Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2020

In this article we ask in what way can the notion of care, collectivizing and the collective become a primary part of contemporary art practice? And further, what types of art practices address these central tenets of democracy? We do this by reflecting on the political potential of care and its importance as a tool for achieving an equal society. Uniting the action of care and collectivity, we conclude that together these two undertakings represent a political force of commoning within the public sphere. Utilizing the writing of Beech, Hutchinson and Timberlake, who argue for collectivism over collaboration as a way towards societal change, we reflect upon the political implications for art when artists work collectively. We consider the practices and function of other art collectives examining their key purpose for acting collectively. We employ our previous practice as the Freee Art Collective, as well as our more recent work as the Partisan Social Club to consider in what ways our practice can be deemed collective.

This article focuses on the importance of reclaiming our rights as citizens and our public spaces by documenting two different public installations/performances that took place in Beirut. The first took place in Spring 2018 and was organized by BePublic Lab at the American University of Beirut, and the second was the Architectural Association Visiting School that took place in Beirut in Summer 2019. Both installations led to a series of interventions on the stretch between Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael, an area that has been witnessing gentrification in recent years. Both projects aim to trigger political engagement and raise public awareness in the face of the lack of public space, especially for the youth, in a city that is gradually moving towards a near total privatization of its public places. They emerged as a response to the sociopolitical strategies of depriving the citizens of their basic needs by privatizing what was once everyone’s. This article argues that urban interventions are an opportunity to address sociopolitical issues through spatial and temporal public installations. These installations, tailored to a human scale and anchored in the city as both art and architecture, reflect on the power of public interventions as urban catalytic tactics that engage with the people and challenge the blasé attitude of the citizens, pushing them to claim their rights to the city.

This article was originally presented at a seminar organized by Josephine Berry (2020) around the ideas of milieu and geoaesthetics, derived respectively from Michel Foucault (2009) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1999). In this account of a network of artworks, I will focus on direct reading of a significant conjunction between works by Richard Serra and David Hammons through an understanding of the political economy of New York at an important moment of transition. I develop the understanding of milieu derived from Michel Foucault with Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of the ‘production of space’ (1991) and the ‘reproduction of the relations of production’ (1976), operations by which capitalism survives its crisis of accumulation at a key conjuncture in the 1970s which has direct consequences for the works I discuss. Responding to the initial presentation context for this article, a seminar coordinated by Dr Josephine Berry, geoaesthetics, a concept derived by Berry from ideas of milieu and geoaesthetics, respectively, from Michel Foucault (2009) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) is grasped in the sense of art and aesthetics responding to the earth’s (adopting the same prefix as) geology, geography and geometry (ge) by offering a planetary reading of art or experience of art that is entwined with a consciousness of our planet as a totality, and perhaps galvanized by our increasing awareness of it as a finite resource. Geoaesthetics in this context is thought of as an aesthetics, an attempt to understand the experience of artworks in ways that render accessible the conditions of their making and witnessing in terms that are inseparable from the environments and conditions in which they are made and experienced.

The text discusses inclusion and social engagement in art, which are central to my practice. My projects operate at the interface between dialogical education and participatory as well as collective art making. By referring to Kester’s critique of New Labour policies of the late 1990s as leading to a de-radicalized Marxism I argue for an agonistic method that I connect with the idea of ‘radical inclusion’ as a strategic approach to democratization. The problem of Austrian history politics and how the country created the myth of Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany is the main focus of my intervention at the Peace Cross St. Lorenz in Lower Austria, which serves as an example of my artistic practice of ‘radical inclusion’. The peace cross exists since the 1960s and is celebrating the Jockisch task force. Contemporary historical research has revealed that this combat group was actively involved in war crimes during the Second World War. To counter the myth of an innocent Wehrmacht I mounted in front of the cross a photomontage made in 1933 by the antifascist artist John Heartfield. Additionally, the memorial is augmented by five signboards which present collages produced by local school pupils during a workshop that took place over a period of six months.

