Art Talk at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
September 29, 1996
Delivered by Marita Sturken, Assistant Professor, Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California



Art and the Public Sphere: Public Art
in the Media Culture of the 1990s


I would like to begin by talking about the larger context of recent public art in which I feel it important to situate this work Friendly Fire. I think that we can look at Friendly Fire as emblematic of a shift in the realm of public art in the 1990s that has not only been necessitated by changing political climates but also which is ironically fitting of this time. In order to do this, I would like to reflect on the public art that was produced in the 1980s.

The 1980s: A Vibrant Arena of Public Art

In the United States in the 1980s, there was an unprecedented amount of public debate about public art and its social and cultural function. At the same time, there was a surge of interest in art criticism in what was perceived as the new, vital, and controversial role of public art. Numerous books were published which lauded the emergence of a vibrant arena of public art that was designed to confront viewers, shape public debate, and redefine notions of art. In the 1980s, public art that had been funded consistently since the 1960s by the National Endowment for the Arts, and through cultural programs in New York and Los Angeles, among other places, broke out of conventional forms into guerrilla theater, activist art, protest actions, billboards, and other forms of public intervention. At the same time, several highly visible government funded art projects came under attack and prompted a debate in the general public about the role of public art, the responsibility of artists to the communities in which their art is placed, and the question of tax funding of the arts.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

For instance, in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is now the most popular and visited site on the Washington Mall, came under attack from some angry veterans and conservatives who felt its design signified the shame this country felt for a military defeat. Art critic Tom Wolfe called the memorial design "A tribute to Jane Fonda" and art-critic-for-a-day Phyllis Schlafly joined then-unknown Ross Perot and others in condemning it as a "black gash of shame." Though the memorial was funded not by the government but by private citizens, its construction was delayed until a compromise figurative statue was built near it on the mall to mollify the opposition. Ironically, the controversy, which was about the larger question of how the nation remembers a divisive war, sparked a public discussion on the role of modernism in relationship to figurative art; hardly a small feat.

Tilted Arc

In the 1980s, another now-notorious public work also prompted an intense public debate. Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, an oppressive, leaning slab of Cor-Ten steel that bisected the equally inhospitable Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, was built in 1981 and dismantled in March 1989 after several years of intense debate, when the workers in the Federal Building petitioned to have it removed. In the media, Tilted Arc came to symbolize the alienating effect of modern sculpture on the viewing public and a questioning by the public of the mechanisms by which tax-funded public sculpture is imposed upon them.

Art and Activism

Yet, the 1980s was also the era in which public art as guerrilla art flourished, reflecting back to the antiwar art of the 1960s. AIDS activism filled the streets with Silence Equals Death posters, catchy slogans and graphics, ubiquitous stickers and signs. Suzanne Lacey organized large groups of people in collective performances in La Jolla and Minneapolis, Krystof Wodiusko built the Homeless Vehicle Project as a prototype for individual homeless sheltering, and several of the artists who produced Friendly Fire shook things up in San Diego with a billboard project, Welcome to America's Finest Tourist Plantaion, that exposed hypocrisy in a city in which immmigrant-bashing goes hand in hand with a tourist economy that survives on the labor of illegal immigrants.

Culture Wars

Much of this work pushed at the boundaries of both art and public debate, and forced into a larger public arena questions of art and its social purpose. However, it also dovetailed with the desire on the part of the conservative and religious right to use art as a symbolic tool in an ideological battle over public funding, family values, and the role of government. Controversial works of public art became part of the culture wars which have succeeded in turning the National Endowment for the Arts into a largely defunded, politically ineffectual institution, with neither the moral high ground or the funds to salvage itself.

The 1990s: The Phantom Public

Now, at the risk of making too much of the convenient rhetoric of assigning identities to decades, I would like to situate contemporary art in the 1990s against this background of the 1980s. Art forced its way into the public sphere of the 1980s. Where does it find itself in the 1990s? In many ways, the storefront and sweat shop of Friendly Fire responds to that question and to some of the central questions raised by public art:
What is the role of art?
How can it affect people's daily lives as they encounter it in public space?
How should art speak to people outside of the museum/gallery?
Who do artists make their art for?
What constitutes a public and what constitutes public space?
How do we respond to the everpresent crisis of the limited audience for art and art institutions?
Is there a consensus about symbolic public language?
Can we think of public art as making a statement about the democratic process?
I would like to look at some of these questions by talking about the concept of the public sphere.
Where in our culture does public debate happen and through what means?
What role does and should art play in this public discourse?

