PUBLIC SPACE, POLITICAL DISCOURSE, AND IDENTITY

Banksy, Street Art from www.streetartutopia.com

After a ten hour flight from New York to Moscow, we somehow thought taking the subway from the airport to the closest station to our hostel on Red October Island is a good idea. The walk from the station to the hostel on Google Maps seemed easy, we were to cross two major public spaces, the square of Christ the Savior Church and the Patriarshy Bridge. However, in reality, the walk with the luggage was a struggle with the countless staircases. The square of the church was elevated from street level but was smoothly connected to the Patriarshy Bridge. Nonetheless, once we got to the end of the bridge the only way down was yet another set of long staircases. Both spaces had no intention of being easily accessible. Moreover, once in the space, both the plaza and the 15 meter wide pedestrian bridge were empty open spaces which apart from the monumental presence of the pastiche church, lacked any identity.

A few days later in London, I left the hostel early in the morning to have my favorite blueberry breakfast bowl at CRUSH, an organic health food store in Brunswick Centre. While walking, I decided to take a shortcut from the Northern side of the center instead of going through my usual route through the main entrance to the central concourse. However, the detour drove me to walk a longer distance. What seemed to be an open central square was in fact barricaded with only three controlled entrances. The public space is “blockaded”, like the public spaces in Moscow, with a change in levels and objects that break accessibility. Sennet in The Fall of the Public Maneloquently expresses the state of the Brunswick Centre writing “Everything has been done again to isolate the public area [of Brunswick Centre] from accidental street incursion, or from simple strolling, just as the sitting of two apartment blocks.” Similarly, the Lever House in New York, despite the fact that it stands on the same level as the street, is isolated by the glass walls that surround it lacking any diversity in people and activity.

The Patriarshy Bridge in Moscow, the Brunswick Centre in London, and the Lever House in New York, as Sennet puts it, are spaces “ to move through and not be in […] public space becomes a function of motion, it loses any independent experiential meaning of its own.” In The Human Condition published in 1958, Hanna Arendt lamented the loss of the Public Realm, which according to her was pacified by mass culture and the household economy. Public realm according to Arendt is synonymous with political discourse. It is a continuous space of contestation. According to Arendt’s definition of Public Space, none of the spaces previously mentioned are public.

On the streets of Shiyyah, a town in the Southern suburbs of Beirut, as one walks from Maroun Street crossing the Old Saida road to Hassan Kanj Street posters of Imam Ali gradually replace the Lebanese Forces Cross graffitied on the walls. According to Rosalyn Deutsche in The Question of “Public Space”, “public space is not a pre-given entity created for users – it is a space that emerges from practices by users.” It is the presence of a set of institutions where people engage in debate, a space where “the identity of society is both constituted and questioned.” In Shiyyah, the Muslims on the West and the Christians on the East, use religious, confessional, and political signage in public spaces to territorialize and enforce the community’s identity, alienating ‘strangers’ who do not relate to them. This is also true for parts of East London where anti-immigration ads have recently filled the billboards which have in turn prompted graffiti artists to respond to the hate ads, thus sparking a nation-wide debate and concern over the identity of London as a diverse city for “all”. The simple act of placing an ad that voices concern over “border control” generated a political discourse reviving the public realm. Here we also recognize Claude Lefort’s concept that public space is the “legitimacy of contest about what is legitimate and what is illegitimate” It is “the social space where, in absence of foundation, the meaning and unity of society is negotiated, constituted, and out at risk.”

However, despite the fact that they generate discourse, both the graffiti and the billboard ads are not formal public art produced by artists striving to connect and engage with the community at large. They are expressions of angry outbursts of dispute over who can rightfully occupy the space. One of the more formal artists whose sculptures have commemorated past struggles in American History is Maya Lin whose three major monuments mark three key periods of public upheaval and severe contestation in U.S. history; the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement.

The three moments that rearranged the foundations of the whole country through uprisings and violence are represented as “Shrines of Conciliation” described by Abramson to have “formal clarity, visual reflectiveness, and inviting tactility”. Lin uses the timeline not only as a teaching device but as a way to historicize the ordinary person’s life, to narrate an “inspirational social history that emphasizes the efficacy of populist politics in American Democracy”. It narrates unity and therefore a common morality. What it does not do is question and challenge authority. Abramson articulates this phenomenon “The raw facts the names the numbers – are bureaucratically produced and impersonally presented and thus possess an autonomy, inaccessibility, and power that prevents the beholder from asking where they come from and who they benefit. […] the information dominates the powerless beholder.”

