Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

Author(s): Rosalyn Deutsche

Source: Social Text , 1992, No. 33 (1992), pp. 34-53
Published by: Duke University Press

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Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

Rosalyn Deutsche

I have said that the survival and extension of the public space is a political
question. I mean by that that it is the question that lies at the heart of
democracy.
Claude Lefort, "Human Rights and the Welfare State"

Judging by the number of references to public space in contemporary aesthetic

discourse, the art world is "taking democracy seriously." Allusions to public
space have multiplied over the last decade along with a highly publicized
growth in public art commissions, and even the most ingenuous accounts of
public art agree: public space is inextricably linked to democratic ideals.
When, for instance, arts administrators and city officials formulate criteria for
placing "art in public places," they routinely employ a vocabulary that
invokes, albeit loosely, the tenets of both direct and representative democracy:
Are the artworks for "the people?" Do they encourage "participation?" Do
they serve their "constituencies?" Public art terminology frequently promises a
commitment not only to democracy as a form of government but to a general
democratic spirit of equality as well: Do the works relinquish "elitism?" Are
they "accessible?"
When it comes to public art, neoconservative critics, no strangers to elitism
in artistic matters, are also out there with the people. Normally suspicious of
democratic "excess"-activism, demands for political participation, challenges
to governmental and moral authority-which, they believe, makes society
ungovernable and endangers democratic rule by elites, neoconservatives
nonetheless attack what they call the public artist's "arrogance" and "egoism"
in the name of "access"-the people's access to public space.'
Opinions on the most famous recent controversy over public sculpture-the
removal of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc from New York's Federal Plaza-also

centered, at least for opponents of the work, on the issue of access. "This
day for the people to rejoice," declared William Diamond of the federal gov
ernment's Art-in-Architecture Program on the day Tilted Arc was torn do
"because now the plaza returns rightfully to the people."2 Supporters of th
sculpture, however, testifying at the hearing convened to decide Tilted Ar
fate, defended the work in the name of democracy, upholding the artist's r

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 Rosalyn Deutsche 35

to free expression or po
processes.3 Others, relu
conflicts between arti
means of "community i
other procedures that "
despite a preoccupatio
shape public art debates
space, let alone of dem
somehow intertwined.

Yet no topic is more urgent today than democracy, which can be taken seri-
ously in more ways than one.4 The emergence of this topic in the art world,
whether in a nascent state or in more sophisticated efforts to formulate the
terms of democratic aesthetic practices, corresponds to an extensive eruption
and diffusion of struggles over the meaning of democracy, in political theories,
social movements, and cultural practices. The question of democracy has, of
course, been raised internationally by decisive challenges to African regimes
of racial oppression, Latin American dictatorships, and Soviet-style state
socialism. Widely touted as a "triumph for democracy," these events have, to
be sure, fostered the use of "democracy" as a political catchword, but they
have simultaneously cast doubt on this rhetoric, posing the question of demo-
cracy as, precisely, a question. For some leftists, uncertainty springs from the
discredit brought upon totalitarian regimes by democratic protests and from
the failure of proposals for "concrete democracy" to appreciate fully the sig-
nificance of ideas about human rights. Clearly, however, rejection of socialist
bloc orthodoxy is no reason to remain content with "actually existing demo-
cracy."5 Needless to say, powerful voices in the United States seek to convert
"freedom" and "equality" into slogans under which the liberal democracies of
advanced capitalist countries are held up as exemplary social systems, the sole
political model for societies emerging from dictatorships or actually existing
socialism. But the current escalation of economic inequality to crisis propor-
tions in Western democracies, coupled with alarming curtailments of constitu-
tionally guaranteed rights-free speech, equal employment opportunity for
minorities and women, choice to terminate pregnancy-attests to the dangers
of adopting such an attitude or of localizing democracy within the sphere of
government at all. In addition, new social movements that not only defend
established civil rights but also declare new rights based on differentiated and
contingent needs-domestic partnership rights, privacy rights for the home-
less-diverge from liberal notions of abstract, universal liberties. And, simul-
taneously, leftist political theories such as those of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal
Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Nancy, emerging out of
confrontations with totalitarianism, propose that democracy's hallmark is the
disappearance of certainty about the meaning of "the social." Democracy then

