Small Talk with the Local Wildlife;
A complementary term that acts as premise to a practice, one that exists in the encounters of everyday life, following a DIY- individualistic approach to public art & life. Working under the methodology of Exploration/Investigation/Intervention to produce a dialogue between people and their environment.
Liam Witter
What I Talk
about When I
Talk about
Experimental
Geography
The metropolis with every crossing of
From what I understood a surveyor undertakes the process of collecting precise measurements of physical space. It is a practice that sees the world made up of geometric proportions and it can be attributed to the field of geography. Its use spans everything from creating land maps to making a prediction of the scale and effect of natural disasters, and it is therefore useful to a range of people from architects to city planners,. These seem like important reasons to take such scientific dimensions of space; obviously people need buildings to live in, and people continue to need to be protected from earthquakes and hurricanes and so on Indeed, the whole physical infrastructure of a city is reliant on the information that surveyors provide; without this information the city would become an even more opaque and chaotic mess than it already is.
The city is nowadays frequently navigated using Google maps and GPS systems. Google maps and (GPS) devices have become synonymous to the way in which people become disassociated with the city around them. For people who can afford to use this technology and use it in their daily life begin to rely on its descriptions of place to navigate the urban landscape. When seen like this, our imagination is skewered and we are left with the mentality that we exist on a flat plane. People see their function as being able to make a journey from A to B in the most efficient manner possible, the in between is not important. This is to say that to a certain extent of people are conditioned by a way of living to an order created by the city, that in its habitual frequency they think of as natural.
The sociologist Georg Simmel made the observation that: ‘to live in the city we have to become part of it and to do so we disassociate with what’s going on around us.’ Of course, he is not talking here with reference to (GPS), but about the way that people must become absorbed in the routine patterns created by architecture – routines and patterns of use that make some things visible and others unseen. This prevents them from acknowledging the geographic unconscious of the city. What seems to be evident in this analysis of mapping the city is that people’s reliance on the information that is given creates a gap in the ‘structure of feeling’.
It is here that psychogeography makes its entry. The surveyor constructs a measurable view of space that is represented in the map, where as, psychogeography is responsive to the mapping the absent or marginalised geographies of the city: the geography of the ‘everyday’. Psychogeography is a term coined, not by the Situationist International, as many mistakenly think, but by their precursor, the Lettrist International, who produced an alternative map of Paris which brought into question the need for creating geographies that opposed capitalist production of space. Guy Debord (a key member of both incarnations of the group) saw mapping as an imperial impulse, in an abstract sense, for one to look down at the city, is to possess it like an object. The map he created was based on a walk of desire that he called ‘the Naked City.’ (1957) The development of cut out sections of mapped locations seen as islands from which one can travel between by multi-directional route. It was a manifestation of ‘dérives’ conducted by the Lettrists and the S.I., that formed a social critique, simply to create the possibility for a playful city that subverted the bourgeois capitalist city.
In its original context it was an attempt to go beyond the End of art; it was yet to be categorised as an interdisciplinary practice existing somewhere between art, sociology, architecture, and anthropology, in and amongst the cacophony of social-geographic practices.
If we pay attention to these principles of psychogeography we now see the surveyor as a figure providing means for the status quo to continue, for the city to be run from above. This is regardless of the honesty of the surveyor, who no doubt aims at ‘scientific neutrality’ in using his expertise to produce factual data. Perhaps without any knowledge of ill intent the surveyor becomes the embodiment of an omniscient view of capitalism. For in this scientific practice can be seen a denial that the city is far more dense and complex than the physical dimension of its architecture. For, the city is being continually produced and transformed, not simply by the ‘planners’, but also by the everyday patterns of life – by the routines of work and leisure, ‘use’ and play.
‘Space is a practised place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.’ Michel de Certeau.
Psychogeography does not exist as an aid to the architect, but conversely it makes unique discoveries within architected space. The act of walking aimlessly leads the psychogeographer to create ‘loose associations’ following a train of thought that is provoked by the relationship between the physical and the metaphorical. These experiences run from individual thought that perhaps can create discussion and raise debates that go beyond explaining the physical dimensions of architected space.
The Cairo Psychogeographical Society was an independent collective formed in 1989. They appropriated the S.I.’s term to describe their explorations around the streets of Cairo, where due to the heavy law enforcement, with the army deployed all around public areas, doing anything could be seen as a subversive action. They received a lot of criticisms from official geographic organisations and from the press. Firstly for the reason that there was little attempt by the group to communicate with other research centres, therefore creating a high level of isolation, which reiterates the accusation that no ‘actual discoveries’ could be made. The lack of efficiency and determinant nature not to be engaged with other fields of study and to discuss its uses seems like a refusal to be involved in pragmatic action full stop. This in turn questions whether their activities are instead more for the sake of creating an elaborate myth surrounding the individual.
The surveyor by now began to question how walking through the city can be seen to inhabit any useful position in the social-geographic praxis without using scientific methods. Perhaps there is a need to reappraise the very varied uses of psychogeography so that it is not confused with Baudelaire’s flâneur whose time was spent hedonistically wandering into coffee shops and making naïve considerations of the street.
The curator Nato Thompson expresses the feeling that the appropriation of the term psychogeography has lead to a continuation of “Situationist-lite practices’” “which consist of tagging on billboards and uninteresting walking tours or pointless
interventions in space, typically they lack a reasonable class analysis and ultimately use the Situationists as a sort of fad to draw upon.”
