10/10/2016

GERARD ORTÍN


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

The complicated thing in this question is to say whether or not artistic practices contribute to generating the public sphere. As it seems a bit risky to answer directly, I will try to provide a general drift.

The definition of artistic practices is constantly being renegotiated. In the XX century this can be seen with the vanguards, where each movement tried to totally change what the earlier movement had done. At a certain point the vanguards reach a stage that lacks definition, which in turn gives them potential; this lack of definition generates a space of possibility. Activists, for example, have used it in the legal framework. But there are many other collectives that have generated a public sphere in a similar way. Their singularity thus provides a space from which a public sphere can be created.

It is difficult to evaluate how real this public sphere is. At times it is perceived in an almost involuntary way, almost in a turbulent way. In my practice I sensed this when I started to practice performance – at the moment when I abandon a controlled and regulated space like an exhibition hall and decide, as in Trabeska, to do a performance in a natural park with its own dynamic and its own logic. For me, there is a before and an after in how I conceive the reception mechanisms of the proposal I have designed and how I involve the participants. I can keep in mind what it is that I want to communicate, how long it lasts or the way I want people to perceive it. But if it rains or a pack of wild boars appears, this will equally affect the piece in spite of my taking decisions in that respect and there are no norms that can foresee this. That is how I conceive of this supposed idea of a public sphere, incorporating contingency as something productive.

At a more general level, in the institutions for example, it is also possible to perceive this dichotomy between the discourse one wants to transmit or the public one is trying to reach, and what happens, the real use that is made of that space. There are a lot of people who come to an artistic centre for other motives: because there is free Wi-Fi or because it rains a lot in the city and they want a place to shelter. The institution thus becomes a leisure centre for teenagers where they can spend an afternoon sending messages by mobile phone, listening to music and watching videos. It is hard to say whether or not this creates a public sphere.

In any case, I have never thought about my practice with the intention of contributing to generating the public sphere. It even proves complicated to understand the concept of “public sphere”, what it means or how far it reaches. For example, this space where we find ourselves, in which several artists are trying to construct workshops, could not have had this use some years ago because it was a wine and oil store and it was full of liquid. A little before we came, it was a storehouse for toilets. Now we have arrived here and our intention is to establish our workshops and also possibly to organize a program of public activities for the neighbourhood and for a particular sector. We do have the intention to generate something or to have some reach from this space, but I also question whether it didn’t have some repercussion on the public sphere previously, although this didn’t involve artistic practices. In any case, I do think that artistic practices have this exceptional condition due to their constant redefinition and, nonetheless, I also suspect that many other fields provide other exceptional conditions that also enable or contribute to generating the public sphere in other ways.
10/10/2016

FERRAN BARENBLIT


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

In order to answer the question: “in what way do artistic practices contribute to creating the public sphere?” I would refer above all to the place in which I work, which is the artistic institution. It has long been established that this institution should participate in the expansion of the public sphere as a place in which to discuss and identify society’s problems.

It has always done so using the notion of crisis, the idea being that the institution should participate at a time of difficulty, of decision-making. However, the contemporary crisis seems to be a crisis of the crisis model. Possibly, in the future we will no longer study the public sphere using the crisis model because it will have been invalidated by a chain of crises. At bottom, the crisis model implies that there are moments that are not times of crisis, meaning that there is a positivist confidence in progress that we perhaps already know to be impossible, which almost ties in with a utopian situation.

The question of the construction of the public sphere is also related to the model of analysis. Analysing is good, but it’s not enough. What must be created are horizontal, volatile and dynamic dialogues, which put all of the actors of the public sphere into relation. This is what some people have come to call super-diversity. Conventional concepts like mediation have been surpassed by the concept of intermediation. Mediation as a space for conversation amongst these actors cannot be considered sufficient; instead, for the real construction of the public sphere, action must start from notions of intermediation. This refers to what Bataille had already outlined in the 1930s: the creation of a headless space in which to raise these questions. That is why the notion of the public sphere reaches a point where it becomes anachronistic, because it is limited to a space that is totally apart from reality.

If we really want to think about how to construct the public sphere, we should perhaps think about how to go beyond that sphere and operate from reality. Possibly the form of doing so will not be through creating grand narratives and the intention to seek a form of explaining everything, but instead will involve thinking in terms of little transformative stories.
10/10/2016

DANIEL G. ANDÚJAR


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

One of the functions of artistic practices is to generate a space of resistance against an increasingly standardised and regularised world, in which the field of freedom is being reduced. The idea of the public sphere was defined as a concept by Habermas. He said that citizens act as a public when they concern themselves with issues of general interest without being coerced. Artistic practices cannot take place except in conditions of absolute freedom. Nonetheless, the public space has been getting very much smaller, which is a threat to artistic practices. If there is no space of freedom to develop that artistic practice, it is very difficult for us to construct that public space.

