Saint George’s Dragon
counter - publics | instantiation by adrian blackwell
installation conversation process assemblage ideology
Saint George’s Dragon is an unrealised installation for Guelph, a small city in southern Ontario.The project was developed over two and a half years from its initial commissioning by the Musagetes Foundation in the fall of 2010. The proposed work consists of three parts, a temporary plywood and steel sculpture to be located in St. George’s Square in downtown Guelph, a newsletter focused on the uses of public space in the region, and a series of conversations to be held in or on the structure, focusing on the questions raised in the newsletter. The project was designed to investigate the contradictory nature of capitalist public spaces through six paradoxes: affinity/disagreement representation/presentation people/things materiality/immateriality
The contemporary paradox of public space
Over the last few years we have seen a resurgence of political demonstrations around the world that have re-animated the concept of public space. In each case, citizens gathered in squares and streets to protest today’s political economy of austerity and inequality. In the face of a pro-market neo-liberal ideology that privatises public assets and encloses common resources, it is no surprise that recent political resistance demands the right to occupy the city. Since the 1970s countries have reversed the redistributive agenda of Keynesian economics, in order to govern according to the rule of the market. Neo-liberalism has wrought a two- headed assault on authentic public space: it has privatised and commodified it while at the same time implementing a regime of surveillance and control over it. These two forms of enclosure, one generated by the free market, the other by the state, function as complementary dimensions of society, opening new markets while policing consequent social instability and economic inequality. Although this duality of openness and violence is obviously contradictory, many people accept these public/private spaces as the unified horizon of our possibility. Real public space is constructed through active struggles that name and demonstrate the contradictions that structure it. By thinking of public space in terms of its essential polarities, it becomes a contested field, providing a conceptual and physical space for discussion and disagreement. Public space is constitutively paradoxical. Public space is nothing but the terrain of its ongoing negotiation.
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privacy/publicity city/urbanisation
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