One artist to deal with this appropriation in a very mindful way is Francis Alÿs who has praise for psychogeograpy as a form of social resistance. Although he recognises that once the suggestion has been made, the appropriation of psychgeography into art can draw upon the reasoning that anything can be included in this field of ‘loose associations’ . Alÿs adds a poetic response with ‘As long as I’m walking’ (1992) which bears clues to the way in which walking can be a philosophical discipline. In this way he separates this activity from the making of art work. The art works may include walking but also they involve other activities, the actions on this list for example, the ideas for which may originate in observations made during the prior act.
Francis Alÿs ‘As long as I’m walking’ 1992
also exhibits the use of walking to contend directly to issues of mapping territory which also contends with the political neutrality assumed by the surveyor. His use of metaphors and stories ignite contention in the heart of the social conscience. He spread a story about an imaginary man who disappeared whilst walking from to his hotel that went beyond urban myth, entering the minds of the small community and causing the police to eventually file a missing persons report on the mystery man. This ability to transform poetry into practice tells us about the operations that are produced by people and aims towards a geography of doing, a geography of practice. Although Alÿs’ actions are to a certain degree experiments, the poetic language that he uses to address the street is in fact a grounded response to political issues. For the metaphors and poetry he creates end up as interventions in the real spaces of the urban fabric.
“ Maps are embedded in a history they help construct…It’s not that the map is right or wrong…but that it takes a stand while pretending to be neutral on an issue over which people are divided.” David Wood.
Modernisation has left scars throughout cities that have created marginal spaces that become destitute and treated as dumping grounds or sometimes activated and turned into recreational space or temporary slums for poor people, homeless and gypsies. ‘Transurbance’ is another form of metaphorical-mapping that dissolves the scales of ‘non-places’ that architecture creates, highlighting the particular issue of liminality. The group Italian group S.T.A.L.K.E.R. used this method in 2005, conducting walking journeys to explore the riverside ghettos of marginal communities . These areas are typically misrepresented in official documents of the city. As is the case when ideological conflicts over land rights, which create territorial divides between the opposing forces. Architectural boundaries have been placed throughout history as a means of controlling the flow of people across certain stretches of land. The group use an aesthetic act of walking to uncover ideological constraints that exist in the city.
How are we meant to understand this relationship between art and geography?
The relationship between art and geography is built on many convexes that attempt to communicate the ways in which humans sculpt the earth. When we consider Robert Smithson amongst others of his generation, we see a shift in artists working outside of the gallery context. Since visual art became a fluid field for experimentation into other disciplines, it has been possible to set forth a new tradition of the body as art. The body is an instrument for which one can cross the boundaries between art and life, a tool for measuring the rhythm of the body against the rhythm of the land. Art can therefore begin at any given moment This opens up the possibility for a whole new set of actions to becoming aesthetic considerations, which bases art criticism in a much larger sphere.
Smithson once again shares this relationship between the city centre and its outer limits, in what began as several trips made to the Passiac River. The post-industrial landscape at the time (1967) skirted between the geologic and urban. Its impression made on Smithson was to recognise this site as a ‘territory of forgetting,’ he journeyed along, over and through ruins. He describes an epiphany during this journey ‘it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel’ which treats this occasion as an ‘art experience’ where he felt strong metaphorical connections were at play seeing the “The urban periphery..” as “..a metaphor for the periphery of the mind, the rejects of thought and culture.” the journey made symbolised a reawakening of the abandoned futures.
Smithson went on to find appropriate means in which to translate his so called ‘New monuments’ to an audience. On the 30th of September 1967 he took a bus to the Passiac river and invited people to join him. This is where we see the artist becoming tour guide and hence forth setting a trend of artist led inquiries into the ‘tour’. The ‘tour’ with reference to De Certeau is thought of as describing the ways in which humans have activated space and is often associated with geologic sites.
De Certeau presents the ‘tour’ as a mode for which to describe space that is the antithesis of the ‘map’. It is a useful tool for alerting the attention of an audience and exploring the multiple ways in which art can collide with an actual space. Janet Cardiff presents a convoluted paradox where to the viewer (listener) accepts the direction of a voice in there head (phones) and leaves the gallery. She directs their passage, whilst allowing for a unique experience it’s narrative attempts to match up with natural actions and observations realised by the viewer. It is a tactic of distraction, diverting the viewers gaze from the gallery institution to the ‘everydayness’ of the street. There is the illusion of synchronicity between the sound information given and the actuality of walking through an environment that is as much of a hallucination as the interconnected moments that make up a journey. With both Cardiff’s audience of individual people blending into the street and Smithson’s tour bus exist the peripatetic axiom that nothing is in the intellect before it’s in the senses. They accentuate our attention to the street to elevate the temporary dynamics that an interaction with its surface will produce.
What is created with Smithson’s ‘new monuments’ tour and Cardiff’s fluttering narration-into-film noir is the ability for a 1:1 scale map. Smithson makes a clear reference to a short story in the book ‘Exactitude of Science’ by Jorge Luis
Borges. The story is about a map so large that it covers an entire kingdom which it represents. The failure of this map being that it becomes weathered and torn, which remarks on the relation between maps and territory and the futility of trying to represent place in a 2D form. Smithson imagines the Passiac as a 1:1 scale map: ‘I had been on a planet that had a map of the Passaic drawn over it and a rather imperfect map at that.’ and it is a space where Smithson can make physical interventions, ‘At any moment my feet were apt to fall through the cardboard ground.’ He interjects a journey into the map, in the metaphorical cutting and rearranging of the 1:1 map he discovers a means to glean aesthetic and philosophical categories with which to work from the territory.