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36 Art and Public Space.: Questions of Democracy

has become a concept which, filled with uncertainties, is

ing the dominant language of democracy surrounding us.
erate the question at the heart of democracy and fail to t
a social practice challenging the omnipotence of power t
of specific rights, discourses of democracy can also be su
to compel acquiescence in new forms of subordination.
Stuart Hall has described a mobilization of this kind an
"authoritarian populism." Hall coined the phrase to encap
tory features of Thatcherist Britain, a historical conjunc
which elements of democratic-populist and conservative
bined to sanction, indeed to pioneer, shifts toward autho
articulation of democracy toward the right, in which co
popular consent to the coercive pole of state power, depe
contradictions between the people and the power bloc, an
the basis of popular-democratic, as distinguished from p
Hall describes, for instance, how Thatcherism placed itse
people" by, first, collapsing a series of individual concep
tism, collectivism-that are felt (for good reason) to b
counterposing to them a constellation of terms-personal
individualism-with which Thatcherism, though operat
apparatus and moving toward a coercive form of democr
less identified itself. A shift from above, Hall says, is "h
ulist groundswell below."7
Seemingly championed by all, democracy is a com
idea-really a multiplicity of ideas-that belongs intr
political perspective or group. Rather, the language o
public space of debate-is open to different, even an
occurs in different contexts. As I have suggested, we fin
discourse about public art where, in a manner akin to Ha
ulism, democracy has been largely articulated in a conser
if, as so many accounts of public art contend, public spa
what future for democracy does the following definition
foretell?

Public Places: publicly accessible areas of private developments

which are ... open and freely accessible to the public for 12 or
more hours daily; or publicly accessible areas which fall under City
jurisdiction.8

Cited from a city report drafted in 1990 to found a "Public Art Program" in
Vancouver, British Columbia, this description typifies the widely accepted
concept of public space circulated today in countless aesthetic and municipal
documents, most often in the context of urban redevelopment schemes. The

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Rosalyn Deutsche 37

report's allusions to see

lic space" and "the pu
within precise physic
objectifying description
selves, this passage di
Consequently, it foste
self-evidently, "public."
Given the nature of co
public sites they develo
redevelopment program
nisms, transforming ci
They massively privatiz
bers of city residents,
making procedures, wit
nel them into subsidi
segregated cities, and,
amenities for luxury d
Within this process, th
works, architectural s
ment democratic legitim
versality, openness, inc
doubly burdened as a fi
Indeed, literature abou
while accepting withou
vate property and state
rights of property as
public spaces in the for
through design, and fo
lems of public space of
connotations of the ter
by giving "the people,"
The people, for instanc
religious notions of goo
nature. As political iss
authoritarian populism
"public decency" whic
imperatives of surveilla
Take a recent New Yor
unitary representations
to Put a Padlock on a Pu
terms as "community"
described a small, com

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38 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

Park-and a group of neighborhood residents who had

park at night. The City Parks Department, lacking the re
park itself, welcomed "public" help in achieving its aim:
less people from the park. Support for the self-evident r
issues from the assumption that urban spaces possess
from historical and social contingencies as well as from t
tion of city space. But, as I have argued elsewhere, the pr
less in public places today represents the most acute sym
ual and uneven social relations-not the essential, unitary needs-that
transformed New York City during the most recent episode of its redevelop-
ment in the 1980s." At that time, housing and services for huge numbers of
residents no longer needed in the city economy were destroyed as, through
gentrification-including the gentrification of parks-space was allocated to
profit-maximizing development that provided the physical conditions to meet
the needs of a new international economy. Yet in a negation of even the sem-
blance of debate over the very issue it is purportedly addressing-a contest
over the meaning of public parks-the New York Times column confidently
announced that "the people who hold the keys are determined to keep a park a
park." And a housed resident of the area declared: "There is no reason for any-
one to be here after dark." At these moments, when the meaning of "public,"
"use," and "public use" are removed to a realm of objectivity located outside
public debate altogether, the homeless are not only evicted from a park.
Stripped of what Hannah Arendt called "the right to have rights," they are
denied access to the definition of the public, an eviction which, we might say,
closes down public space.
Is it possible to speak with assurance of a public space where social groups,
even when physically present, are systematically denied a voice? Does anyone
"hold the key" to a public space? What does it mean to relegate groups to a
sphere outside the public, to bar admittance to the discursive construction of
the public, and, in this way, prohibit participation in the space of public com-
munication? Failure to recognize the homeless as part of the urban public;
disregard of the fact that new public spaces and homelessness are both prod-
ucts of redevelopment; the refusal to raise questions about exclusions while
invoking the concept of an inclusionary public space: these acts ratify the rela-
tions of domination that close the borders of public places no matter how much
these areas are touted as "open and freely accessible to the public for 12 or
more hours daily." Once an essential basis of coherence is attributed to public
space-whether that foundation resides in the supposed possession by the pub-
lic of objective moral values or in the fact of simply living, housed, in the
immediate vicinity--that space is converted, and not in an economic sense
alone, into private property. To the extent, that is, that the unity of public space
depends on repressing-on establishing as external to "the public"-the dif-

