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
Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper
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
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.
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 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
Constructing the Vehicle
Contextualization of the
Vehicle
Walking in One Direction Only
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
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 and United States.
Meaningful Walks
The phenomenon of walking was born with human
civilization. We tend to take walking for granted, not realizing,
perhaps, its long and diverse history. In fact, one of the main physical
characteristics that distinguishes humans from animals is the bipedal upright
position of the former. Scientists claim that walking on two legs appeared
about four million years ago allowing humans to investigate and understand the
world differently than do animals. I would like to present a brief overview of
walking by organizing it into four groupings: spiritual, philosophical,
socio-political and cultural. My contention is that these four conceptual
categories of walking reflect critically on the development of human travel by
foot that is spiritually, socio-politically, and culturally conditioned.
Pilgrimages
Pilgrimages,
portable forms of the world's religions, exemplify the first category of the
oldest travels by foot. They constitute spiritual itineraries whose goal is to
cleanse one's spirit by walking towards the sacred place. Both the journey to
and the reaching of the sacred place are of paramount importance for a pilgrim.
Pilgrimages could often take a long time to accomplish and they were often
experienced as acts of renunciation of earthy pleasures in order to achieve a
state of simple, spiritual purity. These pilgrims, or people-in-transit,
relied on the donations (food, clothing, money etc.) and hospitality of the
people they encountered on their journeys by foot. Different visual and
spiritual principles exemplify the diverse forms of spiritual walks. There
were, for example, ancient Great Panathenaea processions organized in Classical Athens and in
Olympia; Islamic walks to Mecca originated in the VIIth century A.D. One of the
oldest Christian pilgrimages is exemplified by walks towards Santiago de
Compostela in Spain; to the Holy Land in Jerusalem, Palestine; to the Black
Madonna in Częstochowa, Poland; to the Madonna of Fatima in Portugal; to
the Virgin of Lourdes, France; to St. Peter's grave in the Vatican, Rome, Italy;
to diversely diffused sites in the Indian religions; and finally, to Zen
pilgrimages and parties at mount Fuji in Japan. The pilgrims, people who are in
constant displacement, were perceived as a special category of people. They
were called Homo viator, man that
travels.
While
most pilgrims were ardent believers in their spiritual ends, there were also
others who took advantage of the special status of the travelers. In his
Walkingessay, Henry David Thoreau researches an etymology of the English verb
"to saunter" and traces its history back to Medieval pilgrims'
"holy walks" towards Jerusalem, la Sainte Terre. Translation of the French "sans terre"
into the English saunter literally denotes a person who has no land or home.
The "sans terrers" were the medieval wanderers, idlers, and vagabonds
who mimicked the pilgrims walking towards the Holy Land. Their home-less walks,
sometimes mistaken for "Sainte-Terrers" became a marginalized walking
around with no destination. Sans terrers desired no place to rest; they were
migrant people whose only purpose was to walk incessantly. The phenomenon of real Sainte
Terrers and the false sans terrers
lies at the core of the
socio-political discourse that regulated walking in public spaces. While the
pilgrims were welcomed on the journey, the others, the homeless wanderers, were
not supposed to be helped because they circulated outside of the officially
constructed discourse of crusades and pilgrimages. Thoreau seems to defend the
very human right to walk freely when he concludes that "every walk is a
sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and
reconquer this Holy Land" (p. 49). In analyzing the phenomenon of
pilgrimages, we should not forget their link to tourism. There are contemporary
walks in popular culture, such as the famous (and somewhat spiritually
inverted) pilgrimages to Elvis Presleys commodified and tourist-oriented
Graceland, home in Memphis, Tennessee. All these spiritual walks and
counter-walks, which continue to take place today, speak of the great
culturo-spiritual importance placed upon putting one foot in front of the other
to achieve a greater state of being.
