Skip to content

Making Publics

Date:2022
Format:Book chapter
Index: writing

Context

This chapter was developed out of my response to the 2019 symposium, Let's Go Outside, at the Monash University Museum of Art. My basic observation–originally developed in Fieldnotes from the Cloud–that the digital infrastructure of arts organizations was being absorbed into the developing tech monopolies was extended by reflecting on the trend / necessity of moving programming online due to COVID lockdowns.

Making Publics

If the ‘public’ is a thing at all, then it is not an unquestionably good one. At the beginning of Melbourne’s second COVID-19 wave in July 2020, residents of nine public housing towers were forcibly removed from the public life of the city. Many were deprived of food, medication, and psychological support, all in the name of public health and the greater public good. This mobilisation of the public was not an exception, but an extension and amplification of Australia’s ongoing history of dispossession, exclusion, and management of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern migrants and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

As the virus spread, public spaces across the city began to quickly close off. Cultural institutions moved online or took some time to rest and regroup. Internal discussions veered between continuity and rupture. On the one hand were practical considerations of fulfilling promises made to funders, artists, and audiences. But on the other hand, the possibility to build something new, to dismantle competitive and exhausting structures, persisted. If the uncertain and improvisational moment opened by the pandemic is not the time for realising dreams of a different kind of world, then when will it ever be? 

Zoom was the most prominent agent of a perverse continuity, reformatting any social encounter into a meeting, but maintenance of the status quo was assured by the entire apparatus of smartphones, WiFi, laptops, apps, social media, deliveries, and data centres. Art didn’t move online so much as it was coerced by prevailing forces. If the place of public art has typically been outside of galleries and museums, then the widespread closure of those physical spaces and shift of programming during pandemic lockdowns to online platforms presents a problem: all art becomes public art. What is the usefulness of the term ‘public’ in a networked digital context, such as Zoom? Does the public even make sense here? Is it a concept worth holding on to?

One interesting case study that might help in considering these questions is the Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital (BLEED), co-organised by the Campbelltown Arts Centre and Arts House in Melbourne. This six-year project opened with a ten-week festival during Australian border closures and Melbourne’s strict lockdown. It was conceived and planned, however, in the two years prior, allowing me to reflect on the differences between cultural programs that have proactively tested the digital waters and those that have fallen into them by circumstance. The premise of BLEED is to ‘greet audiences where they already reside: online, hyper-connected and virtually networked’, which inherits somewhat from avant-garde traditions of abandoning the stage or space of theatre to confront or activate its audience in a ‘digital public sphere’.1

In some ways, this language feels dated. Even before Twitter flexed its muscles and banned the President of the United States, any semblance of a digital public sphere was smashed into thousands of algorithmically mediated discourses, filter bubbles, and fragmented, disconnected echo chambers. I wouldn’t disagree that platforms have become sites for shared interpretation of events nor that they contribute to the production of public opinions, and I recognise the online condition that BLEED identifies. However, there is something post-public about the emergent political populism, surfacing fascism, and the media, surveillance, and communication environment within which it has flourished.

In contrast to BLEED’s mostly apolitical scene setting, the actual artistic and discursive contributions to the program are deeply attentive to many of these questions. Paeonia Drive, 2019, by Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin, and Jacqui Shelton’s response, Not-Crying in the Park, 2020, produce encounters with systems of management and control of bodies and nature. Hannah Brontë shares the resistance in rest in mi\$\$-Eupnea, 2020. Alex Kelly and David Pledger organised an Assembly for the Future, which made space for citizens to propose and contest visions of the future, in Claire G. Coleman’s provocation, for example, ‘beyond whiteness’.

When Eduardo Costa, Raul Escari, and Roberto Jacoby noted in 1966 that ‘the public is not in direct contact with cultural activities but is informed of them through the media’,2 they positioned the media as a public space and repositioned all art, circulating as it does through media, as public art. Furthermore, artists have long been strategically situating their work within communication media, greeting audiences in the non-art spaces they already inhabit: in avant-garde, experimental cinema, or think of mail art, Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 1966–67, or Chris Burden’s TV commercials, Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, 1996, and net.art more broadly. In a certain way, the idea of the online as a site for art rather than for just its documentation or publicity, and the fact that galleries, museums, and festivals are figuring out how to present work for networked devices are pretty ho-hum. In other words, reaching audiences is less important than making publics.

A discussion of how the presentation of art might occur on a digital stage rented from Instagram or Zoom ought to acknowledge how the infrastructure of arts organisations has been absorbed into these same platforms, as well as those of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Seen from this perspective, across whole organisations, the persistence of language like ‘public’ and ‘private’ in technical interfaces is used to facilitate access management, to define some activities as internal to the organisation with other activities as ‘content’. That organisations have been pulled between continuity and rupture during the pandemic, between the maintenance of existing hierarchies and the production of new structures, is something often felt acutely at this moment of managing access. What if the institutions themselves were the work? Institutions can’t be toggled public through the flick of a switch, but rather through developing processes, infrastructures, and communities that are empowered to act publicly.

Most frequently, the public is set in antinomy to private, but historically the public is the mediating term between private property and the common(s).3 If digital networks are confused for the public, then it’s partly because these networks entangle both property and sharing. For public art to have any relevance amid digital platforms, then it will be more from making publics than from performing for friends and followers. Making publics isn’t just about selecting a targeted audience or meeting old audiences in new spaces, but about creating or renewing communities, spaces, and protocols collectively, conscious of the pull of algorithm. Making publics online today involves a choreography of withdrawal and engagement, it is a generous and generative act of making and sharing spaces, tools and concepts, such as Assembly for the Future or James Nguyen and Victoria Pham’s RE:SOUNDING, since 2018, which creates a library of Đông Sơn drum sounds and proposes a community of shared use. Making publics is a constructive act of building interfaces to redistribute resources out of the control of institutions that have traditionally operated under the mantle of the public and from digital platforms that would ‘disrupt’ the public into the control of corporate monopolies.

Published

  • “Making Publics.” Let’s Go Outside. MUMA, 2022.

  1. ‘About BLEED’, BLEED, accessed 11 January 2021, https://bleedonline.net/about-bleed/. ↩

  2. Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, and Roberto Jacoby, ‘A Media Art (Manifesto)’, in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, MIT Press pbk. ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), 2. ↩

  3. I remember Jason E. Smith posing this relation in the process of writing the lecture ‘There Is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing’ in 2010 with Matteo Pasquinelli, Caleb Waldorf, and me. ↩