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 Rosalyn Deutsche 39

ferences and conflicts a

space becomes an approp
limit of, regulatory pow
Increasingly, comment
lic spaces are, indeed, c
same time, denying the
instance, applauding th
analysts frequently ign
unavoidable, is the cla
describing the decision
space from "undesirab
waged between, on the
in this case, Friends of Jackson Park-and, on the other hand, its enemies-
homeless people. Seeming to acknowledge public space as conflictual yet dis-
avowing the social conflicts that produce space, he portrays the homeless as
bringers of conflict and thus shores up, by means of an appeal to objective
meanings outside public debate, a vision of an essentially coherent space that
must be reclaimed.

Recently, artists and critics eager to counteract the power exercised through
neutralizing ideas of the public have sought to reappropriate the concept by
defining public space as a realm of political debate and public art as work that
helps create such a space. For this purpose, they have sometimes had recourse
to the category of "the public sphere," a term which in its general sense desig-
nates either a set of institutions through which the state is held accountable to
citizens or a space-though not necessarily a physical or empirically identifi-
able terrain-of discursive interaction. There, people talk to each other, gener-
ate political discourses that may be in principle critical of the state, and con-
struct and modify political identities in encounters with others. "The public,"
in contrast to, let us say, an art audience, does not exist prior to but emerges in
the course of the debate.

Introduced into art discourse, the concept of the public sphere shatters
mainstream categorizations of public art and also circumvents the confusions
plaguing some critical discussions of public art. Transgressing the boundaries
that conventionally divide public from nonpublic art-divisions, for instance,
between artworks placed indoors versus those that are outdoors or between
state-sponsored versus privately funded art-it excavates other distinctions
which, neutralized by prevailing definitions of public space, are essential to
democratic practice. The public sphere idea replaces definitions of public art as
art that occupies or designs physical spaces and addresses independently
formed audiences with a definition of public art as a practice that constitutes a
public by engaging people in political debate. Any site can be transformed into
a public or, for that matter, a private sphere. In addition, the public sphere con-

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 40 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

cept counteracts the most naive tendencies in art criticis

with the state, drawing a crucial distinction between the tw
ability to use public art-with its connotations of univ
legitimate existing locations as democratic. With the pub
an inclusionary arena of political participation, a sphe
rights and social legitimacy, arts administrators can less ea
displacement of social groups from public space or th
space while continuing to describe it as "accessible." F
Kluge emphasizes, not only is the public sphere (or, fo
tional public sphere) produced. It is "a factory for the pro
Neither a universal domain that must be protected from
eral formulations, a political realm divided from the priv
laws, the public sphere of discourse is invoked by leftists
the rights of private property but as the equivalent of pol
Still, despite its usefulness, reference to "the public sph
lic function of art as the constitution of a political debat
hardly sufficient to democratize public art debates. These
their own authoritarianism. Concepts of the public sphere
most influential critical definitions share with conservativ
lic a faith that fundamental interests and struggles unify
this way, they bring privilege back into the democrat
although the concept of the public sphere distinguishes b
and the state while eroding the depoliticizing divisions er
and nonpublic art, the public sphere idea can shore up
dichotomies. Historically, public/private polarizations hav
of hierarchical differentiation in which the public spher
treating certain social relations as fundamentally public a
as essentially private or by defining the public sphere as a
ing public space with a positive identity, these acts withd
the meaning of the public from the realm of debate and s
of the public, a private space that avoids immersion in
Given the persistence of this tendency in critical formul
there is one question of democracy we should take more
space be described so that it escapes appropriation altoget