Finally, there are communities for whom
the spiritual understanding of the world is inseparable from walking. Bruce
Chatwins Songlines, presents a
beautiful literary account of the singing of Australian Aboriginals as they
walk the invisible Dreaming tracks left behind by their Ancestors during the
act of creation. The Aboriginal songlines are not a pilgrimage per se because they are inseparable from the Aboriginal way
of living; they do not manifest any faith organizing a sacred journey. Still,
this poetically and spiritually charged delineation of space presents a
powerful example of walking that plays a critical part in the mythic
re-enactment of the world whose end is largely unknown to humans.
Walks in Philosophical Practice and Theory
The
second category of walking offers numerous anecdotes and texts that relate to
the philosophical practice and theory. Meditations on bodily movement versus
immobility were important in Aristotle's peripatetic teachings in ancient
Athens. From the Greek word peripatos, meaning to walk around the colonnades,
the famous Peripatetic School was set up by the Greek philosopher and became
the first "mobile" school where two principal human activities, thinking and walking
were linked together. Although Aristotle was not primarily concerned with
investigating walking in his philosophical writings, his diverse
philosophico-scientific and artistic teachings walked around themes that set
new philosophical paradigms for many centuries.
According
to a later philosophical anecdote, Immanuel Kant's daily walks after dinner in
Knigsberg were so precise that people could adjust their watches according to
Kant's promenades. While Kant did not write explicitly about the importance of
walking (even though his promenades were an important part of his daily
routine), Jean Jacques Rousseau enjoyed walking and praises it in numerous passages
in his Confessions. Rousseau
recounts that:
there is something about walking which stimulates and
enlivens my thoughts. When I stay in one place I can hardly think at all; my
body has to be on the move to set my mind going; my mind works with my legs (The
Confessions, p. 382).
His last unfinished book, Reveries of a Solitary
Walker, written in 1778, is entirely
devoted to walking, which is at once the main inspiration for his philosophical
thoughts and a soothing activity that helps him to come to terms with his
difficult life. Rousseau composes his philosophico-literary and personal
reflections on walking while strolling in the Parisian parks; the activity that
soothes Rousseaus troubled mind and puts his body in a quasi-mesmerizing dream
state. Moreover, it seems that the philosopher wanted to achieve a pure and
disinterested state of mind while walking with no precise purpose. He states
that such movement as walking is necessary because there is simply no life
without movement. He continues that it is important to maintain balance while
putting one foot in front of the other. Furthermore, Rousseau claims that there
should be neither too much repose nor too much movement, because walking should
be done at a constant intensity. Rousseau simply wants to be in control of his
"self"; he does not want to be preoccupied by his thoughts while
enjoying the movement of his body. Such a disinterested state of walking
generates the sweet sensation of reverie. While on one of his walks, Rousseau:
plunged into a thousand confused but delicious
reveries, which without having any well-determined object, nor consistency, did
not fail to be in my opinion a hundred times preferable to all that I have
found sweetest in what are called the pleasures of life (Reveries of the
Solitary Walker, p.109).
Thinking
and walking is extremely present in Sren Kierkegaard's writing in which he
recalls forced walks in a room with his father, and the later importance of his
long solitary walks in the streets of Copenhagen. Edmund Husserl also argues
for a close relationship between walking and thinking, when, in many of his
phenomenological works he stresses the importance of movement as opposed to
immobility. In Husserls view it is when we walk, when we are being displaced,
that we gain a better understanding of our bodies in relation to the world
rather than when we are not moving through space.
The
phenomenological understanding of movement can be found in the deconstructive
thought of Jacques Derrida. The French philosophers re-reading of the history
of philosophy presents one of the most significant contemporary intellectual
contributions to existing philosophical paradigms. It is always a movement of
the other element (often overlooked by philosophy), the absent, the missing, the
marginal, the silent, and the imperceptible that is given a greater power in
deconstructing the existing status quo (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy). Even if our bodies might not necessarily walk to
experience the world, it seems that our minds walk tirelessly by adapting to
ever-changing and shifting environments of mobile deconstructive thoughts.
