10/10/2016

LATITUDES


The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?

MAX: We have been going around in circles trying to figure out how to approach this question. It is a very general question and we tend to work more from a micro-perspective. I guess the simple but unhelpful answer would be: it depends on many things! We are not artists so it makes us feel a little uncomfortable to in essence speak from that perspective, but there must be millions of ways that an artist could reflect such a question, each of which would entirely depend on their sensibility or, for example, where they are working. The practices might be something very direct and engaging in the manner of an activist, or comprise something more reflective and narrated that deals in a more poetic way within a context. There are many kinds of levels of intentionality and sensibility coming to play.

MARIANA: I think there is no one simple answer that any artist would be able to give. Different artists would have entirely different answers depending on the context. One artist could have a specific line of research that had been defined in their previous careers, but maybe then respond in a very different way given another context. So I think it would depend on many factors. Obviously the geographical context is fundamental, as well as the financial context that would make a particular project possible. The multiple agents that are in play within that, the manner of the invitation to the artist, the timescales that the artist is able to work with, the structure of resources that are available – not just financial but also informative resources, social resources – all create a kind of “big umbrella” under which the particular dynamic of an art project takes place. And obviously different countries would have very different impacts on this. Likewise, a project that is taking place in a rural context is not the same as compared to one taking place in a city context. That is a very obvious example, but also different countries would have different politics about what public space is, and understand politics and traditions differently. In Colombia, let’s say, the climate would allow for a kind of public space to be possible that in Finland, just because of very obviously different climate conditions, would make an artist approach their project in a completely different way. Sometimes art would have to take a very specific approach to the public sphere just because of how people in a particular society occupy public space. MAX: I guess also the question suggests a kind of ontological framework in the sense that “creation” would suggest something which wasn’t there before – a kind of coming into being of public sphere. We would be more of the opinion that public space already exists to one degree or another. The question is which public sphere? Which sphere would an artist be interested in investigating? It could be a very small community of specialist knowledge or a much more open discourse. There are different scales at play and that is also very much a matter of the approach and the interests of any artist.

MARIANA: Another way of answering would be from our perspective and our own experience. We have worked with several artists over the last ten years, and I guess that one could perceived a certain “Latitudes sensibility”: artists who work in a process-based way, and that are especially aware of context, of the time in history that they are in, or are looking at a legacy of practices such as Land Art, or microhistory, as Max mentioned at the beginning. That kind of artistic practice is attractive to us – “slow research” and context-specific practices that relate to particular instances in time or something specific about a geographical situation. Something that we are more and more attracted by is artists who work slowly. Slow is good!
10/10/2016

JESUS CARRILLO


The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?

In one of my first year classes, which deals with the systems of contemporary art, we pose the relationship between art and politics. It was very difficult for me to break the mental block that the students had about the possibility of intervening in the present and in the future. We had a structural blockage, as one way of putting it. I did everything possible to convince them and give them examples of how artistic practices had the potentiality of unblocking the imagination, of making perceptible the possibility of a reconfiguration of the state of things and, above all, of making evident our individual and collective role in this reconfiguration that is the basis of the public sphere.

We talked and they immediately felt encouraged. Together we found some rare occasions when those artistic practices had constituted a “real” change. At times on a minimal scale, as an event, but even so they were living evidence of that possibility of reconfiguration. On the majority of occasions, the works in which we localised a relation between artistic practice and the public sphere were those in which we were appealed to because we occupy a different space – as subjects of a community that doesn’t yet have a name, that is under construction, and in whose construction we could play a role.

In today’s discredit of the institutions (specifically but not exclusively the artistic one) it seems that those events that consisted in a real change in order to be plausible can no longer happen within, or at the centre of, the artistic institution as such. We find them in unsuspected spaces and, besides, they are not even named as artistic practices. It even seemed to the students easier that they should occur in those unforeseen spaces than in the institution. An institution in which they felt themselves to be enormously disempowered and incapable. They imagined that that possibility of constructing a public sphere could happen, perhaps, at the margins of the institution.

