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The closure of museums and galleries during the pandemic has left artists little choice but to occupy alternative, non-art and public spaces but, asks Adam Heardman, can such interventions, pioneered in the 1980s, still be considered radical?
One December evening in 1976, Gordon Matta-Clark opened fire on the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. Using an air rifle, he shot through several of the building's windows. Matta-Clark, an artist who often took aim at architecture, had been invited to contribute to an exhibition and had planned a piece in which he would cut a seminar room in half. The night before the opening, however, he decided something more radical was in order. Referring to the architects Richard Meier and Michael Graves (leading contributors to the show and former teachers of his at Cornell), Matta-Clark said: 'I hate what those guys stand for'
Art with a social or political impulse often enacts this inside-to-outside movement - which I want to call 'emergence' - from a private or institutional space into a more public one. In our contemporary moment of crisis, when not only the function of art but also the entire concept of public and private personhood is being violently redefined, it is important to scrutinise what radical new emergences art can perform in response to our new emergencies, to examine exactly what a public space in 2021 might constitute.
The received wisdom on this question, following Jürgen Habermas, is that spaces are defined by the activities or discourses which take place within them. What Habermas called the 'Public Sphere' is not circumscribed within the Greek agora, but exists within the activity of public debate, consensus and collective personhood. These, too, are ideas which have been faced with a new crisis as mass media and other historically public institutions have become aggressively privatised, commodified and co-opted for targeted use against the public. There is also, of course, the coronavirus pandemic to contend with - coming as it does in the age of mass-surveillance and dataharvesting - when trying not only to get a handle on what we now understand by words like 'private' and 'public', but also to figure out how increasingly powerful and malevolent states (and supra-states) can be meaningfully resisted and...