In this article I argue for a shift of focus from measurement to understanding in research on the values of art. Based on my research experience with publicly funded opera companies and inspired by ethnography, I suggest a bottom-up, contextual and patient approach to research on the values of art in society. Bottom-up means that it focuses on the valorization of practice versus theory; contextual means that it focuses on the valorization of the specific contexts versus the generalizability of results; patient means that it focuses on the valorization of the process of understanding versus the urgency to apply. Three of my research projects illustrate how this approach can contribute to finding a voice for all facets, both quantifiable and unquantifiable ones, of the values that arts organizations create for their communities.

A neo-liberal narrative dominates the cultural value discourse wherein the value of publicly funded art and higher education is increasingly assessed on the basis of extrinsic values. Higher education is expected to contribute to the knowledge economy and the arts to social amelioration, cultural tourism and regeneration. Such an overt focus on the extrinsic values of art and education sidelines their intrinsic values – how they contribute to the common good by promoting collective well-being and sustaining a critical public sphere. Rather than arguing for how their intrinsic values might be marshalled into this neo-liberal value discourse as many cultural analysts continue to do, this article calls for a redefinition of value based on principles of commoning. In place of ‘value’, it looks to the concept of ‘social wealth’, which is created by radical experiments in producing the commons. It considers how ‘art institutions of the common’ and ‘universities of the common’ that have emerged in recent years are producing forms of social wealth that offer a viable alternative to the neo-liberal discourse of value.

Decolonizing archiving practices is about emancipatory actions rather than databases. It is about conveying a multitude of actions where conflictual narratives exist. The process of democratization of societies in conflict could take place by increasing the degree of access, of the constitution and of interpretation of archives that have to do with collective memory and urban knowledge. In spaces of conflict, however, any kind of public archive, and collective memory are under the control of the dominant political powers. They use them to sustain divisive status quos. ‘Contested Fronts: Commoning Practices for Conflict Transformation’ challenges such control. It is the curatorial project of the Cyprus pavilion, curated by the author, for the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture. It is an open-source archive, part of an agonistic architecture, that assembles international spatial practices, networks and pedagogical programmes. They are complementary to an activist Cypriot project, the ‘Hands-on Famagusta’ project. They all offer methods, inspirations and imaginaries about constructively transforming conflicts by encouraging the emergence of emancipatory commoning practices to support the commons during a potential reunification of the divided island of Cyprus. In the article, I shortly discuss the political dimensions of archive and its use by critical spatial practices. I further on, discuss issues concerning conflict and how its transformation can have constructive or destructive consequences. Additionally, I unpack the three notions constituting the ‘Contested Fronts’ commoning practices, those of countermapping, threshold and controversy. I examine how ‘Contested Fronts’ constitute an open-source archive thanks to its content, to its performativity as well as to its manifestation in the form of exhibition-on-the move.

A number of North American artist project spaces established in 2003 activated alternatives to display and programming practices found in mainstream museums, giving voice to artists who did not fit existing durational, disciplinary and authorial parameters. One such site was Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina, an artist residency and living museum set within a 1930s Depression-era thrift store. Here, an archival approach emerged from the mess of thrift store Americana that considered what an artist project space could be if nothing was sold, altered beyond repair or thrown away. Central to the artist organizing practices that emerged on-site are archival principles that enable empathetic connections to form in relation to object meanings, lost subjectivities and neighbourhood relationships. Elsewhere, as a site, offered a means for hidden voices to be heard and alternative archiving practices to be tested as a form of community memory, with their museological presentation indebted to the implications of mess and its endless reordering. This article builds on the idea of empathy as a capacity to be engendered in museum audiences by seeing it also as a structuring principle to invoke organizational difference at every turn. Such structural empathy became tellingly significant in 2020 as racial justice protests and the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the inequities of American life. For Elsewhere, the principles of practice that enabled them to become a platform for imagining and securing hyper-local change are bound to successive reformulations of both the site since 2003 and the resulting archive.