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URBANITYThe Discreet Symptoms of Privatization and the Loss of Urbanity

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Ute Burkhardt-Bodenwinkler Urbanity – The Discreet Symptoms of Privitatization and the Loss of UrbanityUrbanität – Die diskreten Symptome der Privatisierung und der Verlust von Urbanität Jennifer Friedlander Public Art and Radical Democracy: Christoph Schlingensief’s Deportation Installation Öffentliche Kunst und radikale Demokratie: Christoph Schlingensiefs Abschiebungsinstallation .......................

Peter Moeschl Privatized Democracy – On the Current Degeneration of the Political .................Die privatisierte Demokratie ...................... Kulturrisse 03/2013

Robert Pfaller What Reveals the Taste of the City – The Ethics of Urbanity .......................Was den Geschmack der Stadt verrät. . ......... www.content.associates

Lars Schmid Urban Guerrilla ..............................................................Stadtguerilla

Daniela Kuka Das Spiel als Methode – Mögliche Zukünfte des urbanen Raums ............................

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Designing the PublicImanuel Schipper and Johanna Dangel

Proposing such a title is like fishing for problems that cannot be solved. How would it ever be possible to design a or the public, knowing that such a thing like the public does not exist? And how could we ever think that a performance or a play could really design a public in the sense that it would be constructed and formed and shaped in a certain manner as the artists wanted it to be? Especially when our concept of art is based on the assumption that for the production of an experience called art the work of the artist is only one part, while a second very important part is the complex part of the receiver of art. Following that thought, the question how the public can be designed has already come to a dead end. Therefore, the focus of the examination will rather be on what the public is. After mapping out some approaches to what the public could mean in different discourses, showing that it is almost impossible to design a public, we will focus on one example where special behaviors of the public are designed especially by the scenography of the venue.

Public – what can that mean? The term public seems to open up a morphological field due to its conceptual history. Talking about public, notions of publicity, publicness, the public, public opinion, public view, public sphere, and audience are raised. In this article, we will focus on the relationship between the concepts public – meaning publicum/audience – and public in the sense of publicity, and examine these in site-specific performances (with public/audience) in public spaces. Furthermore, it is interesting (especially for us German speakers) that in English the term public denotes the two concepts of audience and publicness, which is not that obvious in German.“There is a word for people like you – audience”, the British performer Richard Lowdon said in his opening monologue in Showtime, one of the many plays of Forced Entertainment. He chose the term audience – not public. Audience, referring to the Latin verb audire – to hear, seems to point more to the concept of reception. Audience is, according to Wikipedia, “a person or group of (usually) people viewing a show (film, play,

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performance) or the readership of a publication”. The concept of the audience alludes to a concept of art reception that follows very closely the communication theory of broadcasting: Artist or artworks are seen as transmitters of a message that is received by the audience. The focus of the term audience alludes to the

act of getting the thing called art that is produced by the artists. Nevertheless, we

consider the public more and more to be a part of the process of artistic production

process, at least since Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Rancière’s The

Emancipated Spectator (2009).

The public is – though not in all cases – an active partner in creating the event that we call

performance or art. They help create the art work they look at at the the very same moment.

The performance they see in front of them is therefore not only a medium and a message, but it is the occasion, the cause of the new story the public experiences and produces in co-authorship with the artists. When witnessing a performance, the public constructs a new narration that involves the space where the performance takes place as well as the story that is told and the individual pre-sets (based onf the individual experiences and the individual memories) of each single person.The actions of the audience – even if they are physically moving and doing real actions during the performance – could still be very private and therefore a non-public process. The images and experiences I produce during the performance could have an importance or an effect only for me. In other words: The fact that the audience plays an active part in the production process does not necessarily mean that it becomes a public in the sense of publicness. While the term audience evokes more a picture of a passive mass, mainly silent and contemplative, the term public seems to point more to the active part of these people, who consider themselves not to be artists. The term public opens up the concept that in German is called Öffentlichkeit (publicness) and instantly gets a political connotation. “In Berlin heißt das Ding jetzt Publicum” – with this quote from Johann Christoph Gottsched (1760) the German cultural theorist Dietmar Kammerer opens his book Vom Publicum (Kammerer 2012), in which he shows that the public of today (Öffentlichkeit) is similar to what used to be known as audience (Publicum) in the late eighteenth century. Following the changing and

