Blindspots: The Unhappy Public in Public Art

There is often a largely unquestioned assumption in public art circles that generating good feelings is measurable proof that a project was successful. If the audience has been made happy, then the project is often assessed as good. If the public are content after participating in an art project, then it is deemed that the work has engaged them in the right way. In this essay I wish to problematise these assumptions. In recent decades, theorists of emotions and affect, such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Jack Halberstam, have urged a reconsideration of negative feelings – like depression, failure, shame, unhappiness and rage – in order to understand their enabling and galvanising effects for political engagement and community formation. This critical discourse contests the assumption that ‘good politics can only emerge from good feelings’ and contends that living better entails ‘embracing rather than glossing over bad feelings’. Informed by this work, this chapter challenges the attachment to good feelings in public, participatory and socially engaged art which leads to a tendency to overlook the generative capacity of discontent. By drawing on the work of Ahmed specifically, the chapter aims to expose the unhappy effects of happiness and to think about what gets ‘hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy’. It does this by looking at two artworks, Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) and Michael Sailstorfer’s Folkestone Digs (2014), which offer useful case studies for discussing the wider phenomenon of glossing over the bad feelings stirred by public art.