Has the public image replaced a missing public space? Too many artists
rest content with the projection of distanced imagery into an
environment of public images governed by the sole principle of visual
shock. Serge Daney proposed a much broader and more radical distinction
between the discrete, specific image and the undifferentiated flux of
the visual, functioning as a loop.
The problem goes even further: today, public space itself becomes an
image. In the context of economic competition between cities (on a
national, regional, and global scale) public space is hypostatized for
use as a promotional pitch. The result is to caricature the effects of
exclusion from the social norm. The citizen--or the unfortunate person
without such entitlement--must struggle to be part of the picture, or
patch together some kind of ethnic identity to make up for the lack of
social integration. This construction of the pseudo-public urban image
is particularly apparent in the field of architecture, sometimes for the
better, more often for the worst. As Philippe Genestier has recently
recalled, the aestheticization of urban public space cannot provide a
solution to the ills of contemporary society. "This aestheticization,
which is essentially expressed today in terms of images, as for any
other product, is based on the short term... Where the advertising
slogan and the 'shock' image are ephemeral by nature, modifications of
the city are durable: they are inscribed in the long, banal
temporalities of everyday experience." The idea of the "urban project,"
which has largely replaced the model of the "city development plan,"
accords too much credit to the benefits of spatial normalization.
Nonetheless, one cannot give up the notion of "publicity"
(Offentlichkeit) and all its corollaries without negating the democratic
ideal. Whatever one's reserves and legitimate suspicions toward a
"publicity" conditioned by the norms of the media industry (where the
performance of the transmission networks overwhelms interpretation and
debate), the great risk in the evaluation of contemporary cultural
relations is the temptation of a normalizing mediaphobia. A new
Manicheanism now opposes the truth of artistic experience to the lies of
the media. This dubious position recently produced its own caricature
in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique: John Berger exalting the
painting of Barcelo as a model of resistance, when in reality all one
can find in this artist's work is a vulgar rehash of yesterday's
colonialist cliches. A "committed" intellectual opposes the imperialism
of the media with the exotic seductions of a primitivism served up in a
familiar modernist sauce.
This last is just one more reason to work toward the reactualization of
the critical exigency that inheres to the ideal of public space. It is
not enough to withdraw into the fortress of a (bourgeois) subjectivity
which in reality is open to the changing winds. Such a modernism has
long been complicit in everything it claims to denounce. At the same
time, the overcoming of bourgeois subjectivity--whose ideal figure has
been described by Habermas--cannot be accomplished automatically,
through an impersonal play of procedures highlighted with the label of
"critical art." As important as it is, the public image in all its
incarnations is not the ideal condensation of a new relation between art
as the privileged experience of subjectivity and culture as a system of
normative procedures. What remains to be explored is the complexity of
contemporary procedures of subjectification, in the image and elsewhere.
Jean-Francois Chevrier
Catherine David
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