'Public art as an invitation towards abolition' by Chloë Bass

In our conversation with Elina Suoyrjö, Mark Niskanen mentions the uncanniness of hearing a sound out in public that, “seems to be coming from almost inside you, even though nothing is close to you.” He is referring, of course, to his and Jani-Matti Salo’s own project Murmurations, which was on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 3 in October 2020: sounds emanated from hyper-directional speakers installed so as to be audible only to the closest passersby. I was captivated by his statement: what is it to encounter, in a public realm, something that feels (physically or emotionally) internal? In my own work, this operates somewhat differently: where Mark and his collaborator Jani-Matti Salo focus on the internal sonic qualities, I am focusing broadly, perhaps sometimes too broadly, on internal qualities at large. What are the feelings that we recognize within ourselves, and where do we most encounter those feelings, where are we reminded of them? What is it to put private thoughts and affect into a public landscape?

Through language contained on sculptures and recorded in an audio artwork, my 2019 project Wayfinding (currently on view in an expanded form at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri) puts small inner feelings into public space, attempting to offer emotional guidance as a form of orientation within park landscapes. Wayfinding is a reflective project both materially (many of the signs, including the four at billboard-scale, have mirrored faces) and conceptually, asking its viewers neither to agree nor agree with the project’s language, but to consider iterative statements (I want to believe that interpretations can be different without being threatening; I want to believe that approaches can be different without being threatening; I want to believe that desires can be different without being threatening; I want to believe that bodies can be different without being threatening) and answer questions (How much of belief is encounter?).

People who haven’t seen the project -- and even some who have -- often want to talk to me about feedback, as in: how do I receive or collect feedback from audiences when I install work in public places? Usually, the information they’re hoping for falls somewhere between the poles of “love” and “gossip”: did I witness people saying the work was particularly meaningful to them? Did people do harm to the work, was it tagged, or broken, or otherwise visibly unappreciated? But I would like to consider a type of feedback that is neither a statement of enthusiasm nor disgust. To me, the broad question of feedback feels very related to two other questions: 1) how do we measure an experience as successful? And 2) how do we collect or harness the public (in which I include both public space and public life) into some form of meaning?

These questions have more complex answers. The public (for which I’ll provide some definitions below) produces a consistent stream of disaggregated data that is nevertheless still information. What does it mean to put something precious, like an artwork, into the realm of the untrackable? It seems in some ways like an unconquerable divide: the relationship between art, which is, at least in theory, collectible, and public experience, which isn’t.

Not just because I am writing for an international audience, but because within the United States, too, some of the terms I’m about to use remains in a state of unshared definition that fraught language can sometimes produce (it means one thing for those who want to do it, and another thing for those who don’t), let me sketch out a few definitions:

• Public (adjective, definitions 1 - 3; noun, definition 4): 1) of or concerning the people as a whole; 2) open to or shared by all the people of an area or country; 3) of or provided by the government rather than an independent, commercial company; 4) ordinary people in general; the community. 

• Abolition: the action or act of formally putting an end to a system, practice, or institution.

• Defunding: to divest money from a system, practice, or institution. 

• Protection: the act or protecting, or the state of being protected. 

• Stewardship: the job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property.

Learning from Wayfinding, the most telling answers I have about feedback are, perhaps, the most boring to witness: the tiny everyday acts of mutual respect, passive disinterest, and mild tending that result in the project largely remaining intact over multiple months on view in the outside world.

To me, this almost unobservable everyday behavior points to something much deeper and more profound: an invitation to consider public art as a case for abolishing societies run by systems of punishment; in other words, a call against the police state.