Walking as a Tool for Change
Walking
has also been employed as a powerful tool advocating political and social
change. Collective acts of walking seek to empower people to walk and talk
freely in situations where the political and social norms are imposed by the
ruling powers. Such examples of socio-political walks include military marches,
labor strikes, parades, and diverse political demonstrations, to name a few.
Another poignant example is the Argentinean womens resistance to the official
junta regime. Since public gatherings were not allowed in the city, a group of
brave women decided to walk counter-clockwise in Buenos Aires' Piazza de Mayo
to protest against the cruelty of the Argentinean regime towards its citizens.
Another
powerful example of walking, understood as a political resistance during the
Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., is the famous walk of Black people from
Selma to Montgomery in 1965. The predominantly Black group walked for four days
and four nights to protest the racial discrimination and violence of the
American political and social systems. Although the walkers faced opposition
and resistance along the way, the walk culminated with a crowd of twenty-five
thousand people in front of the statehouse in Montgomery, and was a significant
factor in the decision to issue the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Charles Fager,
Selma 1965. The March that Changed the South).
Yet
another example of a solitary yet strong walking figure in American history is
that of Mildred Norman Ryder. She called herself "Peace Pilgrim"
because she used walking as a means to promote peace during troubling political
times in the United States. In order to make such a committed and admirable
life decision, she had to virtually annihilate her own personal life. Over the
period from 1953 to 1981, Mildred Ryder walked (accepting only occasional car
rides) over twenty five thousand kilometers. She promoted peace, and in her
public speeches she protested against the U.S. military actions during the
McCarthy era, the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Last,
but not least, there are many examples of socially engaging walks that aim to
raise money to find cures for diverse illnesses. These predominantly urban
walkways are primarily a North American phenomenon. These charity fundraising
walks have had and continue to have great success in raising money for good
causes with the number of participants increasing each year.
Walking in Culture and Visual Arts
Walking
was born with human civilization; careful examination of this phenomenon
reveals the desire to represent walking in even the very earliest of visual
artworks. From the Paleolithic stick man, a hunter drawn in the Lascaux cave,
through the ancient cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Europe, there has
always been grand effort put into the representation of walking. The Medieval,
Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical artistic experimentation with diverse
walking poses and the fascination with this basic human movement continues, and
is primarily expressed in drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture.
Prior
to the late XVIIth century it was usually the wealthy upper classes who would
leisurely stroll in specially adapted and enlarged interiors such as mansions
and galleries.
The
history of European gardens is inseparable from the history of walking, since
gardens developed as a natural extension towards making walking more
adventurous and pleasant. Gardens started to be developed mainly as an exterior
forum for walking for exercise and for pleasure. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit states that the architecture of the
medieval garden had high walls because individuals were less interested in
walking in the garden than in resting and in lying down. Later, medieval
gardens yielded to the much more open and elaborate design of the paths of the
Renaissance walking trails. The ostentatiously cultivated gardens of the
Baroque period slowly developed into the Classical and Romantic "wild"
gardens with many architectural surprises or follies such as ruins, bridges,
lakes etc. However, it was in the second half of the XVIIth century when
walking in nature came to be seen as more of a general social practice. In some
of the masterly artistic representations of nature we can admire a walking
subject embedded in many of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator
Rosas paintings, to name but a few.
The
most elaborate and beautifully constructed gardens, however, could not satisfy
some of the more curious and creative spirits such as Dorothy and William
Wordsworth. They became some of the first Europeans to venture into nature and
make walking an important aesthetic experience. Dorothy and William wrote many
accounts of their walking tours. William Wordsworths An Evening Walk is one of the most beautiful Romantic poems that
translates the pleasures of walking in nature. Wordsworth is seen as the poet
of nature because the he re-wrote the poem over a period of several years in
order to find the most just word to describe each of the particulars
experienced when walking in the natural environment which had been unnoticed
by the poets of any age or country (James Averill, p.ix).
