Countering the Public?
On the Conditions of Art Production in a World in Fragments
Simon Sheikh
The notion of public art works traditionally entails the installation of an art work in public space, pure and simple. Works installed in this manner and context are thus supposed to be distinguished from art in the private sphere, such as works circulating and sold through galleries. Public art projects entail a different audience and indeed different notions of spectatorship. They are usually also involved in a different (public) debate that takes place before as well as after the installation of the work, and the construction of the piece usually involves a long political and planning process: What can be installed where, and for whom?
In modernism such questions were deceptively easily answered: the form of the work was an answer in itself – it was a synthesis. Architectural and sculptural forms were produced from a similar modernist matrix, and adding a sculpture to a square usually meant continuity rather than discordance. There was, presumably of course, a unity between the conception of the public sphere and the public art work. Such a unity has, however, been much discussed and criticized. It was, after all, always a construction, an ideal, rather than an actuality. The public sphere was never entered and used uniformly, and art works naturally had both different conceptions and significations to be read in different ways. We must, then, rather talk of a fragmentation and differentiation of the public sphere on the one hand, and of an expansion and/or dematerialization of art works on the other. Which, in turn, requires different understandings and realizations of public works.
This shift also entails, naturally, different notions of communicative possibilities and methods for the artwork, where neither its form, context or spectator is fixed or stabile: such relations must be constantly (re)negotiated, and conceived in notions of publics or public spheres. This means, one the hand, that the artwork itself (in an expanded sense), is unhinged from its traditional forms (as material) and contexts (galleries, museums etc), and on the other hand, is made contingent on a(nother) set of parameters that can be described as spaces of experience, that is, notions of spectatorship and the establishment of communicative platforms and/or networks in or around the artwork that are contingent on, and changing according to different points of departure in terms of spectatorship.
The gaze of the spectator is, of course, not only dependent on the work and its placement, but also on the placement of the spectator socially (in terms of age, class, ethnic background, gender, politics etc.). Or, more broadly speaking, experiences and intentionalities. We can, thus, speak of three variable categories, that, in turn, influence the definition of each other; work, context and spectator. None of which are given, and each of which are conflictual, indeed agonistic.
When thinking about art production and representation, it is therefore crucial to negotiate these terms both individually and in relation to each other. And just as contemporary art practices have shown that neither the work nor the spectator can be formally defined and fixed, we have also come to realize that the conception of a public sphere, the arena in which one meet and engage, is likewise dematerialized and/or expanded. We no longer conceive of the public sphere as an entity, as one location and/or formation as suggested in Jürgen Habermas’ famous description of the bourgeois public sphere. Jürgen Habermas’ sociological and philosophical investigation of the emergence of the so-called ‘public sphere’, most often categorized and criticized for being normative and idealist, is basically a reconstruction of the ideals and selfunderstanding of the emergent bourgeois class – positing a rational subject capable of public speaking outside of itself, in society and of society. Thus the separation between the private (the family and the house: property), the state (institutions, laws) and the public (the political and the cultural). 1
Instead, we have to think of the public sphere as fragmented, as consisting of a number of spaces and/or formations that sometimes connect, sometimes close off, and that are in conflictual and contradictory relations to each other. And we have, through the efforts of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, come to realize that our interactions as subjects with the public spheres are dependent on experiences. There not only exists public spheres and ideals here-of, but also counter-publics. By placing the emphasis on the notion of experience, Negt and Kluge do not only point to the inequality of access to the public sphere in Habermasian terms, it also allows them to analyze modes of behavior and possibilities for speech and action in different spaces. In their analysis both the workplace and the home as ‘public’, ie. spaces organizing collective experience. And they attempt to posit a specific, but plural, public sphere that can be termed ‘proletarian in opposition to the normative ‘bourgeois’ public sphere. 2
Counter-publics can be understood as particular parallel formations of a minor or even subordinate character where other or oppositional discourses and practices can be formulated and circulated. Where the classic bourgeois notion of the public sphere claimed universality and rationality, counter-publics often claims the opposite, and in concrete terms often entails a reversal of existing spaces into other identities and practices, most famously as in the employment of public parks as cruising areas in gay culture. Here, the architectural framework, set up for certain types of behavior, remains unchanged, whereas the usage of this framework is drastically altered: Acts of privacy is performed in public. 3
Counterpublics are 'counter' [only] to the extent that they try to supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity as publics, they reain oriented to the stranger circulation in a way that is not just strategic but constitutive of membership and its effects. 4
If we can, then, only talk about the public sphere in plural, and in terms of relationality and negation, it becomes crucial to understand, place and reconfigure art’s spaces as ‘public spheres’. Are the artworld – the public arena in which ‘we’, reader and writer alike, are presently located – to be seen as one fragment of a generalized bourgeois public sphere, or is there a possibility of opposing spheres within it? And how are these related? If we analyze a particular public sphere called ‘the artworld’ what is its delimitations, and how can it be employed strategically to engage with other public spheres? Finally, there is the question of how artworks and the thinking around art can intervene in these different spheres – on the one hand taking its point of departure in the specific fragment the artworld, and on the other engaging in other spheres directly or indirectly.