These are ‘new geographies’ that are in conjunction with a contextual art practice and the pragmatics of producing space. When we begin to consider what Henri Lefebvre termed ‘The production of space’ we can bare these associations between geography and art together, but it’s not quite a neatly wrapped parcel. The production of space is to suggest that we actively construct the world around us and as a result the world around creates us, what we do is characterized by the material world we construct. These principles are part of a Marxist tradition that can be seen in the creation of new geographies. To comprehend an artist’s interdisciplinary approach to issues of geography, one needs to stop seeing art purely as a cultural production and see these experiments as an inclusive part of the production of space. Coming from Walter Benjamin: “rather than ask, ‘what is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them’?’”
Going back to the party, we need to reappraise the surveyor’s involvement production of space. I want to now revoke the surveyors’ neutrality with reference to this symbolic exchange. If we consider our position at this party, we will see that our own act of being here amongst this crowded courtyard has created a space for discussion. In this respect we have finally reached our paradox. To take this further I want you to consider your relation to a geographer. A geographer may use collated information to produce a spatial geography, but at the same time their own engagement with surveyors plans, researchers and the people who are involved in the organisation and its material surroundings is what creates the dialectical field of Geography. Therefore, if you want to take what I’m saying seriously then you might consider your interrelations to the workplace and the city as a space for contestation.
But is this geography of doing, doing the right thing?
Should we believe that artists are the most qualified in dealing with spatial-politics?
The investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting concepts out of existing sense-data through direct perceptions…One does not impose, but rather expose the site…The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists.
-Robert Smithson, pg.183, Lure of the local.
Actually I don’t think we assume anything quite that abstract. This is an important point to consider. As we see the majority of these artists creating ‘new geographies’ responding to places where they are a cultural-outsider. How can sensitivity to place in terms of grounded involvement in the socio-cultural fabric of a certain culture. Obviously there are artists who have inherited the culture and this enables them to treat it with the sincerity of an insider. Javier Tellez’s gesture of firing a human cannonball from Mexico to the U.S highlights a relationship between native territories. Particularly in this case of the race and class divisions in the level of control the U.S enforces on there neighbour country. Lippard suggests; ’We wrap ourselves in the city as we journey through it. Muffled, we march, “like Juno in a cloud,” drawing it around us like a cloak of many colours: a disguise, a refuge, an adventure, a home.’
In the evidence she brings together she grips at a sense of Localism to allow for a deeper response to place through historical textures, but is it an effective way of addressing place.This seems polar to the way a lot of artists now work. Being an outsider is in the nature of Alys’ practice, he is of Belgian origin and has made the majority of his work whilst living in Mexico city. However he has embraced this nomadic position, in ‘turista’ he offers his services as a tourist by placing a painted board standing in a line of locally skilled handymen. The romantic image of a nomad in a city is one of a drifter who has some kind of skill to offer in exchange for food and shelter.
Miwon Kwon provides an updated image, dubbed the ‘Neo-nomad’. She describes the nomadic tendencies of artists, ‘It occurred to me some time ago that the success and viability of one's work is now measured in proportion to the accumulation of frequent flyer miles’ Which tends also to go hand in hand with mobile-capitalist-economy. The influx of international Biennales and place-specific exhibitions offer a chance for artists to make work in response to the geographic location. This has coincided with a trend in producing contrived works which more often that not become self-indulgent rather that addressing any sort of actualities. Place orientated works can be frustrating in their attempt to directly engage the public. Often ending in a compromising position where nothing much is being said. Such as
Ghetto Biennale 2009, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
However being displaced can allow for a sensitivity of difference, which is to say an openness and practiced ability to react to. Certainly it is an escape from the sedentary nature, the sense of belonging that Lippard tries to maintain."A lesson to be drawn here is that an encounter with a "wrong place" is likely to expose the instability of the "right place," and by extension the instability of the self." Alys responses to past Biennales have taken the idea of ‘wrong place’.
Doppelganger is an on going project of stills taken by Alys when he travels to another city and comes across a person who has a similarity in their mannerisms to himself. He follows the person walking behind them and mimics them as if he is attempting to slip into the character of a paradox self. Alys doesn’t ‘ever belong to the cities’ he travels through, therefore to find his Doppelganger evokes a sense of ‘wrong place’ for the artist in the creation of portal for belonging to a place.
Alys is critical in his approach, contending with the politics of space whilst also remaining self-aware as to his position in the world. His discipline is part of the transgression from the plights of urbanism. The emergence is a field of contemporary art practitioners who are genuine in an aim to create geographies of doing.
Liam Witter
What I Talk
about When I
Talk about
Experimental
Geography
The metropolis with every crossing of
the street, with the tempo and multiplicity
of economic, occupational and social life-
it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life… a deep contrast with the slower,
sensory-mental phase of a small town.
Simmel (1903)
From what I understood a surveyor undertakes the process of collecting precise measurements of physical space. It is a practice that sees the world made up of geometric proportions and it can be attributed to the field of geography. Its use spans everything from creating land maps to making a prediction of the scale and effect of natural disasters, and it is therefore useful to a range of people from architects to city planners,. These seem like important reasons to take such scientific dimensions of space; obviously people need buildings to live in, and people continue to need to be protected from earthquakes and hurricanes and so on Indeed, the whole physical infrastructure of a city is reliant on the information that surveyors provide; without this information the city would become an even more opaque and chaotic mess than it already is.