II

Now what is that point of view on everything and everybody, that loving
grip of the good society, if not an equivalent of the phantasy of omnipo-
tence that the actual exercise of power tends to produce?
Claude Lefort, "Politics and Human Rights"

"Who is to define, manipulate, and profit from 'the public'?"'4 Five years ago,
when Craig Owens asked this question at a panel discussion in New York City

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Rosalyn Deutsche 41

on "the cultural public

emerging in the art wo
series of discussions spo
tion of public, historica
temporary art criticism
public theme. Most wid
and critics to intervene
and circulation that m
public funding, growi
interrupt the legitimat
that, as Owens observed
other factors directed t
One was the imperativ
projects that would co
spaces that were vigor
developers and munic
projects. The second, se
called "public art," wa
nature of meaning and
late 1970s and 1980s in
under the heading, "the
Each of these pursuits
public" and each raise
Yet critics generally tr
few points of intersecti
art-world discussions ab
tion is virtually unreco
lic art or, worse, divert
of public space. Across
some art criticism fas
ignoring or trivializing
No doubt, some of this
critiques of representat
spring, in turn, from b
monly defined. By the
ments or explicitly cr
sites seem self-evidentl
empirical concepts of p
conservative explanation
lic space and, moreove
notions of a public realm
of the privatization and
nocratic and quasi-pub
accountability, profit-m

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42 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

centers and marginalized peripheral zones, state control

tolerate little resistance to officially approved uses, rac
borhoods, commodified housing.
Not surprisingly, artists hoping to offset or infiltrat
industry with critical public work have sometimes a
urban social movements protesting redevelopment, gent
lessness. Two exhibitions recently mounted in Toron
Power Plant's "Housing: A Right" (1990) and Martha R
the Dia Art Foundation, "If you lived here . . . " (19
alliances and demonstrate a twofold relationship betwee
tics.16 Each project combined urban and aesthetic di
struggles that oppose the provision of housing as an int
fight, instead, to establish housing as a right. As respon
to the global reorganization of capital accumulation for
has been a vehicle, and to the social conditions-like homelessness-that the
reorganization has generated, such projects are about urban spatial politics-
the social relations of subordination that shape the organization of space in
advanced capitalist society. But to counter the instrumental use of art by real
estate, corporations, and city government in the redevelopment process, they
sought to transform the art world's own spatial relations as well. Since art's
supposed universality and autonomy-actually a constructed relation of exte-
riority to other spaces-has permitted "the aesthetic" to legitimate all kinds of
oppressive economic and political systems, these projects attempted to "go
public" by eroding the aura of isolation erected around art institutions. Spon-
sored by art organizations housed in redeveloped urban neighborhoods, they
encouraged audiences to recognize that the social problems of the city, often
considered extraneous to art, actually constitute some of the conditions of art's
current existence. By organizing public meetings and utilizing billboards or
newspaper inserts, they transgressed the borders of the art gallery, linking it to
other sites and reaching out to new audiences in the hope of constituting a pub-
lic that would critically debate the housing question.
In part, then, the art world has conjured the concept of "the public" to con-
test the appropriation of that category by forces legitimating new public spaces
and a new public art that have less to do with the democratization of the city
than with the imposition of new forms of subordination. Some artists and crit-
ics have turned their attention to the literature of urban studies and especially
to materialist urban theories that analyze the production of space as a conflict-
ual process of domination and resistance to domination under capitalism rather
than as a natural or technological process expressing the needs of a unified
society. Urban theory contributed to the development of a genuinely site-spe-
cific public art that draws attention to and encourages debate about the political
struggles structuring public art's urban sites. Work such as Krzysztof Wod-

