Abstract
This article addresses the question of how artists may recognise art as a public pedagogy whilst staying detached from the role of teacher in the traditional sense. We report on three art practices of citizens engaging in ‘situation art’ to support and illustrate a few theoretical concepts derived from Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy. The examples will be investigated as pedagogies ‘that enact a concern for publicness’, where Biesta argues for pedagogic interventions that make action possible in an arena of plurality and diversity. Inspired by Biesta we will develop the concept of ‘artistic citizenship’, a practising of citizenship in community settings that engages in playful and unknowable-in-advance artistic interventions in everyday life, thereby testing the quality of the public sphere and setting conditions for pedagogies that have the potential to be ‘politically significant’.
Keywords
Introduction
It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect. (Rancière, 2009: 15)
This contribution will report on three practices of situation art, that is to say art produced within particular spatial locations, physically and socially, in order to support and illustrate a few theoretical concepts relating to art as a public pedagogy concerned with the production of public space. We will connect situation art with Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012). This theory involves three ‘modes’: (1) a pedagogy for the public (instruction), (2) a pedagogy of the public (conscientisation), and (3) a pedagogy that opens up a concern for publicness (interruption). Biesta articulates a preference for the third mode as central to setting the ground for democratic participation. The particular position taken by the pedagogue involves troubling the relationship between educator and the individual and, in the practices we will present, the artist and spectator. Therefore, this article explores three art practices and seeks to understand them as forms of public pedagogy in the third mode that may take place in settings of ‘situation art’. In the analysis inspired by Biesta we will develop the concept of ‘artistic citizenship’. This citizenship chooses art as a form of playful creative action, creating beginnings that engage with the public sphere, explore the world, expose the private, position subjects, and raise questions that test new possibilities.
This paper will be organised in the following way. Firstly, we will explore the environment within which this paper is located: that of ‘situation art’ with a concern for the creation of public space and for a particular form of citizenship-as-practice (Lawy and Biesta, 2006). In order to explore what we mean by ‘situation art’ we will explore the Situationist International movement of the 1950s and 1960s in Europe. This movement originally pitched the notion of art as a constructed situation of human interaction (Debord, 1957), and has inspired both of our work and research in many ways. We relate this to the theory of citizenship-as-practice (Lawy and Biesta, 2006) in terms of artists’ organisation of situations that are centrally concerned with the democratic participation (i.e. the citizenship practices) of the audience. We will then situate Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy within the realm of situation art. As we have already outlined, Biesta’s theory consists of three pedagogic ‘modes’. Biesta's third mode is central to questions surrounding the artist as pedagogue and their interactions with local communities. Here, the artist's engagements focus on stimulating the citizenship practices of residents living in these communities – at the point where they are exposed to such artistic interventions.
From this, in order to illustrate Biesta’s theory in more detail we will then investigate forms of art that might be considered an enactment of Biesta’s third mode of public pedagogy – which has a concern for publicness. We will discuss various art practices that Arthur Caris has researched and reported on as an artist and a researcher. The first practice deals with a group of artists whom Caris brought together to explore everyday life in order to find inspiration for their separate practices as artists in different disciplines. However, their expeditions turned out to be an interesting work of art in itself. The second practice deals with further experimentation based on this concept of art exploration in public space. We present this work in order to explain our understanding of the term ‘situation art’ – as a form of art that steps out of the traditional frame and operates in the realm of everyday life. From this discussion we will then explore a third practice that Caris has studied, the art practice of the well-known Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, who works on socially committed art projects. Besides her art she presents a clearly articulated analysis of her practice, referring to philosophers such as Arendt and Bloch. Van Heeswijk is a recognised pioneer in social design and so we consider her to be a good example of contemporary public engagement in visual art.
Within this paper we thus seek to underline the benefit of artistic practices that aim to ‘stage interventions’ that test the quality of the public sphere, whilst exploring what this means for the relationship between artist-pedagogue and citizen, in terms of making themselves and their surroundings public. In our discussion we will argue for Biesta’s preferred third mode of public pedagogy, which is concerned with setting the foundations for new forms of democratic citizenship that might be enacted in situation art practices. Overall this paper stretches meanings around the practice and production of art, whilst at the same time stretching the role and practices of education in non-formal and informal settings, where it has a concern for the political aspects of citizenship and democracy. In our conclusion we will explain our concept of ‘artistic citizenship’ and the role of the artist as an intermediary of situations that are created as works of art.
Situation art, citizenship and the formation of public space
Through the ages the public role and benefit of the arts, for better or for worse, have been well recognised (McCarthy et al., 2004). The practices of art that we are dealing with here involve art created and developed outdoors; Schuermans et al. (2012) articulate that such art occurs not in galleries or museums as traditional ‘works of art’, but in the streets of towns and cities – as projects and practices concerned with public space. Therefore, in the contexts we are dealing with here in relation to art and public space, art becomes a public thing, articulated by Schuermans et al. as ‘public art’ (2012: 675). Conceptually, a work of art comes into existence not only in the mind of the artist but through interactions between people. This understanding moves beyond the stereotypes, formalities and conventions that conceptualise art as a fixed form and process. Instead, in this realm art is considered as an intentional intervention in the design and formation of human relations (Bourriaud, 2002). That is, art is more than the refined composition of aesthetic relations between forms (shapes, sounds, words or colour). In this view, these relations between artist, the environment and the ‘spectator’ are neither inconsequential nor a side effect in the world outside the artefact or performance; they are instead a deliberate and essential – and indispensible – part of the work of art itself.