This is a large leap, so now I’ll step back. Consider the difference between a museum -- even a public museum -- and a park -- even a publicly accessible private park that’s owned by an institution. In a museum, we believe that we need guards: guards protect precious artworks from the audiences who come to see those artworks and might behave badly. In fact this bad behavior (smashing a sculpture, stealing a painting, even walking beyond a barrier) is rare, and guards serve other functions as well, such as providing directions to a particular work, gallery, or the washroom. In addition to their intended service of protection and, if necessary, security enforcement (aka interference and punishment), the guard is a knowing steward of the museum. A park, generally speaking, has no such guards. Perhaps local police are present in a public park, either coincidentally or by design (in Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park, where Wayfinding was first installed, the NYPD were certainly present according to a set plan). But when an artwork is installed in the park, there is usually no increase of police presence to guard the work, nor do any existing police take on that particular responsibility of protection unless they are drawn to as individuals. In other words, the protection of the artwork in the public realm does not exist by dictated terms of a policing job. In the same way that any given visitor to the park may not be looking for or expecting an art experience, the police are also not there for the art.

The question of what we are drawn to as individuals becomes, in the case of presenting art in public space, essential and central to issues of feedback and protection. Instead of a guard or an institution standing by to make sure nothing goes wrong, the public itself takes on that role: from minor acts of stewardship, such as picking up litter, to larger acts of observational reporting (I learned that one of the Wayfinding billboards was damaged during a hurricane in New York because someone reached out to me on Instagram). I don’t think that liking the work is a requirement for the engagement of public protection, merely not being alienated by it. In a context where the public actually feels included (in the space, and, in this case, in the artwork present within the space), we may no longer require policing in order to uphold a sense of shared safety and abundance.

This kind of shared care for artwork in public space is not an invitation for all of us to become police in the absence of actual police, nor to internalize mechanisms of policing and control that we then enact on those around us. Rather, I am suggesting that engaged stewardship is an indication that when at minimum we experience a baseline of safety in our public lives and routines, and at maximum we are, perhaps, enriched and enthusiastic about the space and culture that we publicly encounter and participate in, abolition no longer seems like such a far-flung idea.

Shared care suggests a particular self-sufficiency as well: that we, the public, are enough to keep something valuable, an artwork, safe. It’s not to say that nothing further than human awareness would ever be required for the stewardship of public artworks. Of course maintenance and repair are inevitable, whether as a result of improper engagement enacted by bodies, or the havoc that weather can provoke. But extending this thought exercise, if all we need to preserve for public art is the funding of maintenance (labor) and repair (materials), why waste money first funding people to guard [in this case: the artwork], then fund mechanisms of punishment [for anyone who engages harmfully with the artwork], and still need to financially support protection against wear and tear [to the artwork]? The square brackets here indicate a space of possibility: what if I were writing not about public artwork, but public space more broadly?

What if we always funded maintenance and repair prior to wasting money on harmful acts of policing that may not even be required? What if we carried as primary within us not our ability to judge others, but our ability to maintain relationships between each other and to the world?

The single example of Wayfinding is not just a metaphor, but a model: first, it makes an argument that more consistent, uncontrolled public presence actually provides conditions of safety for people and for objects. Second, how we understand culture is a huge part of how we understand society. We attach visual, sonic, fashion, and other aesthetic memories to a certain time and place, and we think of those memories as telling how that time and place actually were.

So what we’re able to see, experience, and maintain with respect to arts and culture quite literally affects the ways that we remember how history was, how politics were, how people behaved, and what actually happened or didn’t. This rooting of creative culture in memory, and the process of memory becoming history, goes way beyond “art is valuable” from an aesthetic perspective.

Presenting one’s work as valuable in the mode of capitalism has traditionally required the maintenance of a certain scarcity, i.e. not to allow free access to that work to an uncertain and shifting public. Presenting one’s self as viable in the mode of capitalism has traditionally meant not admitting feelings of uncertainty at all. These twinned conditions of scarce access and emotional allowance have provided us with increasingly narrow margins of joining together, margins in which we learn to trust each other less and less. Margins that dictate that the only way we can be safe is to be policed into it. What I have learned from Wayfinding is the opposite: in public space, the presentation of those uncertain somethings (a sound, an image, a feeling) that comes almost from inside us is an invitation towards inclusion, towards access, and towards decentralized protection that puts maintenance above judgement, stewardship above punishment.

Chloë Bass (born 1984, New York) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere.

Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, and was a 2019 Art Matters Grantee. Previous recent honors include a residency include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette.

This essay has been commissioned to accompany episode 3 of Withstanding, a podcast by the Finnish Cultural Foundation in New York.