Ben Jones » Public Sphere

Public Sphere and Web2.0

Ben Jones — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:45:44 +0000

Isla Leaver-Yap in her essay concerning Freee’s contribution to the ICA’s ‘Nought to Sixty’ programme of exhibitions and events, considers their work as allowing for a ‘casual and repeated dissemination across various media and sites’. She continues to their strategies as undermining the ’uniqueness of the original aesthetic encounter, dispersing the experience of the work across a number of formats and promoting the message of the collective over the individual, whilst also retaining the conviction behind each message’.

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s “Toward an Analysis of the Organization of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres.” (a critical response to Habermas’ “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”), puts forward their belief that there is more than one public sphere, and that it is not the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie. They contend that there are at any one time various public spheres that exist simultaneously, formed by different and often competing constituencies, often constituting themselves in contexts that are not usually recognized as legitimate public spheres.

Whilst Negt and Kluge wrote this in 1972, before the development of Web2.0 this can be seen as a direct link and the use of open source software and social networking sites. Craig Calhoun, in his essay ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’ discusses this as ‘a “space” for communication and as a result transcends any particular place, and weaves together conversations from many. It also transcends particular social groups involving people who are strangers to each other. Publics grow less place-based as communication media proliferates, yet the spatial image remains apt.’

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

Ben Jones — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:37:19 +0000

Freee see there work existing everywhere. Not, as Performance Art or Land Art would lead us to believe, in one given time and/or space, but in the gallery as well as within the public sphere possibly at the same time. The billboards, and ‘mini-protest performances’, as Freee calls them, are not solely for the passer-by but made with the full knowledge that the work will be presented in other ways, including the gallery, for a secondary audience.

There is no documentation. The video’s, photographs, manifesto, magazine works etc are all equal and relevant, even more so, as the original moment. All these contexts and mediums are variations of the same work. The dissemination of the work is paramount, and the idea of making something is with the intention to distribute it further.

They equate it to a protest chant, where one person shouts out a slogan, someone else hears it, agrees with it and repeats it and so on and so on. The intention is to copy or repeat and activate and empower the statement, the difference between, as Freee say the slogan and the modernist art object.

Huebler and Bourriaud

Ben Jones — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:24:53 +0000

The quote by the American Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler acts as one of the many points of possible departures for me when I decided to undertake a project with Freee Art Collective. As an artist myself dealing with the many issues and beliefs I have concerning contemporary art and its function within the modern world, I realised that I personally did not have any real want to add to it, or at least not in the way the current art scenes expects me to, and especially within the local context.

Nicolas Bourriaud brings a connection to this in his 2002 text ‘Postproduction’ where he believes that ‘Contemporary Art does not position itself as the termination point of the “creative process” but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities…Artwork functions as the temporary terminal of interconnected elements and reinterprets preceding narratives. Each exhibition encloses within it the script of another…The artwork is is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions’.

I see the work I am doing with Freee as a part of both these statements, I do not intend to create another object, (one reason for making it an online project), but using the slogan by Freee and advancing and disseminating it further within its written form. The medium of it may change, but the text remains the same but can be repeated in ‘an infinite chain of contributions’.