Jamie Daniel

Virtual Communities?: Public Spheres and Public Intellectuals on the Internet

Bérubé clearly wanted us to understand teaching as a practice of critical cultural analysis that we should be willing to take beyond the parameters of the university classroom and the cultural studies journal. "Teaching and writing," he argues, "are two important ways of being public...but what I want to call for is a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy" (12). Bérubé is right to criticize "cultural studies theorists of the left [who] often express outright disdain for the policy implications of their work" (11), and to locate the source of this disdain in our tendency to value most in our intellectual work and indeed in ourselves whatever we assume is so unconventional, transgressive, or "cutting edge" that it can be used to justify our exemption from the demands of "common" discourse. Fortunately for those who want to claim such exempt status, the academy has institutionalized this attitude in that it both encourages and rewards behaviors that isolate us from communities more broadly defined; we often get grants and tenure and promotion precisely by convincing those making decisions on such matters that our work on whatever topic, be it modernist poetry or television sit-coms or hypertextuality, is more complex and, with this, more intelligent than conventional or commonplace readings. Anyone like myself who is in the first years of a tenure-track job has been told more times than she wants to recall by well-meaning senior colleagues that the kind of writing Bérubé is suggesting we try to get out into more public contexts not only "won't count," but might in fact be read as evidence of insufficient "intellectual commitment." The implication is that writing (as Bérubé has done) an article on the experiential implications of the social construction of Down Syndrome without referring explicitly to the work of Foucault is equivalent to a disavowal of the importance of that work; never mind that more people may understand and be convinced by a compellingly articulated Foucauldian argument than they would be by reading Foucault himself.

Josie Appleton

What if political art doesn’t have the politics to back it up?

Good politics, bad art?

Appleton.pdf

When art tries to take a stand on big issues such as inequality or war, it tends to come out as clichéd or ironic. Instead of weighty political art, we end up with artists posturing. This isn’t due to artists’ personal failings – it is due to the apolitical times we live in.

Perhaps a more genuinely political kind of art is that which concentrates on telling the truth about contemporary experience – be that love, depression, scientific progress or whatever. Art’s attempt to capture reality in all its complexity, to probe beneath everyday experience, is actually an inherently political task – more political, in fact, than posturing about the Iraq War. Raymond Williams and others have noted how art developed in self-conscious opposition to capitalism. (4) While capitalism looked at the world from the point of view of mechanical utility, art aspired to be a sphere of ‘imaginative truth’. While capitalism weighs all things in terms of market value, art looks at the object from its many angles. In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx wrote: ‘the dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral – he has no mineralogical sense.’ (5)

Simon Sheikh

Public Spheres and the Functions of Progressive Art Institutions

sheikh01_en.pdf

Historically the art institution (museum) was the bourgeois (wealthy propertied social class) public sphere per excellance... contributing to the self representation of and self-authorization of the bourgeois subject of reason. Supporting this "ficticious entity" that is bound to its own self-representation as a public. (the ruling class out to reshape society after its own image)

Now this bourgeois sphere's horizon is receding. It no longer corresponds to everyday interactions to the "public spheres" we have access to. Now individuality and community are compartmentalized, fragmented into multiple spheres. The "public sphere" is no longer just one entity, formation, or location. (Habermas). Now there are many "public spheres" sometimes connecting, sometimes closed off, and sometimes conflicting and contradicting each other.

It is crucial to reconfigure art's spaces (institutions) as "public spheres". The "art world" as public sphere is not unitary, but multiple and conflictual... a battleground (Bourdieu and Haacke), where ideological positions compete for power and sovereignty. These spheres are not autonomous, but connected, interdisciplinary (anything can be considered an art object in the appropriate context). Art has become a field of possibility and intervention, connecting with architecture, design, philosophy, sociology, politics, biology, science... a field for thinking. A cross field, intermediary for different modes of perception and thinking. This is a privileged mode, but tenable, slippery, and crucial to contemporary society.

The "public sphere" (and the art institution) is contradictory and non-unitary in its very embodiment. The public sphere is now an "agonistic sphere". According to this view, democratic institutions are not for establishing rational consensus (in the public sphere), but to defuse potential hostility in human societies... translating antagonism into "agonism" (Chantal Mouffe). Democracy is the uniting, empty signifier of our times... insurmountable and impossible to defy or deny openly (cant argue against democracy within democracy). By insisting on the art institution as a place for democracy (everlasting agonism) we can counter both populism (bread and circus) and managerialism (corporate takeover).

