Antonis Pittas

These hands illustrate that the public sphere has enlarged and become more chaotic in the past century. Photos of politicians rarely appeared in the paper in 1920, but by the late 1960s, politicians could be seen on TV debating in the House of Representatives, and today, they tweet voting-booth selfies. Politicians’ increased visibility in the public domain has not necessarily made their thoughts or actions transparent. To the contrary, it seems to distract attention from public and social interests, especially when the subject of discussion is a politician’s pants suit or motorcycle. By having chosen a selection from an enormous number of fragments, making them his own and then again making them public, Pittas creates new meaning, the value of which is not always clear. This strategy appears to fit seamlessly with contemporary reality, where the significance of what it means to be public also remains unclear. Of all the possible meanings of public, only one seems to be becoming ever more powerful today: that of publicizing or making something known to the world. Other senses of public – such as something being out in the open, or belonging to or being associated with government, society, or a specific social group (i.e. the public sector) – appear to be overshadowed by the dominant sense of public. There is a great deal of ambiguity wrapped up in the contemporary meaning of public. The hand – the body part so often encountered in the public domain – appears to be a most apt symbol for laying bare this equivocality.