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evolving meaning of the term Öffentlichkeit from “Adressaten obrigkeitsstaatlicher Rechtsakte” to “gebildete bürgerliche Gesellschaft” (Gottsched 1760) to our modern understanding and use of public or publicness, it is striking that mainly aesthetic categories are used to describe this concept. Regardless of whether we talk about the visibility of spaces and political acts or compare politicians to comedians or clowns, aesthetics seem to be an adequate means for grasping that concept. More than that, the impacts of the iconic and the performative turn show us how genuinely performative the concept of the public is. Regardless of whether we focus on its political, sociological, spatial, or functional effects, the public is always something that is not static and has to be redefined all the time by its users. In other words: it is – as all performative concepts are – heavily ephemeral. Spatial theorists of the performative turn, such as the German researcher Stephan Günzel, drawing on theories of De Certeau and the Situationists, argue that space is no objective constant, but a construct, a product of social, cultural, political, and artistic influence (Günzel 2009: 370). Therefore, public does not only imply a spatial dimension, but also socio-political and aesthetical dimensions. In this triangle, we try to discuss theatrical interventions in urban space: The spatial dimension gains focus when urban space is conquered – which is traditionally not thought of as theater space. The socio-political dimension emerges when people gather in the public sphere and have to negotiate; and also the aesthetical dimension has to be dealt with if the experience is produced through means of art.Talking about the public, one always has to consider its dichotomous antagonist: privacy (or the private life). This great dichotomy in political thinking can be traced to the ancient Greeks and their separation of oikos and polis and was also an element of Roman law, which, as codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis, for the first time in history defined the private and the public field (cf. Seubert 2010: 9).In the 1970s, the sociologist Richard Sennett proclaimed The Fall of Public Man and the tyranny of intimacy. He argues that the newly developed narcissism of individuals destroys the basis of a functioning public sphere, which consists of free communication and interaction (Sennett 1977).The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas narrowly defines the term public sphere in his book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from 1962, where he argued that the essential characteristic of the culture of the public sphere was its critical nature. It was characterized by dialogue, as individuals either met in conversation or exchanged views via the print media. For him, in contrast to Sennett, the concept of public sphere is normative; public sphere is a political goal that has to be realized (Habermas 2008).

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In other words: The public sphere is produced and constructed through performative and dialogical means by the users of a space in cooperation with the space itself. In a quite similar way, we argue that the public (audience) is a living and fluid phenomenon that is constantly co-constructed by the artwork and the audience itself, as well as that the later simultaneously co-produces the artwork.

Theatrical interventions in urban space – Prime Time and Infinite Jest

To explain this complex construct, the following report of Prime Time by Dominic Huber will be presented as an example.

What happened there? – Thinking about space First of all, not even the journey to the performance was similar to a regular theater evening, where you go to a building, show your ticket, and enter a more or less familiar room. As the announcement of Ciudades Paralelas told me, I was supposed to go to a grocery store at the corner of Josefsstrasse/Ottostrasse in Zurich, enter a shop, show my ticket, and ask for headphones. Then I would get more information. As I am not from Zurich, the way to this grocery store was already part of the performance because I was very attentive to the neighborhood I walked through, searching for the address I was given and having a careful look at the houses I passed by, looking for signs that indicated that soon a performance would start. For me, not only the house – the particular building – appeared staged, but the whole neighborhood. I felt like a flâneur with a very specific task. Finally equipped with headphones, the audience gathered in front of the staged house, immediately adopting a passive attitude again – being ready to watch the play. The fact that they were kind of sealed off from their environment with the

headphones on intensified their passive attitude. There was no interaction between audience

and performers; the audience even had to keep a certain distance to fully see the house. For the next

half an hour, the audience could follow a completely choreographed performance (or one may say audio

installation) and listen to the pre-produced texts via headphones.

The house as such was untouched – its façade was completely unchanged. In terms of space and setting,

only the light show fundamentally changed the everyday appearance. Dominic Huber worked with colorful

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theatrical lighting, and, as in scenes on the stage, certain windows were illuminated from the inside while the audience was listening to the prerecorded stories of the inhabitants and could watch their simple choreographies such as standing at the window, standing on the balcony, standing in the kitchen, sitting on the piano, and so on. Together with the pre-produced stories of the inhabitants’ lives, one could hear live sounds such as a girl playing piano, a play station soccer game, or kitchen noises, etc.