The city is nowadays frequently navigated using Google maps and GPS systems. Google maps and (GPS) devices have become synonymous to the way in which people become disassociated with the city around them. For people who can afford to use this technology and use it in their daily life begin to rely on its descriptions of place to navigate the urban landscape. When seen like this, our imagination is skewered and we are left with the mentality that we exist on a flat plane. People see their function as being able to make a journey from A to B in the most efficient manner possible, the in between is not important. This is to say that to a certain extent of people are conditioned by a way of living to an order created by the city, that in its habitual frequency they think of as natural.
The sociologist Georg Simmel made the observation that: ‘to live in the city we have to become part of it and to do so we disassociate with what’s going on around us.’ Of course, he is not talking here with reference to (GPS), but about the way that people must become absorbed in the routine patterns created by architecture – routines and patterns of use that make some things visible and others unseen. This prevents them from acknowledging the geographic unconscious of the city. What seems to be evident in this analysis of mapping the city is that people’s reliance on the information that is given creates a gap in the ‘structure of feeling’.
It is here that psychogeography makes its entry. The surveyor constructs a measurable view of space that is represented in the map, where as, psychogeography is responsive to the mapping the absent or marginalised geographies of the city: the geography of the ‘everyday’. Psychogeography is a term coined, not by the Situationist International, as many mistakenly think, but by their precursor, the Lettrist International, who produced an alternative map of Paris which brought into question the need for creating geographies that opposed capitalist production of space. Guy Debord (a key member of both incarnations of the group) saw mapping as an imperial impulse, in an abstract sense, for one to look down at the city, is to possess it like an object. The map he created was based on a walk of desire that he called ‘the Naked City.’ (1957) The development of cut out sections of mapped locations seen as islands from which one can travel between by multi-directional route. It was a manifestation of ‘dérives’ conducted by the Lettrists and the S.I., that formed a social critique, simply to create the possibility for a playful city that subverted the bourgeois capitalist city.
In its original context it was an attempt to go beyond the End of art; it was yet to be categorised as an interdisciplinary practice existing somewhere between art, sociology, architecture, and anthropology, in and amongst the cacophony of social-geographic practices.
If we pay attention to these principles of psychogeography we now see the surveyor as a figure providing means for the status quo to continue, for the city to be run from above. This is regardless of the honesty of the surveyor, who no doubt aims at ‘scientific neutrality’ in using his expertise to produce factual data. Perhaps without any knowledge of ill intent the surveyor becomes the embodiment of an omniscient view of capitalism. For in this scientific practice can be seen a denial that the city is far more dense and complex than the physical dimension of its architecture. For, the city is being continually produced and transformed, not simply by the ‘planners’, but also by the everyday patterns of life – by the routines of work and leisure, ‘use’ and play.
‘Space is a practised place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.’ Michel de Certeau.
Psychogeography does not exist as an aid to the architect, but conversely it makes unique discoveries within architected space. The act of walking aimlessly leads the psychogeographer to create ‘loose associations’ following a train of thought that is provoked by the relationship between the physical and the metaphorical. These experiences run from individual thought that perhaps can create discussion and raise debates that go beyond explaining the physical dimensions of architected space.
The Cairo Psychogeographical Society was an independent collective formed in 1989. They appropriated the S.I.’s term to describe their explorations around the streets of Cairo, where due to the heavy law enforcement, with the army deployed all around public areas, doing anything could be seen as a subversive action. They received a lot of criticisms from official geographic organisations and from the press. Firstly for the reason that there was little attempt by the group to communicate with other research centres, therefore creating a high level of isolation, which reiterates the accusation that no ‘actual discoveries’ could be made. The lack of efficiency and determinant nature not to be engaged with other fields of study and to discuss its uses seems like a refusal to be involved in pragmatic action full stop. This in turn questions whether their activities are instead more for the sake of creating an elaborate myth surrounding the individual.
The surveyor by now began to question how walking through the city can be seen to inhabit any useful position in the social-geographic praxis without using scientific methods. Perhaps there is a need to reappraise the very varied uses of psychogeography so that it is not confused with Baudelaire’s flâneur whose time was spent hedonistically wandering into coffee shops and making naïve considerations of the street.
The curator Nato Thompson expresses the feeling that the appropriation of the term psychogeography has lead to a continuation of “Situationist-lite practices’” “which consist of tagging on billboards and uninteresting walking tours or pointless
interventions in space, typically they lack a reasonable class analysis and ultimately use the Situationists as a sort of fad to draw upon.”
One artist to deal with this appropriation in a very mindful way is Francis Alÿs who has praise for psychogeograpy as a form of social resistance. Although he recognises that once the suggestion has been made, the appropriation of psychgeography into art can draw upon the reasoning that anything can be included in this field of ‘loose associations’ . Alÿs adds a poetic response with ‘As long as I’m walking’ (1992) which bears clues to the way in which walking can be a philosophical discipline. In this way he separates this activity from the making of art work. The art works may include walking but also they involve other activities, the actions on this list for example, the ideas for which may originate in observations made during the prior act.
Francis Alÿs ‘As long as I’m walking’ 1992
also exhibits the use of walking to contend directly to issues of mapping territory which also contends with the political neutrality assumed by the surveyor. His use of metaphors and stories ignite contention in the heart of the social conscience. He spread a story about an imaginary man who disappeared whilst walking from to his hotel that went beyond urban myth, entering the minds of the small community and causing the police to eventually file a missing persons report on the mystery man. This ability to transform poetry into practice tells us about the operations that are produced by people and aims towards a geography of doing, a geography of practice. Although Alÿs’ actions are to a certain degree experiments, the poetic language that he uses to address the street is in fact a grounded response to political issues. For the metaphors and poetry he creates end up as interventions in the real spaces of the urban fabric.