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Rosalyn Deutsche 43

iczko's real-estate and

the apparent stability o
or city spaces.17 Intere
complementary relation
dual antidotes to the ro
izing concepts of urba
Against the authoritar
exclusion-and against th
lic as a homogeneous
artists and critics, allie
of public space.
There is no inherent
raises to authoritarian s
with questions of visua
likely to overlap and, s
difficult to separate in
classify them as discret
of vision emphasizes l
politics. Yet, it was pre
seems in retrospect-wh
lic sphere, "The Birth
Art." What "definition
postmodern art practic
sality, first insisting th
autonomous p aesthetic
defining viewers as "s
of the image fixed the
side themselves, in a se
temporary feminist id
itself from essentialism
locating meaning not
complex of representat
images. Looking, these
Artists engaged in cri
Mary Kelly, Cindy Sh
Kruger, not only inves
use and social practice
mechanisms of identifi
universal, coherent, tot
Used in connection wit
nate an empirically iden
tions. Nor does public

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44 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

meanings are manufactured and circulated. It designates

structuring vision and discourse themselves. Art dealing
sentation engages in spatial politics, then, when it quest
localization, or interiorization, typical of authoritarian
meaning and identity-to assert that they are confine
determinate origins-is to deny the worldly relations th
transcendental sources of truth, both constitute meanin
them at risk. Of course, feminist critiques also rejected
ninity is an intrinsic property of female persons and ex
position in social relations of difference, a position
allowed idealized images of masculinity. And work that
about images questioned, along with feminist practices
movements, the spatial constructs of radical social theor
or sexuality the auxiliary of relations assumed to be fun
Moreover, by investigating the image as itself a relation
subordination of the politics of representation to anoth
side-a model that leaves the image per se politically neu
At this point, artists' interrogation of the politics of
with feminism's long-standing inquiry into the "loc
assertion of feminism as a requisite mode of political crit
ence and gender as relations that are irreducible to
relation, and of vision as an independent object of po
ferent from other critiques, relations, and objects-casts
of an a priori privileged place from which to transform
space this work investigates-the relational space wher
the identity of politics, are constituted and modified-is
cratic one, free of absolutist privilege.
Both the projects I have outlined, work dealing with u
and work on the space of representation, entail a recogni
of "the public" and its attendant categories-public sp
public art, public intellectual, public space-are discursiv
transparent designations of groups, realms, activities, pla
a discursive formation, "the public" is not simply a cate
Craig Owens warned, "to appropriation by diverse--
cal interests."18 Its constitution as a category, presuppo
"the private," is a political relation in which relationshi
sions enacted and, in the process, subjects positioned. Th
with which Owens left us-"Who is to define, manipulat
public' today?"-calls then for another question: Who is t
space?
Yet critics often ignore this question despite a general eagerness to appro-
priate the term public from mainstream and neoconservative domination. To be

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Rosalyn Deutsche 45

sure, "the public" now

of the site of universal
public space and public
itics? Increasingly, we
as one advocate puts it,
supporting the goals a
forms of social struggl
social movements"-fem
ing "civic consciousness
sent the "recovery of t
writing in a recent issu
by "serving the needs o
ing their practice for w
of art."21

This critic was assessin

vative and New Right e
States. How, he asked, h
vatize the public sphe
inherent in notions of
liberal responses that d
that the most viable co
movements, artists, wh
outside conventional a
public function of art."
hand, "the market (gall
practice)" o and, on the
panels he, like many a
art's public function lie
forming "the material
tribution, reception, pub
lic function is possible.
There can, I agree, be
ments, "aesthetic practi
crucial public practices.
conservative aesthetic m
does the imperative of
require the positioning
public space? Or do re
pense with the frame of
ating alternative privat
sense? What, for examp
art's threatened public

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46 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

realm? What has happened to that other set of art practi

gested earlier, also formed a principal impetus for the re
public: postmodern, and, especially, feminist work on im
vision as themselves, precisely, public? Such work, sa
practical function because it is located in a space that is "
tioning." "Regrettably," he writes, "the art world is separa
tioning by a complex mechanism that defines 'discipl
humanities" and which, "fragmenting knowledge, whi
practical circumstances . . . drains the aesthetic of any pr
Work on the "politics of representation," if it is situated
and directed toward an art audience, he continues, "pr
cultural practice that is socially disinterested and nonpoli
Again, the second critic agrees: "The 'politics of represe
by this type of art ... [t]his play on the constructedness
necessarily lead to changing the conditions that produc
place."25
Within this perspective, the gallery and museum appear
public space. They are private for two reasons. In the first
theticist ideologies underlying the prestige of art institut
society understood as a totality. Art institutions then are
ing systems but "fragmenting" forces, and fragmentatio
is presupposed to constitute a withdrawal from an all
social practice and public life. Secondly, aestheticism o
cultural level a foundation--"the conditions that produce
place"-of social meaning. When critics assume an essen
in the transformation of basic material conditions or in alliances with social