The concept of the situation as a work of art was first coined by the Situationist International (SI), a modern avant-garde movement established in the 1950s. Guy Debord, the most prominent theorist of the SI, declares: Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it. (Debord, 1957; in Knabb, 2006: 38)
Sadler argues that, ‘In a paper delivered by Guy Debord to artists preparing to unify as Situationist International, the mission to construct situations was proposed as an honorable and revolutionary alternative to the creation of traditional artworks’ (Sadler, 1999: 105). As Debord states, ‘The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible’ (Debord, 1957; in Knabb, 2006: 39). Thus, the artist constructor gathers and accumulates poetic objects and subjects, and the members of the community formed this way do not visit but live this situation. With these situations Debord argued that, ‘…the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors.’ (Debord, 1957; in Knabb, 2006: 40–41).
Practicing situation art the artist is not the typical member of a specific social economic elite crafting (and/or distributing) an artistic product for others to ‘perceive’; being an artist in this mode can also be – and maybe we would argue it is first and foremost – an explorative way of living in the world as an interlocutor. The artist is bound up in raising questions, stirring things up towards developing interventions that expose and spark the possibility for alternatives to emerge as central to citizens’ emergence as political subjects. Artists’ projects are central to political activity as an existential quest. Such a way of life is not a career but an art of (everyday) life that is about becoming artistically active in public.
When we bring together such forms of art with the citizen, we may start to engage with questions around the purpose of the artistic intervention and the form of engagement sought with citizens. Schuermans et al. (2012) discuss such purposes as social interaction, community formation and the intention to put forward questions that expose underlying urban problems. In this vein, Schuermans quotes Pinder, arguing that the intentions of such artistic processes are complicated because ‘…there are risks of simplistic celebration or romanticization’ (Pinder, 2008; in Schuermans, 2012: 676). However, crucially, artistic interventions seek to create public spaces that have the purpose of asking such questions in the hope of developing spaces for citizens to explore and challenge the characteristics and issues rooted in their place. More specifically, such interventions have the intention of bringing the spectator into a direct and co-productive relationship with the artist where neither can know what will happen or emerge through this activity. This is the central aim of public pedagogy in relation to art in public spaces, in terms of the artist-pedagogue’s encouragement of citizens to explore conditions and structures that affect them, towards acting in their place around issues of central concern to them. Given that the central concern of Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy is to set the conditions for political subjectivity, the creative public action that we are focusing on is bound up with democratic participation – and thus with citizenship in terms of how it can be encouraged through artistic interventions that function as public pedagogies.
Public pedagogy is thus responsible for setting the foundations for certain practices of citizenship to emerge, without prescribing what form those actions might take. This does not mean that ‘anything goes’, because Biesta makes the case for events that have at their roots a concern that the interventions set up by the pedagogue have the potential for new and unforeseen forms of political subjectivity – as acts in public – to take place by the participants. This is profoundly concerned with democratic participation, where our definition of democracy is the translation from private to public. It is also about the necessary engagement in collective debates, actions and decision-making that seek to organise the complexities of our lives in public and that ‘test’ the publicness of spaces and places (Biesta, 2012; Biesta and Cowell, 2012) against controlled and private agendas.
In this framework, then, citizenship cannot be a status that is taught in advance of participation but is instead asserted and enacted through confrontation with the unknowable and the unknown. The conceptual framework of Lawy and Biesta (2006) makes a distinction between ‘citizenship-as-achievement’ and ‘citizenship-as-practice’. They argue citizenship-as-achievement is the prevailing discourse in curriculum and policy interventions; a framework has been set up in advance to ‘engineer’ individuals towards what they need to do to become active citizens. These interventions position citizenship as an achievement, towards creating the ‘good citizen’. They express this as individualistic, citizen-as-consumer: ‘It is associated with a particular understanding of what it means to be a citizen and is tied to a developmental and educational trajectory and a commensurate set of rights and responsibilities’ (Lawy and Biesta, 2006: 42).
Citizenship-as-practice, on the other hand, does not presume the induction of individuals into a particular citizenship status but assumes they are active already, concerned then with the actual conditions of their lives (i.e. what they are being exposed to and have to respond to). Following this strand, Lawy and Biesta (2006) provide a stronger ground for understanding citizenship as practiced through its capacity to expose civic issues, and is thus concerned with how educators might set the conditions for such exposure. Citizenship-as-practice also connects to the notions of the public sphere and public space as a particular configuration of individuals, which brings together citizens’ civic agency through activities they engage in within their place. This involves understanding the ways that individuals practice their citizenship through exposure to challenges in their locality.