“ Maps are embedded in a history they help construct…It’s not that the map is right or wrong…but that it takes a stand while pretending to be neutral on an issue over which people are divided.” David Wood.
Modernisation has left scars throughout cities that have created marginal spaces that become destitute and treated as dumping grounds or sometimes activated and turned into recreational space or temporary slums for poor people, homeless and gypsies. ‘Transurbance’ is another form of metaphorical-mapping that dissolves the scales of ‘non-places’ that architecture creates, highlighting the particular issue of liminality. The group Italian group S.T.A.L.K.E.R. used this method in 2005, conducting walking journeys to explore the riverside ghettos of marginal communities . These areas are typically misrepresented in official documents of the city. As is the case when ideological conflicts over land rights, which create territorial divides between the opposing forces. Architectural boundaries have been placed throughout history as a means of controlling the flow of people across certain stretches of land. The group use an aesthetic act of walking to uncover ideological constraints that exist in the city.
How are we meant to understand this relationship between art and geography?
The relationship between art and geography is built on many convexes that attempt to communicate the ways in which humans sculpt the earth. When we consider Robert Smithson amongst others of his generation, we see a shift in artists working outside of the gallery context. Since visual art became a fluid field for experimentation into other disciplines, it has been possible to set forth a new tradition of the body as art. The body is an instrument for which one can cross the boundaries between art and life, a tool for measuring the rhythm of the body against the rhythm of the land. Art can therefore begin at any given moment This opens up the possibility for a whole new set of actions to becoming aesthetic considerations, which bases art criticism in a much larger sphere.
Smithson once again shares this relationship between the city centre and its outer limits, in what began as several trips made to the Passiac River. The post-industrial landscape at the time (1967) skirted between the geologic and urban. Its impression made on Smithson was to recognise this site as a ‘territory of forgetting,’ he journeyed along, over and through ruins. He describes an epiphany during this journey ‘it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel’ which treats this occasion as an ‘art experience’ where he felt strong metaphorical connections were at play seeing the “The urban periphery..” as “..a metaphor for the periphery of the mind, the rejects of thought and culture.” the journey made symbolised a reawakening of the abandoned futures.
Smithson went on to find appropriate means in which to translate his so called ‘New monuments’ to an audience. On the 30th of September 1967 he took a bus to the Passiac river and invited people to join him. This is where we see the artist becoming tour guide and hence forth setting a trend of artist led inquiries into the ‘tour’. The ‘tour’ with reference to De Certeau is thought of as describing the ways in which humans have activated space and is often associated with geologic sites.
De Certeau presents the ‘tour’ as a mode for which to describe space that is the antithesis of the ‘map’. It is a useful tool for alerting the attention of an audience and exploring the multiple ways in which art can collide with an actual space. Janet Cardiff presents a convoluted paradox where to the viewer (listener) accepts the direction of a voice in there head (phones) and leaves the gallery. She directs their passage, whilst allowing for a unique experience it’s narrative attempts to match up with natural actions and observations realised by the viewer. It is a tactic of distraction, diverting the viewers gaze from the gallery institution to the ‘everydayness’ of the street. There is the illusion of synchronicity between the sound information given and the actuality of walking through an environment that is as much of a hallucination as the interconnected moments that make up a journey. With both Cardiff’s audience of individual people blending into the street and Smithson’s tour bus exist the peripatetic axiom that nothing is in the intellect before it’s in the senses. They accentuate our attention to the street to elevate the temporary dynamics that an interaction with its surface will produce.
What is created with Smithson’s ‘new monuments’ tour and Cardiff’s fluttering narration-into-film noir is the ability for a 1:1 scale map. Smithson makes a clear reference to a short story in the book ‘Exactitude of Science’ by Jorge Luis
Borges. The story is about a map so large that it covers an entire kingdom which it represents. The failure of this map being that it becomes weathered and torn, which remarks on the relation between maps and territory and the futility of trying to represent place in a 2D form. Smithson imagines the Passiac as a 1:1 scale map: ‘I had been on a planet that had a map of the Passaic drawn over it and a rather imperfect map at that.’ and it is a space where Smithson can make physical interventions, ‘At any moment my feet were apt to fall through the cardboard ground.’ He interjects a journey into the map, in the metaphorical cutting and rearranging of the 1:1 map he discovers a means to glean aesthetic and philosophical categories with which to work from the territory.
These are ‘new geographies’ that are in conjunction with a contextual art practice and the pragmatics of producing space. When we begin to consider what Henri Lefebvre termed ‘The production of space’ we can bare these associations between geography and art together, but it’s not quite a neatly wrapped parcel. The production of space is to suggest that we actively construct the world around us and as a result the world around creates us, what we do is characterized by the material world we construct. These principles are part of a Marxist tradition that can be seen in the creation of new geographies. To comprehend an artist’s interdisciplinary approach to issues of geography, one needs to stop seeing art purely as a cultural production and see these experiments as an inclusive part of the production of space. Coming from Walter Benjamin: “rather than ask, ‘what is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them’?’”
Going back to the party, we need to reappraise the surveyor’s involvement production of space. I want to now revoke the surveyors’ neutrality with reference to this symbolic exchange. If we consider our position at this party, we will see that our own act of being here amongst this crowded courtyard has created a space for discussion. In this respect we have finally reached our paradox. To take this further I want you to consider your relation to a geographer. A geographer may use collated information to produce a spatial geography, but at the same time their own engagement with surveyors plans, researchers and the people who are involved in the organisation and its material surroundings is what creates the dialectical field of Geography. Therefore, if you want to take what I’m saying seriously then you might consider your interrelations to the workplace and the city as a space for contestation.