The Swiss and their privacy - thinking about socio-political aspects As Dominic Huber told us, it was very difficult to find a house in Zurich (Transcript of the Nightly Research Saloon) as compared to other cities where Ciudades Paralelas was staged – and where enough inhabitants collaborated. In Switzerland, it seems, people do not like to exhibit their private lives. And then there was a very interesting moment: The staging of the house recalled a live Facebook page, where people publish more or less intimate details of their lives. In Zurich, as Dominic Huber said, people were quite aware of this fact – and when listening to their stories, this became quite obvious. They talked about their biographies from a very professional perspective, it read like a written CV for a scholarship, including the right political attitude, social engagement, and nice quirks such as enjoying being home alone. Not to forget the artistic activities of many inhabitants such as doing photo projects, having an art company, or taking acting lessons. Maybe I should mention that the district of Zurich, Kreis 4, where the house is situated, is a very lively district close to the main station, which was once seen as a problem area, with many immigrants and a red light district. After a process of gentrification, it is now a booming, fashionable area with many bars, a flourishing nightlife, and old and not too expensive apartments, which is why many young people and artists live there. Also the University of the Arts is situated in this district. For the inhabitants of Josefsstrasse 187, it seemed very important what other people thought of them – this fear was also present in their biographical texts. One man was concerned about his neighbors thinking he was cooking in the kitchen all the time, others mentioned their family and childhood background, and what they thought about their actual studies. The media researcher Georg Christoph Tholen from Basel compared the setting in our research saloon to watching TV because he saw an analogy to “movie-like images” and identified a “panoptical, voyeuristic view” (Transcript of the Nightly Research Saloon). The issues of privacy and public were very present, but the strict choreography and the overall visible theatrical form, which contrasted with the seemingly private biographies, blurred this traditional dichotomy.

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Some remarks about the audience Concerning our argument that the public can

be designed through theatrical interventions in urban space, I need to describe an

interesting phenomenon that occurred during the performance. As I mentioned earlier, the

audience, who had paid for their tickets and were therefore equipped with headphones,

were standing on the sidewalk vis-à-vis the house following the performance. But, of course, this

unusual gathering of about thirty people attracted the attention of passersby. They stopped and started

to watch the audience or – what was even more interesting – started to have a conversation with members of the audience, not realizing that a show was going on with a beginning and an end. It seemed as if they followed the rules of an opening event instead of those of a theater event. The rules of this performance in public space, of this gathered community, were obviously unclear, so people negotiated the setting through their behavior. Thus, in fact there were two stages: the curated house and the audience standing on the sidewalk. This phenomenon was additionally emphasized by the presence of a photographer at the performance. One of the inhabitants of the house in Josefstrasse 187, Luca Zanier, who is a professional photographer, regularly took pictures of the audience.Talking about community or communities, I also want to add that, with regard to the house, not only an ephemeral public was produced, but a new community was founded – one of non-professional actors, the inhabitants of the house, who got to know each other through working on the performance.

More than one public Unheimlicher Spass – 24 Stunden durch den utopischen Westen (Infinite Jest – 24 hours through the utopian west) is another example of how theatrical interventions do not only show a story that allows the audience to practice empathy, as Lessing proposed in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1769). The nine-station and twenty-four-hour marathon journey produced at the same time an ephemeral publicness and a sustainable publicity. It was the last production of Matthias Lilienthal’s seven years as director of the Hebbel Theater (HAU) in Berlin, and the exhausting proposal of twelve artists and collectives to stage the more than 1000-page novel by

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David Foster Wallace. The event started on a tennis court in Grunewald at 9:30 in the morning and brought the audience – with coaches and the help of caffeine and sugar – through the day and on the following night back to the HAU in Kreuzberg. The tour included visiting different strange architectural reminders of a time when the area was a border to the land of the enemy, as well as a place where the Western culture could present its open mind regarding the future. The fact that time had already passed and that these reminders were standing like fossilized dinosaurs produced a strange ghostliness that corresponded strongly with the atmosphere in the novel. The locations were (amongst others):

a tennis court, beautifully situated in front of a small lake, and part of the famous tennis club Rot Weiss, which was present in the media when they sold the license for the German Opens to the Sheikh of Qatar, who re-sold it later to a club in Warsaw.

the ruins of a US high-tech radar station with the ability to broadcast to the Far East, because it was constructed on top of the highest mountain in Berlin. This 120-meter-high mountain was completely built of stones of ruins from the bombings at the end of the Second World War

a hospital that used to be in the center of the city and became one of many institutions that found themselves at a more marginal position after the fall of the wall

a cultural center in a city district for about 40,000 people that prior to 1989 used to be a lively place for encountering art and hosted important political debates, but today is of nearly no importance

Besides getting a re-narration of that overwhelming and inscrutable novel, besides witnessing some of the best contemporary performance collectives like Gob Squad, New Your City Players, or She She Pop, and besides getting the opportunity to visit places and buildings in Berlin you would otherwise

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never visit, besides all these things that were most likely envisaged by the artists and the curatorial team, some other effects arose that were probably not consciously intended by the artistic team:

Spending time alongside a person who was on the same journey allowed, or even provoked, me to get in contact with that person and talk to him in a way that would have not been possible on a traditional theater evening.