The
pleasurable states of mind described in Wordsworths accounts of walking in
natural sites can be illustrated by some of the Romantic painters'
representations of the solitary walking figures contemplating nature. One of
the best examples is a painting by the German Caspar David Friedrich that
represents the subjects meditation on a transcendental landscape. His
melancholic painting entitled Monk at the Sea displays a sublime instance of the individual walking
towards and abandoning himself to the overpowering forces of nature (Appendix
1).
While
on one hand, there were excursions to admire infinite natural phenomena, there
exist on the other, modern metropolises that became sites where individuals
have strong aesthetic feelings. Since the Romantic period the phenomenon of
walking has undergone a more scientific and aesthetic scrutiny; with the
technological advancements of the modern era and a growing number of large
urban metropolises, there occurred a shift from the previous solitary walks in
nature to the more frequent solitary and group strolling in the city. In fact,
walking as a cultural phenomenon, and as a full-fledged cultural act was not
known until the Romantic era. With the birth of Modernity and urbanism, walks
in the city began to replace walks in nature.
Walking in Painting and Photography
From
XIXth century painters and photographers showed interest in urban walking
figures. Paris, the modern European metropolis par excellence, became a city where walking was a positive image
that was valorized in many visual representations.
There
are several parallels that can be drawn between the painterly and photographic
representations of the Parisian walking figure. For example, Gustave
Caillebotte's painting Paris: Rainy Day from 1877 can be compared with Eugne Atget's Marchand dabat-jour, taken between 1899-1900 (Appendix 2). Even though the
former painting depicts a walker strolling through the streets
self-confidently, and the latter represents a disappearing Parisian petit
mtier, a seller of lampshades, both
walkers seem to be lost in the middle of the modern deserted proscenium of
large Parisian boulevards. Another example shows Ragpicker painted by Edouard Manet and Ragpicker photographed by Atget, each of which represent a
homeless beggar-philosopher, and dispossessed urban spectators whose anonymous
walks become visualized as the marginalization of certain unwanted populations
in the XIXth century metropolis (Appendix 3). The modern walker, the
Baudelairean flneur, strolls the
streets out of necessity and becomes a tragic dispossessed hero of the new
urban order. In addition, the interdisciplinary movement of surrealists with
such literary works as Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris and Breton's Nadja elevate the modern city to a dreamy and unconscious
phenomena where sur-real things
might happen.
Walking in Science and Art
The
mechanics of walking always interested scientists and artists. With the
invention of photography it became possible to freeze an image, to capture and
thus dissect a walking movement. Two modern photographers, Edward Muybridge and
tienne-Jules Marey made extensive photographic studies of human and animal
locomotions. Among many photographs they took, there are series of detailed
chronophotographs of moving bodies, legs and feet (Appendix 4). Their
scientific-artistic contribution to studies of walking became important to
visual arts. Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists creative
works, among others, explore the theme of walking and movement through time and
space (Appendix 5 and 6).
There
is a particular photographer, Albert Londe, who offers a different type of
photographic inquiry about walking (Appendix 7). Asked by Dr. Paul Richer to
document his patients with walking problems at the Salptrire hospital, Londe
produces documentation of hundreds of photographs organized according to the
specific illness. The photographs were enclosed in the book Trait Pratique
de la Photographie, published in
Paris in 1896. Similar to Muybridge and Marey, Londe used a chronophotographic
technique, but he used it to classify the other way of walking: the
pathological, unnatural way of moving one's feet. While Muybridge and Mareys
photographs represent more scientific studies of walking, Londes photographs
communicate uncanny visualization of walking staged in the hospitals courtyard.
The photos suggest a strange relationship between a patient walking in the
awkwardly large hospital gown and a supporting nurse. Both documented figures
take their uneasy steps on a specially prepared prop: a hospital carpet. In
fact, these curiosity photographs go further to marginalize the unhealthy act
of walking by producing an awkward visual document. Consequently, Londes
photographs classify the sick walking figures (marginalized images) against the
healthy and visually desirable images that are officially acceptable and
publicly circulating (Les Chefs-Duvre de la Photographie dans les
Collections de lĒcole des Beaux-Arts).