Public pedagogy and the interplay between artist and audience
As discussed, our theoretical framework for this paper is that of public pedagogy, which we will use to subsequently analyse the various art practices studied. Public pedagogy is a general term for a broad collection of theories that have in common the assertion that education must be committed to democracy and political action as a public process. This relates specifically to education occurring in non-institutional settings such as neighbourhood projects, art collectives and town meetings (Sandlin et al., 2011). Public pedagogy is concerned with creating new interventions at a local level by residents, sparked from the pedagogue’s questioning and tentative experimentations that seek to develop new practices, focusing on unearthing and making visible local issues of concern and interest to residents. Notwithstanding discussions about what constitutes ‘public pedagogy’ (see Sandlin et al. (2009) for a discussion of its various uses), Biesta has developed a framework involving three modes of public pedagogy, each with implications for our emergence as citizens-in-public: (1) a pedagogy for the public (instruction), (2) a pedagogy of the public (conscientisation), and (3) a pedagogy that enacts a concern for publicness. He explicitly states a preference for the third conception (Biesta, 2012). As we will detail below, a pedagogy for the public sees public pedagogy entirely in terms of instruction. A pedagogy by the public positions public pedagogy predominantly in terms of critical reflection (Biesta, 2012; Biesta and Cowell, 2010). Setting the course for citizen education, Biesta argues that we are not dealing with an acquisition of knowledge, skills, competencies or dispositions concerning democracy. Instead he points towards the subjectifying engagement of an ‘exposure’ with the experiment of democracy, central to his third conception.
A pedagogy ‘for’ the public
Biesta’s first formulation of public pedagogy centres on the notion that the agenda of the pedagogue is to engage in forms of instruction in order to draw participants into already-existing issues that the pedagogue has identified. Biesta argues that the pedagogical intervention is ‘outside’, and thus where participants are brought ‘into’ pre-existing public debates and encouraged to learn about particular issues outwith themselves. He exemplifies this mode by stating that the world is seen as a ‘giant school’ where educators engage participants in instruction that involves ‘…telling them what to think, how to act and, perhaps more importantly, what to be’ (Biesta, 2012: 691). Biesta argues that this mode is highly problematic from the perspective that it denies the entry of plurality and difference, both of which are central to democratic participation, through the ways in which the pedagogue’s focus is on instructional methods.
A pedagogy ‘of’ the public
This second formulation focuses on what Biesta argues is based on community work in the vein of Freire, where the empowerment of groups subjected to marginalisation is central to a public pedagogy attempting to foster critical consciousness. The discussion shifts towards ‘learning’; more specifically, this public pedagogy comes from the ‘inside’, with the individual situated outside. Biesta’s argument is that this form attempts to foster learning opportunities provided by these democratic processes and practices (cf. Biesta, 2012). It seeks to encourage learning that shifts individuals’ self-conception as political subjects, where the educator’s main goal is to draw marginalised groups and individuals into political processes. The role of the pedagogue is thus as a facilitator in processes to bring about individuals’ and groups’ politicisation through increasing their critical consciousness. Although it does not set up what needs to be learned in advance, Biesta’s point is that it still attempts at bringing learning into a ‘regime of learning’, where the outcome should be ‘overcoming alienation from the world’ (Biesta, 2012: 692). He argues that it is thus the issue that public pedagogy comes with a specific conception of political agency, where individuals must continue to learn in order to become better political actors. Biesta argues that calling someone a ‘learner’ is a specific intervention in itself, ‘…where the claim is made that the one who is called a learner lacks something, is not yet complete or competent, and therefore needs to engage in further “learning activity”’ (Biesta, 2013: 8). Crucially, his final point is that social and political problems are traced onto becoming a problem for learning, whereupon the individual is then responsible for solving the problem, rather than it being a problem for a group of people collected together (Biesta, 2012: 693).
A pedagogy that enacts a concern for ‘publicness’
Biesta’s preferred third mode has as its central component a form of public pedagogy that is concerned with plurality, specifically our relationships with others. Biesta’s main concern is for pedagogies that make action a possibility, specifically action in an environment where plurality is a central component, ‘…one where public pedagogy appears as an enactment of a concern for “publicness” or “publicity”, that is a concern for the public quality of human togetherness and thus for the possibility of actors and events to become public’ (Biesta, 2012: 693). Here, the act of ‘becoming public’ occurs precisely through the creation of a public sphere that attempts to disrupt the normal order of things – but crucially the pedagogue does not seek to impose any alternatives to this order. Instead of expecting particular forms of learning from citizens and setting the groundwork for what they might become through the process, it instead ‘…keeps open the possibility of a space where freedom can appear’ (Biesta, 2012: 693). The interruptive process set up by the public pedagogue has the purpose of allowing for original and unforeseen forms of political subjectivity, which arise alongside new and unforeseen representations of the context being explored.
