The reconfiguration of publics and spaces through art: strategies of agitation and amelioration (original) (raw)
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Contemporary Public Art and Dialectical Aspects of the 'Democratization' of the Urban Public Space
Public Art Journal, 2021
This article lays out the claim that every open space is not a democratic space and the plurality of voices does not mean a plurality of discourses and democratic political existence. It discusses why it is important to always take into account the dialectical dimension of the urban space and public art and points to the perils of the ‘democratization’ of the public space. The author alerts us that some public arts are directly commissioned by the government for a more ‘democratic city’ and there are also those artistic projects that confront government-supported public artworks for the ‘democratization’ of the urban space, but display even more autocratic or exclusionary tendencies. She argues that, despite their radical potential, contemporary public art as the consolidator of political publics, does not simply concede the democratization of the public space. These publics can as well be constituted by neoliberal agendas, and even worse, authoritarianism. In the light of this critical perspective, the article asks: What kind of public art can then be appropriate for a democratic public?
Anamnesis : Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces
UPI2Mbooks, 2018
Antique term anamnesis denotes recollection or remembrance, to gather something that was lost, forgotten or erased. We are talking about something very old and archaic that made us the way we are now. But anamnesis also denotes a work that transforms its subject to produce always something new. The task of anamnesis is to recollect the old and to produce the new. The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces, synthesizes current urban culture starting with an agonistic society characterized by an inquiry of existing consensus and by disagreement between past and present, in order to be used as a heuristic tool for better understanding of the role of cultural particularization as opposed to globalization and other transnational processes connected with urban culture. The book is divided into nine chapters covering theoretical, investigatory and practical approaches to documenting and acting in public spaces and city, using various art formats. Logic of selected works doesn't always reflect a quality of works or a place of their positioning, but also the way those works and the place (location) itself interact with each other in a new and novel way. Selected artists managed to avoid not only restrictions of art conventions, but also restrictions of traditional and institutional spaces and their products such as museums and galleries. This art insists on relocation of the center of gravity from universal tendencies of modernists' abstraction to the reality of "ordinary" people and their "common" experiences in public spaces. The book Anamneses: Dialogues of Art in Public Spaces is a critical inquiry of the culture of space and of economic exploitation of public spaces in order to show a wide span of art practices that enable citizens to become co-creators of public spaces. Illustrated with selected examples in this book, contemporary art in public spaces creates a particular point of view on collective culture and its affirmation in urban life. The book explores ways in which art interventions and practices transform and symbolically shape public spaces, that is to say ways in which they participate and change the meaning of public spaces, where users could feel in a different way experimental character of sensory experience.
Cultural Conflict and Public Space: A New Conceptualization
2017
Since the definition of the global city in the 90s, our understanding of the generic city has been that of a formless, diluted, urban mass ineluctably moving towards complete homogenization and the subsequent dilution of character. However, cultural positions on how city spaces are lived in today seem to be more polarized than ever. The increasing mobility of population transnationally has emphasised this polarization, and is mainly seen in large, global metropolises. Today, cultural conflicts are not happening between regions and nations, but are unfolding at the scale of the city. In opposition to ideas that understood cultural conflict as either an increasing revelation of an abstraction that alienates subjectivity-as suggested by Marxist critics-or a tumultuous path before the triumph of the generic and homogenous city-as in the 90s-this paper will explore the concept of "transculturation" and navigate through this new socio-cultural and spatial situation in cities. According to the concept of transculturation, taken from the Latin-American critical theory tradition as an alternative tool to analyse cultural conflict in the city, the cultural reality of the city is always defined by specific and concrete truths through a relentless process of contrast and debate and by power relations that are continuously defined and redefined at various scales. Focusing on the notion of public spaces and its production as a critical means of exploring urban cultural conflict today, this paper will examine the theoretical bases for a culturally sustainable public space, taking as precedents both the square under the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo designed by Lina Bo Bardi and the more recent and collectively designed Gillet Square in Dalston, London.
