A critical examination of the 'Public Programme' within contemporary art.

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From the informational to the informal, the practical to the performative, what acontemporary art institution's public programme includes is seemingly limitless.Despite the increasing visibility of this practice, it remains side-lined in institutionsand discourse. Yet, I argue it offers a unique vantage point from which to explorepublicness, as it is produced by the art museum and its extended spaces - thecontemporary art institution, art school and performance festival - in a mannerdistinct from exhibition making and other forms of the curatorial. I ask in this thesis:what can the space of the public programme tell us about what it means to becomepublic in the contemporary art institution?It is my contention that publicness is both spatially and temporally constructed; wemust observe and quantify the feelings, responses, actions of ourselves and othersto truly understand it. Through a combination of queer theory, theatre andperformance studies, I attend more fully to the sensuous, affective and feltdimensions of publicness, and trouble the abstract, singular public found in theconstruction 'public programme'. Challenging pervasive spatial metaphors ofpublicness that curatorial discourses often have recourse to, I then argue for analternative understanding of publicness as an emergent becoming.My understanding of 'becoming public(s)' emerges from the art museum and how ithas been tied to publicness in rather uncomfortable ways, alongside close readingsof specific moments during events I have programmed or attended that left mefeeling uncomfortable, awkward, or uncertain how to respond. My findings are takenback into practice in a series called That Awkward Stage: Private Workshops forPublic Programmers (2018-19). Inviting participants to share moments of discomfortin their double role as programmer and audience, I analyse anecdotes shared toanswer my final research question: what could reframing publicness as a process ofbecoming do to our understanding of the public programme in the contemporary artinstitution? This thesis argues for embracing the discomfort around publicness as away to rethink the space of the public programme in ways that no longer takebecoming public for granted.