Art and the Public Sphere

Variously understood, the theme of art and the public sphere has attracted a great deal of interest over the past decade. Ideas about the relationship have had an impact on art in practice as well as in theory, and the topic has been worked hard in the sphere of ideology. Today's approaches require new critical parameters, and it is from the current practice of art, in which new examples of conscious and sometimes radical reactions to public structures and systems are continually being produced, that these must come. From our present vantage point, even against the background of some significant projects and initiatives of the seventies (and gladly ignoring the merely ideological and utopian ones) we may feel that there are not a few questions that need to be asked again.

In recent years the meaning of "public", as it relates to spaces and physical structures, has been permanently enlarged and modified. Meanwhile, detailed political, sociological and socio-theoretical analyses of the functioning of individual public systems, as well as investigations of the complex mutual interaction of systems based on totally different semiologies, have not merely led to revealing results, but have also been helping to determine the strategies of art. The information age and the media society have brought about drastic changes in the essential characteristics and external forms of the public sphere. In a parallel development, an ever clearer understanding by artists of the nature and functioning of various parts of public systems has led to a new approach to the public aspect of art. This is no longer something confined to dedicated architectural locations in the urban framework, sending out special signals in spaces that are already aesthetically overcrowded. The traditional models of the relationship of art and the public sphere have undergone a protracted and enduring revision, not least because artists are no longer worried by their proximity to "the practical conduct of real life" with all its constituent features and rules, but freely involve themselves in the multiplicity of public systems and develop configurations that relate to patterns of practical activity in the everyday world.

The Public Image

Photographic images play a vital part in the public sphere. Created daily, by the million, they serve a multiplicity of purposes. They record states of affairs, for example, about which they convey information, and provide representations of the constituent structures of current systems. In performing these functions they usually retain their traditional symbolic or illusionist power, while conceived and created on the understanding that they are to be instantly consumed. Even before the World Wide Web, with its immense data-files, came into being, the images which communications strategists used as instruments of power surpassed the privately produced article in technical perfection and in their nicely calculated presentation.
In a public space defined by precise visual codes a constantly self-renewing archive of images, vast despite the impermanence of the items, is under construction, its aim to provide a record of the production of public images. Contents range from the products of the electronic and print media, by way of CD covers, flyers and advertising hoardings, to daily direct mail items.

It is an archive capable of meeting the requirements of globalization with its demand for multinational components, and yet is obliged to have a habitation in local space, on the periphery, in places which have always been the real centres of the machinery of information and communication.

How, and with what consequences, can art photography produce a "public image"? - one which is not merely able to hold its own in the media-dominated world, but is able to go beyond this, providing information about the different public systems and thus making the question of their access the central concern of an art of the public sphere?

Twenty-five international artists have accepted the challenge of Fototriennale to work out visual representations of those systems which together constitute the public sphere. These represen-tations, to which the title of this year's event, publi©domain, refers, serve as a paradigm for spaces in which and for which images are created.

Think Tank

With its dual commitment to global communication on the one hand and local ties ("home pages") on the other, the Internet has evolved an order which parallels that of the real world, and is one of the most compact public systems of communication now in existence. By way of building into the unfolding project some relevant aspects of the public sphere, the artists (who will be independently nominated to take part ) will not work "collectively" on the exhibition until it actually opens, but will be invited, along with a number of theorists, to take part during the initial phase in a discussion about the various ways in which things may be public. Their contributions will be posted on the home page of publi©domain, where they can be publicly followed and commented on.

Exhibition

Complementing the discussion of the concept of "public" as applied to photographic images there will be concrete examples of some of the forms which public involvement with images may take, as well as some of the ways in which images are publicly presented and represented. A selection of the relevant body of graphic data will be available on the home page of the Triennale, while a plotter at the exhibition site will turn out large-format print-outs of the complete set, comprising 3 - 5 images per participant. One picture per artist will also be reproduced as a poster (238 x 504 cm), serving both as a specimen of the artist's work and an advertisement for the exhibition. In the public exhibition space there will be a direct confrontation between pictures specially produced for the Triennale and some examples of those countless photographs that can be obtained anywhere, are in everyday use, and are thus truly public images.

The power of the image as such

The fact that photographs are translated into electronic data, existing on the internet in a state of virtual presence and materialising locally when called up on screen, demonstrates that the photograph has become a graphics file, a visual information carrier, for which no particular status (e.g. as an art photograph) is being claimed by means of any special or individual mode of presentation.

Like the computer screen, or the typical commercial print product, publi©domain focusses exclusively on the power of the image as such. Unlike so many of the "actions" of the eighties and early nineties, publi©domain ignores any mise-en-scene external to the image carrier; Thus the uniform presentation of images, without frames, in all the places mentioned, is an aspect of the general theme. Meanwhile the original photograph disappears into the mass of data stored in the archive, from which alone it can be retrieved.

This project is not about the representation of isolated subjective states. It points, rather, towards a dialogue between the individual consciousness and the body of society, and to the way this dialogue is currently embodied in material forms, in ideas, and in actions.

Werner Fenz / Ruth Maurer