movements that are held to participate in a total social practice, their support
for artists they believe are recovering art's public function occurs at the
expense of other practices whose different political concerns they disparage as
private. The particular casualty of the either/or construction of the public I
cited above, the artist held up as a foil against which publicness can be mea-
sured, is the photographer, Cindy Sherman, whose "deconstruction of socially
constructed representations of women in patriarchal society," the author con-
tends, may "challenge the authority of representation" but are easily accom-
modated within the institution.

In the name of the public, such a position resurrects as an unquestioned

assumption the very polarization-between the formal operations of images
and a politics exerted from the outside-that feminist critiques of representa-
tion, establishing a constitutive link between images and sexuality, questioned
from the start. To disagree with this position is not to deny that images signify
meanings within institutional structures. However, work on the sexual politics
of images problematizes (as practices aligned with new social movements also

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Rosalyn Deutsche 47

do) the boundaries that

cism-the doctrine, cruc
aesthetic vision is the d
by the implication of "
pleasures, as Jacqueline
neous political space.26
politics of images repre
accept, of course, that
within the parameters o
element or committed t
the politics of images i
cated in its loss. Work
frame, since its conte
nonpublic matter.
Is it really possible to
"social functioning" and
separation? And what
destroys the public sph
tion" by comparing t
Edward Said's "Oppone
of the role that acade
depoliticizing knowledg
that politicized knowled
of political life. Transf
publicness, doesn't this
an original unity, turn
plenitude from which t
their impoverished exil
realm of wholeness-a
function for art--entai
with specific and differ
A similar logic inform
to "conditions that pro
ation constitutes the fo
of meaning in basic obj
now in the name of t
authoritarian notions o
thatfeminist theories o
agement of art's publi
polarity the similarity
admittedly different b
Harmony cannot be res

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48 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

process of elaborating a definition of the public, critics w

have diverged from the premise on which the feminist p
tion conceived what I called a democratic public space-
nal grounds of meaning.
The opposition drawn in recent art criticism between,
politics of representation and, on the other hand, the all
cific social movements depends, we have seen, on a prior
demarcation of the public sphere-identified as politi
from the private-seen as fragmented and nonpolitical. It
that such a distinction surfaces by consigning some femi
private realm; this merely confirms feminism's long-stan
spatial relations that structure the public/private divide
who, identifying with the public as a unity, police it. In
tial location of politics, women, of course, but feminism
been forced into privacy. The question of the location of
in the feminist slogan "the personal is political," is repro
Robbins observes, in a "tension within the concept of
tight, authoritative singleness (the public as object of a q
collective subject or a privileged arena of struggle) and a
pluralism (public-ness as a quantity spread liberally throu
different collectivities)."29
That the question of the location of politics resides t
critical concepts of the public sphere should, however, rem
tion of who is to define the public cannot be directed sol
mainstream discourse. Nor are the attendant questions
profit irrelevant when assessing critical ideas of publicne
notes, "In contemporary political discourse, the 'privat
powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitim
views, and topics and to valorize others ... to restrict the
mate public contestation."30 Indeed, as concepts of "t
shall see, "the urban," have become criteria by which to
itics, certain kinds of feminist practices have been positi
rather, through the consignment of feminist work on su
other practices emerge as public ones. Critical voices in t
can no more afford to formulate ideas about public art by
tions of domination disavowed by liberal or conservative
in general can confine discussions of democracy to expos
of bourgeois democracy while ignoring the undemocratic
its own theories. To concentrate on distinguishing affirma
in public places" from critical ones of "the cultural publi
the apprehension of other contests over "the public," is to
stating the public as a realm of purity that can be rescue

