Democratic Performatives and an Aesthetics of Public Space

Abstract

Street arts interventions in public spaces interrupt the everyday activities taking place there and challenge unwritten rules governing those activities. But, in addition, the artists, through their provocations, seem to grant permission to the passers-by to do what they would not normally do in a public space, to act differently. As the artists create events that blur the boundaries between actions that the spectators do in the fictional world of the performance and those that they do in the actual world of the public space – actions that challenge the status quo however minutely – the artists and their audiences shift democracy from an idea to a practice. In fact, these alternative ways of inhabiting public spaces are a key source of the performance’s potential for efficacy since the spectator learns and creates new ways of thinking about urban space and civil society. ‘Civil society’, Kester explains, ‘is a complex term that describes the capacity of individual subjects to engage in substantive debate over political issues, as well as the agency whereby this debate, in the form of consensus or “general will”, could be transformed into an instrument of political decision making’ (2011: 175). As the artists contrast the ordinariness of daily life with Debord ‘situations’ and Lefebvre ‘moments’ in the interventions, they also entice the spectators to break their routines, to transgress accepted behavioural norms obeyed out of habit rather than examined consideration, and thus to enter public debate about socio-political issues with their bodies.KeywordsPublic SpaceCritical AwarenessUrban ForageBare BreastCity ResidentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.