Introduction: Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations
2023
This volume presents an extensive array of examples drawn from diverse disciplines and regions worldwide. These examples share a common thread of interest in fostering participation, agonism, and the potential for "possibilizing" – the concept of fostering equitable interactions that facilitate the creation of complex imaginaries and the envisagement of agonistic coexistence through artistic processes, dissemination, and observation. The discourse within centers on the dialogical attributes of art, prioritizing them over the establishment of a predetermined aesthetic-political praxis. Contributors to this volume encompass a spectrum of roles, including social activists, museum professionals, art historians, and practitioners of collaborative art. Their collective objective revolves around outlining strategies for engaging with art within regions marked by pronounced political divisions. Timely inquiries are posed concerning the capacity of art to orchestrate challenging conversations, establish connections, and devise methodologies conducive to urgent political retorts. Can contemporary art effectively transcend political schisms and progress toward fostering democratic social interaction, openness, and contingency? How might artists contribute to the comprehension of agonistic encounters within urban public spaces? Amidst the escalating influence of regressive forces such as nationalism, racism, and misogyny worldwide, can artworks reciprocate and counterbalance these trends? As the self-contained realm of art steadily diminishes, artists face the task of crafting new frameworks that enable the articulation of a political aesthetic through democratic dialogue. This collective book delves into the potential for artists to recontextualize their work, thereby establishing platforms wherein a political aesthetic can flourish and contribute to democratic discourse.
"Public spaces and the end of art", Philosophy and Social Criticism (2011)
Philosophy & social criticism, 2011
This article contributes to studies in democratic theory and civic engagement by critically reflecting on the role of contemporary art for the transformation of the public sphere. It begins with a short assessment of the role of art during the Enlightenment, when the communicative function and the public role of art were most clearly articulated. It refers in particular to the analogies between aesthetic and political judgement in order to understand the emancipatory role of artistic production within a philosophical project centred on reason’s capacity to liberate itself from the dogmatism of authority and from the errors of superstition, both elements considered crucial to the development of a functioning public sphere. The article then discusses the historical transformation of art following a number of philosophical and sociological critiques to a similar project of the Enlightenment and assesses the attempt of historical avant-gardes to appropriate this critique yet maintain art’s emancipatory function in society. Having examined some problems raised by these attempts, the article turns to the analogies with contemporary artistic production. It examines the role of contemporary visual art in the public sphere and shows how the anti-rationalist theories articulated to reflect on contemporary works of art, and the works themselves, both fail to develop art’s emancipatory role in society. Without rethinking artistic experience in a way that places emphasis on reason’s capacity for critical and constructive selfunderstanding and without reconsidering art theory in a way that brings back the emphasis on the emancipatory role of rational communication, contemporary art, far from contributing to the revitalization of the public sphere, will contribute to its decline.
Performing civic cultures: Participatory public art and its publics
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
This research investigated the performances of participatory public art as ways of taking political agency in contemporary democracy. We considered these ‘maximalist’ forms of participation – ‘multi-sited’, as the language of democratic theory suggests, in both the political sphere of art and the formal arena of politics – as ways of doing, acting, and performing citizenship in democratic societies. Drawing upon the ‘cultural turn’ in citizenship studies, we assumed civic cultures as central variables to explain these forms of political agency. Referring to media audience research, we adopted an analytical framework to explore the artists’ civic cultures that are in action in public urban spaces. The analysis focused on performances of citizenship developed in Sardinia (Italy). The research shed light on the artists’ knowledge and values, the multiple layers of audience participation envisaged in their practices of communication, their (dis)trust towards institutions and non-elite a...
When does a place start to be an exhibition space? In 1986 Jan Hoet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, organized Chambres d'Amis: an outdoor exhibition where fifty-eight artists exhibited in private apartments. The show invaded the private sphere of the city, leaving the perimeters of the museum. This historical example enables introducing a by now common contemporary situation where artistic institutions stage extramural exhibitions in “alternative” places. Indeed, in the last twenty years, one can recognize the proliferation of artistic proposals that exploit the non-ordinary aspect of a place to create a "spectacular" event. Besides, today, we also notice the multiplication of art centers, nonprofit associations, festivals, that made the alternative space an ordinary space, where sometimes space is inseparable from artworks. Through the deepening of two study cases, the Trussardi Foundation in Milan and the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the paper studies the aesthetical role of the place within exhibition design processes, thus suggesting the necessity of new vocabulary and a new definition of curatorial modes for the contemporary art.
STUCK BETWEEN DISCIPLINES – NOTES ON PUBLIC ART DISCOURSE IN 2012
In surveying where the field of public art practice and research currently stands in 2011, there remains a deficit of critical discourse - what some would call “theory”, and others research-oriented approaches to urban public art practice and interpretation. Furthermore, public art has yet to mature as a field and begin to take account of it’s own histories, both past and present. In this essay, I claim that in order to understand public art, it is necessary to investigate the space that informs it, that of public space. It is necessary to dig into more complex territory to do this.