Performance Art
Although
it is marginalized within mainstream culture, I found performance art to be one
of the most provocative art forms that defines human culture. Therefore, I
became particularly interested in performances that challenge the notion of
walking in urban spaces. In order to engage in a critical discourse about
performance art, many contemporary artists and cultural critics employ diverse
interdisciplinary sources to tackle the uniqueness of this postmodern art form.
Since performance art questions existing art historical discourse by asserting
its new artistic and theoretical presence around the 1960's, it can no longer
be evaluated by employing canonical aesthetic standards. Moreover, performance
art remains a marginal and exilic art form, even though it has started to be
acknowledged and included in mainstream art.
Performance Art in Contemporary Theory
I
would like to refer to two contemporary theoretical discourses that
problematize performance art as a very special art form. In particular,
deconstructive ideas of Jacques Derrida, and Peggy Phelans interdisciplinary
contribution to understanding performance art help to further problematize
performance as exilic art form.
Exilic and Itinerant Thoughts of Jacques Derrida
My
contention is that Derridas philosophy presents a case of exilic and itinerant
philosophy because it is about intellectual displacement and subversions of the
key metaphysical concepts of the Western thought. The contemporary thinker does
not want to define another fixed philosophical system; instead, he constantly
interrogates his own deconstructive method. He sees deconstruction as a
movement of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing (Signature,
Event Context, p.329) and of overturning and displacing a conceptual order,
as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is
articulated (p.329). Derridas critical input here is exilic and performative
because his itinerant signature welcomes new intellectual challenges that stand
in opposition to institutionalized yet immobile philosophical opuses. Since the
Derridian philosophy of reading the philosophers in a certain way
(Structure, Sign and Play in the discourse of Human Sciences, p. 885)
presents itinerant thought par excellence (hence his philosophical insistence on mobile tropes such as
differance, iterability, destinerance, supplement, undecidability, etc.) it
becomes an important tool for conceptualizing other traveling activities such
as performance art. The first Derridian text, Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences, was written in 1966 during the uncertain
socio-cultural and political times in which performance art was also asserting
itself as a new art form, a fact that provided a ground for intellectual and
artistic exchanges and influences between these two areas.
Arguing
for a deconstructive and exilic structure embedded within performance art, I
will refer briefly to Derridas interview conducted by Peter Brunette and David
Wills and published as The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.
In the discussion, the French philosopher is challenged by delimiting the
nature and the properties of the visual arts. There has perhaps always been a
certain uneasiness on the part of the artists and art critics about subscribing
to interdisciplinary and constantly evolving performance art works under the
academic title of visual arts. The open-ended discipline of performance art
employs diverse aspects of artistic and non-artistic elements (drawing,
painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater, video, film, new media, and
virtually every aspect of every day etc.), is conceptually closer to the
Derridian definition of spatial arts
than to the existing stiff terminology of the visual arts. Derrida argues for his original
nomenclature of arts in the following way:
The general question of the spatial arts is given
prominence, for it is within a certain experience of spacing, of space, that
resistance to philosophical authority can be produced. In other words,
resistance to logocentrism has a better chance of appearing in these types of
art (The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida p.10).
Performance art not only engages our eyes, it creates
a whole new context in which the mobile body is staged and perceived in a
different way than most objects and subjects represented in other forms of
visual arts. Performance art is very much about space not only because it
envelops a physical (or virtual) space, but, most importantly, because its
representation is temporal and citational. This charged representation of the
body is explained by Derridas notion of ontological presence, a notion upon
which Peggy Phelan elaborates. The performing body is experienced via a
deconstructive understanding of the limits of its own representation. It is
also a body that, in a certain metaphoric way, communicates marginal and exilic
experiences of the performing artist. Derrida explains:
The body is an experience in the most unstable sense
of the term; it is an experience of frames, of dehiscence, of dislocations
(The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida p.16).
