The Art of Publics

It would seem that the public domain is becoming more and more public: the government is pulling back and now only watches over safety and hygiene. In this ostensible operation – after all, the public has just as little to say about public space as it did before – works of art play an uncomfortable role. At first sight, they are an obvious victim in the prevailing tendencies towards popularization, for they have hardly any function and their presence is not a necessity. While the size, location and shape of almost all elements in the public domain (buildings, traffic signs, crowd flows, benches, trees, security cameras, no-trespassing areas, youthful loiterers) can be substantiated by appealing to ‘the facts’, the placement of an art work always seems to be the result of wishful thinking and arbitrariness. There is seldom a demand for it, nor does it offer any solutions. This is why some voices in the political world have called for the abandoning of such public art entirely, or leaving its selection up to local residents. Then, at least, the legitimacy of its placement would be guaranteed.

No matter how contested, and no matter how much administrators and leaders can also run into difficulties because of it, the instigating of all sorts of forms of art in the public domain still mainly turns out to be seen – in the Netherlands, anyway – as a task of government. This is at odds with official policy, which increasingly has determined that art should be left to the workings of the market. Art in public space is apparently an exception, an exception that is hard to legitimize and one that administrators would actually prefer to avoid, but which they somehow see as an inescapable part of our democracy.

The direct connection between the government and art in public space not infrequently leads to the labelling of art there as ‘state art’ rather than 'street art’. There is much to be said for this, but it does immediately raise the issue of the character of the state that is represented by such art. Artistic representation of the ruling power of a nation or community has a long history, which can be interpreted as one of the forms in which the state makes itself public.1

Moreover, this always involves the representation of a community that does not actually exist, but whose existence is assumed, desired or intended. These images always suggest an implicit ideal, and in a certain sense they are performative. This is also true of the art in our public space: its diversity, the extent to which such works of art are coquettish or confrontational, self-referencing or altruistic, is a good indication of the kind of society we supposedly live in. This art indeed represents the state, but a state that not only opts for recognizable and unifying images, but also and particularly considers exception and deviation, the unexpected and the unobserved, as characteristics of its existence.2

The fact that the public does not directly and never completely recognize itself in these images is thus not strange in itself. What is strange is that this is often used to substantiate the conclusion that there is ‘too little support’ for a particular work of art. The government, however, is not just responsible for the realization of an art work; sharing and communicating its reasons for considering the work a matter of concern so that it has a chance of getting the desired support is also part of its tasks. By making it clear that works of art in the public domain not only serve ‘to make things public’, but that this also is a case of ‘things making publics’, their role in the creation of a network of public space can be strengthened.

In What is the Style of Matters of Concern?, Latour provides a few conditions that these matters of concern must meet. Applied to the art practice in the public domain, they clarify what is often lacking. First of all, according to him, it must be clear for whom the matter is of concern, but this remains rather vague in the practice of public art. Afraid of responsibility as people generally are, this ‘concern’ is tossed back and forth like a hot potato, only to end up on the plate of those least aware of it: the residents/users of the area. According to Latour, matters of concern have to matter , they have to lead to emotional reactions, and they have to be open for discussion, for only then can they have real meaning. And with works of art in public space, this is where it often goes wrong, because commissioners are inclined to interpret a negative reaction as rejection and defeat and not as the beginning of a productive difference of opinion. Finally, Latour states that matters of concern must be ‘populated’ by people and things, that they must be durable for a long period of time and that they must be taken care of, or as he puts it, they must be ‘saved’.4 a thing, to not become abandoned as an arbitrary object, an exaggerated obstacle testifying to lost ambitions, art in public space must not only assemble a network around itself before and during the making process, but also, and perhaps primarily, afterwards. So the question for a city district or housing corporation must not only be ‘How do we manage to put an art work there? ’, but ‘How do we ensure that the object stays there?’. Art in the public domain survives by attracting so much (people, things, care, looks, ideas, feelings) to itself that it does not shrink but grows, that the publicly made thing transforms into a thing that makes publics. The question, however, is how this process of transduction can work out in practice.

But the most fruitful meeting with other practices happen when a work is completed and takes its place in the public domain. At that moment, it can acquire a meaning that neither the commissioner nor the artist could have foreseen, a meaning that generally is based on a misunderstanding. Stengers: ‘Indeed the “ecology of practices” practice first implies that whatever its good will, its practitioners will not cross the border of the practice it addresses without a transformation of the intention and aim of the address, what is often called misunderstanding. And the practical certainty of misunderstanding is something ecology of practice has to affirm with no nostalgia for what would be a faithful communication.'5The possibility of a misunderstanding is the principal power of works of art in the public domain, precisely because they are situated on that intersection of practices. What’s more, this is a misunderstanding that is unpredictable. It does not arise because the artist has wanted to ‘show the world in a different light’ or to ‘put the viewer on the wrong track’. Viewers are always on the right track, their own, and in appropriating an unfamiliar image they take steps that they might not have otherwise taken.