How we conceptualize "public", our notion of "audience" and dialogical mode of address, has become all important to our institutional constitution. Art is now both ethical and political... concerned not just with the artworld, but with the world.

Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri

Empire (excerpt p.300-303)

Empire_Commons.pdf

There has been a continuous movement throughout the modern period to privatize public property. In Europe the great common lands created with the break-up of the Roman Empire and the rise of christianity were eventually transferred to private hands in the course of capitalist primitive accumulation. Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood's forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth. During the consolidation of industrial society, the construction and destruction of public spaces developed in an ever more powerful spiral...

Capitalism sets in motion a continuous cycle of private reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what is common...

The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations. The crisis of the welfare state has meant primarily that the structures of public assistance and distribution, which were constructed through public funds, are being privatized and expropriated for private gain...

...what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism...

Ivan Illich

Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich

Silence_is_a_Commons.pdf

"Commons" is an Old English word.... a word which, in preindustrial times, was used to designate certain aspects of the environment. People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households. The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal plants in the forest... When people spoke about commons... they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community's survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.

When today, in Europe, with university students I use the term "commons" (in German Almende or Gemeinheit, in Italian gli usi civici) my listeners immediately think of the eighteenth century. They think of those pastures in England on which villagers each kept a few sheep, and they think of the "enclosure of the pastures" which transformed the grassland from commons into a resource on which commercial flocks could be raised. Primarily, however, my students think of the innovation of poverty which came with enclosure: of the absolute impoverishment of the peasants, who were driven from the land and into wage labour, and they think of the commercial enrichment of the lords...

Only recently, at the base of society, a new kind of "popular intellectual" is beginning to recognize what has been happening. Enclosure has denied the people the right to that kind of environment on which - throughout all of history - the moral economy of survival had been based. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure underlines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent - "ei-ei schau-schau!!!" - to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals that depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens' movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers.

Miwon Kwon

Public Art as Publicity

kwon01_en.pdf

The impact and implication of such shifts in public sphere discourse for contemporary art are rather profound. To counteract the spatialization of the notion of the public sphere, art historian Frazer Ward, informed by the writings of Negt and Kluge that emphasize modes of communication (publicity) over the resulting site of communication (public sphere), has encouraged a shift in thinking about the function of art as a form of publicity.2 Heeding such encouragement, this essay will review some paradigmatic public art works over the last thirty-five years in the United States to reconsider them as different forms of publicity, that is, as different models of communicative practices or forms of public address (rather than genres of art). This reconsideration will be guided by the wisdom of Raymond Williams, who outlined in his 1961 essay "Communications and Community" four modes of communicative practices that follow a quasi-evolutionary development - from authoritarian, to paternalistic, to commercial, to the democratic.3

Miwon Kwon

Public Art and Urban Identities

Public_Art_and_Urban_Identities.pdf

Public art practices within the United States have experienced significant shifts over the past thirty years.

The three paradigms can be schematically distinguished:

(1) art in public places, typically a modernist abstract sculpture placed outdoors to "decorate" or "enrich" urban spaces, especially plaza areas fronting federal buildings or corporate office towers;

(2) art as public spaces, less object-oriented and more site-conscious art that sought greater integration between art, architecture, and the landscape through artists' collaboration with members of the urban managerial class (such as architects, landscape architects, city planners, urban designers, and city administrators), in the designing of permanent urban (re)development projects such as parks, plazas, buildings, promenades, neighborhoods, etc.; and more recently,

(3) art in the public interest (or "new genre public art"), often temporary city-based programs focusing on social issues rather than the built environment that involve collaborations with marginalized social groups (rather than design professionals), such as the homeless, battered women, urban youths, AIDS patients, prisoners, and which strives toward the development of politically-conscious community events or programs.

These three paradigms of public art reflect broader shifts in advanced art practices over the past thirty years: the slide of emphasis from aesthetic concerns to social issues, from the conception of an art work primarily as an object to ephemeral processes or events, from prevalence of permanent installations to temporary interventions, from the primacy of production as source of meaning to reception as site of interpretation, and from autonomy of authorship to its multiplicitous expansion in participatory collaborations. While these shifts represent a greater inclusivity and democratization of art for many artists, arts administrators, arts institutions, and some of their audience members, there is also the danger of a premature and uncritical embrace of "progressive" art as an equivalent of "progressive" politics. (Although neglected by the mainstream art world, artistic practices based in community organizing and political activism has been around for a long time. Why is it now that it has become a favored model in public arts programming and arts funding?) The shifts in artistic practice, while challenging the ideological establishment of art, may at the same time capitulate to the changing modes of capitalist expansion. What appears to be progressive, even transgressive and radical, may in fact serve conservative if not reactionary agendas of the dominant minority...