Biesta argues that such pedagogies are fundamental because ‘They can function as a test, in other words, of what is possible in that location and in this way they can reveal whether particular spaces are determined, controlled and policed, or are open to a plurality of being and doing.’ (Biesta, 2012: 694). Educationally these interventions are important because it is a form of pedagogy that does not rely on the superior knowledge of the educator in terms of telling citizens how to act. Neither is the educator attempting at facilitating learning. Rather, the pedagogue can only prepare the ground for action but cannot claim to know what will emerge. In this way, connecting with our focus on situation art, the situations that emerge involving both the artist and spectator are bound up in processes where it cannot be planned nor known in advance what will emerge from the pedagogic intervention. In what follows, we will explore how this third conceptualisation might be understood through presenting various forms of situation art practices.
One place where the idea of a pedagogy of interruption is explored is in Biesta’s discussion of Lingis’ Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Lingis, 1994; Biesta 2004) for a further discussion see also Biesta (2009)). Following Lingis, Biesta argues that: ‘the community without community, which exists as the interruption of the rational community, is the most important, and ultimately the only relevant educational community’. (Biesta, 2004: 307) He refers to Lingis to explain that this community comes into presence when the ‘rational community’ is interrupted. In the rational community we speak with a representational voice: it is not important who is talking but what is said (Biesta, 2004: 311). But this rational order is interrupted when we speak with our own voice, and in the situation we need to know who is talking to understand what is said. Biesta explains that The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common exists within the rational community as a possibility to come into presence as soon as one responds to the uniqueness and otherness of the other (Biesta, 2004: 319). Developing the pedagogy of interruption, Biesta (2006) suggests that the educator should therefore neither operate as an instructor nor as a facilitator, but rather as someone who interrupts. These interruptions create dissensus in the form of heterogeneity – they introduce an ‘incommensurable element’ – rather than that they produce disagreement (Biesta, 2006: 29). Crucial to the ‘act’ of interruption, both educationally and politically, is that not just any interruption will do, but that there needs to be a concern for interrupting those political and educational situations that prevent the ‘other community’ from arising (Biesta, 2011). Therefore, in this article we want to consider art to be a mode of human togetherness that interrupts the rational order, creating a community in which freedom might appear and people might speak with their own voice, allowing participants to ‘come into the world’ as subjects and perform what is ‘infinitely improbable’ (Biesta, 2006: 82).
Three practices of situation art
The first two practices relate to two communities of artists and other creative professionals who developed an experimental situation art practice. The first practice concerns The League for the improvement of urban wellbeing, an artist initiative established by Caris to experiment with artistic urban expeditions in the mid-1990s. The second practice concerns the Pavlov medialab, founded by Caris together with Nathalie Beekman. In this lab Caris and Beekman, together with a larger group of people, were studying new media – not as a new technology but as a new social order and therefore a possible new context of artistic practice. The artists in the Pavlov medialab observed a shifting power relation between ‘transmitter and receiver’, ‘talker and listener’, ‘maker and taker’, ‘producer and consumer’. From this perspective new media had socio-political as well as spatio-temporal implications, and therefore it also changed the meaning of all art practices, including the ‘old’ media. In this lab several collaborative and co-creative art projects were initiated, stretching the notion of art from a sole practice of individual genius to a social practice of communal imagination and expression. The third practice concerns the situation art project Freehouse by Jeanne van Heeswijk. Caris studied this project in 2012 and 2013 amongst several other practices of situation art initiatives in the Netherlands and abroad. 1
Practice 1: The League for the improvement of urban wellbeing
Members of The League were young artists from various disciplines such as painting, music, poetry, photography, dance and film. The mission of The League was the search for, and creation of, urban adventure. The first activities were meetings in public to measure and map the ‘psycho-sphere’ as a public space. The locations of such meetings were determined by chance, asking passers-by to call numbers and letters that were treated as coordinates on the map. Once the location was determined they would meet there the next day, travelling on their own. And because the coordinates were not pointing to an exact address it would take a while wandering through the neighbourhood before the team would have gathered together.
Meeting up they would try to surprise each other with their discoveries, and because most of the time there was nothing much interesting going on at first sight they had to be pro-active and talk to a passerby or ring a doorbell. They also had to be creative and resourceful, interpreting observations of common phenomena, suggesting all kinds of possible deeper meanings or spectacular uses for things. The outfit worn by the members of The League in action looked formal and serious: they wore suits, hard hats and nametags with the logo and name of their organisation. They carried pen and paper, cameras or other recording devices. Later on they would also bring chalk to mark things, and gloves and grabbers to pick things up as well as evidence bags to take things home. This remarkable appearance and public participation would draw the attention of people living in the neighbourhood. People often assumed they were government officials or real estate professionals who might have intentions that would interrupt their lives. At a certain moment, often immediately, they would come out and ask who they were and what they were doing; The League would identify themselves: a society of artists exploring the local atmosphere in order to develop plans for creative interventions to improve urban wellbeing. It is no surprise that this would not always be completely understood, and the artists themselves were not quite sure about the meaning of this mission either.
