Политике видљивости: Уметност у јавном простору
Politics of Visibility: Art in the Public Space

Summary/Abstract: The famous sentence from Benjamin’s seventh thesis on the philosophy of history describing documents of culture as documents of barbarism appears in the context of a reflection on culture as the plunder of history’s victors. This is particularly applicable to the art in the public sphere. Public space is the constitutive moment of politics of visibility, backed by the state. Benjamin’s thesis could be problematized further by questioning in what way documents of barbarism become documents of culture and what are the strategies of masking the violence inherent in such a shift. This could be connected to W. J. T. Mitchell’s statement that the violence associated with public art is not simply an undifferentiated abstraction, any more than is the public sphere it addresses, but it is “encoded” in the concept and practice of public art. Slavoj Žižek also calls this “encoded” violence systematic, symbolic and objective violence – inherent in “normal” state of affairs. In that matter Benjamin’s violence which he recognized in cultural artefacts is normalization of objective and systematic violence in the process of constitution of the tradition, and a policy of visibility within the dominant reality of some historical formation. Systematic and symbolic violence and difference between old fascism and new fascism are discussed and analyzed in relation to some contemporary artworks in public space: Banksy, Maurizio Cattelan and Hans Haacke.

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