But is this geography of doing, doing the right thing?
Should we believe that artists are the most qualified in dealing with spatial-politics?
The investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting concepts out of existing sense-data through direct perceptions…One does not impose, but rather expose the site…The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists.
-Robert Smithson, pg.183, Lure of the local.
Actually I don’t think we assume anything quite that abstract. This is an important point to consider. As we see the majority of these artists creating ‘new geographies’ responding to places where they are a cultural-outsider. How can sensitivity to place in terms of grounded involvement in the socio-cultural fabric of a certain culture. Obviously there are artists who have inherited the culture and this enables them to treat it with the sincerity of an insider. Javier Tellez’s gesture of firing a human cannonball from Mexico to the U.S highlights a relationship between native territories. Particularly in this case of the race and class divisions in the level of control the U.S enforces on there neighbour country. Lippard suggests; ’We wrap ourselves in the city as we journey through it. Muffled, we march, “like Juno in a cloud,” drawing it around us like a cloak of many colours: a disguise, a refuge, an adventure, a home.’
In the evidence she brings together she grips at a sense of Localism to allow for a deeper response to place through historical textures, but is it an effective way of addressing place.This seems polar to the way a lot of artists now work. Being an outsider is in the nature of Alys’ practice, he is of Belgian origin and has made the majority of his work whilst living in Mexico city. However he has embraced this nomadic position, in ‘turista’ he offers his services as a tourist by placing a painted board standing in a line of locally skilled handymen. The romantic image of a nomad in a city is one of a drifter who has some kind of skill to offer in exchange for food and shelter.
Miwon Kwon provides an updated image, dubbed the ‘Neo-nomad’. She describes the nomadic tendencies of artists, ‘It occurred to me some time ago that the success and viability of one's work is now measured in proportion to the accumulation of frequent flyer miles’ Which tends also to go hand in hand with mobile-capitalist-economy. The influx of international Biennales and place-specific exhibitions offer a chance for artists to make work in response to the geographic location. This has coincided with a trend in producing contrived works which more often that not become self-indulgent rather that addressing any sort of actualities. Place orientated works can be frustrating in their attempt to directly engage the public. Often ending in a compromising position where nothing much is being said. Such as
Ghetto Biennale 2009, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
However being displaced can allow for a sensitivity of difference, which is to say an openness and practiced ability to react to. Certainly it is an escape from the sedentary nature, the sense of belonging that Lippard tries to maintain."A lesson to be drawn here is that an encounter with a "wrong place" is likely to expose the instability of the "right place," and by extension the instability of the self." Alys responses to past Biennales have taken the idea of ‘wrong place’.
Doppelganger is an on going project of stills taken by Alys when he travels to another city and comes across a person who has a similarity in their mannerisms to himself. He follows the person walking behind them and mimics them as if he is attempting to slip into the character of a paradox self. Alys doesn’t ‘ever belong to the cities’ he travels through, therefore to find his Doppelganger evokes a sense of ‘wrong place’ for the artist in the creation of portal for belonging to a place.
Alys is critical in his approach, contending with the politics of space whilst also remaining self-aware as to his position in the world. His discipline is part of the transgression from the plights of urbanism. The emergence is a field of contemporary art practitioners who are genuine in an aim to create geographies of doing.
Open Council
Interviewed by Liam Witter
Beyond Civic Duty
Art galleries and, art institutions have learnt to always stay one step ahead capitalising the art world and keeping artists under the thumb. This is proven by the stance taken by ‘institutional critique’ – the overbearing problematic- the artist falls back attached by a bungee cord. Since the late 60s and 70s, many artists that have tried to work with art as a fluid form have come to realise the implications. Alan Kaprow’s ‘Course’ (1968) describes this energetic propulsion (an effort by artists to escape institutionalised practices) that ultimately ended up filtering back and submitting to art institutions, and he became a teacher.
Since the 60’s the idea of self-institution has been developed, purposing organised structures adjacent to existing models. The Copenhagen Free University, established in 2001 by Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise, created a place for an alternative way of thinking about public order and education. These initiatives have been set up in various different ways worldwide. In developing
key critical art strategies the ‘Open Council’ a project set up by John Maclean in 2007 (Ph.D fine art Newcastle Upon-Tyne UK) purposes a form of self-institution carried out through the Open Council website. The ‘Open Council’ provides a healthy sense of anarchy—albeit behind the mask of formal officialdom. The careful art of diplomacy emerges as made-up policies that shed a rhetoric sense of ‘what if’. Asking “What is your policy?” its members begin a cycle of ridiculousness in the subtle appropriation of a city council framework..
Liam Witter: Orange charming seems to be an emblem for the website, is there a particular significance with the orange as symbolic of your practice? Where did the story of the orange originate?
John Maclean: The short answer is it mostly came from work I was doing in the studio. If you look at the website and see the story you may think it came from a lot of thought, but really it came from messing around. I’m an amateur musician, through fiddling around improvising with these flutes and looking at improvisation in relation to process based art works these ideas of process became important. Orange charming was about emphasizing process, obviously the orange would never charm however the belief is what’s important, the aim. This added a plot device for all sort of other things to happen. An even shorter answer would be that it’s based on snake charming.
J: The idea of a story or a spoof council takes the pressure off the art practice, within the story you can get on with all sorts of experimental stuff.
L: The nature of the practice is experimental.
