The Question of "Public Space"
By Rosalyn Deutsche

I’m very happy to be here and would like to thank Cheryl Younger for inviting me to take part in this seminar. I thought that the most useful contribution I could make would be to offer an — admittedly selective — introduction to the discourse about "public space" and to focus on some of the ways in which this term is currently deployed and with what consequences. Discourse about "public art " is a major site of this deployment. Inevitably, statements about public art are also statements about public space, whether public art is construed as "art in public places," "art that creates public spaces," "art in the public interest," or any other formulation that brings together the words "public" and "art." My critical method in this talk can be traced back to a shift that took place in art criticism in the 1970s. Craig Owens characterized this shift as "a displacement from…a criticism concerned primarily or exclusively with the abstract truth or falsehood of statements, to one which deals with their use in specific social circumstances." This method is "genealogical" in that it makes no attempt to find some essential, unchanging meaning of a concept but, rather, tries to show that meanings are conditional, formed out of struggles.

Exploring the ways in which the concept of "public space" has been constituted and used does not preclude supporting a particular use, proposing a different one or taking a position in debates about the meaning of public space. On the contrary, it is precisely the abandonment of the idea that there is a pregiven or proper meaning of public space that necessitates debate. A genealogical approach does mean, however, that in these debates, no one can appeal to an unconditional source of meaning — a supreme judge. We must take seriously the idea that public space is a question, the idea that I think gave rise to this seminar.

Why is public space such a ubiquitous and pressing question today? Why do debates rage over this question? Why do we care? Why, that is, are we here, in this seminar? What political issues are at stake? What are the political functions of rhetoric about public space? How have these changed in recent years?

Over the last decade or so, I have started looking for answers to these questions by noting that nearly all proponents of public space and nearly all advocates of "public" things in general — public parks, public buildings and, most relevant here, public art — present themselves as defenders of democracy. The term "public" has democratic connotations. It implies "openness," "accessibility," "participation," "inclusion" and "accountability" to "the people." Discourse about public art is, then, not only a site of deployment of the term public space but, more broadly, of the term democracy. For example, when arts administrators draft guidelines for putting art in public places, they use a vocabulary that invokes the principles of direct and representative democracy, asking: "Are the artworks for the people? Do they encourage participation? Do they serve their constituencies?"

Public art terminology also alludes to a general democratic spirit of egalitarianism: Do the works avoid "elitism?" Are they "accessible?" On the day Richard Serra’s "Tilted Arc" was removed from the Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, the administrator of the federal government’s Art-in-Architecture Program declared that, "This is a day for the city to rejoice because now the plaza returns rightfully to the people." Advocates of public art often seek to resolve confrontations between artists and other users of space through procedures that are routinely described as "democratic." Examples of such procedures are "community involvement" in the selection of works of art or the so-called "integration" of artworks with the spaces they occupy. Leaving aside the question of the necessity for, and desirability of, these procedures, note that to take for granted that they are democratic is to presume that the task of democracy is to settle, rather than sustain, conflict.

Yet democracy itself is an extremely embattled concept. Indeed, the discourse about public space that has erupted over the last decade in art, architecture, and urban studies is inseparable from a far more extensive eruption of debates about the meaning of "democracy" — debates taking place in many arenas: political philosophy, new social movements, educational theory, legal studies, mass media and popular culture. The term "public space" is one component of a rhetoric of democracy that, in some of its most widespread forms, is used to justify less than democratic policies: the creation of exclusionary urban spaces, state coercion and censorship, surveillance, economic privatization, the repression of differences and attacks on the rights of the most expendable members of society, on the rights of strangers and on the very idea of rights — on what Hannah Arendt called "the right to have rights." The term public frequently serves as an alibi under whose protection authoritarian agendas are pursued and justified. The term, that is, is playing a starring role in what Stuart Hall, in another context, called "authoritarian populism," by which he meant the mobilization of democratic discourses to sanction, indeed to pioneer, shifts toward state coercion. Adapting Hall’s concept, we might say that the term public has become part of the rhetoric of conservative democracy, which may well be the most pertinent political problem of our time. By "conservative democracy," I mean the use of democratic concepts such as "liberty," "equality," "individual freedom," "activism" and "participation" for specifically right-wing ends. Public space is another democratic concept, one that is central to discourse about cities, where it is used to support a cruel and unreasonable urbanism.

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