractThis text is a critical analysis of the term ‘public art’ and the often unquestioned assumptions that underpin the term’s still-extant currency, this in spite of the mani-fold shifts that have taken place in recent decades that, for me at least, render mori-bund any reductive oppositions between the ‘public’ and the ostensibly ‘private’. Attempting to go beyond the binary of ‘autonomous’, privatized domain of white-cube, ‘gallery art’ versus a putatively ‘socially engaged’ art within the broader domain of the public sphere, I will attempt to argue that the all-too-often elided dimension of the time of art, or art’s durationalty conceived of as spatio-temporal ‘scene-event’ might offer a productive means of exceeding the ossified public-private dialectic.
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Memory of absence: Contemporary counter-monuments
More LessAbstractIn 1992, James Young published an article examining the rise of the counter-monument in Germany. According to Young, the counter-monument provokes its viewers, demands interaction, has the possibility to change over time and insists that memory work be the burden of the viewer, not of the monument itself. While Young focused his attention on a particular set of Holocaust memorials built in Germany in the late 1980s, his formulation can be usefully applied to other contemporary memorials that increasingly incorporate particular design elements that mark them as counter-monuments. This article considers the design of several recent memorials in terms of their aesthetic and physical function as counter-monuments and identifies a new trend in memorial design, the creation of memorial museums, which further expands and complicates the role of these memorials.
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Broadcasting the archive in Barcelona: Analysing the side effects of Arte Útil projects
Authors: Gemma Medina Estupiñán and Alessandra SaviottiAbstract‘Broadcasting the archive’ is an independent project conceived and curated by us in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) and the Asociación de Arte Útil. The idea arose from the urgency to spread the Arte Útil archive created as a principal source of reference and the core of ‘The Museum of Arte Útil’1 beyond the institution, which hosts the material. Being the initial archive researchers, we started thinking about how to make visible the potentiality that the archive – intended as a tool – has. The project is the first attempt to emancipate usership around the Arte Útil archive through a year touring activity programmes such as workshops, discussions and tours hosted by different organizations in various locations in Europe and United States. This interview will reflect on how ‘Broadcasting the archive’ could be considered as a new methodology to understand the porosity of Arte Útil – intended as a movement – outside and inside the institutional framework, with a particular reference to the programme we developed at Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), in collaboration with the Avalancha collective, Núria Güell, Rubén Santiago and Valentina Maini. We invited them to revisit the conversations we had during the weekend for this journal.
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Joey Orr interview with Suzanne Lacy, Sunday, 19 July 2015
Authors: Joey Orr and Suzanne LacyAbstractFrom 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.
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Reviews
Authors: Thomas Kaestle, Bill Roberts, Jonathan Vickery, Lorna Hards, Lucy Lopez, Claire Mead, Kate Brehme and Gill ParkAbstractPlanning Unplanned: Can Art have a Function? Towards a New Function of Art in Society, Barbara Holub and Christine Hohenbüchler (eds) (2015) Vienna: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 256 pp., ISBN: 9783869840635, p/bk, £30.87
Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, Liam Gillick (2016) New York: Columbia University Press, 208 pp., ISBN: 9780231170208, h/bk, £26.00
Production Show 2016–2018: Prototyping/Discovering/Analysing, curated by Ruth Claxton and Gavin Wade, Eastside Projects, Digbeth, Birmingham, 1 October– 10 December 2016
The Birmingham Big Art Project (BBAP), shortlist exhibition, various venues in Birmingham, 2016–17
‘The Hop Project’ by General Public (artists Elizabeth Rowe and Chris Poolman), various venues across Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Birmingham and the Black Country, 2016–17
Human Right, Stephen Willats, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough, UK, 4 March–4 June 2017
The Present in Drag, 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 4 June–18 September 2016
Marie Yates, Works 1971–1979, Richard Saltoun Gallery, Great Titchfield Street, London, 24 June–22 July 2016
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