People might critically interview them about their activities, forcing them to reflect on their practice. Sometimes this would lead to tensions, confrontations and occasionally even rejections. But most of the time, once they were being identified as ‘harmless artists’, people would be set at ease. Often residents would tell them about their lives and sometimes invite them into their homes. Through this way of working they became mixed up in many wonderful – and unpredictable – encounters. For instance, they listened to the memoires of a veteran foreign legionnaire, watched a feeding of piranhas, witnessed a healing by faith, and found a love letter in the park. Originally they used this material as a source of inspiration for their personal art practices. But later on they realised that these interventions provided an aesthetic experience that no image, sound, word or gesture could represent. The expeditions became unplanned works of art and their palette and perspective became richer through engagement with the people in the expedition or those they encountered along the way, who contributed and participated through responding to the presence and questioning of the artists to create new ‘situations’.
Practice 2: The Pavlov medialab
The League was the beginning of a series of works of art by Caris and his companions that can only be categorised as ‘situation art’ (Ledesma et al., 2013). The Pavlov medialab would support further development of the work that The League started. Pavlov medialab tried to reclaim and prepare parts of public space that were ‘rediscovered’ in the urban expeditions by The League for more permanent playful use. Lightweight rooftop dwellings were designed and built, together with labyrinths of scaffolding connecting them. On this rooftop landscape, again, artists would situate sound and image to create what was called an ‘inspironment’ in addition to the franchised consumerist city centre down below. Pavlov medialab also invited artists from outside the community to join the neighbourhood investigations. They were asked to leave their findings behind in the public space in the shape of sound and image. This way a trail of audiovisual art was created that could be visited as a kind of outdoor street gallery.
One of the most radical interventions was a project called ‘Mobile’. In preparation for this project numerous households were asked to leave their backdoors and windows open so that Pavlov medialab could send expeditionary groups through their houses on a journey exploring the hidden city. To join an expedition the participants – a collection of visitors, residents and artists – would find a private address on their ticket. Arriving there they would meet up with about twenty other visitors and two guides, whilst everyday life was just proceeding as usual all around them. To communicate between the different groups every attendant received a mobile phone. The Pavlov medialab crew would send text messages telling people about open doors or accessible fences that would give them access to these private domains in that locality. They also would interconnect telephone calls to randomly bring participants together in unexpected conversation. The guides carried radios that received telephone taps broadcast by the local radio station, which the Pavlov medialab crew had also taken over. During five continuous days this web of intersecting realities was spun over the city. For the people who took part in this the city would never be the same again, made and remade a multitude of times through participation by artists and ‘audiences’.
Art in real life
Inspired by the Situationist avant-garde, The League and Pavlov medialab organised and directed urban expeditions and adventures, interventions and happenings, that included the physical and social environment in a spatio-temporal work, which we refer to as ‘situation art’. These works of art were not untouchable exhibited artefacts or distantly staged performances to be distantly ‘viewed’. The art described here emerged in ‘real’ life and it had to be engaged with to be experienced and made visible. According to Guy Debord such a constructed situation should not be limited to an integrated use of artistic means to create an ambiance. As Debord notes: Our conception of a ‘constructed situation’ is not limited to an integrated use of artistic means to create an ambiance, however great the force or spatiotemporal extent of that ambiance might be. A situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time. It is composed of actions contained in a transitory decor. These actions are the product of the decor and of themselves, and they in their turn produce other decors and other actions.… A constructed situation must be collectively prepared and developed. It would seem, however, that, at least during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of ‘director’ role.… This relation between the director and the ‘livers’ of the situation must naturally never become a permanent specialization. (Debord, 1958; in Knabb, 2006: 49–50)
For this argument we prefer to define art as the production of aesthetic relations, noting that these relations can be composed inward, within the frame, but also – as promoted by the Situationists – outward, including the dynamic and multiple relations possible using the social and physical environment in the composition. Inspired by this vision, the practice of The League for the improvement of urban wellbeing and the Pavlov media lab were carried out as joint ventures of desire, generating an atonal chorus of passions and a cacophony of actions. Every now and then there would be confusion, irritation and an occasional conflict, but most of the time there was great enthusiasm and joy. Primarily the goal was to playfully inhabit their environment in order to experience life in a more intensive, participatory, way. For the artists there was no agenda of reform or conversion, nor was there a mission or curriculum; they could not know how, or if, their practices would be taken up by those ‘spectators’ around them.
For many years The League for the improvement of urban wellbeing, the Pavlov media lab and its supporting scene were creating playful public situations of wonder, disturbance, excitement, confusion, intimacy and more. This art was not made to sell, nor to impress, or to build a career. What happened was the formation of a temporal community around a work of art as an event, creating a conversational space in which the qualities of human togetherness and interaction were tested and enacted. However, although the actions and interventions were based upon strong beliefs and opinions about what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or false, they were asserted in public with others as a process of beginnings for new acts and ideas to emerge. For this reason external standards of good taste to live up to, and the ‘right’ way to be a citizen in each space were absent. Here, art involved practices that set the foundations for the emergence of plural representations of space to emerge, without any authority examining the achievements. The focus was on the lived communal experience of public creation instead of an individual endeavour to produce an isolated, framed and signed ‘exclusive’ work of art. A ‘good’ judgment of taste or any other form of competitive distinction would have been completely beside the point. Both producers and participants were, first of all, acting as free citizens who had chosen to become active in their own habitat in order to participate in the human encounters and togetherness they desired for themselves as citizens living in a world of plurality.