It could be said that that artistic practice which makes us sense or put into practice the construction of a public sphere is the one that clearly reveals the obsolescence of the existing institutional models. This is the impasse we found and in which the students and I started to think about not only what practices could exemplify this process, but also what those other models of a public sphere might be. The very hypothesis of an artistic practice that helps us to reconfigure it was in itself sufficiently powerful for us to start to imagine it together.
10/10/2016

JEREMY DELLER


The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?

I suppose in the simplest way, when an artist makes a big sculpture that create a place where people congregate they add to this public quality of life in the public area. That’s the simple or traditional way. And then there is the other way, when artists make events and make things, work on projects that are not objects, or work with the public, you create a different kind energy with the public, you create a different kind of public life. You are asking the wrong person because I do it, I don’t really think about it, and I don’t really think about the legacy of the things I do or their effects. I just make it happen sometimes, if I’m lucky. I suppose artists also help the public to look at their surroundings more or differently, or look at their history differently or again, and that is another way of creating a common consciousness with the public.
10/10/2016

JAIME IREGUI


The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?

With respect to the question, I would like to answer on the basis of three debates that have repeatedly taken place in the discussion space (esferapública) that I have directed and moderated since nearly fifteen years ago. It is a site on Internet in which artists, curators, critics and people from the art field participate through texts and debates.

One of the most regular discussions has to do with political art and the way this should participate in public debate on situations of great relevance like the issues of violence or conflict. Nowadays, when we are in peace processes, there is a very relevant issue related to that: what can happen after the conflict. Political art could have a lot to say and debate about this and could offer some different ways for openly taking part in the discussion. However, there have been a lot of criticisms made that this art has largely been aimed at the field of the market and the galleries, basically circulating in the commercial and institutional circuit, very far removed from the public debate on social issues that are of burning importance in our country.

Another important question that has arisen over recent years concerns independent and self-managed spaces, which generate an alternative to the circuit of commercial art, galleries and institutional spaces. In principle, this involved a series of places that began to appear in our country some fifteen or twenty years ago, created by artists. In their form of exhibiting these spaces provided a much more critical format in comparison with the curatorial circuits. What has been happening recently is that they have been normalised and standardised to the point where they are not much different from an institutional space or a commercial gallery. They are spaces that need visibility in fairs. They are openly participating in the market and what they really offer is a first opportunity to an emerging artist, who will later be recruited and begin to circulate in the conventional, institutional circuit.

Finally, the third debate is about art related to the community. Practices in which the artist generates many works or processes of dialogue in an open relationship with small communities, neighbourhoods or vulnerable communities. There are very interesting projects at present in different parts of the country. But also, in relation to peace dialogues and the funding provided by the state to favour artistic projects in the post-conflict period, many projects have appeared that simply seek to generate collaboration with a community in a very one-off way in order to gain visibility and a reputation thanks to that.

These are the three discussions that have taken place. They generate a series of reflections and also raise a question: Why are artistic practices, which should supposedly create the public sphere, more aligned with the world of the market and losing their critical capacity and capacity of reflection?
10/10/2016

IRENE AMENGUAL


The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?

At the educational department of the Museo Es Baluard, which is where my experience proceeds from, we are interested in working with artists and cultural producers, with collectives and groups of people, because it seems important to us to develop practices in which a public sphere is generated. This means initiating a series of debates amongst the members of that group on a concrete issue of any type to generate a discussion in society. The public sphere is a place of enunciation where we always intervene from a perspective, from a position or a very specific place.

Working with artists is interesting because it makes it possible to initiate those debates and processes. When one works in the educational field, they provide a complement to one’s ways of doing and even to one’s ways of looking. The relation between art and education is problematic, not free of conflicts and not always easy. Moreover, working in education or in artistic practices does not necessarily entail generating a public sphere. Nonetheless, when shared projects are generated with that intention, very interesting processes and results can be obtained.

Some of the artistic practices that are related to creating a public sphere are those that involve collaboration, the communitarian and the participatory (depending on the degree of participation). In any case, one has to be very careful with the relations between different agents and the hierarchies that can be established. One of the dangers of artistic practices in this context is that they can assume a hegemonic position and that those who are working collectively to generate debate can end up being manipulated. But this forms part of the problems involved in the process itself.

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