Derrida explains that Western philosophical axioms
attempt to represent a body in its full presence, thus stabilizing the subject
as an autonomous perceiving entity. However, unlike other canonical examples of
visual art works, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture,
performance art is about the disappearance of the body and an insistence on the
temporality of a performative event that reinforces subjects anxiety to seize
the authentic self. In other words, the performing body is in a constant
state of exile that engages the viewer in a discursive way. Since performance
art examines the limits of its artistic discourse, it functions as a complex
text. There is text, Derrida says, because there is always a discourse in
the visual arts (The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida p.15).
The philosopher is interested in the polysemic nature of creating and
translating representation in the arts. The plurality of tones establishes
important relationships between things and creates differential tones.
Derrida argues that the experience of the beautiful is linked to a differential
tone, in other words, it can only be experienced through the plurality of an
aesthetic experience. Meditating on the nature of the beautiful experience,
Derrida says:
It can happen only with you - as is the case with the
signature [....] - and at the same time you have nothing to do with it. Thus
you are dead; it does without you [...] That is beauty; its sad, mourning
(The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida p.23).
In addition, the philosopher says that spatial arts
are silent, but their mutism produces an effect of full presence (p.12). This
is a critical trait of the arts because in the artistic silence resides the
greatest power to oppose a dominant logocentrism. Inherent in spatial art is
the resistance to official authority that can produce a different kind of
artistic counter-dialogue. The fact that the first performances of the 60's
functioned outside the official art discourse, and were thus an exilic art form
par excellence, marked them with
an ontologically confrontational character (p.13). The signature of the
artistic event is always proceeded by a countersignature, that is a context
that prepares and then justifies an artwork as an important cultural and social
event. Performance art, by becoming a new type of countersignature, put into
crisis the existing and officially accepted cultural status quo; it revisited
the aesthetic codes and reestablished the new ones. Such a deconstructive
reading of the arts opens up a great number of possibilities in understanding
the limits of the performative aesthetic discourse.
Performative Writing on Metonymic Body by Peggy
Phelan
In
her informed discussion on performance Peggy Phelan is greatly influenced by
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and literary studies. Her interdisciplinary way
of writing creates a highly influential performative act of re-creating new
types of performance art works. Phelan employs some deconstructive tenets in
her critical contribution regarding the phenomenon of performance. In Unmarked:
the politics of performance (first
edition in 1993) and Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1997) Phelan establishes well-respected scholarship
that carefully examines the notion of performance. There are only a few
examples of performance art stricto sensu upon which Phelan draws in her books. She understands the performative
act in a broad philosophical sense, the act that includes active and thoughtful
engagement in experiencing artistic and non-artistic events.
This
respected performance theorist offers not only an insightful critique of
performance art, but also sets an example of writing about it in a performative
way. According to Phelan, there is no need to repeat a performative event by
describing it from memory. She argues for enacting the performance in an
informed yet creative way. Her own performative writing presents an engaging,
well-composed literary style that skillfully introduces and juxtaposes personal
(sometimes very autobiographical) accounts and criticism with the theoretical
conceptualizations of the selected key contemporary thinkers. Phelan summarizes
the critical character of performance art as non-reproducible (it functions
outside the commercialized market), asserting itself through disappearance (she
understands the body in Derridian sense as a supplement), and through
temporal, irreparable artistic action that cannot be recorded or documented in
any way. I am particularly interested in Phelans elaboration on the
disappearance of the body in performance art, because she offers one of the
best examinations of the key aspects of live art. Even though Phelan does not
explicitly focus on exiled or exilic qualities of performance art, her thought-provoking
theory of a metonymic understanding of the performing body not only
acknowledges the marginal qualities of performance art, but also desires to
transcend the exilic states inherent in performance art. By opposing the
metaphorical and metonymical understanding of performance art, Phelan argues
that the employment of metonymy displaces the performing body and marks it as
loss. While metaphor works in a comparative fashion, performing towards the
holistic representation of the subject, metonymy is a trope that fragments the
subject by generating the meaning contingent upon a shifting context. In
particular, Phelan recounts:
Metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value
and is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference;
it turns two into one. Metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure
a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement (Unmarked: the politics of
performance p.150).