According to this desire the organisations involved did not intend to form or join congregations of politics, art or science. From the beginning they felt instinctively that such affiliations would suffocate inspiration, block the creative flow, and that such an agenda would corrupt their hearts and minds. To preserve their integrity they had to approach it as an enactment of intentional ignorance and naiveté. This was a fundamental necessity to create a creative base, a mental space, shared and multiplied whilst at the same time as free as possible from interference by official politics, the market – and the art world as well.
Practice 3: Jeanne van Heeswijk – Contexts for interaction in public space
Since 2010 Caris has been researching the transformative power of situation art in the Netherlands and New York. One of the practices studied was Freehouse, a long-term social intervention project in Rotterdam directed by Jeanne van Heeswijk. In her work as a socially committed artist van Heeswijk has developed a strategy of engagement with a local community by redesigning or redirecting aspects of public life. She scans and monitors communal life to get a picture of local cultural production and seeks opportunities to radicalise it in inspiring ways. She links people – locals as experts and experts in terms of those who work there – gathers them in and around production facilities, helps to make them visible in public, and challenges them to innovate. When van Heeswijk comes to the neighbourhood one can expect public workshops to appear, prominent artists or designers to visit, a public display of products made, and various collaborations between artists and local people to occur. The neighbours will be confronted with dressed up markets, outdoor fashion shows, public meals, parades and exhibitions. During the course of our conversations, she prefers to describe herself as an ‘urban curator’ or ‘compiler’. That’s why I talked before about a practice of permanent curating I am actually performing. You act in the neighbourhood and synthesise that to a compiled shape…. I think in terms of permanent exploration, documentation – what I always say – noticing, creating, debating, propelling, taking snapshots, putting lenses on it, opening discussions, creating movement, densification, in a continuous curiosity, without truth – or better – without exactness.
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Van Heeswijk considers her work to be a visual art practice. In the same conversation she explains: Well, I do consider it a toolkit and my critical faculty. I consider the things I do belong to the visual arts…. It is my frame of reference; I develop my thoughts from there and bring it to the public realm.
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But van Heeswijk clearly crosses the borders of traditional art by moving into everyday urban living – and into the neighbourhood economy. Van Heeswijk argues that her projects also get very close to a Gesamtskunstwerk (a collaborative work of art). This does not fit the dominant profile of the star-artist, or star-designer. Even when collaboration in art is accepted it is still often understood as a collaboration by experts, where ‘expert’ to van Heeswijk is defined as those who live and work in the locality in which she is engaging. ‘People seem to prefer that’, van Heeswijk observes, ‘I prefer my work to be more famous than myself’.
Van Heeswijk’s work is not clearly visible in the usual way. She claims that you need to be informed about the social and cultural context of her interventions to detect and understand them. At the art shows van Heeswijk exhibits all sorts of documentation and material outputs to visualise her work. She also organises expeditions into ‘her’ neighbourhood so that the audience may witness the actual, much larger, work of art that transcends the artefacts and staged performances. This way van Heeswijk creates platforms both in real life in the neighbourhood and in the art world. At these platforms debate, confrontation or other things happen with a certain outcome. These things have a certain shape and become a platform for discussion themselves. So loops are formed with nodes. These nodes become things. Maybe new regulations, or a book, an artefact, performance, a letter, a movie, practically anything, even a good meal. [What is] important is that these densifications have a quality of their own. A regulation must be interesting, the book must be good, a film must be good, and so on. So now you can judge these densifications on their own qualities. And the whole bunch of densification together form the project, not the porridge of processes. It is a constellation of densifications, something real you can talk about. Where I am thinking about now is how to create such constellations of densifications in such a way that you can show them in the context of a museum and create discussion there too.
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Manifesting publicness
As an artist van Heeswijk picked up the task to (re-)design public life as an act of inhabitation of public space. She considers this action to be an aesthetic practice that makes up a fundamental aspect of citizenship because her work focuses on challenging local people to respond and interact with the situations she creates. This aims to generate new events and processes to emerge that relate directly to the wishes, desires and needs of the residents for their neighbourhood. Always with a focus on encouraging action towards continual change, van Heeswijk observes that people are losing power to act out such citizenship in present late modern times. In van Heeswijk’s opinion too many people feel excluded from public life; they consider themselves to be ‘invisible’ at the margins of public attention, and find it hard to picture themselves as being in charge of their own habitat. Thus, van Heeswijk’s art practice focuses on the enhancement and visualisation of citizens’ public positions through public interventions that try to encourage citizens to act in public as central to creating and developing their own local cultural life. As Westen (2003) articulates: She sees herself as a mediator, an intermediary between a situation, a space, a neighbourhood and the people connected to these. Acting, meeting and communicating are key concepts in her method of working. She generates ‘interspaces’, contexts and crossovers within which new relations and connections can be established between groups of people, institutions and conceptual frameworks that are always different. (Westen, 2003)
For van Heeswijk the visual arts are the most suitable for this work. ‘I’m convinced that the image is determined as a means of getting hold of the surroundings and a way of imagining oneself in the environment. To be able to control this image one needs to become visually productive’, she argues. Well I regard the ‘cultural’ or the ‘ability-to-visualize’ to be an extremely important quality that people have lost at the moment. Far too many people have lost the feeling to be connected to the place where they are. They are convinced they’re not in the picture, nor can they picture themselves in charge of the world that surrounds them. To do so you have to inhabit your life world. Inhabitation is a form of annexation, meaning that you’re allowed to design a place. This ownership is lost for many people. Even the very thought of it is lost. But I think this is an important asset of citizenship. One could say that this design is an aesthetical practice, a typical task for the arts.