Walking in a group of about hundred people through different public spaces that are not really used (or no longer) to host such a group evoked a strange feeling of political importance and power in me.

Spending such a long time with a group I hardly knew, allowing them to see me in intimate situations such as fighting to keep awake or sharing my food with them, created a group, or even collective, that seemed to be able to do greater things together – like solving difficult problems or helping someone in need.

In other words: The public (in the sense of a group) was more constructed by the dramaturgy and the scenography of the event than by its content or artistic forms. This immediately raises the question of who the producers of that artwork are and who – other than the artists – designs the public.On the one hand, there was the construction of a public as a unique group that emerged in the spectacle and probably will disappear just after the twenty four hours are finished. On the other hand, there was the simultaneous creation of a maybe more sustainable publicness through the special scenography of the different places. Due to the fact that the stages of this play were these strange buildings from the 1970s, which created an atmosphere of a specific historical and political time, this event constructed together with the audience and the novel a new narrative of the city. A narrative that has never been told before and that is not part of the hip, contemporary, arty narrative of the Bohemian chic or the touristic board of the city. It is a narrative that is built of architectural utopian images of the past and the exhausting performance experience and unforeseen group dynamics of today. It is a narrative that has changed my personal city map of Berlin forever and has already had an impact on my present work of analyzing urban phenomena.

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Instead of a conclusion The performances opened up many questions that have not necessarily to do with the content of the play or the aesthetics of the artwork. The questions that emerged are more like:

What kind of perception of the city was produced through these theatrical productions?What different possibilities of publicness were produced?What kinds of narratives of or about the city were constructed?What kinds of memories were produced? What remains of such events?

One may ask now what differences are there between designing a public by means of theatrical interventions and, for example, commercial events, advertisements, or political propaganda. As the British theater researcher Jen Harvie puts it:

Theater is [...] in some ways symptomatic of urban process, demonstrating the structures, social power dynamics, politics and economies also at work more broadly throughout the city. […] [T]heater is a part of urban process, producing urban experience and thereby producing the city itself. (Harvie 2009: 7)

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ReferencesBianchi/Macras, Gob Squad, Kastenmüller, Peter et al. Unendlicher Spass, 24 Stunden

durch den utopischen Westen. Curated and produced by Hebbel-am-Ufer, Berlin/Matthias Lilienthal. Visit at the Opening Night, 2 Jun. 2012.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon-Quetigny: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.Günzel, Stephan. Raumwissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2009.Harvie, Jen. Theatre & the City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Huber, Dominic. Prime Time, part of the Ciudades Paralelas Festival curated by Stephan

Kaegi and Lola Arias. Zürich, 2011.Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a

Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.Kammerer, Dietmar. Vom Publicum: Das Öffentliche in der Kunst. Bielefeld: Transcript,

2012.Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim. “Hamburgische Dramaturgie” (1769). In: Werke, vierter

Band by Gottfried Ephraim Lessing. Ed. Herbert G. Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009.Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.Seubert, Sandra (2010). “Privatheit und Öffentlichkeit heute. Ein Problemaufriss”. In: Die

Grenzen des Privaten. Eds. Sandra Seubert & Peter Niesen. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag 2010, 9–22.

Transcript of the Nightly Research Saloon of 30th of June 2011 as part of the research project ‘Re/Okkupation’ of Imanuel Schipper. Talk with Georg Christoph Tholen, Patrick Primavesi and DominicHuber.

Wallace, David Forster. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

The term urbanity is used to denote a certain quality of life, a standard of social coexistence. Today, this standard is acutely endangered. Both shrinking cities and growing cities are tending towards dis-urbanization and to the pauperization of their populations in terms of political participation, social security, and aesthetic respect: Public places of assembly are increasingly disappearing; more and more people are afraid of losing their jobs, healthcare, and pensions, and are subjected to degrading forms of prohibition and control. This leads to what Henri Lefebvre calls an “urbanization without urbanity”. We want to find out what ethics, what principles, modes of behavior, and forms of organization of the social imaginary are a necessary and indispensable element of urbanity. Drawing on Lefebvre’s slogan of the “right to the city”, we demand a “right to urbanity”, against all neo-liberal trends towards homogenization and the attempt to turn our society into a consensus model.

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