Minette Estevez

Theorizing Public/Pedagogic Space:

Richard Serra's Critique of Private Property

Serras_Critique.pdf

If artifacts do not accord with the consumerist ideology, if they do not submit to exploitation and marketing strategies, they are threatened or committed to oblivion. -- Richard Serra Writings/Interviews, a collection which spans the 60's through the early 90's, makes clear the depth of Richard Serra's commitment to art as a critical intervention, as an inquiry into the social contradictions that unfold in the dominant discourse. Though his politics are most concretely visible in those essays and interviews detailing the battle over Tilted Arc, this volume demonstrates that Serra's grasp of the repressive nature of bourgeois aesthetics has always been a major component of his work. While his earlier minimalist and process art practices were specifically directed toward the commodification of art and "creativity," his recent encounters with the legalities of intellectual property rights has succinctly focused his work on the politics of public space. This places Serra's work within some of the most contested of discursive spaces. Given the current world-wide efforts at the reprivatization, the concept of "public" itself has become one of the most densely layered sites upon which the superstructure of a new world order is being erected.

The continuing controversy surrounding the U.S. government's destruction of Serra's sculpture Tilted Arc has made it one of the most publicly visible of contemporary battles over intellectual property law. Though Serra's contract, like most contracts for public art work, sought to guarantee the sculpture's maintenance in the site it was commissioned for, the government was able to break the contract, moving, and subsequently destroying, the work. Serra argued that the government's actions were a violation of "free artistic expression, but the final court ruling held that any rights of artistic "free speech" were not violated since as owner, the government also owned the "speech" of the art work. Property rights take precedence. As Serra learned, "the right to property supersedes all other rights: the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to protection of one's creative work."

What lends the work of artists like Serra their particular political resonance, a resonance that goes beyond the mere affirmation of "free expression," is that they do not abandon the institutional spaces of artistic practice -- the conceptual apparatus of "high art" as well as its museums and galleries -- for a supposedly unmediated contact with their audience. Thus, such work begins from an implicitly materialist assumption about the institutional structuring of experience. In this way it makes possible the important argument that institutional spaces cannot simply be abandoned but must be worked with and transformed. These concerns are spelled out in Serra's earlier writing and interviews, such as the 1980 interview with Douglas Crimp in which Serra highlights the importance of context in thinking through the potential of any public sculpture. "There is no neutral site," he remarks. "Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones" (127). For Serra, then, one of the functions of any public art should be to make those "ideological overtones" visible and accessible to an audience. Public space thus becomes a pedagogical space where citizens can become students of, in the words of Serra's contemporary Robert Smithson, "cultural confinement."

Gerald Raunig

Grandparents of Interventionist Art, or Intervention in the Form.

Rewriting Walter Benjamin's "Der Autor als Produzent" (The Author as Producer)

Grandparents_of_Interventionist_Art.pdf

I'm sure you no longer remember what role art plays in Plato's State as the perfect community. In the interest of community life, he bans art. He has a high regard for the power of art. But he believes it is harmful.

That you no longer remember Plato, doesn't matter at all. There are numerous cases in participatory, activist, interventionist art that confirm Plato in that they culturalise and aesthetise. Political inequalities are concealed and in their care for the "real people, the real neighbourhoods" they continuously need to construct the "Other" first. Much of art production turned toward community art in the early 90s. Generally, on account of the pressure exerted by economic conditions and more importantly due to the slump in the art market. Many of the resulting, superficially politicised projects did not, to a large degree, self-address their own work. But they propagated the straightforward transgression of limits and art as a social cure.

