By Ben Street

Standing outside KFC on Brixton High Street a couple of weeks ago with a sign reading 'When Is This Going To End', New York-based artist Sharon Hayes squinted in the afternoon sun, making her look even more aggrieved than you'd expect from her punctuation-free, angrily scrawled sign. Hayes' slight, defiantly eccentric adjustment of the Saturday afternoon shopping experience bewildered a handful of passers-by. A bus glided past, emblazoned with the weirdly resonant ad 'I Am The Way, The Truth and The Life', like an answer to Hayes's non-question. She walked a little course between the bus stop and the pedestrian crossing, as if warming up for a big march. A few in the know stood at a respectful distance, taking photos. An old man stamping his walking stick on the ground hobbled up and bellowed at each one in turn: "I work for Jesus Christ! I work for England! I work for Elizabeth the Second!" When he reached Hayes he paused for a second, perhaps recognising an affinity. Hayes smiled. There were titters. It was a bit tense.

Hayes' performance formed part of the Lisson Gallery's Perplexed in Public summer programme, an ongoing series of offsite projects investigating the nature and history of public political expression, explicitly playing on the 40th anniversary of 1968 – and as such its knowing failure was stamped through it as on a stick of rock. (In the two remaining installments of Perplexed in Public, in Trafalgar Square next week (8-11 June at 2pm daily), you can catch Allora & Calzadilla's Balance of Power, in which men in guerrilla outfits perform yoga, and next weekend, (11-13 July), Lara Favaretto will suspend a caravan over the parade grounds at at Chelsea College.)


Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future, London, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.

In another of her performances, Hayes stood in Hyde Park holding a sign reading 'Votes for Women', which was met with bemusement and some curiosity by joggers and strollers, and soundtracked by the continuous clicks and snaps of artfully outmoded cameras. Hayes' melancholy anachronism and ferociously vague slogans, here and in Brixton, did generate an awkwardness that was political in a whimsical way, a kind of altered protest in the spirit of Mark Wallinger's State Britain (2006). Is a true public intervention actually possible now? Are we too knowing and cynical to be surprised into action? These were some of the questions I thought about while watching Hayes, before being distracted by overhearing someone say "But don't women already have the vote?"

By its very nature, a protest is pictorial, composed for photographic record and for maximum visual resonance, and, like most protests, Hayes' work lives best in photographic afterlife as a kind of readymade political cartoon. You don't really have to be there, in a way, and as in '68, so in '08: I can remember it, so I must not have been there. The events took on a pointed, perhaps ironic nostalgia for the days when art's weirdness could send cracks up government buildings. They also had a kind of willfully self-defeating shrug about them. Now, a savvy 21st century urbanite is wearily familiar with staged oddities in the city – guerrilla ad campaigns, flash mobs, Trigger Happy TV – and it's increasingly difficult to induce genuine, fruitful perplexity on the street.

Hopes were high, then, for the Lisson's next public project, which started in the East End a week ago: go-to artworld bad boy Santiago Sierra's 4,000 Black Posters. Would they be made with ink from the dried blood of trainer-making sweatshop children? Collages of the bruised soles of Beijing stadium builders, sliced off using sharpened credit cards? No: they were 4,000 black posters.


Santiago Sierra, 4,000 Black Posters, 2008, on Brick Lane, London. Photos: Ben Street

In a dark echo of Daniel Buren's Affichages Sauvages (1968, in which he pasted his stripes on advertising space around Paris), they were slapped onto billboards and bridges on and around Brick Lane, and are now creeping onto Old Street and Bethnal Green Road too. Initially their unyielding, slightly glossy blackness, as frank and blank as censored text in political documents, had a satisfyingly puritanical and minimal quality, before accumulating graffiti like limpets and sinking into the background noise of city life. As with Hayes, the work began to recall insidious teaser ad campaigns predicated on obscurity and enigma. A flyer reading 'Minimal Carnival' appeared on one poster.

Claire Fontaine, Capitalism Kills (Love), 2008. Photo: Dave Morgan

Also attempting to perplex in public is 'readymade artist' Claire Fontaine, a collective working in Paris, which has installed a neon sign across the roof of a building between the Lisson Gallery and a nearby pub, reading, in 1980s computer font, 'Capitalism Kills Love'. The word 'Love' flashed on and off slowly, Nauman-style, nudging various readings all as hollowly sloganeering as the last ('Capitalism Kills!', 'Capitalism Kills – Love!', 'Capitalism Kills Love'). On opening night last Friday, you were supposed to go into the pub and repeat the phrase to claim a free drink. "Capitalism kills, love," I said to the barmaid. "I'm sure it does, darling," she replied. "What are you drinking?"