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Here, in theory, van Heeswijk sets a goal to (re-)connect people with their environment. In practice among the participants there is a more general desire for getting together towards making this togetherness exciting and inspiring. Observing van Heeswijk’s project on the work floor Caris saw lightness, energy, fun, spontaneity, sensitive engagements and actions. Fuelled by this mix of joy, passion and idealism, a fluid course is set out – meandering between opportunities and threats. And in the observations there seemed to be no final destination on the map, no trophy to be captured, no dragon to be slain. Van Heeswijk emphasises: We’re not here to solve things; I think all these final solutions have become a burden for this area. Whether they work or not, at a certain moment they come to a standstill. What we want to do is to develop an attitude that keeps things moving.
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But it is not a movement for movement’s sake. The reflexive pragmatism is submitted to a carefully developed and consistent set of principles and values. Van Heeswijk still definitely rejects the role of scholar. I consider myself an artist in public space, more than a community artist. I have a big problem with that term and absolutely hate this pedagogy – the so-called empowerment of community art. Educating the lower classes with culture? I consider that now far too presumptuous. (Bertina, 2009)
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So van Heeswijk avoids and explicitly rejects the use of terms like ‘emancipation’ or ‘empowerment’; instead she is developing a terminology that refers to a practice of citizenship. In her publications, presentations and lectures she puts forward the importance of the confrontation and repositioning of subjects shaping public space, and the inhabitation of this space by these subjects as a result of this action. And when dealing with the inclusion of people in her art practice her main concern is their subject position, or – more precisely – the release of their subject position in public space, as she puts it: It is, like Hannah Arendt suggests, about giving up one’s own subjectivity, bringing it into discussion…. Thinking about public space, where every form of confrontation and individual presence is rendered harmless, it becomes important to create projects, trajectories, conditions and representations that support the manifestation and offering of one’s own subjectivity.
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The ability of people to publically express themselves is of the greatest importance to van Heeswijk, who proposes that the ability to make one’s own presence visible in public space is a fundamental human right. But she does not educate people in the sense of teaching people how to be present in public space; neither does she intend to activate people. Instead, she begins the process of creating situations – without plans, recipes or criteria for how they might be taken up, continued and altered – in collaboration with local people according to their needs and local context to produce a new environment. She actually supports people who are already culturally productive, and indirectly stimulates those who are not yet active in their neighbourhood. Van Heeswijk believes she can evoke positive social change by ‘radicalising the local’, as she prefers to put it. Van Heeswijk argues that the local should also be a field of development and democracy next to the everyday tensions. Van Heeswijk goes on to note: ‘Such friction is productive. In this friction the project takes shape’. 9
Discussion
Summarising these examples we would like to point out that these works of art are not just placed or positioned ‘in’ context as a passive environment; in all these practices the artists work ‘with’ context, as a central influencing factor in itself, as Verschelden et al. (2012) argue. The spectator may become a participant or user or even a co-creator but they may also choose to remain a passive viewer or even an antagonist. The examples also share the creation of opportunities for becoming public on one hand while assuming an ignorant manner regarding its pedagogic benefits on the other. Relating to a ‘third thing’, both artist and spectator face equally a work of art, a situation, that invites to be explored.
The League did not disseminate a lesson to be learned by the public in the sense of an induction into already-existing ideas and forms. Secondly, they were developing a method of reflection and intervention they considered important to the creation of situation art. The reason why they wanted to share this method was because they needed others to become part of their practice to make it more intense and more adventurous. The League was convinced that it was worthwhile to go out and discover ‘life’ – to bring it into the open, just to see what happens and be surprised. In the end, to themselves as artists there is no bad subject, no bad material, no bad circumstance, as long as there are creative people who produce interesting actions or ideas about it. So their primary concern was in the publicness of peoples’ lives and the build-up of collaborative energy to share ideas about its continued presence and new formations into the future.
A similar conclusion can be made about van Heeswijk’s Freehouse. As far as people were actively trained or helped in the course of the project it was because the enterprise needed the people to be well prepared and focused on the job. Learning was not the main goal of Freehouse. Neither was it the intent of van Heeswijk to make people reflect on certain issues; these issues were determined by the residents who participated and responded to van Heeswijk’s beginnings. She picked up what was already present and responded to it, as a conversation right from the start: the public raised the subject and made it visible, with van Heeswijk pulling the focus on it.