The concept of the public sphere has been debated throughout much of the 20th century, in Germany with Jurgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge, and in the United States with Walter Lippmann, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt and Jean Elshtain, and others. Lippman wrote in 1925 of the "phantom public," by which he meant that people simply do not have time to do the work of becoming informed citizens (a concept that still resonates with us today--especially with California public referendems). In the 1960s, Jurgen Habermas wrote of a public sphere acquired by the liberal European bourgeoisie of the 19th century and then lost to the world of consumerism, commodity culture, and the mass media. As Bruce Robbins writes,

"the list of writers that announce the decline, degradation, crisis or extinction of the public is long and steadily expanding. Publicness, we are told again and again and again, is a quality that we once had but have now lost and that we must somehow retrieve."

The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.viii.

Much debate has ensued in the 1980s and 1990s of the potential to speak of counterpublics, multiple publics, and alternative publics in order to describe the ways in which public debate has evolved in our culture.

In what social realms, we might ask, do we actually speak to and as a public?
Where does public debate take place, where is it promoted, how is it defined and how is it suppressed?
In what ways do we need to rethink the question of what a public sphere is and should be?

This question dovetails in the 1990s, with the defunding of government programs for art, with questions about the role and funding of public art.

How does one make art in the public arena, and what is that arena?
How should art speak to a public and through what means?

Contemporary Public Debate: Orchestrated Political Conventions

Friendly Fire attempts to address these issues by intervening into the question of the public sphere and its relationship to the world of commodity culture. In so doing, this work takes as its primary example of contemporary public debate, the event of a national political party convention.

To create Friendly Fire, these artists (Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Scott Kessler, Louis Hock, Cheryl Lindley) worked collaboratively and collectively to intervene as participants in the context of the Republican National Convention in San Diego in August 1996. Their project consisted of a mass mailing of a slick and provocative flyer (with a fake bullet) that was mailed to the 3,800 delegates attending the convention; a factory/sweatshop/showroom in San Diego, adjacent to the convention, where they manufactured, displayed and sold mock bulletproof vests with enigmatic and political messages; and finally, this exhibit of vests, slogans, mannequins, and images in the MOCA gallery.

Real World Postmodernism

First, I think it important for us to consider the world of the political convention, and the way in which this art work/intervention addresses the creature it has become. Now, everyone knows that political conventions, which used to be the events at which political parties debated their positions, aired their differences and fought through their ideologies, have become highly orchestrated events that exists primarily as infomercials, presenting a smoothed-over seamless and homogenous image via television and the media to the viewing public at large. (It's worth noting that the viewing public essentially voted with its remote control this year, the ratings were appallingly low for both conventions.) Hence, those of us who did watch and took interest were told in endless media commentary that what the media was showing was a highly orchestrated four-day photo opportunity.

Now, this stunning self-referentiality is a primary aspect of postmodernism, and highly revealing of the public sphere in which we participate. The topic discussed was not the convention so much as a general recognition of the artifice of the convention. What makes it postmodern is that the media and the viewing public collectively remarked upon and discussed not the issues but the format, structure, and commercialism of it all, though this discussion ultimately had no effect on that artifice. The convention, it was agreed, has become a purely commercial event, with no spontaneity and no visible debate, simply prepackaged symbolism, slogans, and jingoism. This analysis was simultaneously delivered to us by the very media who, instead of intervening into the structure of the event, simply broadcast it wholesale.

The "Freedom" of the Marketplace

The public sphere represented by the political convention is thus not an arena of political debate and discussion, but an arena in which commercialism marks what is spoken and heard. Because everything is orchestrated for the camera, political signs and buttons take precedence over serious debate. The relam of the visual reigns. It is this world into which the artists of Friendly Fire intervened, and they chose to do so, astutely I believe, by speaking the language of the convention itself. You do not intervene through the traditional models of holding protests in the street, rather you sell your wares to the convention public and use commerce as the means to speak.

