It’s 2016 and I am still trying to find that ‘beach beneath the street’: Re-Inventing Public Spaces, a manifesto for site-specific art
‘The last man will die of boredom as a spider dies of inanition in the
middle of its web.’[1]
The ‘beach beneath the street’ was the motto of the glorious times of the Situationist International, but where is that beach today? The idea that every part of public life has been transformed into a ‘spectacle’, a system of symbols and representations, captured the beginning of an unstable process that has now become a rotted certainty.[2] People’s immediate reaction to any given public event is now certain and well-known: to immediately spectacularize it by capturing hundreds of image-reflections on their smartphones, and transferring them into the cyber social media sphere. Guy Debord once affirmed that ‘everything that is lived has moved away into a representation’[3], and yet today the necessity of endlessly capturing the fleeting moments composing the fluidity of the real has reached a new apex. We hide behind the endless collection of pictures taken and shared, a growing fear of true existence and insecurity of one-selves. It feels like life isn’t lived, until the moment it reaches social media’s approval.
Still living in the moment: Elderly woman pictured at a premiere becomes an online hero - because she was the only one NOT taking a picture of Johnny Depp.[4]
This is why Richard Sennett maintains that ‘silence in public has now become the only way one may experience public life’[5], especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed. People prefer to stand in silence and post comments online followed by a picture of a live event rather than discussing it with the people around them. Public behaviour has become a matter of observation, of passive participation, of a certain kind of voyeurism- a voyeurism which reaches its peak with the use of social media and 4G internet broadband. Back in the days Honoré de Balzac called it ‘the gastronomy of the eye.’[6]
‘Re-Inventing Public Spaces’ does not intend to be another spectacle to be splurged online together with a plethora of other mediated events. It is an art project that wants to escape representation and promote direct action, creating a living public experience which intends to twist the expectations of its viewers/voyeurs and puzzle them. RIPS actions do not belong in any festival or institutionalised art fair. They want to remain unreadable signifiers, events whose meaning remain suspended and their consumption obstructed; they could be part of an advertising campaign[7], or a protest as its form is designed to remain unclassified. RIPS actions are site specific actions as they are conceived for, and conditioned by, the particulars of these chosen spaces without any intention to be decorative or illustrative: they incorporate the materiality of the chosen site, and as such they are inseparable from it.
Passenger’s reaction while observing RIPS action Women in Agony, Oxford Circus, June 2015.
RIPS are strongly influenced by the Situationist International, Dadaist practices, phychogeography and the lineaments of intersubjective space. Situations appear and disappear into the urban landscape; ‘they come together, and where they create something, that is a situation. But situations are temporary, singular unities of space and time. They call for a different kind of remembering.’[8]
RIPS perceive the street as a visionary ‘theatre stage’ and human beings as performers; an idea developed following the tradition of theatrum mundi and Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Our actions intend to investigate the vague line between everyday life and performance; making art in public spaces is a purposeful choice; the real world, as opposed to the theatre world is subject to randomness, an element which adds unpredictability to the artistic practice as a desired challenge and risk.
The first action of RIPS, a collaboration with the performance artist B Hanusova, Breakfast in London Bridge (July 2014) was a simple rhythm juxtaposition of how a slow-pace everyday action of having breakfast blends in with the quick-pace of a rush hour on a Monday morning (duration, 6 hours), an attempt to revolutionize time horizons.
RIPS aim to bring meaningful social experience to an eroded public life, giving the possibility for a multitude of strangers to interact and merge transforming the street into an experiential space of encounters rather than a functional milieu bringing us ceaselessly from work to home and reverse.
RIPS creates non-elitist art. Everyone can see it, it’s free and it expands outside traditional restrictions of time, space, audiences and markets.
RIPS second action, Women in Agony, Oxford Circus, June 2015. A comment on urban alienation, neurosis, uniformity and consumerism.[9] Sixteen women gathered in the middle of the pavement amongst fashion victims in rush hour and simultaneously screamed.
BUT MOST OF ALL RIPS is a revolt against the stifling routine of everyday life.
Our actions witness the possibility of a new public sphere, open to the unpredictable vitality of spontaneous authentic reactions. By injecting randomness, spontaneity, disordering panic and risk into a metabolism stunned by repetition and routine; they press the city to face itself in the mirror for what it has really become. They force us to put our selves into question.
I hereby acknowledge that I have understood the terms and conditions of being an artist in times of austerity, and I declare that I will continue to be led by artistic forces until the coming insurrection.
Signed: Eliza Soroga
Date: 04/02/2016
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[1] ‘Comments against Urbanism’ in Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 126.
[2] Guy Debord stated it very simply: ‘The world we live in is not real. Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back through advertising and the mass media.’ Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell, How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Capstone Publishing Limited: West Sussex, 2005), p. 7-8.
[3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1992), thesis 1.
[4] Daily Mail, <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3260626/Elderly-woman-pictured-premiere-online-hero-one-NOT-capturing-scene-camera-phone.html> [accessed 3 February 2016].
[5] Richard Sennett, The fall of Public Man, (New York: W.W.Norton, 2003), p.58.
[6] Sennett, p.27
[7] I am using this example here as while we were planning the RIPS action Women in Agony in Oxford Circus -which involved sixteen women dressed unanimously holding dozens of shopping bags and screamed in rush hour- I got an offer from a women’s clothing brand to use this action as part of their advertising campaign. Inevitably, ‘it’s the non-conformists, not the conformists, who are driving consumer spending. Brand identity is all about product differentiation; it’s about setting the product apart from the others.’ Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell, How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Capstone Publishing Limited: West Sussex, 2005), p. 106. It is alarming to notice their immediate response; ready to adopt this artistic initiative and commodify it.
[8] ‘The Long Walk of the Situationist International’ in Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002), p.4.
[9] In Marxist terms ‘commodity fetishism’ identified from mass production and homogeneity of appearance. Sennett, p.20.