The practices presented in this article are examples of art functioning as an open and egalitarian form of Biesta’s third conception of public pedagogy: a pedagogy that does not put artists into a strained affected role of teacher or judge of what should happen. To differentiate such a modest role we need to differentiate ourselves from ‘learning’, and to put forward an alternative conception of what pedagogy is doing here, in its public mode. In these art practices several public pedagogies occur, especially as those involved as co-creator become part of the work of art itself. The artist presents an intriguing perspective on that ‘third thing’, while inviting the spectator to deliver a similar contribution in return; the form or shape of the response that the artist cannot know, nor seeks to shape, in advance. The artist as well as the spectator responds to the ‘third thing’, a collaboration between them both, emerging in real life. Public pedagogy here is about discovering things; not only finding what is out there, but also revealing the things and issues that were hidden in your neighbourhood spaces, and discovering possibilities that no one could have thought of before. In this reciprocal conversational space personal lives are publicly expressed, reflected and reviewed equally free in a spirit of open susceptibility.
In the practices treated in this article we believe to have found forms of art that can be considered a public pedagogy of the third kind, expressing a concern for the publicness of people as subjects in real life. Art was offered to the people as an opportunity to enact their right to manifest themselves as subjective members of society, to present themselves as citizens. We want to call this enactment ‘artistic citizenship’. It is not difficult to understand these art practices as ongoing experiments, ‘decomposing and recomposing ways of doing, being and saying, researching the world and developing quality of life’ (Rancière, 1995; in Biesta, 2011: 95). We would like to promote this working of art to distinguish it from entertainment, a form of art with no other purpose but to amuse or impress. From such a perspective we understand the production and perception of situation art as an artistic enactment of citizenship, practicing freedom of expression, acknowledging the equality of our private preferences, fascination and taste, and inviting others to get together in a spirit of openness in the collaborative freefall of situation art experiences.
From a situation perspective a work of art does not come into being just before it is transported to the stage or exhibition space, but emerges from the practice in which it is expressed and experienced. According to this view art is always ‘situational’, but situation art practitioners designedly prepare these social relations while other artists consider these relations not to be part of their artistic concern and even try to escape this responsibility. Traditional white exhibition spaces or dark theatres seem to be designed to eliminate interference from the audience and the outside world, presenting art as a monologue of genius that should not be interrupted. Situation art not only recognises and appreciates the relation with the outside world but also wants to be part of this outside world. Bourriaud cites Godard claiming that ‘it takes two to make an image’ and explains that, with this, Godard was furthering the notion of Duchamp that ‘it’s the beholder who makes pictures’, ‘postulating dialogue as the actual origin of the image-making process’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 11). Next, Bourriaud observes that: Today, this history seems to have taken a new turn. After the era of relations between Humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations. (Bourriaud, 2002: 12)
In addition to this observation we would like to suggest the consideration that after a long period of extensive experiment and explorations in modern art of substantial elements like form, colour, media, techniques and subjects, new artistic developments could very well come forth out of experiment with, and exploration of, relational aspects of art that are rooted in daily life. This approach does not rule out traditional media or techniques but it does challenge the hierarchies hidden in the architecture, protocol and organisation of the formal art world as well as its relations with society.
As a public pedagogy this situation art is an enactment of the very specific ‘concern for the publicness’, positioning itself on the other end of the spectrum of involvement opposite to the exclusively framed, distantly staged and placed artefacts and performances. The situational work of art is taken out of quarantine and intentionally merged into the world and its everyday life either in harmony or antagony. The conversational space that is opened in situation art is arranged to fit a ‘many to many’ omnidirectional nexus of dialogues and perspectives. Such a setting brings about spontaneous forms of informal practices by pulling the focus not on the star-artist, nor on the learner-spectator, but on the ‘third thing’, the event between the artist-pedagogue and resident. Situation art that seeks to become a democratic public pedagogic intervention should a) purposely include the social and physical environment into the composition of the work of art; b) renounce the artist’s ownership and authority of the interpretation of meaning as well as judgement of taste; c) offer the opportunity for the spectator to take over the role of director of the situation; and d) promote freedom, equality and brotherhood among all people involved in the situation.
We want to conclude by arguing that all art is not just relational but also situational. Besides the isolated artefact or performance and the relation established between artist and spectator, the social and physical setting also determine the perception, reception and shape of a work of art. Only if the artist is aware of the setting and purposely composes this as a situation – that is taken up by residents in the sense of being responded to in a variety of ways – can we speak of ‘situation art’. Otherwise we should speak of traditional or relational art with a situational effect. Of course, it is up to the artist to decide whether the situation is taken care of or not. If so this care may focus on the aesthetic of the situation, but the artist must also take responsibility for what happens next, in terms of working with fellow citizens in a bond of ‘artistic citizenship’. Our personal experience with this mode of togetherness is one of unique and invaluable joy and satisfaction. As Schuermans et al. argue: ‘Public pedagogy emphasizes how educators (e.g. artists) cannot merely impose meaning or singular answers upon their educational subjects. Instead, public pedagogy through art is about creating “transitional spaces” where individuals are challenged to face the ambivalences that result from encounters with diversity’ (Schuermans et al., 2012: 677).
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.