Just as the modernist conception of the singular artwork and spectator, the idea of the universal, bourgeois public sphere now seems purely historical. The well-ordered bourgeois public sphere is as much a fragment as other formations, and the question is indeed rather whether it has ever at all existed as anything other than a projection, an ideal. A projection that does not seem useful in our multi-cultural and hyper-capitalistic, modular society. Perhaps this modulation of division of society into different areas and specialized disciplines should be seen as the foundation for the realization and fragmentation of the public sphere into different camps and/or counter-publics. Fragmented spheres that together form the “imaginary institution of society” as described by Cornelius Castoriadis. For Cornelius Castoriadis, society and its institutions are as much fictional as functional. Institutions are part of symbolic networks, and as such not fixed or stable, but constantly articulated through projection and praxis. But by focusing on their imaginary character, Castoriadis also suggests that other social organizations and interactions can be imagined: that other world are indeed possible. 5
When establishing the artworld as a particular public sphere, we must explore this notion along two lines; firstly as a sphere that is not unitary, but rather agonistic and a platform for different and oppositional subjectivities, politics and economies: a ‘battleground’ as defined by Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke. A battleground where different ideological positions strive for power and sovereignty. And, secondly, the artworld is not an autonomous system, even though it sometimes strives and/or pretends to be, but regulated by economies and policies, and constantly in connection with other fields or spheres, which has not least been evident in critical theory and critical, contextual art practices. 6
Since the formal, autonomous work is no longer a useful model, we have been witnessing a number of artistic projects that takes their point of departure in the notion of different fields, if not down-right in the notion of difference in itself: projects that relates to a specific set of parameters and/or a specific public as opposed to the generalized and idealized. In other words, we are speaking of works that do not employ the notion of the bourgeois public sphere, but rather different fragments, camp- and/or counter-publics. Or, at least, different ideas of a public, be they utopian or heterotopian. It is a question of to and for whom one is speaking, and on what premises.
Efforts to construct new models, new public sphere formations can be seen as, if not ‘the answer’ to such questions, then as attempts at indicating the routes one was to follow if one was to answer these questions. Such platforms must distinguish themselves by not creating single projects or interventions in (a generalized) public sphere, but rather try to constitute a continuous counter-public stream. Such a project must attempt to perceive and construct a specific public sphere and a positional and/or participatory model for spectatorship as opposed to (modernist) generalized ones. And it entails a reconfiguration of the (bourgeois) notion of the public sphere into a different arena, into a potential multitude of different, overlapping spheres and formations. It must replace the notion of ‘the’ public sphere in singular into plural sub- and/or counter-publics. The task before us becomes, then, how such practices can conceive of their specific public, their interfaces with it and towards which aims? Relational publics are also always specific ones. We must thus map and define these different arenas and possibilities and methods for interaction within and between them. And, finally, question how this should relate to and alter artistic production, art’s spaces and institutions, and their ‘publics’.
Notes.