Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (A BAK Critical Reader in Contemporary Art) by Ariella Azoulay

by Nancy Adajania

With contributions from artists, theorists and activists, among them David Graeber, Brian Holes and Geert Lovink, "Future Publics" reflects on the emergence of radically new publics whose origins in moments of social crisis and political uncertainty inspire them to question existing forms of collective organization, decision-making structures and protocols. These future publics recognize that following the collapse of late capital's certitudes, the institutions of political and cultural life cannot continue as usual. Utopian yet pragmatic, insurgent yet self-critical, they resist normalization into restrictive definitions of citizenship, cutting across conventional lines of class, region, ethnicity and ideological affiliation. This reader explores how the imaginative and intellectual labor of these new publics has proposed new speculative forms of belonging and collaboration beyond the ones envisaged within the paradigm of contemporary art.

Paperback

First published September 29, 2015

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art’s publics are perplexing things – for some they are dangerous rabbles, for others passive audiences, others see them as social participants making the cultural moment while for some they subvert, reinscribe and remake once again killing the author. For many aspects of contemporary art, where that art is actively engaging with the social struggles of the day publics are those addressed, those who make the struggles meaning that the addressed have made reason for the art, often in settings and forms where the artist is part of the public being addressed (and causing the art to be made).

These slippery, paradoxical, uncertain and uneven publics pervade this collection of essays positing publics, suggesting ways they might be and become and calling on us to think and re-think the public/audience/textual-producer-and-subverter. The pieces include bespoke essays, previously published pieces, interviews and discussions, a set of art works used in an artist’s talk and excerpts from a lexicon on usership. As with any edited collection, there are pieces that sparkle, inspire and provoke and a much smaller number that just seem to miss any mark that I can recognise (I’m sure they hit marks, I just can’t see them).

In terms of pieces that inspire new things for me, two stand out – Ariella Azoulay’s exploration of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s 2003 Venice Biennale installation Nationless State looking at Israel/Palestine, and Elżbieta Matynia and Joanna Warsza’s conversation about Public Happiness traversing Occupy Wall Street, Poland of the Solidarność era and what it means to work as a curator in Russia in the wake of the annexation of Crimea – framed and explored via Matynia’s discussion elsewhere of performative democracy. These pieces explore alienation and exclusion, hope and happiness and the problem of what it means to be and belong, by unravelling paradoxical, engaged and not-quite-right fluid publics (but not audiences, no passivity or outsiderness here). The pieces contain powerful and sometimes surprising political critiques, noting that for instance OWS is guilty of losing sight of its publics (and in doing so sitting in tension with elements of David Graeber’s discussion with Michelle Kuo).

There is an intriguing tension and complementarity between Bassam El Baroni’s discussion of audience-ness and Amelia Barikin and Nikos Papastergiadis’s essay on perspective and citizenship, where in both cases publics become forms of citizens – a long way from the sense of audience so beloved of conventional Kantian and Nietzschian approaches to art, audiences and looking. For outright inspiration, though, it is hard to go past Nancy Adajania’s wonderful discussion of two community-based project in India, projects that explore meaning making, co-production and living in a digital world. Alongside this there is also Manuel Beltrán’s series of image and very few words that reflect on the significance of the man who came to just stand in Gezi Park after Taksim Square was cleared of its occupiers, a man who may be seen as making a new public that again defies the state.

Throughout the collection we find institutions and audiences, publics hailed into existence by art, artists, cultural forms and practices – publics who participate, publics who ignore, publics who reject and unmake but who also remake and revise. In wondering about the public sphere, Matynia and Warsza discuss radical imagination, laugher and playfulness as preconditions for change, wondering how carnival can “embody or lead to a negotiating process” (p222) – which has prompted me to think more a play, playfulness and publics in the context of the widely accepted notion that play is autotelic, is of, by and for itself: I think I feel a paper coming on…….

Once again we have a gorgeously produced example of exciting and stimulating sociology and philosophy of art and culture emerging from the Dutch publisher Valiz Press, in conjunction with the gallery BAK in Utrecht – invigorating, stimulating if a little uneven.