Relating experiences in public space to contemporary artistic creation poses an initial challenge, which is to specify the issues to which these relationships relate, and then to understand in a comprehensible way how to measure the intensity and nature of this interaction.

The easiest and most common way to address the issue is simply to talk about this relationship concerning a multitude of occurrences, assuming that "public space" and "artistic creation" are either perceived as self-explanatory denominations (which is false) or defined so vaguely and generically that one could conclude everything and nothing from them – Christmas illuminations and a street theater performance involving politically intended action tacitly conceived as a confrontation could thus be thought of similarly. Between protest art, produced in public space without the consent of the owner of the wall, floor, or shop window..., and commissioned art for purely commercial and advertising purposes, there is an abyss, but for passersby, perhaps it is not distinguishable. The boundary between "artification" and certain forms of political activism expressed with the codes of art (quite diverse and subject to controversy) is often vague as well. Written on the walls – "we want new lies" – it is the most refined poetic literary or philosophical essay, and yet it is intentionally a political manifesto. The street musician who uses very pedestrian melodies to earn some coins with musical accompaniment (some are extraordinary musicians, but that's not who we're talking about here) is not the same as the one who waves a flag and sings Grândola Vila Morena on the street. We all know these things, and we also know that between the intentionality of the maker and the perceptual filters of the viewer, listener, or somehow, feeler, there may be another abyss, that of subjectivation. For Michel Foucault, interested in power games, subjectivation implies more or less coercive mechanisms between power and the subject, through which the latter is domesticated or subjected (or even alienated and emptied of any kind of awareness), or, on the contrary, freely reacts critically, according to norms and conventions available in the cultural environment.

There are multiple ways of producing intentions for subjects to decipher; sometimes very simple, generic, and focused strategies (as in advertising and propaganda), sometimes very elaborate and disguised. André Gide used the term mise en abyme to refer to narratives that contain other narratives within themselves, continuously unfolding (in the case of a character in one of his novels – Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) – who presents himself as a writer beginning a novel entitled Les Faux-Monnayeurs). Thus, the hall of mirrors of communication and message encoding is constructed. All art is communication (also), whether object or event.

Generally understood as libertarian, critical, or even guerrilla, art often functions as a normalization device, as referred by Giorgio Agamben (2006, p. 10): a device is anything that, in one way or another, has the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, shape, control, and ensure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, and discourses of living beings. Stated in this assertive manner, it is an act of power clearly assumed, although the strategy used varies from the subtlest to the crudest. However, art can also be counterpower, counternormalization, and the same words of Agamben can be said in this regard. Banksy, the celebrated and anonymous graffiti artist from Bristol, has taken artistic ingenuity to places and situations hardly imaginable, but easily transferable from the real to the virtual, especially through the internet – literally, from walls to screens, crossing all dimensions of public space, from physical locations to websites, as seen on www.picturesonwalls.com. The remote humans who drew on the rocks of the Côa Valley did not possess such technological apparatuses to expand the local reality of sites with names as powerful as the Canada do Inferno.

All works of art (considered as such, whether from the Paleolithic era or contemporary times) rely on mechanisms of mediation for their placement in public and all the relational processes that this implies. The "activation" of a work of art as such can result from its simple placement in public space, transcending the barriers and norms of museums and curators. It may not be interpreted in the same way as a traffic sign, but rather as an unexpected signal, subversive, ironic, or other gesture of interference.

Regarding the adjective "public," Chantal Mouffe (2005, pp. 147-171) poses the question as follows:

- "public" is defined by three fundamental characteristics - a) that which is common, general, opposed to what is private, particular, and individual; b) in reference to the act of "publicizing," everything that is visible and manifest, opposed to what is secret in the private sphere; c) finally, everything that is open, accessible is public, opposed to the closed condition of what is private.

- at the same time, the emphasis on the idea of public space is primarily understood as inscribed within a democratic political context, open, referring to what is common and shared. Here, Mouffe deliberately distances herself from public spaces understood and manipulated in the manner of dictatorial and autocratic regimes and many other spaces deemed public (or for public use), but subject to private mechanisms of control over use, mode of appropriation, and reservation of admission rights.

