I write as a means to tie together diverse yet connected activities and histories. The field of my practice as a visual artist (1) lies somewhere within a triangle whose three corners point at once to the geometries of the urban grid and its architecture, to the history of Minimal Art and to the experience of walking in the city. Writing about (and researching) each of these as cultural, social and aesthetic phenomena is a means to negotiate the triangle; I use writing to make the connections that allow me to find a space in which to work.
I gather material for my artwork by wandering the city, the cities that I have lived in and the cities I visit. I look for, record or draw upon the unseen everyday, the unnoticed, the repetitive and relentless phenomena that constitute the urban experience of modernity; I look to places and situations where I believe the underlying structures and unstated interests of the city are revealed.(2) For the most part my wandering is done on foot. Thus, although I will use different media and different approaches in my work, walking is not only the underlying recurring motif of my practice but also its dominant media.
In order to explore the mobile, wandering gaze of the urban walker, I deliberately avoid exhibiting work that requires a stationary listening place or prolonged watching in a fixed position on the part of the viewer. In the presentation of my work, which often takes the form of room sized audio video installations, the visitor will have to walk through or around the different elements and structures of the installation to watch, to see or to listen to them.(3)
Like walking, writing around my practice is also a process of wandering: wandering through different moments in art history, through a diversity of artistic practices, through an array of aesthetic, social and cultural references. This 'wandering through writing' allows me to collect fragments, which I subsequently link together to form a cultural and historical context for my art practice.
When the ancient Greek city of Miletus was rebuilt between the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE, it was designed in a regular grid layout. It is believed that the grid concept was brought from Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley to Greece. The ancient Greeks used the grid as a means of harmonising their cities with nature by aligning the streets so that they opened unto views of the surrounding landscape, thus bringing nature into the rationalised matrix of the city. While the modern grid, in Rosalind Krauss's words, "turns its back on nature" (Krauss p. 9), the regulated street layout of ancient Miletus was aligned so as to unite the city with its natural surroundings.
In 1573 Spain adopted the Laws of the Indies to regulate the governance and urban planning of its colonial communities in the Americas. According to Wikipedia "The Laws specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza's corners." (Wikipedia) Most of Spanish America's cities were built to this form, which echoed the layouts of the pre-colonial settlements of South America. When the newly independent United States of America appropriated parts of the colonial Spanish law of the Indies as guidelines for the urban planning of its rapidly emerging and growing cities, the continental dominance of rationalised, compartmentalised and regulated city layouts was put into motion in North America.
In 1811 the Commissioners' Plan for New York City was dawn up for the development of the city above Houston Street. The 155 numbered streets and 12 numbered avenues not only assured ease of orientation for the city dwellers and visitors in New York, it also facilitated commerce and the buying, selling and development of real estate. In The Grid Book, in her chapter on the urban grid, which she calls the gridiron, Hannah Higgins summarises the critique of the rationalised efficiency of the American city layout "…the gridiron in the United States of the Industrial Revolution embodies the mechanical efficiency and rational organization of the mass-production enterprise." (Higgins pp. 70-71)
Growing up in North America, I first experienced the modern city as a vast and complex three-dimensional grid based matrix, it's centre composed of towering steel and glass oblong cubes, also grid based forms. Re-examining the gridiron layout of the American city and the rational geometry of modern urban architecture, I now understand them as at once accommodating and concealing abstract power structures. Invisible yet present, these structures manifest themselves in uniquely modern urban spaces which fulfil neither the societal nor familial roles that the streets and squares of older urban models did.(4)
Both the layout of the modern city and the dominant, modernist, architectural paradigms of the 20th century (5) have helped to produce a new kind of urban space. The rationalised and controlled nature of the modern city have led to the development of an urban space characterised by what Henri Lefebvre referred to as "homogeneity-fragmentation-hierarchy", the homogeneity and fragmentation of the modern city due in part to the industrial mass production of architectural elements and materials. (Lefebvre p. 210) Lefebvre warns us that the homogenisation of urban space and the repetition of architectural elements, by facilitating communication and surveillance, lead to the management and control of the populous.(6)
The repetition of architectural forms and urban space is also present in the temporal landscape of the city. The modern architecture and the regulated grid layout are coherent and repetitive in their structure. They, and the automated forms of traffic regulation, not to mention mechanised transport, impose a repetition on the individual's movements and experience of the city. But time is also rhythmic in the urban landscape and the modern city is characterised by a complex mélange of rhythmic and repetitive temporal forms.(7) The sun casts changing shadows on the streets and architecture. Responding to this diurnal rhythm, birds sing in the morning and evening. Rain falls sporadically and wind blows rhythmically.
Our own bodies impose their rhythm on our experience of the city, at times we are keeping step with the city's repetitive structure, at times we are losing sync and improvising to our own (heart) beats. Walking, as a means of traversing space with our bodies rhythmically, offers us the most efficient means of connecting ourselves with the rhythm of the city, and potentially a way subverting the fragmented homogeneity of its mechanical, repetitive elements.(8) While the regulated, coherent forms of the urban grid and of modern architecture control and affect our experience of the city, the complex articulation of these structures allow for gaps to appear within their inherent geometry. It is in these gaps, these spaces between the lines of the grid, that the disinterested urban walker, the flâneur, the situationist and the artist will feel free to wander.(9)
Historically, we can identify moments where walking in the city became both a subversive and an aesthetic act. In his essay, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Walter Benjamin wrote about the appearance of the flâneur in the French capital. Benjamin saw this uniquely urban, and uniquely post eighteenth century figure as possessing new, modern, forms of behaviour and response to his surroundings. He sees the flâneur as being a historical first, an individual totally disconnected emotionally and spiritually from his social, familial and cultural environment. “The flâneur is still on the threshold, of the city as of the bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he at home.” (Benjamin p. 156) The flâneur's disconnectedness and indifference allowed him to roam the streets aesthetically, without purpose.(10)
Affected by the, then still present, technological destruction and moral devastation caused by the Great War, the Dada movement saw the city of Paris as a clichéd readymade, "a city of the banal that has abandoned all the hypertechnological utopias of Futurism." (Careri p. 73) They proposed excursions to overlooked places in the city, transforming insignificant urban space into art by simply occupying it temporarily. For the first Dada excursion the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, was chosen as most suitable destination for its banal uselessness, banal as it was familiar, situated in the Latin Quarter not far from where the participants lived and useless as it was abandoned and of little historical or architectural importance.(11)
Later in the 1920s, André Breton, influenced by the Dada excursion, proposed the Surrealist déambulation. The Paris based Surrealists looked for spaces outside of the city in which to wander (or déambule). The déambulation took place in the non-space of the countryside (the sites were chosen at random) as it was seen as a space lacking referents, more conducive to getting lost, to unconscious wandering.
After the war, the Situationists proposed an experimental way of transgressing the rational logic of the modern city. The dérive as it was named and practised by Situationists in the 1950s was described in the journal Internationale Situationniste as follows: "A mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous dériving." (Careri p. 97)
While these instances are all examples of how urban walking could be seen as an aesthetic (or anti aesthetic) practice, they were, in essence, activities carried out by poets, novelists and writers; these walks were derivations of literary practices, (although they may have influenced visual artists). We have to look to the 1960s and 1970s to see the emergence of walking as practiced by visual artists. I believe that we also need to look to Minimal Art to understand how a visual artist would construe walking as a visual art practice.
In 1966, in the American magazine Artforum, the sculptor Tony Smith wrote about a drive he took with his students in the 1950s along an unfinished section of the New Jersey Turnpike. He wrote of the journey along the dark, unlit, non-delineated strips of black asphalt as a "revealing experience." He remarked on how, although the landscape was artificial, it was not art, yet it had the liberating effect of a reality that (until then) "had not had any expression in art." (Careri p. 121) Smith's drive along the unfinished, empty freeway was significant because it posited that the journey itself could be an art form.(12) His journey, and his later account of it, are also significant in determining the development that Minimal Art, its later metamorphosis into Land Art, and I would argue, walking as an artform, would take.
In 1967, the art historian and critic Michael Fried published in Artforum, partially in response to Tony Smith's article, his now famous essay, "Art and Objecthood." In it Fried wrote about the theatricality of Minimal Art. Lacking "presentness" a Minimal sculpture could not be understood as an aesthetic entity unto itself, but needed the physical and perceptual interaction with the spectator to be complete.(13) Fried wrote of the relationship as theatrical. According to Fried's critique, the spectator would become an integral part of the art experience. If the work would be the stage, set, (and perhaps script), the spectator by moving around the work would take on the dual role of the audience and the actor. The defenders of Minimal Art subsequently appropriated Fried's criticism. In it, they found an argument for the phenomenological nature of the Minimal Artwork.
Walking as an aesthetic experience can be connected historically and epistemologically to the phenomenological and interactive presence of the Minimal Artwork. Nicolas Bourriaud, in referring to the influence of Minimal Art on some of the artists using relational aesthetics in the 1990s, explains that Minimal Art's "phenomenological backdrop speculated on the presence of the viewer as an intrinsic part of the work." (Bourriaud p. 59)
Bourriaud also wrote that Minimal Art "…provided the tools required for a critical analysis of our perceptual conditions…" (Bourriaud p. 59) Referring to Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" essay, he sees the space of the Minimal Artwork as being "constructed in the distance separating eye and work." (Bourriaud p. 59). I would speculate that it is in the distance between the walker and his or her surroundings that resides the experience of the walk. I link the experience of walking, the presence of the walker, with that of the viewer of the Minimal Art object. That is to say that the walk (aesthetic or otherwise) is experienced in the space between the walker, through his or her sensory perception, and the landscape (urban or otherwise) the walker passes through.
Setting the possibility for art to be experienced, led to the development of a form of visual art that would be based more on its presence, its interaction with the viewer and the space around it, than on any tendency towards craftsmanship, mimesis, figuration, or even expression. Tony Smith was an important influence on the American sculptors who established their careers in the 1960s. Artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt sought to reduce sculpture to simple clean geometric forms. They sought to produce works that had virtually no presence of their own, thus opening them up to enter into an interaction with the space around them, and with their viewers.
As an example of the form a Minimal Sculpture could take, consider Carl Andre's rolled steel floor pieces. Echoing the strips of black asphalt Smith described, these works served to define the space around them while themselves occupying the only the lowest periphery of the space. The viewer could enter and occupy the space, walking over the array of steel tiles; here walking becomes an integral part of the experience of the artwork.
The rationalised geometry of the modern city would influence the form Minimal Art would take. If we liken the geometrical structure of the gridiron-planned city to Minimal Art forms, we can use Michael Fried's model to describe the experience of the urban pedestrian. We can see the buildings and city streets not as static forms but as phenomenological sites of subjective experience. As such, their presence is as much temporal as it is spatial.
If we consider a video artwork, from the same era, which could be described using the same theatrical model that Fried applied to Minimal Art, we see the role of the spectator becoming even more complex. In theatrical terms, in Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(s), spectators are simultaneously audience and actors, but with the tape delay of their image, their actions, their images, their subjectivities become subservient to a technological process. Short of unplugging or somehow sabotaging Graham's apparatus, spectators lose control over their image which remains displayed in the installation long after they have exited the work (and infinitely long after if the device worked, without degeneration, to its full potential). Nicolas Bourriaud likens this technological loss of control to the effects of the repressive urban structures and technologies on someone walking in the city. Picking up on Fried's model and referring to Present Continuous Past(s) Bourriaud writes: "The filmed visitor shifted from the status of theatrical 'character' caught in an ideology of representation to that of a pedestrian subjected to a repressive ideology of urban movement." (Bourriaud p. 78)
To produce my artwork, I make use of an approach for gathering material (and ideas) that is akin to the wanderings of the flâneur described by Walter Benjamin. I see wandering as a contemplative and reflective, and at times transgressive, act. I also see writing as a process of wandering, wandering through written material, notes and experiences. The unpredictable outcome of my writing is often fragmented and open ended. In this form, it, hopefully, allows space for the reader to take distance from it and interact with it. Like Minimal Art, like walking, the reader participates in the experience of writing the text.
Notes
(1) As a visual artist, I work with, and in this order of frequency, video, photography, sound recording, film, text, and drawing. At times I will also use other techniques, drawing from traditional artmaking processes, to new media technologies. While my work will at times incorporate textual elements, both original and borrowed, I also use writing, as in this case, as a process by which to better understand and communicate my practice.
(2) A recent example of my approach would be a work I began during a residency in Buenos Aires in 2009. I photographed every Peugeot 504 that I saw parked on the street. 80 of these images will be projected in a continuous slide show. This work looks at a repetitive feature of the urban landscape of Buenos Aires, the Peugeot 504, an older model car that remains very popular among Porteño drivers. While the modern, European, shape of the vehicle is a repetitive feature of the streetscape, the variations in colour, condition and decoration of each of the different parked cars reveals individual and local cultural influences on this icon of international industrial design.
(3) An example of how my work is presented in order to privilege an active mobile gaze would be the interactive audio video installation The Man of the Crowd. Four video displays are attached to the walls of a wide corridor, two on each wall. As the spectator enters the corridor the corridor she sees white screens. As she moves down the corridor images appear on the screen; she sees the head and shoulders of a man walking past. The same man appears on all of the monitors at different intervals. The frequency of the man passing on the screens is increased as the movement of the spectator(s) in the corridor increases. The installation uses interactivity as a means of enhancing the random nature of crowd movements. The images (the movement of the crowd) are presented to the spectator in a sequence that cannot be pre-determined. Like walking in a crowded street the spectator has a direct effect on the crowd’s behaviour.
(4) Henri Lefebvre (who wrote primarily about Paris after Baron von Haussman's social and political rationalisation of its street plan) wrote this about the modern city street. "The medieval city was not a site of circulation, but an interconnected complex site of (familial, social and economic) exchange. The modern city (street) is dominated by the (abstract) circulation of goods and people." (Lefebvre p. 90)
(5) Here I am referring primarily to the influence of the Bauhaus school whose stated aims were to produce architecture "to serve the needs of the collective rather than to provide personal satisfaction." (My translation of, the then head of architecture at the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer's 1927 statement: "Unter Architektur verstehe ich die kollektivistische und unter Anschluß des persönlichen erfolgende Deckung aller Lebensbedürfnisse.") Henri Lefebvre however saw the Bauhaus, through its members' wartime exile in the United States, as theoreticians and practitioners of the space of advanced capitalism.
(6) Lefebvre found that though this new modern space bore the illusion of being logical and transparent, it in fact hid more than it revealed. The real interests of the controlling forces of the society were concealed behind what seemed to be a technological coherence. "This space exerts a curious logic, which we mistakenly connect with computerization, and which hides 'real' relationships and conflicts behind its homogeneity." (Lefebvre p. 210)
(8) Michel de Certeau, in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, describes walking in the city as an individual's negotiation of an abstract power structure. By walking in the city the individual can renegotiate and circumvent that structure of power. Referring to the baby's first steps, de Certeau writes "Walking is empowering as it is almost always our first real use of space." (de Certeau p. 84)
(9) Referring to Michel de Certeau's concept of space, Marc Augé writes that space is more abstract a term than place – it is a distance between, or a non-defined area and gives the example of judicial space as an "institutional and normative mass which cannot be localized…" (Augé p. 83) Space according to de Certeau is to be traversed "Space as a frequentation of places rather than a place…" (Augé p. 85) The space of the city thus implies our moving through it. We can only understand it by traversing it.
(10) I write of the flâneur here in the masculine gender, as in 19th century Paris it was a behaviour permitted only to men and only to a certain class. For a feminist reading of the flâneur's female counterpart the flâneuse, the Parisian prostitute, please see Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity."
(11) Although now, because of the Dada excursion, that may no longer be the case.
(12) At the same time as Smith's article was published, the English sculptor Richard Long began to make works in which the walk itself was the artwork. His 1967 sculpture A Line Made by Walking, was a straight line of grass trampled by the artist as he walked through it. Long's passage through the landscape had more resonance than just the traces he left behind. The trampled grass soon regained its form, the photograph of the line in the landscape was documentation of Long's act, but the essential component of the artwork was the actual walk.
Bibliography
Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London and New York, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, Schocken Books, New York, 1986.
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Les presses du réel, 2002.
Careri, Francesco, Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice, translated by Steve Piccolo, Paul Hammond, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2002.
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press. Berkeley, 1984.
Fried, Michael, "Art and Objecthood" in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.
Higgins, Hannah B., The Grid Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009.
Krauss, Rosalind, "Grids" October 9, Summer 1979.
Lefebvre, Henri, "Preface to the New Edition: The Production of Space" in Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, Edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas and Eleonore Kofman, Continuum, New York, London, 2003.
Lefebvre, Henri, and Régulier, Catherine, "The Rhythmanalytical Project" in Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, Edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas and Eleonore Kofman, Continuum, New York, London, 2003.