Unfortunately the field of development of artistic practices, above all in this country and under this state, has been getting smaller. In recent years a field of regulations has been imposed that has affected what we understand by the public sphere with laws like “the gagging law”. Some months ago German public television interviewed me about it. The journalist brought me the catalogue of my last exhibition at the Reina Sofía and told me, piece by piece, which works that I had made in the 1980s and 1990s are illegal right now: you can’t put on a police uniform, you can’t hire this type of thing, you couldn’t have brought out this website, you couldn’t have taken this photograph… Habermas also said that “the political public sphere in the welfare state is characterized by a singular weakening of its critical functions”. I believe we find ourselves in that state of things.

There are also other fields in which we can develop the public sphere: the pro-common, which also has to do with ownership and the theory of value. That which we think belongs to all of us, which is in the pro-common space and is outside the market and its regulations. The ownership of a work like Guernica, the central jewel of the Reina Sofía Museum, is not free of controversy. It never appeared in Picasso’s legacy except for that mythical receipt that Picasso signed at the Universal Exhibition of 1937 in favour of the Spanish Republic, a form of state that does not exist today, which is why its ownership has always been in limbo. Nonetheless, there is international recognition that the picture belongs to all of the Spanish people and that is why it is placed in the museum. On the one hand, there is the feeling of ownership and, on the other, the theory of value: Guernica’s symbolic capital belongs to all of us. It is through this symbolic aspect that we should influence that space of construction of that pro-common value that cannot be manipulated through its condition as merchandise.
10/10/2016

DANELE SARRIUGARTE


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

When I am asked one of these deep questions, I always use the same strategy: I anchor the question, concretise it, bring it down to earth. This time I have been asked in what way artistic practices contribute to creating the public sphere, and without any doubt it’s a deep question. For that reason a concrete memory at once comes to mind. Last December I went to Berlin, that Berlin where it was cold winter and people were thinking about the situation of the refugees. They have spent three winters now concerned about that issue. I arrived in Berlin just when they were holding a powerful festival on audio-visual arts. The festival was dedicated precisely to the situation of the refugees. Its epicentre was being developed in a big theatre, in the island of the museums, in the centre of the city. The directorship of the theatre was in the hands of a woman for the first time, a German woman who was the daughter of Turks.

We went to see a performance organised by the theatre. At first we were not at all sure what on earth the performance was about: the workers told us it was on the upper floor, but when we went up all we saw was an exhibition of different works. And people like us, spectators, going back and forth. Walking the way we do in that type of place: quite slowly, quite calmly, quite quietly. We were also walking about like that when, suddenly, we saw five or six people crossing the hall without stopping and in a strange way. One went very slowly: two steps a minute at the most. Another went quickly instead, walking fast and noisily. The third was jumping, the fourth dancing, and the fifth was walking normally, but every now and then stopped dead and changed direction…OK, OK, OK, we knew it was a performance. However, it didn’t affect us at all, or at least that’s how it seemed. We watched and smiled at the walking actors, and we wondered whether we had identified all of them.

The change came later. The moment at which artistic practices create a public sphere happened to us later, when we left the hall, when we reached the enormous Unter den Linden Avenue, open and full of people. We couldn’t walk normally. That is, we couldn’t automatically take steps like we normally do, without thinking carefully about each of our muscles and movements. We couldn’t walk automatically, as we do normally, without thinking about each and every one of the consequences of walking. We didn’t walk like we did when we entered the hall, at least for a while.
10/10/2016

CUAUHTÉNOC MEDINA

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

(…) I am certain that a part of recent art has consisted in bringing about a space of expression, interaction and advanced dialogue. And that in this sense the proximity of the notion of the public sphere as a political project is important, in particular in everything that involves collaborative or relational practices. I have the impression, and this is related to my own experience, that artistic practice (independent of the form it takes) produces parallel spheres of opinion. There is a way of acting – above all in recent art – that involves constructing fields of discussion on everything not included in the debates of the public sphere, fields that are not validated by language, as they are constructed in an academic way or politically, or are aimed at raising concerns that are not yet completely formulated. So, these parallel public spheres are not integrated in the greater public sphere and in a certain way they are both places of experience and possibilities that would not fit in anywhere else, in the same way that the poem contains verbal possibilities that cannot be expressed on television.

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