On the Open and Closed Space of Public Discourse

The subject of this article is to investigate the notion and status of public discourse in contemporary media. The article opens with a reading of the trope the ‘open’ (das Offene) in Rainer Maria Rilke’s eighth Duineser Elegie and then discusses the meanings given to openess and public (Öffentlich, Öffentlichkeit) in the academic discourses of law, philosophy, political theory, and sociology. However, the principal focus of the article is on the artistic and political interventions by two Austrian artists, Otto Mittmannsgruber and Martin Strauß, made in commercialized public spaces in Austria and Germany during the years 1995-2004. Their artistic works directly address issues of power and public discourse, and effect both a questioning of unilinear mass media communication and a politicization of commercialized public space. In the article it is argued that the interventions of Mittmannsgruber and Strauß in commercial mass media make strikingly visible the simultaneously open and closed nature of contemporary public discourse.