J: It is very experimental, the story is meant ultimately to give value or valorise very experimental stuff that otherwise might just be left hanging as something too disparate. It might just be an idea, but with the story you can give a bit more.
L: Do you think before your Ph.D there were a lot of loose ends..? Did this help to tie it together? How did you get to this point?
J: I was interested in a kind of systemic abstract painting in which the paintings are made according to a set of rules. This evolved into the idea of treating the painting process as a game which could be 'played' by several people at once with each 'player' taking it in turns to engage with the canvas (or bit of old wood in my case). The aim of this was to find ways to emphasise the making process rather than the resulting art work and to critique of ideas of individual authorship and the commodified art object. What were left over were stones from relational aesthetics and discussions of public participation. Open council was my ultimate solution to this complex area.
L: What do you feel were the failings of public participation?
J: It’s a vast area in terms of art works that seek participation. These experiments with shared authorship and collaboration led me to research relational aesthetics and the discourse of participation in which the critical potential of multiple authorship and participatory art is brought into question. From this point onwards I suppose I became more interested in critical art and the aim of developing critical art strategies for the contemporary social political and economic context and this is where I came across the Copenhagen Free University project and their aim to oppose and resist the idea of a 'knowledge economy' through the practice of self-institution. At the root of my practice is to develop critical art strategies – critical attention. If that’s what you’re interested in the question then is: does public art have any critical potential?—the answers is no. It’s not my thing. I want to be able to make work about it without having to arrange a huge logistical operation to get people involved. It’s often very restrictive to work like that.
L: What kind of audience do you feel the Open Council has?
J: Well, doesn’t really matter if no one looks at it. The project is about creating the impression of a public institution, and, at the same time to be viewed as art work / experimental practice or research of any kind can be woven into that story, so, even though everything on the website is directed to an imaginary public of Open Council members it’s not important that people see it. The process of creating the story is the artwork.
L: What role do you think you have?
J: It’s probably obvious from the site. I don’t engage in any sort of public art. It could do. It’s more about giving the impression of public art happening. I suppose there is some doubt as to whether that has happened, so ultimately the project, you could say it’s about public art, as it’s subject but it’s all within art work, rather than approaching the public, its not as direct as that.
L: Would you say it is in the realm of public art?
J: Not public art. I suppose it’s more institutional power. The relationship between institution and public within that is public art. But, because it’s a vast subject that links fascinating subjects I wanted to delve into all aspects of it, in a way that I don’t think you can if you’ve got a public art practice; one where you’ve got an idea and you go do it. I felt it was more beneficial to make an art practice about the discourse of Public art without having to do it.
How does this idea of self-institution offer criticism if Its not involved with other institutions?
J: First of all, self-institution, allows you a huge increase in possibilities for not only art practice, but what you might call research generally. It allows you to include suddenly anything as long as it’s fed into this. In terms of the critical bit, one aspect self-institution Is that it allows for ideas of collective and individual authorship to be mixed up and become far less rigid oppositions. This has come from critical theory the ideas of collective and individual rigidity and the need to free them up so that one can work flexibly in-between – that’s one of the ways I see the self- institution.
L: Do you feel that your policies are useful to you or to others?
J: They function firstly as satires of
the way local authorities communicate with the public but their real use in the context of the project is that experimental policies provide the Open Council with its ideological framework, mission and identity as an 'Institution for Experimental Policy. The thinking behind this is that the construction of this fictional institution becomes an interpretative framework in which art practice can be contextualised.
L: A city council deals with a specific residential region and the problems local to that area. Are there any distinct aspects of the Open Council in dealing with this idea of locality?
J: One of the reasons for choosing a council to base this work across, is precisely because it focuses on this local area which gives the opportunity to root one’s art practice very literally in the concrete streets where one lives. The Open council does not, however, attempt to mirror the council, to accurately mimic it or provide any services or alternatives. Rather it’s just a story-plot- stories of this bizarre local authority and art practice can proceed to be weaved in. it’s certainly not a critique of the council or the way they go about governing.
Do you feel it’s a project that is sustainable? How would it translate into a different project?
J: I feel it is, but I’m moving from Newcastle, which will be an end to it. As a practice, the idea of self- institution can carry on. It could translate into anything potentially, what it does is it turns into an archive eventually that will keep getting filled. I did think that I should write a story about me going missing to leave the story open ended.
L: Do you feel that there is any pressure to evolve it, in that if it was intended a representation of a council then that council has to deal with a ceaselessness of problems.
J: I seek to avoid it being real in any sense- because the purpose is fairly simply to work in this way so one can be more experimental, but, the other day I was contacted by UK TV a food channel who had seen the Open council’s ‘Urban gardening policy’ and they wanted to talk to me about it. They wanted to know if it was still running and to film an episode with this chef and a rugby player. The producer thought it was real. I suppose if I wanted to I could milk that. As it is, I completely refuse because project’s not ambitious in becoming real and constrained and after all it’s a Ph.D project. It could be interesting if a similar project had ambitions to be a bit more real or to engage with other organisations.
L: Have you had any other weird responses from people believing it?
J: A couple, a guy from the ‘Monster Raving Looney Party’ wanted to use some policies in his manifesto, I said yes, and I don’t know if he did or not.
Part of what I like to do is to connect the Open council, this daft spoof institution, with as many ‘real things’ in an online sense- connecting by bringing things like the ‘Big society’, coalitions, governments, nonsense about the Big society, setting off a daft contrast between Open council and authorities, suddenly they end up looking quite defenceless. I also like to connect with the police - the most powerful institutions- through the internet they are brought down to a level playing field, everything is reduced to the screen, easy to mimic, operate on the same level in a way you couldn’t do in reality. Suddenly they don’t have a big building to hide behind.
"Our practical conclusion is the following:
we are abandoning all efforts at pedagogical action
and moving toward experimental activity"
– Asger Jorn: Notes on the Formation of the Imaginist Bauhaus, 1957
25/11/10
Albert
We met before on a bench below the Civic centre, asking him for a lighter was an invitation to take a seat. I wonder whether to mention that two years ago I had confronted him with the same action, but curiously I decide not evoke this memory. To be a stranger again..
A friend from Czech Republic
Albert represented a philosophical figure on the first occasion, we talked in spurts, he never twisted his body to face me- instead gazing across the park. He causally spoke about his career at the Rambert School of Ballet. This jogged some internal jukebox that muttered ‘L’important c’est la rose’ – Gilbert Bécaud.
The rose is important, “everything else is shit.” - A motif for my first encounter with the man who had what could be called a ‘gloriously horrifying smile’. His teeth were the greenest I’ve seen. Obviously way past caring about it, I am able to take his photo, this was my original intention and vital that I did.
It is a relief in some ways to see Albert once again, I had begun to feel that the person in the photo had vanished and it was haunting to look at. I ride past him but then stop, deciding that it could be intriguing to take a photo of him once again. This time I get the impression that he allocates time for the activity of sitting on benches. This idea and the polite manner of engaging a stranger seems more of a European than an English custom.
We both look out to the view of five o’clock traffic on the outer ring road of the city. Albert watches to the right, a very tall guy of about twenty is bouncing along the pavement with his Air bubble trainers. Albert is following every jolting movement made by the passer-by, who clearly lacks a rhythm to his stride. It’s a ‘Rocky fitness montage’- gone bad, awkwardly flicking those long legs up at the back. A sudden halt from the bouncing and he throws his fists out, sparking the air. “ Oh dear he’s practising to become a boxer.”
22/11/10
How far do you need to travel in order to escape the norm? Well, 25 minutes from Newcastle
Alternatively, Durham
After graduating in 2009 the students planned a mammoth 500km cycle along the Trans-Himalayan highway, from the town of Manali at the foothills of Himalaya to Leh, a town deep in the mountains. Their journey was in order to study the effects of tourism on the remote communities along the route since it was opened to non-military traffic in 1988. This was translated through a photo-journal exhibition at the Oriental museum, Durham
Team member Adam Richards was responsible for recording this huge gesture. The selection of photographs captured mainly road maintenance workers; young and old, nomadic communities, children from remote settlements and rest stop workers. As usual with documentary photography the subtexts accompanying each photograph establish context and offer snip-its of information that bring it all together.
The last piece of info noted that the other three students had gone on into the world of high-flying corporations, this initially spoilt the entire conviction of the exhibition. I was disappointed and the journey along the trans-Himalayan-highway seemed to symbolise their last breathe of freedom before eternal damnation. I wonder in ten years would they get bored of their life in the Cotswalds and try to claw back the essence of excitement and freedom they once had. Only this time it would be a beautiful landscape framed by the window of a 4.4 litre range rover.
This is a grand assumption, that I hope doesn’t spell out p-r-o-f-i-t-a-b-l-e in the eyes of many Durham
But really they had no idea of local customs, had their heads buried in the ‘Lonely Planet guide’ as Dom Joly points out. ‘Every tourist that I saw clutched their copy like Maoist devotees clinging to their Little Red Book’
The Dark Tourist - Dom Joly’s recent paperback/travelogue explores the alternative tourist experience which has transformed sites of historical tragedy into places of travel. These sites are far from your average ‘fun in the sun’ tourist experience, Joly admits that his idea of fun exists in the “darker side of tourism” which is not to say that he ‘gets off on scenes of human suffering’, but that he loves to travel to fascinating places, some he remembers hearing about during his childhood.
He knows what he is interested in, with a background in international relations- it’s the big gun political figures that he goes in search of on his USA
He specialises his quests by arranging different tour guides who are usually confused by his desires to travel to places of war ‘the killing fields’ at Phnom penh , Cambodia or following other odd intentions such as the ski slopes in Iran
Growing up in the Lebanon
A good amount of humour often using examples of western pop culture mixed with factual information. For instance he uses Angelina Jolie as the ‘Tomb raider’ character to build up a picture of the temples he visits in Cambodia as well as to remark on a heavy-hearted moment witnessing the very poor conditions of a children’s school and how if Angelina were there she would have ‘flashed the AmEx and had the whole lot gift wrapped and delivered to Beverley Hills’.
Dark tourism – Dom Joly, gets ultimately involved in experiencing the atrocities that confronted with alternate holiday destinations. Coming face to face with a war criminal almost spoils his sense of what he’s doing. He finds it much too real under this circumstance, unlike the of JFK memorial where the event marked by an X and those cashing in on tourists is an otherwise unthreatening environment.
It’s strange though to consider the Gound Zero site, No New Yorkers ever go there’ there is something unusual amount monumentalising a disaster in such recent history. This is becoming one of the most visited dark tourist sites; site is surrounded by people cashing in on the act. This is tastelessness.
He brings out an honest and accountable look at each destination, if you find yourself with a strange inclination to head to Cambodia Cambodia
But meanwhile back in Durham
Richards, has not what I would just call a keen eye, but a way of documenting people as they are. His method of portrait is to let the subjects conduct how they be portrayed, ultimately they end up smiling. The subtext under Samad Koskshan portrait: He requested that he wear his hat to look the Cowboy from the ‘Bang bang’ films.