Ironically, in Art and Censorship, Richard Serra explains the process in which a public art is legally accepted into the public realm, which may explain why it rarely questions authority but instead affirms it. In 1989, Serra’s Tilted Arc on the Federal Plaza in New York was removed; the site specific art piece was therefore destroyed. The Berne Copyright Convention, which grants moral rights to authors was unable to help the artist in re-claiming his rights since the treaty, ratified by the congress excluded the key moral rights clause. This exclusion had been made due to heavy lobbying from powerful magazine, newspaper, and book publishers. The defendant therefore has the right to “curtail free speech based on dislike of the content”. The Yates Amendment passed by the Senate further gives the government rights to judge the content of art, opening the doors to moral crusades under the rhetoric of “quality of life”.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery was cancelled for not meeting the standards of “decency”. In Serra’s words “the penalty for this violation is the exclusion of his speech from public viewing and the withdrawal of public funds to make the world available to the public”. Here the term “Quality of Life”, instead of connoting equality, implies the “existence of an abstract universal city-dweller […] encompasses all people in a single whole and in this way neutralizes their differences and erases concrete inequalities”.

The democracy of public spaces was further questioned in 1990 after the restoration of the Jackson Square Park, the keys to the gate were handed to an alliance of residents who locked the park during night time making sure that the homeless feel unwelcome to this “public park”. Interestingly, the controversy of the rights of the homeless in public spaces was addressed in Krzysztof Wodicsko’s The Homeless Projection (1986-1987) at the Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Memorial in Boston, two years before the destruction of Serra’s art on the Federal Plaza in New York. Similar to Wodiczko’s controversial art is Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) which was quickly cancelled due to his art’s questioning of the shady works of a real estate company which ironically still remained in business afterwards. Barbra Kruger’s photomontages (1980s) also question and critique society’s norms and priorities. More recent works include Lebanese born British artist Mona Hatoum’s Hanging Gardens (2008) “‘hanging garden’ consists of 770 jute sacks, stacked to head level. All together, they form a 10 meter long wall, which looks much like the sandbag barricades used as defense from enemy gunfire during battle and other war zones such as checkpoints and border crossings. Despite the associations we have with the image of these barricades, the sacks are filled with seeds that sprout, greening the wall and expressing more of an image of growth and prosperity. The piece deals with the friction between notions of home, security, warmth and their opposites.”

The most recent controversial art is Paul McCarthy’s Tree, the 24 meter (80 feet) sculpture standing on Place Vendome was part of the International Contemporary Fair in Paris before being sabotaged and brought down two days ago on the 18th of October (2014). McCarthy described his sculpture as an “abstract work” inspired by a Christmas tree rooted in a joke about a sex toy. The Mayor of Paris condemned the attacks claiming “Paris will not succumb to the threats of those who, by attacking an artist or a work, are attacking artistic freedom. Art has its place in our streets and nobody will be able to chase it away.” In Art and Political Consciousness Rosenberg writes “Art is affected by the quality of political order, but the influence does not flow the other way.” However, in the case of Paul McCarthy, the dismantling of the “public” in reaction to the art has influenced French Politics to take a stance in favor of the art. The sculpture generated the public realm by creating a discourse between the art form, the general public, and the state. The art generated a concept called triangulation, which is a dialogue that arises between the art form, the artist, and the people. Here the art object is not the main masterpiece to be admired but about the dynamism that it creates in its surroundings, becoming a chain of reactions thus generating the public realm.

This process of triangulation has also been used by a team of Lebanese designers called Dispatch Beirut, who striving to spread hope have begun using LEGO as “building blocks” to patch up the bullet holes and cracks in buildings in Beirut. Every weekend, they choose a random site and as they place the LEGOs the residents of the neighborhood join in, interestingly, even after the artists leave, the LEGO pieces always change, and grow. People have the urge to personalize the pieces placed together. By doing so the object or art piece allows people otherwise insignificant to the larger political and public realm to emerge and declare their right to the city.
Finally, Rosalyn Deutsche writes in The Question of “Public Space”: “The term “public space” is one component of a rhetoric of democracy that in some of its most widespread forms, is used to justify less than democratic policies: the creation of exclusionary urban spaces, state coercion and censorship, surveillance, economic privatization the repression of differences and attacks on the rights of the most expendable members of society.” Unfortunately, these phenomena are true and ever growing with the expansion of global cities. However, small installations by local artists addressing root problems of the immediate society through interactive art that is a chain of reactions, redefines the space through empowering certain urban actors who otherwise may be insignificant or even invisible. Even the act of “vandalism”, whether it is the graffiti that covers border control ads or dismantling an art piece overnight, is a form of discourse that further drives people to question key issues and redefine their identity as a community and as a city.