Shauna Laurel Jones: What are people’s reactions to your work? In your film, How to Talk to Public Art (2006), I was struck by the silence of the city in the background—if anyone does anything spectacular in the city anymore, people keep walking. Do people ever stop and read your slogans? Do they talk back?

Mel Jordan: Sometimes. When we did Immigrants of the World Unite on Brick Lane, there was a very big prop we were holding up. It was quite theatrical; a lot of people stopped with their cameras and phones and started taking pictures of us. But they didn’t really ask us anything about it.

Andy Hewitt: But it’s not like we’re there all day doing these things; we’re just there going about the best possibilities for a photograph. It’s not like we’re making a spectacle to a passing audience.

Dave Beech: Because we’re photographing ourselves, people look at us and think we’re busy. And we are; we’re trying to get this photograph right.

AH: We don’t think of that as an audience. We’re doing our thing; we’re not performing. We’re just making our slogans and constructing an image.

MJ: And the idea of us being in it came about through wanting to embody our slogan and wanting to stand by our slogan and wanting to give presence to the thing we believe in. So it’s not anonymous. But we wouldn’t be performing for anyone because we’re not interested in the moment of doing this as one, “authentic” moment; you wouldn’t be an audience without the original. There’s never any original, so the action’s not original, either.

DB: For us, the relationship’s not about somebody watching what we do; it’s about somebody seeing what we’ve done and then acting on it—agreeing with it or disagreeing with it, changing their life, changing the world. So the reason we don’t perform to an audience is because we don’t want to turn people into viewers, or spectators, or observers. We think of people as reactive.

SLJ: You mentioned that people sometimes commission you to make public art, then realize what you do, and decide, “That’s not what we want!” It seems like people still have a very rigid idea of what constitutes “public art.” How would you define the term?

DB: Maybe it’s an old-fashioned category that doesn’t make sense anymore. I think in order to have public art, you have to believe in public space. If all public space is being transformed into commercial space, if it’s just retail, then anything you put there is a function of retail. All public art now is just a way of managing flow of people between shops, so that’s what is going to constitute the public. It just doesn’t exist anymore.

AH: Tell that to the commissioners! They’re still holding onto the idea. Because we talk about the public, they want to work with us.

MJ: We’re just interested in a different public: the public sphere, not public space. That’s what we were trying to say yesterday about what’s so important about the term “public sphere,” because it gets you out of that trap of “public space” and “public.” It gives you a way to think about things differently.

DB: One of the problems with the idea of public art is it makes you feel as if it’s different from the rest of art—as if only public art is involved in opinion formation, and the rest is something more pure than that; it’s not involved in trying to change people’s minds about things. So that’s another reason why we need to get rid of the term “public art,” which is the apparent difference between public art and the rest of art. In the other direction as well, one of the problems we face in terms of the industry around public art is that because it feels separate, there are separate ways of judging it. As if public art doesn’t have to be as good, because it’s not going to be under the same kind of scrutiny as something in the gallery.

SLJ: Especially if it’s temporary.

DB: No, especially if it’s permanent, it doesn’t have to be good art. It just has to fulfill the commissioner’s criteria. So you end up with a lot of really awful, pre-modern representational sculpture that refers to a particular theme that’s related to the site. The sculpture just wouldn’t survive under the kind of scrutiny that artworks have to survive under in galleries and museums. Most of it is just really, really crap. As art. But it never gets judged as art anyway. Not only is it not public, it’s not art.

MJ: The thing about it as well is that it creates this idea that something’s at stake. If you can get your “risky” piece of public art through planning, you forget about quality or value or ideas; it’s just the fact that you actually got the city to agree to this thing that was slightly riskier than that thing! Therefore it becomes imbued with this idea that the value of it is in its being more risky than things that were so bad anyway.

SLJ: Another thing you’re trying to do is to problematize the idea of “the” public.

DB: Some people talk about the public in an undifferentiated way, as if it’s just one big harmonious mass. The thing that frustrated us with the way the planners were talking yesterday is that if you picked apart the things they said about the public, take them out of the context of the plan and list the things the public does—or the things that they do for the public, the spaces they prepare for the public to occupy—it seems to us to be a very narrow set of behaviors: the public wants leisure, retail, and culture. And culture is just another version of leisure. And that’s all that they do. It’s a very narrow idea of why people come together at all. No planners are developing the equivalent of Trafalgar Square. But why not? Trafalgar Square works really well. Everybody knows that if they want to do a protest, then they go to Trafalgar Square to do it. It seems to me that that would be a good thing for each city to have. I think more and more people want places where they can congregate for non-retail reasons. There are lots of potential protests, lots of people with the desire to protest.

SLJ: How do you break beyond the external discouragement of protest, and through the feelings of, “Is there a point to what I’m doing? Am I going to make any difference?”

MJ: It’s difficult. There’s a sense that you have to keep doing the thing that you do. You try to fight for your beliefs, and you find a way that feels best to do it, and I think you just keep trying to do it. Otherwise you end up in a cul-de-sac of not doing. So for me, action is always protest. In terms of our work, it feels like there’s always a campaign, there’s always action to be done, there are always things to fight for, win over, resist, contest. Some of the issues we’re interested in, in terms of the politics of art, are these ideas of not performing, so we have no audience, we have no authentic original…

DB: One of the problems is how people conceive of their role. If you live in the society of the spectacle, and you’re a spectator of your government, you’re a spectator of democracy but not a participant of democracy. Actually within the society of the spectacle, your role is to watch, not to speak. It almost becomes a Catch-22: So long as you continue to think your job is to address the state directly, you will be frustrated. I think you would get further and make more difference if you ignored the state and started to address the rest of your citizenship. It’s more interesting to get the state to come to the citizens and say, “What are you talking about? Can we be part of it?” And I think that’s one reason why planners don’t think about creating an infrastructure for citizen action. They’re part of that state as well; they’re controllers, managers, administrators. That’s why citizens don’t need to do anything else: the problems have all been solved by planners, so why would the citizens need to act? Exactly that model that Hannah Arendt described: It’s like the planners are trying to create public places where you can be a private citizen…where you can just relax, not worry about politics, not be engaged, but just be side-by-side with people who are equally not engaged as well.

MJ: It’s spatial again: it’s just about putting people in spaces.