- in turn, public art is not understood in a generic manner, simply designating artistic practices and presences in public space; it is art itself (those who produce it, the ways of doing, organizing, publicizing it, its results, etc.) that institutes or establishes the public character of a space. Chantal Mouffe intends to tell us that certain spaces and certain artistic practices establish typologies of public space, that certain artistic practices contribute to the creation of specific publics and audiences.

To advance in the possible intersections between this way of framing questions and relationships, it is also necessary to take into account the diversity of contexts and intentions in which artistic practices develop. If these practices contribute to questioning or, conversely, to the reproduction of what is characteristic of dominant hegemonies, everything changes. In the words of Chantal Mouffe herself, in the article already cited: "Clearly those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces, where the objective is to unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus, are going to envisage the relation between artistic practices and their public in a very different way than those whose objective is the creation of consensus, even if this consensus is seen as a critical one. I am, for this reason, very suspicious of the current tendency to promote 'commemorative' art because, even when the intention is a critical one, it tends to impose one accepted way of seeing things, instead of opening up the debate and facilitating an agonistic confrontation" (Mouffe, 2005, p. 162).

This agonistic quality of public space (which refers to symbolic confrontation, to the antagonism that is constitutive of human society and politics) makes it an ideal arena for demonstrating the power of art to question the system, denounce forms of oppression, propose, denounce, or even engage in political struggle.

The issue is of utmost sensitivity, as it is common to encounter certain artistic practices associated with criticism of the system, almost guerrilla-like, almost vandalism – as seen in the aforementioned work of Banksy, for example – which almost transform into their opposite. Banksy appeals through his aesthetic drawing choices. By addressing themes of injustice, he attracts and moves people, while also embodying and promoting counterculture. However, the so-called "Banksy effect" becomes as innocuous and decorative as the famous image of Che Guevara on clothing or the well-paid commission to graffiti a villa's living room, luxury real estate facade, or the decorative saturation of the "historic center" street. In addition to these examples, there are countless others where public art, street art, and other names serve as gentle vehicles for celebration, propaganda, commercial advertising, entertainment, partying, diversionary maneuvers for uncomfortable issues, and everything related to appeasement, annulment of dissent. However, the party is, by excellence, the celebration of collective feeling (freely and consciously expressed, one must understand) or a special individual restlessness, like the one Chico Buarque sings about, starting well and ending less well in another verse that is not included here: "I was wandering aimlessly in life / When my love called me / To see the band pass by / Singing about love...".

Conclusion. There is none (much less with the subject only sketched out).

Photo: Artwork by artist Cletus Abraham (2012).

The text corresponds to an excerpt from the postscript chapter of the "Manual de boas práticas para a organização de eventos artísticos no espaço público" (Outdoor Arts Portugal, Bússola, 2021).

References

Abraham, C. (2012). One of the first street sign silhouettes created by Clet [Fotografia]. Tuscan Traveler. http://tuscantraveler.com/2012/florence/tuscan-travelers-tales-clet-abrahams-street-art/

Agamben, G. (2006). Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif ? Éditions Payot et Rivages.

Mouffe, C. (2005). Which public space for critical artistic practices? Cork Caucus. https://readingpublicimage.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/chantal_mouffe_cork_caucus.pdf

Álvaro Domingues

Álvaro Domingues (born in Melgaço, 1959) is a geographer and professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where he is also a researcher at CEAU - Center for Studies of Architecture and Urbanism. He has regularly conducted research and published work in collaboration with institutions such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Foundation for Science and Technology, CCDR-N, CCDR-C, the Xunta da Galiza, the Technical School of Architecture of A Coruña, Erasmus University of Rotterdam – EURICUR, Club Ville Aménagement – Paris, University of Granada – Planning and Urbanism, Federal University of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Serralves Foundation, among others. In addition to his teaching duties at the University of Porto and other universities, he regularly publishes on topics related to urban geography, urbanism, and landscape.