Simon Sheikh

Representation, Contestation and Power: The Artist as Public Intellectual

sheikh02_en.pdf

The artist as a producer is thus dependent on the apparatus through which he or she is threaded, through specific, historically contingent modes of address and reception. The artist is, in other words, a specific public figure that can naturally be conceived in different ways, but which is simultaneously always already placed or situated in a specific society, given a specific function. This was, of course, what Michel Foucault was driving at when he wrote of "the author-function" in his essay "What is an Author?".1 "What is an Author?" is an institutional and epistemological analysis of the figure of the author, which can be read as a problematization of both Walter Benjamin's politically motivated imagining of the author as producer, as well as Roland Barthes' equally polemic and instructive essay "The Death of the Author".2 Rather than eliminating or transforming the author, Foucault wants to suspend or bracket the author as a specific function, invention and intervention (with)in discourse:...

Philip Glahn

Public Art: Avant-Garde Practice and the Possibilities of Critical Articulation

Critical_Articulation.pdf

"Public art" as a category embraces a wide variety of aesthetic practices: outdoor sculpture, poster art, multimedia projections, earthworks, community-based projects and many more. This totalizing classification reflects a very traditional understanding of the concept of the "public sphere;" the ideal arena in which critical dialogue among citizens is made possible. Once understood as an alternative to private experience within an art world that displayed only a limited interest in public policy and the exchange of critical ideas, public art today is confronted by an increasingly inclusive art market. At a moment when popular culture and the media make the boundaries between "public" and "private" more and more permeable and when the traditional institutions of high culture appear to enthusiastically embrace all that is different, even oppositional, the question of what public art is and can be is crucial. In this rapidly transforming framework of cultural intelligibility, experience and acceptance, the issu es within this question need to be carefully reexamined...

Simon Sheikh

In the Place of the Public Sphere? Or, the World in Fragments

sheikh03_en.pdf

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.

As opposed to high modernism's ideals of a singular, autonomous and formally complete artwork, we would now consider artworks as placed in a heterogeneous field, where the significations and communications of the work shift in relation to space, contexts and publics. Just as there is no complete, ideal work there is no ideal, generalized spectator. We cannot talk of art's spaces as a common, shared space we enter with equal experiences - on the contrary, the idea of the neutral spectator has been dissolved and criticized, and the identity of the viewer have been specified and differentiated by both art practices and theories since the 1960s.

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.

Oliver Marchart

Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s).

Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism and political theory

Art_Space_Public_Sphere.pdf

As we know, "art in the public space" can mean at least two things. For one, art in combination with architecture and artistic urban outfitting; this is the traditional conception - among other things, a conception of space as a physical geographical urban and architectural space. Yet on the other hand, "public art" in the sense of more recent forms of "art in the public interest" (or "social interventionism", "community art", etc.) - not least in Austria - has also been developed into a secure niche in the canon of available art practices and forms. Sending Austrian artists, usually subsumed under this header, to the Biennale of Venice is just the keystone of sanctioning social interventionist art practices in art history (and could very well be their gravestone, too).

However, what this general artistic enthusiasm for social issues tends to outshine is politics. What artistic social work replaces is political work. And what social interventionist art practices have completely superseded, it would seem, are political interventionist art practices. Politics, wherever it enters the scene at all, is understood exclusively by social work art "in the public interest" to mean policy: administration, engineering and possibly technocratic handling of social problems. Public art becomes a privatist version of public welfare. The astonishing thing about this is not only the appearance of bureaucratic phantasms of administration or administration reform in art, but above all a narrowing of the concept of the public sphere whose banner had once been held high. For the concept of the "public sphere" is relegated to the realm of social affairs - and yet the public sphere really only deserves this name if what it denotes is the political public sphere.

For public art, everything would seem to depend on what exactly is implied by the concepts of "public sphere" or "the public" or "public space". Is it a space in which conflicts are resolved or in which they are managed and administered? Is it a space of open political agonality, a space of the battle for meaning in the sense of a "politics of signification" (Stuart Hall), or is it a space of reasoned rational and informal debate, as Habermas would have it, or is it a space in which so-called concrete shortcomings are to be named and remedied "in situ"? Is the public space one space among many other spaces (private, non-public, semi-public, local), is the public space one particular space at all or is it rather a generic term for a multiplicity of public spaces? What exactly makes it a political space (as opposed to social spaces)? And what is public about the public space, and - vice versa - what is spatial about the public sphere? I am not asking these questions at the beginning of this chapter with any rhetorical aim of finding some kind of approach to the issue, rather I would like to try and find a real answer to them in the following...

MORE ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Susan Gal

A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction

13.1gal.pdf

Michael Warner

Publics and Counterpublics

14.1warner.pdf

Paul Stob

Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public

38.3stob.pdf

Douglas Kellner

Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention