Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kinga Araya

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Thesis in the Special Individualized Program

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at

Concordia University

Montral, Qubec, Canada

 

 

 

 

 

 

April, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kinga Araya

 

ABSTRACT

 

Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper

 

 

 

 

Kinga Araya, Ph.D.

Concordia University, 2004

 

 

       This thesis investigates two art performances involving walking in the city that are conceptualized as exilic works of art: Krzysztof Wodiczkos Vehicle performed in 1973 in Warsaw; and Adrian Pipers Catalysis performed from 1970 to 1971 in New York. My contention is that Wodiczkos and Pipers walks in the city can be examined by applying a threefold understanding of exile. First, these important performative artworks made manifest in the form of artistic walks are marginalized within, or exiled from, an institutionalized mainstream art. Second, the artists themselves communicate either personal or metaphorical states of exile. Third, the phenomena of contemporary metropolises, as diverse as the communist Warsaw and the capitalist New York of the 1970s are analyzed as alienating and exilic social dwellings par excellence in which most of the inhabitants do not feel at home.

       This paper also summarizes a much longer and more intense conflation of my personal and professional experience with walking. I, myself, am an exile, who literally walked away from a student trip in Florence, Italy. Since that crucial event, I have developed a very special relationship with walking, this most humble human activity that I no longer take for granted. In order to make my writing more conversational I traveled to Poland and the United States to walk the same streets that Wodiczko and Piper walked during their performances with my photo and video cameras.  My visual and textual re-tracing of the artists steps form a creative part of this dissertation. Since I wanted to exhaust the richness of these two exilic art works and to connect them to the contemporary urban experience, I employ my personal writing style and juxtapose it with the photographs I took in Warsaw and New York. These creative reflections on walking that enrich the academic form of expression are enclosed in two attachments following the chapters in which I theoretically analyze Wodiczkos and Pipers walking performance artworks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Richard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First and foremost I wish to thank my artists, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper, for providing me with invaluable information regarding their artworks.

I thank my supervisor, Dr. Olivier Asselin, for his thoughtful comments, corrections, and encouragement during my doctoral studies; I acknowledge careful readings and corrections by Lynn Hughes, Martha Evens, and Mary OMalley; I greatly appreciate technical support and help of Pierre-Emmanuel Lvesque, Christian Mercier, and Kimberly-Ann Shier whose generosity was beyond my expectations. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preface

 

 

This is a thesis written by a scholar and an artist engaged in visual representations of walking and talking. My doctoral research was twofold: on one hand, studio art practice and, on the other, art history and critical theory. My  thesis therefore consists of two parts: an art exhibition and an academic thesis.

During my doctoral research I produced a number of artworks related to the themes of my final exhibition and my written thesis topic. My exhibition entitled Prosthetic Self featured only a selection of interdisciplinary artworks and was held at Oboro Art Gallery, located on 4001 Berri Street, suite 301 in Montral, in March, 2004.

The core of the show consisted of a sculptural-audio installation. In particular, there were a hundred and five pairs of used wooden crutches leaning against the four walls of a small room in the gallery (Appendix 30). This physical installation was accompanied by a twelve minute and forty five second long, looped narration in English and French (the bilingual script and an audio CD accompany this paper). In addition, outside the installation room, there were four video art works screened on a TV monitor: Orthoepic Exercise (1998), Peripatetic Exercise (1998), Exercising with Princess Headgear (Adjustable) (2000), and Walking with Arms (2002), (Appendices 32-35).

            Prosthetic Self introduced some of my theoretical and visual preoccupations with the representations of a contemporary identity. The fact that there has been a growing interest in critical theory with the concept of prosthesis (Prosthesis by David Wills, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin by Jacques Derrida, and Prosthetic Culture. Photography, Memory, and Identity by Celia Lury, among others), has helped me to visualize a prosthesis as an artificial and technological challenge to autonomous and freestanding notions of the self. By working with video, performance and installation art, I examine the notion of prosthetic self, visualizing its performance in diverse socio-political and cultural contexts.

The art works (sculptures, video, performance and installation art) I produce refer to prosthetics and they open up areas of indeterminacy that speak not only about aesthetics and beauty, but also about power relations. They problematize a formation of the self that has always been inscribed within the context of family, community, and nation.

            Although I felt my own defection from Poland in 1988 was the beginning of a pilgrimage towards the Promised Land, I metamorphosed into a perpetuum mobile. The compulsion to walk away from communist Poland towards the West was filled with a mythic belief that life is elsewhere. It was a search for the perfect walk, a journey with no destination. My personal art of fugue introduced many harmonic steps and transitions that played intensely without breaks and stopping points. For me putting one foot in front of the other was never about becoming a flneur or a flneuse, it was about survival and I did not look back at the ruins of the iron curtain, a burden engraved in the silenced and humiliated faces of Polish citizens.

I strongly feel that I have always been in some sort of personal and artistic exile but, soon after leaving Poland I became conscious of the fact that the foreigner is often treated as a cast off subject, an abject that is not allowed agency. As I walked through various socio-political systems, I was continually anxious about not being able to perform successfully in adopted political and cultural structures. While the communist system represented to me a false prosthesis constructed over the original socialist idea, the Western capitalist world offered still another fiction about autonomous self. My becoming Canadian was marked by profound realization that I needed to read a double discourse and perform accordingly.

Most of the artworks I have produced since 1998 address the reclamation of my body through differing and deferring discourses on loss. In Peripatetic Exercise I walked in impossibly heavy shoes; two cast iron hemispheres with imprints of my feet in the middle of each. In spite of the difficulty of balancing in the shoes I attempt, at the same time, to play the Vivaldi Concerto in A-minor (a piece I learned as a child).

During Orthoepic Exercise I walk around the swivel pole with a two-meter long extension of my tongue inserted into my mouth. My beautifully threatening instrument for correct (ortho) speech (orthoepy) sets up conditions for the war of pronouncing the words rightly. For this piece I performed in the enclosed and unifying space of a soundproof studio. It was a non-place, where the emerging language of violin and metal met as I walked around the swivel pole followed the squeaky sound of an iron tongue weighing twenty four kilograms. 

Exercising with Princess Headgear (Adjustable), was performed in a public space, as I was climbing Mount Royal in Montral. Dressed in black, I wore a beautiful, yet cumbersome and dangerous copper hat that weighted about ten kilograms.

Walking with Arms, was the fourth interpretation of my walking and took place in each of the four seasons in Montrals Jarry Park. In this case the prostheses are made out of maple wood and leather. These paradoxical extensions of the arms do not facilitate bodily movement. On the contrary, they represent grotesque attachments that exemplify the very impossibility of undertaking any unrestrained journey through time and space.

By insisting on building walking and talking prostheses in iron, glass, copper and wood, I wanted to seize the purest meaning of the self where meaning is circular and collapses. Constantly performing as an estranged body that moves in and out of socio-political and cultural frames, I deliberately exercise my prosthetic language by stepping over and over again into a world that both promises and denies.

The written thesis that follows acts as a historical and theoretical complement to my artistic production. I focus on two artists, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper, who were exiles and who performed walking in the city under inhibiting social and political conditions. Their works and sense of commitment have served as an important source of inspiration to me.

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction  p. 1 - 34

 

Rationales

The Chapters

Sources

Meaningful Walks

Pilgrimages

Walks in Philosophical Practice and Theory

Walking as a Tool for Change

Walking in Culture and Visual Arts

Walking in Painting and Photography

Walking in Science and Art

Performance Art

Performance Art in Contemporary Theory

Exilic and Itinerant Thoughts of Jacques Derrida

Performative Writing on Metonymic Body by Peggy Phelan

Walking in Contemporary Art

Socio-political context in Daniel Buren and Milan Knižak

Spirituality in the works of Richard Long, Marina Abramović and Ulay

Philosophical Meditations in Vito Acconci and Sophie Calles Works

Technically Mediated Performances in Janet Cardiff and Annette Weintraub

 

Chapter One Walking in the City p. 35 - 75

 

Etymology of the Word Flneur

Modernity and Modernism

The Society of the Spectacle

Baudelaires Flneur

The Modern Metropolis

The Urban Sublime

Contemporary Urban Space

Exilic Qualities of Modern Metropolis

Modern Hero

Identities of the Flneur

Arcades Project

The Poetics of Walking

 

Chapter Two Walking in Exile p. 76 - 103

 

Understanding Exile

Mobile Flnerie

Minor Subject

Estranged Flnerie

Estranged Identity

Lost in Translation

Marginal Flnerie

Minor Literature

 

Chapter Three Walking in Warsaw with the Vehicle p. 104 - 161

 

Communist Poland: Social, Political and Cultural Contexts

Polish Conceptual Art in the 1970s

Conceptual and Political Aspects in Tadeusz Kantors and Andrzej Partums Art

Defining Eastern European Performance Art Before and After the Demise of Communism

Formal Description of the Vehicle

Constructing the Vehicle

Contextualization of the Vehicle

Walking in One Direction Only

Performative Aspect of the Vehicle

Urban Flnerie

Polish Flneur

Sisyphus Work

The Production of Space

 

Attachment Walking in Warsaw p. 162 - 168

 

Chapter Four Walking in New York as a Catalytic Agent p. 169 - 209

 

History of New York City

Manhattan

Walking Towards Freedom

Cultural Context of New York City since the late 1960s

Formal Description of Catalysis

Walking as Catalytic Agent

Critical Biography of Adrian Piper

Self-Reflective Method of the Catalytic Agent

Catalytic Agent as a Political Flneur

Documentation of Catalysis

Homeless Body

 

Attachment Walking in New York City p. 210 - 218

 

Conclusion p. 219 - 229

 

Works Cited p. 230 - 234

 

Bibliography p. 235 - 240

 

Appendices 1-35,  p. 241 276; enclosed Prosthetic Self audio CD

 


Introduction

            The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the motif of exile in two art works performed in different urban settings, Adrian Pipers Catalysis, performed from 1970 to 1971 in New York; and Krzysztof Wodiczkos Vehicle, performed in 1973 in Warsaw. My contention is that Wodiczkos and Pipers walks in the city can be examined by applying a threefold understanding of exile. First, these performative artworks made manifest in artistic walks are marginalized within, or exiled from, an institutionalized mainstream art. Second, the artists themselves communicate either personal or metaphorical states of exile. Wodiczko, for example, performs his walks in the streets of his native Warsaw as an artist-in-exile because of the socio-political and cultural restrictions imposed on Polish citizens by the communist government. Adrian Piper, a New York artist, strolls in her metropolis to forcefully communicate personal and racial banishment from home as a mulatto woman. Third, the phenomena of contemporary metropolises as diverse as the communist Warsaw and the capitalist New York of the 1970s are examined as alienating and exilic social dwellings par excellence in which most of the inhabitants do not feel at home.

Rationales

            There are at least four major rationales for exploring my dissertation topic. The first rationale is to make a meaningful academic comparison between two walking art performances, in terms of their exilic and marginal qualities. Since there are relatively few descriptions and critical writings (including artist and critic accounts) about each performance, it is important to re-examine them by emphasizing the role of exile in each artistic intervention. I needed to get first-hand information about the personal and artistic raisons dՐtre that prompted the artists to execute these particular ambulatory art works. Consequently, I arranged personal and electronic interviews with the two performers, presented them with a number of questions related to their walking art works; I compared and contrasted the artists personal walking experiences vis a vis the official and alternative media press releases. The fact that the existing publications on performance art do not fully engage in analyzing the significance of these two walking performances as exilic art works amplified my interest in seriously researching them in terms of their compelling aesthetic and political contents that enrich the understanding of the phenomenon of exile.

            The second reason for choosing this particular topic is the fact that Wodiczkos and Pipers walking performances mark significant innovations in their artistic careers. Unlike most of Wodiczkos and Pipers later interdisciplinary artworks, these walking performances are executed by the artists themselves; they communicate, among other things, the artists remarkable integrity to perform despite constraining socio-political and cultural contexts. It was thirty years ago when the Polish and the American artists first started to walk to redefine the critical status of the minor urban identity. Taking into consideration distinct Eastern European and American historical contexts, I understand these two art walks not only as important caesuras within each artists professional development, but also as powerful and universal artistic statements that still provoke us to rethink the (unresolved) problematics of urban space. It is no coincidence that these urban strolls are ethically and aesthetically engaged. These critical walks in the city that are set at the highest formal and conceptual standards engaged the artists both socially and politically and earned them international respect.

            The fact that this topic not only solidifies the years of my graduate research, but also summarizes a much longer and more intense conflation of my personal and professional experience with walking is the third reason for its selection. I, myself, am an exile who literally walked away from a student trip in Florence, Italy. Since that crucial event, I have developed a very special relationship with walking, this most humble human activity that I no longer take for granted; therefore, in my numerous theoretical and artistic investigations I have become involved with the phenomenon of walking and displacement. This document reflects partially on my passionate academic studies, which began in 1986 when I was an Art History student at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, as well as on my migrant walks that took me from Poland to Canada in 1988. It was important to me that one of my major academic documents not only present scholarly research, but also introduce the near twenty years of personal and artistic wanderings around and about the theme of walking. Since I understand this dissertation as a very special revisiting of my own performative experiences, I have complemented this paper with a personal and creative interpretation of walking. I felt compelled to argue about these conceptual and political art works by applying styles of logos and pathos; so inspired and encouraged by the contemporary theory of Peggy Phelan, a respected performance art critic who argues for performative writing about performance art. I have made a critical and creative contribution to two walking art performances. Phelan claims that creative writing about performance is excessive writing because it  enacts the affective force of the performance event again, as it plays itself out in an ongoing temporality made vivid by the psychic process of distortion (Mourning Sex, p.12). Furthermore, she adds that performative writing is solicitous of affect even while it is nervous and tentative about the consequences of that solicitation (ibid, p.12). I welcomed the theoretico-affective challenge of re-creating these powerful yet ephemeral art works in my own performative act of writing. In order to make my writing more conversational I traveled to Poland and United States to walk the same streets that Wodiczko and Piper walked during their performances with my photo and video cameras.  My visual and textual re-tracing of the artists steps form a creative supplement to this dissertation. Since I wanted to exhaust the richness of these two exilic art works and connect them to the contemporary urban experience, I employed my personal writing style and juxtaposed it with the photographs I took in Warsaw and New York. These creative reflections on walking that enrich the academic form of expression are enclosed in two separate attachments following the chapters in which I theoretically analyze Wodiczkos and Pipers performance artworks.

            The fourth rationale for investigating these particular walking art performances is the fact that there has been a recent increase in the number of representations of walking phenomena in interdisciplinary cultural practice and theory, which inspired me. While doing my walking research I realized that there is a growing interest in the contemporary artistic representations of walking that are understood as important socio-political and cultural acts. There have been many exhibitions, catalogues and books published on the subject of walking. Some of the most important international group shows, accompanied by resourceful catalogues, are exemplified by Walking and Thinking and Walking at Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark (1997); Ambulations: An Exhibition of Contemporary Works based on the Notion of Walking at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore, (1999-2000); Les figures de la marche: Un sicle darpenteurs at Muse Picasso in Antibes, France (2000 and 2001); and the traveling Walk Ways at American and Canadian art galleries (2002-2004). Some of these exhibitions re-introduce the names of such acclaimed master-walkers as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Francis Als; however, each exhibition also presents younger artists who are making creative contributions to walking. All of the exhibitions and the accompanying catalogues argue for the indisputable importance of walking as one of the major contemporary artistic tropes that can be conceptualized in a rich interdisciplinary fashion. In addition, in the four chapters of Wanderlust: the history of walking (2000), American scholar Rebecca Solnit, presents cross-disciplinary studies of the walking phenomena. Even though Solnits research on walking encompasses a wide spectrum and is directed towards the general public, her conversational presentation informs the reader about the historical importance of the main philosophical, artistic, and social aspects of human walking. In Marcher, Cre. Dplacements, flneries, drives dans lart de la fin du XXe sicle (2002), Thierry Davila scrutinizes the urban interventions exemplified by the walking art performances of Gabriel Orozo, Francis Als, and the Stalker group. Davila argues that these three chosen artists exhibit a great interest in moving around the city in kinesthetic investigations of urban spaces that can be traced back to the first Situationists psychogeographic maps and performativity of drives. Last but not least, in Walkscapes: Walking as Aesthetic Practice (2003) Francesco Careri, a Stalker group member, posits a philosophical question regarding how the humans create spaces by walking around them. For Careri there are three historical moments in which walking asserts its importance while metamorphosing from the Dadaist banal and Surrealist oneiric cities through the playful and nomadic city of the Situationist International to the entropic city of Minimal and Land artists such as Robert Smithson. All of these reading are beneficial to understanding walking not only as a physical act of measuring space, but also as a potent metaphor of creating culture. None of these readings, however, introduces the motif of exile as important element of the walking experience.

The Chapters

            The paper is organized into four chapters. The first chapter, Walking in the City, presents a historical and interdisciplinary overview of the urban walking figure, the flneur, as it was introduced in Charles Baudelaires literary accounts of modern Paris. I complement the socio-political and cultural significance of the urban stroller, a modern exile, with selected critical writings of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, and Susan Buck-Morss (among others). The urban walker, the flneur, presents a complex figure, problematized not only as a disinterested Baudelairean voyeur who observes the modern city, but primarily as a marginal city dweller who assumes many alter egos in order to constantly adjust himself/herself to an alienating urban way of living. The flneurs alter egos can be exemplified as a dispossessed intellectual (i.e. an exiled artist), a detective, a prostitute, a ragpicker (a homeless person), a dandy, and a conspirator. Moreover, the phenomena of the modern and the postmodern metropolises are examined as alienating places in which the city dwellers feel exiled from their own homes.

            The second chapter, Walking in Exile, elaborates on one of the most challenging of the flneurs alter egos: the figure of the contemporary intellectual understood as an exile. Drawing on interdisciplinary texts written by leading contemporary thinkers and exiles such as Edward Said, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Homi Bhabha, I problematize walking in exile as mobile, estranged and marginal flnerie. Elaborating on key thoughts put forth by Edward Said in his essay, Representations of the Intellectual, I argue that the figure of the contemporary intellectual-exile represents one of the most provoking and empowering model scholar figures that performs within minor, estranged and shifting contexts. I complement the theoretical discussion on exile with two examples from contemporary literature: Eva Hoffmans Lost in Translation, and Sherry Simons Hybridit Culturelle. Hoffman is an intellectual exile who moved from Poland to Canada. This Polish-Canadian writer who exhibits rare sensitivity and intelligence translates for the reader the complexity of the states of dwelling in primarily linguistic exile. Simon, on the other hand, a native of Montral, takes the reader for a walk in Mile-End one of the citys most culturally diverse neighborhoods. Both writers engage the reader with informed and passionate styles that eloquently represent the phenomenon of living between cultures, countries, and languages. Hoffmans and Simons individual and professional work with the phenomenon of cultural hybridity greatly complements an understanding of the exilic figure.

            Chapter three, Walking in Warsaw with the Vehicle, formally and critically analyzes Krzysztof Wodiczkos 1970-73 performance in Warsaw, Poland. Wodiczkos work embodies not only aesthetically beautiful, but also politically engaging art. As it was dangerous and sometimes illegal to walk ostentatiously in public spaces in communist Poland, Wodiczkos walking machine represents a daring example of artistic trespassing on the existing political and cultural constraints controlled by the official state ideology. These formal restrictions imposed on walking in Poland allowed Wodiczko to stretch the conceptual limits of the urban movement in a way that had never occurred in other countries. In fact, Wodiczko became a performing figure of an exile in his own homeland.

            Chapter four, Walking in New York as a Catalytic Agent, introduces and discusses the series of one-year-long (1970-71) courageous and absurd metropolitan strolls in New York by Adrian Piper, an African-American artist. This early New York ambulatory performance communicates the issues of gender and race as experienced by an exiled subject. Pipers Catalytic series forcefully questions the nature and the formation of the (racial) self vis a vis its social identifications. Moreover, Adrian Pipers minor walks address personal and social fears towards the other. Her publicly displayed performative acts consisted of walking in the city while, for example, wearing malodorous clothing, a painted T-shirt, balloons attached to her teeth, and a red towel in her mouth. Catalysis communicates the limits of individual and group self-preservation in one of the worlds biggest metropolises. 

            Finally, the Conclusion critically compares and contrasts the two walking art performances and summarizes the papers main argument regarding the motif of exile in the two examined performance artworks. An interdisciplinary discussion concludes the dissertation with my closing academic and creative remarks.

Sources

            The sources for my thesis are interdisciplinary, as the application of one critical discourse on exilic walks in the contemporary metropolis would present only a partial account of such a rich and moving subject. Therefore, I have applied critical thoughts on walking drawn from literature, philosophy, and cultural theory. My real challenge was to discover how the selected modern and postmodern theories (writings by Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Zygmunt Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Julia Kristeva, Michel De Certeau, Edward Said, Peggy Phelan) and creative texts (Charles Baudelaire, Eva Hoffman, Sherry Simon, et al.) can be used to provide a context for the performances executed in such diverse countries as Poland a