Determining a Public around 3-D Street Art

Imagine waking up and walking out of that house on the left the morning after this was finished, I’d probably freak out for a second. Anyway, this is a 3-dimensional pavement drawing by artist Julien Beever. In class, we talked about the formings of a Public, specifically graffiti. Graffiti can be anything from the “Fuck NEU” on a bathroom stall to a highly detailed and elaborate street art. In order to help us define these expressions as Public, we referenced Michael Warner’s seven classifications of a Public from Publics and Counterpublics. Let’s see if we can classify this “graffiti” as a Public based off of Warner’s seven classifications of a Public.

First off, this public is easily self-organized. The public surrounding the pavement drawing consists of anyone who happened to be walking past this street, anyone who lived on this street, and even people like myself who stumbled across this photo through the Internet. Beever did not ask for a media showing for this masterpiece, yet people all over the world have seen this work. This easily falls under Warner’s second point, “A public is a relation among strangers.” According to Beever, this street art was a way of expressing his own curiousity with the medium. Meanwhile, the public has suggested this “graffiti” is meant to represent the ends of the Earth, the plummet into Hell, or is just something that looks really cool. This satisfies both Warner’s third (public speech on a personal/impersonal level) and seventh (poetic world making) requirement of a public. Searching this pavement drawing via the internet, you will come across hundreds of photos of people pretending to jump from one platform to the other, or reaching over the chasm. You can only imagine these photos found their way onto Facebook at some point as well. The popularization of technology makes it easy for anyone who hasn’t visited the street art to still be part of the Public surrounding it. It also increases the amount of attention drawn to it. This satisfies Warner’s requirement for a Public being created through mere attention, as well as the creation of a social space surrounding the Public. To tell you the truth, I am having trouble understanding Warner’s sixth point making up a Public, “Publics act historically according to the temporality of the circulation.” I am sure Beever’s work satisfies this requirement in some way, but if anyone could comment and explain this point, that would be fantastic.