Dan Graham, Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out Variation H - Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery

Jes Fernie asks whether the rash of temporary pavilions in London and further afield, enlivens our streets or trivialises the provocative role of such structures.

What is this itch I have about my ankles?  Oh, here’s another at my elbow and another, priming itself on my nose.  Ah! It’s a pavilion; a temporary structure made by an architect, or an artist or possibly both.

As Tim Abrahams reported in a recent Blueprint article, there were no less than twenty pavilions scattered across London this summer, many brought to us courtesy of the hugely successful London Festival of Architecture.  And like a germ on a mission to procreate they continue to multiply.  Frank Gehry’s ode to vanity at the Serpentine Gallery; the ‘Portavilion’ structures in parks across London by Toby Paterson, Dan Graham, Annika Eriksson and Monika Sosnowska; and Jeppe Hein’s ‘Appearing Rooms’ outside the Royal Festival Hall.

It all started when I took my kids on a trip around London on a sleepy Saturday morning.  We began at the Southwark Lido, the French collective EXYZT’s ode to city living where the sun didn’t shine but we had a pleasant time hanging out on deck chairs talking to people like us who were watching the children of people like us being ritualistically cleansed in the pool in front of us.  Dishevelled, insouciant French architects were lounging around in beach huts looking very much as if the ‘participation’ bit of their project was something they engaged in last night rather than this morning. 

Slightly soggy but light-hearted and gay, we made our way up to the South Bank to see the Psycho Buildings show at the Hayward.  Oh no! A long queue.  But no matter, here is a temporary structure to distract the kids from the trauma of 21st century cultural consumption.  Jeppe Hein’s ‘Appearing Rooms’ is a thrill a minute.  Quick! Run into the empty room while the water spurts are low.  Marvel at your entrapment when the spurts rise again.

Clothes now thoroughly sodden, we pad off to steam dry in Tomas Saraceno's ‘Observatory, Air-port-city’, the Buckminster-Fuller-type transparent dome located on one of the Hayward’s sculpture terraces.  We lounge around in a soporific state of hazy non-participation, vaguely computing that there are human bodies traversing the dome above our heads.  We shuffle to another sculpture terrace where we witness the surreal scene of people indulging in the fantasy of living a bucolic life rowing into an inner-city sunset on an artificial lake, courtesy of the Austrian artist collective Gelitin.

It was a day of physical and immersive play which got me thinking about what is happening in our public realm, how art and architecture are increasingly being used as a tool to engage, involve and ‘challenge’ audiences.

There are a number of themes that these artists and architects seem to be interested in exploring:

• How to make a social structure which somehow engages the audience in a meaningful or participatory way;
• How to challenge people’s perceptions of their environment;
• How human behaviour and social norms influence the way we inhabit and negotiate public space;
• How collaboration with specialists working in different fields and public agencies can open up fruitful dialogues and engage new audiences.

What I’m interested in is whether these projects are doing anything more than providing an opportunity to bring people together, to create a good atmosphere and get strangers talking to each other.  Or do they have more bite: are they able to create a platform for dissent; a critique of contemporary politics and institutions or a platform for real social change?  Or, to put it another way, is there a void where once there was political dissent or action?  As Dave Beech asks in a recent essay published in Art Monthly, is there a declining ambition for the politics of participation? Is the participant merely invited to accept the parameters of an art project rather than assume the role of subversive agent? 

Do we go so far as Derrida who says that inclusion is a brand of neutralisation?  Probably not, but extremes can sometimes be useful to construct a critical framework.

How much is the government’s agenda to involve new audiences in contemporary culture related to this explosion of activity in the public realm and participatory art and architecture projects? 

What is the relationship to this expansion of artistic practice and the increasing privatisation of the public realm?

What does ‘temporary’ allow for that ‘permanent’ is unable to offer?  Is our obsession with temporariness linked to the capitalist drive to make us forget – to consume more tomorrow?

Or is this interest in temporary architectural structures related to a growing fascination with the intersection of the public and the private; the permeability of exterior and interior spaces or what the critical theorist Giuliana Bruno refers to, with particular reference to the work of Rachel Whiteread, as ‘the definition of the frame of memory’?

What relationship does the institution, in particular, the art gallery, have to the public realm?  Is the expanding number of off-site programmes and art and architecture biennials which take the city as a starting point for discussion, an instrumentalisation of art and architecture or a welcome implosion of the gallery walls?

And finally, is this activity indicative of a general move towards ‘easy art’ or the public realm equivalent of Julian Stallabrass’ highartlite.  A sort of immerse-yourself-in-a-physical-or-social-situation-and-forget-the-rest type of hedonism or do these projects provoke serious questions for those who interact with them?

I am genuinely unable to make up my mind where I stand on this issue. On the one hand, these structures quite clearly enliven our streets and create extraordinary opportunities for artists and architects to play a part in shaping our public realm and it seems churlish to bash that.  But I can’t help thinking that more subversion, dirt and dissonance needs to be bred into these structures; we need more public realm equivalents of Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’.

The full version of this article will appear in the October issue of Blueprint www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk

For more writing by Jes Fernie visit www.jesfernie.com