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Rosalyn Deutsche 49

And if the unity of the

tion of the social whic
"the material condition
address other, incomme
emerge, and be rejected
Still, it is particularly
with new social movem
consider that both-new
sentation-have challen
among other things, th
emancipatory struggles
quality that also defines
a foundation determin
before art can be public
an independence of suc
of political identity dist
movements, by their d
new, specific rights. An
they refuse submission
abrogating to themselv
under the banner of a
invites accusations tha
the harmony-or potent
preconstituted harmon
escape partiality by id
"fragmentation" can be
erogeneity, and indeter
new kinds of common
When critics who supp
representation as nonpu
practice," or peripher
undermine the very po
ously defend. They thu
rejections of the politic
ernism proposed by suc
urban geographer, Dav
spread commitment to
from capitalist dominat
of an urban spatial poli
dem with discussions of
of public art. Unlike ma
the similarity between

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50 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

images. Each development, they argue, springs from a co

ceptual apparatus and, in turn, perpetuates confusion. Th
however, in the global spatio-economic restructuring that
stage of capitalism. A new international spatial netwo
technological advances, facilitates capital accumulation an
precipitates a crisis of representation, overwhelming our
capitalism's exploitative operations and to represent the t
cern the underlying coherence of social reality, the subjec
political place--equated with class consciousness-and so
action necessary to transform society.
As Harvey concludes, following Jameson, "Postmoderni
than the cultural logic of late capitalism," a component, in
ital's fragmenting effects. Politically, fragmentation app
of new political identities with no adherence to a norm; ae
tation appears as a focus on images rather than on a reali
to underlie them. (For Harvey, too, Cindy Sherman's pho
postmodernism's "complicity.") Thus, the questions that p
have raised about universalizing thought and foundationa
selves, forms of subordination become, in Harvey's an
complicit with capitalism. Whereas some postmodern
gests that it is the very condition of representation t
underlying presence guarantees truth, Jameson believes th
practice should help end the crisis by producing coherent
maps"-of the social whole. The space of aesthetic politics
the real space of politics.
What these explanations disavow is the space from whi
public space? Claiming to observe the essence of a soci
subjects of such accounts are elevated to a position outsid
Accordingly, others are demoted to secondary rank or wor
of Harvey's urban discourse, for instance, where pol
reduced to uneven spatio-economic arrangements, and th
of these arrangements) become the privileged figures
space, efforts to talk about urban space differently are ta
quietism, complicity. Feminists who analyze the image of
not as an object tested against objective reality but as a r
subject (an approach which, in my view, is essential t
changing current representations of and attitudes toward
accused of callousness toward poor city residents and set
homeless.32 Farfetched as such a conclusion may soun
unfamiliar in the history of radical social thought. When
ever, they invoke the homeless less to promote social just
superior penetration of their own social vision.

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Rosalyn Deutsche 51

Fortunately, we have c
Claude Lefort, for one
that Tocqueville called "
of monarchical power
power is no longer beli
opens up at the spot w
God-was once embodie
reside in "the people"-
possess an absolute def
moment "to the imag
democratic when it pro
of an objective guaran
well. It is then from a
space where human be
political identities thro
public space is the legit
support of an external j
Totalitarianism, the ru
the democratic revolutio
substance to social cohe
essential interest or "on
thereby closing down t
such tutelary power. I
paradoxically, is constit
politics, a unique space
obstacles to the spread
The extension of pub
movements a organized
erogeneity ungovernab
alliance of art with new
laborations a public pr
restores a fundamental
ing, claims that can b
public space, they close
they want to defend. T
public and the private w
differences and the pub
the existence of anothe
the sovereign subject
rigor of this public/pr
representation threaten
public space and there

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52 Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy

Ernesto Laclau has suggested that the main task of po

democratic struggles is "to transform the forms of identi
tion of subjectivity that exist in our civilization."36 When
of images directs attention to processes of viewing and t
tures through which subjects, in relations with images, id
and flee from difference, shouldn't we welcome such wo
public space? Especially if we want to prevent the con
sphere into someone's private sphere.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Eric Gibson, "Jennifer Bartlett and the Crisis of Public Art," New
Criterion 9, no. 1 (September 1990), 62-64. Neoconservative devotion to the right of
access to public space generally serves, of course, as a rationale for eliminating public
funding for the arts, a position outlined in Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse:
Visual Arts and the Public Interest (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
2. Quoted in the New York Post, 17 March 1989.
3. For a discussion of the language of democracy used during the Tilted Arc debate see
Rosalyn Deutsche, "Tilted Arc and the Uses of Public Space," the Design Book Review
(Winter, 1992).
4. See Stuart Hall, "Popular Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism: Two Ways of 'Tak-
ing Democracy Seriously,'" in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of
the Left (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 123-49.
5. This phrase comes from Nancy Fraser. See her "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," Social Text 25/26 (1990),
56-80.
6. In making this distinction, Hall draws on the work of Ernesto Laclau who, in his Po
itics and Idealogy in Marxist Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1977), distinguish
genuine mobilizations of popular demands and discontents from populist mobilizatio
which at a certain point are recuperated into statist-led political leadership. (See Stuart Ha
"Authoritarian Populism: A Reply to Jessop et al.," in Hard Road to Renewal, 150-6
Hall succinctly summarizes the difference between the two at the end of his essay, "Pop
lar-Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism" (see note 3). Referring to the radical right,
concludes: "What gives it this character are its unceasing efforts to construct the movement
towards a more authoritarian regime from a massive populist base. It is 'populist' becaus
it cannot be 'popular-democratic'" (146, my emphasis).
7. Hall, "Reply to Jessop et al.," 51.
8. Draft Discussion Report by the Social Planning Department about "A Public Art Pro
gram for Vancouver," 1 June 1990.
9. For analyses of redevelopment, see Rosalyn Deutsche, "Krzysztof Wodiczko's Home
less Projection and the Site of Urban 'Revitalization,"' October 38 (Fall 1986), 63-98; an
"Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City," October 47 (Winter 1988), 3-5
and Neil Smith and Peter Williams, "From 'Renaissance' to Restructuring: The Dynam
of Contemporary Urban Development," in Neil Smith and Peter Williams, eds., Gentrific
tion of the City (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 204-24.
10. Sam Roberts, "The Public's Right to Put a Padlock on a Public Space," New Yor
Times, 3 June 1991, B 1.
11. Deutsche, "Uneven Development."
12. Fred Siegel, "Reclaiming Our Public Spaces," City Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1992
41.
13. Alexander Kluge, "Film and the Public Sphere," New German Critique 24-25
(Fall/Winter 1981-82), 213.

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 Rosalyn Deutsche 53

14. Craig Owens, "The Yen f

Death of the Viewer: On the
temporary Culture (Seattle:
tence, which reads: "And th
public' is, I believe, the cent
15. Hal Foster, "Preface," i
16. The Power Plant, Toron
Dia Art Foundation, New
February-11 June, 1989. F
ed., If you Lived Here. ...
Martha Rosier (Seattle: Bay
17. For an analysis of Wo
Deutsche, "Architecture of
18. Owens, "Yen for Art,"
19. David Trend, "Beyond
image (April 1989), 6.
20. Ibid.
21. George Yiidice, "For a Practical Aesthetics," Social Text 25/26 (1990), 135.
22. Ibid., 136.
23. Trend, "Beyond Resistance," 4.
24. Ibid.

25. Yuidice, "Practical Aesthetics," 135.

26. Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Field of Vision," in Sexuality in the Field of
Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 231. Barbara Kruger quoted this passage as an epigraph to
her contribution to the Dia panel discussion "The Cultural Public Sphere," where Kruger
and Douglas Crimp insisted, in different ways, on the relevance of sexuality to issues of the
public sphere.
27. Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," in Hal
Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay
Press, 1983), 135-59.
28. Bruce Robbins, "Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric," Social Text
25/26 (1990), 115.
29. Bruce Robbins, Introduction to "The Phantom Public Sphere" (special issue), Social
Text 25/26 (1990), 4.
30. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere."
31. See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"
New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984), 53-92, and David Harvey, The Condition of Post-
modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.:
Basil Blackwell, 1989).
32. See Rosalyn Deutsche, "Looking at Homelessness," in Green Acres: Neo-Colonialism
in the United States (St Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, forthcoming).
33. Claude Lefort, "The Question of Democracy," in Democracy and Political Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17.
34. Claude Lefort, "Human Rights and the Welfare State," in Democracy and Political
Theory, 27.
35. Claude Lefort, "Politics and Human Rights," in The Political Forms of Modern Soci-
ety: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 251.
36. Ernesto Laclau, "Building a New Left," in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our
Time (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 190.

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