For artists, such as the artists represented here by Friendly Fire, the public sphere is defined by and within the world of commerce. We can no longer attempt to idealistically construct the idea of a public sphere which is outside of the world of commerce, commodities, and consumer culture, indeed this is our public arena. What then does it mean to see that world as public space?

Consumer culture is usually looked upon as having a tainting and contaminating effect on art. Yet, it is evidence of the complexity of cultural arenas in the late twentieth century that cultural meaning and public discourse is often produced through commodities. This fact was used by marxist theorists such as Theodor Adorno to define the malaise of contemporary culture--the "hollowed out" objects of commodity culture that could be imbued with any meaning. Adorno, among others, defined the emergence of commodity culture as a kind of cultural forgetting.

However, from the perspective of the 1990s, the dismissal of commodity culture as a source of cultural meaning no longer seems a viable option. We live in a culture in which commodification and marketing tactics are so pervasive, in which the boundaries of art and commodity are so easily traversed, that it no longer makes sense, if it ever did, to dismiss commodities as empty artifacts. This is particularly evident in the context of the AIDS epidemic, in which the marketing of AIDS in red ribbons, T-shirts, books, buttons, posters, and coffee mugs, among other objects, is the means through which nonprofit AIDS service organizations raise the money to provide support for people with AIDS. That these commodities can reduce AIDS to a slogan or a package is inevitable, but they are also part of a broader context of AIDS education and its politics of representation.

Hence, Friendly Fire uses the world of commercialism and consumer culture to intervene in the public sphere of the 1990s. It is selling its message, precisely because in so doing it points us to the fact that we live in a world in which messages of political content are usually bought and sold, in which ideas are treated as and exchanged as commodities. Mail order is a primary element of public discourse. Shopping malls form our primary public spaces. The idea that there exists separate worlds of the private and public, while always an illusion, is now painfully exposed. Friendly Fire thus gained an authenticity and a right to exist within the world of the convention precisely because it conformed at one crucial level to the comingling of commerce and the public sphere: it operated as a business.

People who were concerned about the mailings (with their fake bullets) and the project's intent (people like the FBI and the Secret Service) called the artists with one specific question: "Are you a legitimate business?" The answer yes was all they needed to hear. Once the business aspect of the project was established, as far as these regulatory agencies were concerned, the project could become a part of the discourse of the convention, a public sphere not of debates and discussion but of products bought and sold, images constructed, produced and packaged.

Friendly Fire Vests: Art for the Millennium

The vests of Friendly Fire ask us to consider the competing discourses of safety, protection, paranoia and survival. The language of the contemporary American public sphere is, according to this work of art, the rhetoric of selling survival in a world in which people (regardless of their political persuasion) feel that their identities, security, and way of life is under fire. Friendly Fire borrows the paranoid rhetoric of the militarized and religious right to talk about the marginalized cultures which it places under seige--women, people of color, gays and lesbians, children. It suggests that we are all symbolically wearing bulletproof vests throughout our lives.

In addition, the vests operate as art commodities both in the storefront of Friendly Fire, through the mail order catalogue and in the museum store of MOCA. They thus remind us that the world of art has always functioned in tandem with the world of commerce, and that in the increasingly complex world of the art market, art patronage, and the public funding of the arts, the contemporary art museum exends its reach into the public not only through the mounting of exhibitions and the funding of education programs, but also through the merchandise of the museum store. Indeed, several theorists have suggested that ultimately the museum of the 21st century will be a museum store and nothing else.

Culture for the Savvy "Masses"

Finally, and importantly, the fact that these vests, these works of art, are sold to the public gives them a life beyond the gallery, the convention, and the museum. The reproducibility of art allows for everyday people to own copies of well-known originals as posters and postcards, and the museum store functions as the means through which we can acquire works of art for our own living and working environments. In addition, much of our participation in popular culture is about our role as consumers--to purchase, change, reinvent the products before us, be they baseball caps, feature films, or designer clothing. Today's consumers are not the early model envisioned with alarm by mass media theorists, the passive couch potatoes and gullible viewers. Rather, people today are media and consumer savvy, and they often change the meaning of the cultural products that they acquire. The selling of art as clothing in this exhibition means that it will have a life long after the show of Friendly Fire is gone. The "conversation piece" that each vest is thus will extend outward. It is also a means by which the artists allow us, the consumers, to make new meaning of their work if we so choose.

©Marita Sturken, 1996