It seems that this very insistence of performance art
on introducing the body that was veiled in art practices before 1960's, is also
a recognition that it cannot be authentically and holistically represented as a
free-acting agent. The temporality of the bodily performance understood as a
representational addition through the use of metonymic tropes conveys the
exilic qualities marked by the loss and continuous displacement of the
performing subject. In this paradoxical assertion and disappearance of the
acting body there lies, perhaps, the greatest artistic strength of performance
art.
Walking in Contemporary Art
Since
the 1960's, many artists have been engaging formally and/or conceptually with
the theme of walking. The critical nature and characteristics of performance
art will be explored by contemporary artists who, conscious of the ontological
instability of the performative event, engage in a creative way to generate new
aesthetic meanings. The following selection of walking art performances
illustrates both daring and engaging performative countersignatures, whose artistic
walks become critical caesuras for
the advancement of postmodern art. Some of these performances convey strong
exilic characteristics when a performer is represented as an artist in exile;
the performative actions are often executed in deserted or alienating city
spaces. I will introduce these performances according to four walking
categories to show the breadth of contemporary walking art works.
I
will introduce and briefly discuss eight exemplary walking art performances
that were executed since the 1960's in diverse socio-political and cultural
contexts. All the selected artworks relate to and critically comment on
spiritual, philosophical, socio-political, and/or aesthetic concerns. Although
it can be argued that each performance art work draws on four critical aspects,
I will discuss Daniel Burens and Milan Knižaks actions mainly as a
response to the socio-political context; Richard Long's, Marina
Abramovićs and Ulays works as those that raise spiritual questions; Vito
Acconcis and Sophie Calle's performances as philosophical meditations on the
contemporary urban dwelling; and finally, Janet Cardiffs and Annette
Weintraub's walks as primarily examining the question of aesthetics as
challenged by the use of technology.
Socio-political contexts in Daniel Buren and Milan
Knižak
Daniel
Buren's early example of performance art from 1967 with two Sandwichmen took place around the building of the Parisian
Contemporary Art Museum as part of the Salon de Mai group painting
show (Appendix 8). The performance consisted of two men, dressed conservatively
in black suits, who carried striped billboards attached to their bodies. The
men walked for one full day outside the Museum. Their billboards did not convey
any specific messages; they were painted with green and white vertical stripes.
The great irony of this performance lies in playing a free and disinterested
city walker, an artist/flneur who
produces nothing. The Sandwichmens
walk problematizes the strolls of dispossessed walkers who used to walk in the
same city almost one century ago. In a modern consumer society where everything
seems to be for sale, there is a danger that even one owns subjectivity and
freedom might become a bargain.
The
other socio-politically engaging walking series was performed in communist
Prague in the early 1960's by Milan Knižak. This controversial performer,
whose brave Demonstration for all the Senses was presented in the streets of Prague in 1964 and
consisted of walking, falling, sleeping, and lying down on the streets,
challenged the social codes of behavior in public communist spaces (Appendix
9). His public performances were always nonconformist because Knižak
wanted to defy the political system that was imposing oppressive rules on
artistic freedom. His uncompromising art and lifestyle made him one of the bravest
Eastern European performers. Knižak paid a high price for his choice of
living; he was expelled from different Czech universities, arrested, and
imprisoned several times in his life.
While
Buren's walk in Paris challenged the Western state apparatus, Knižaks
acting out in Prague's streets defied the Eastern communist system. Both
performances are examples of political counter-signing of public space, of
questioning the political system that stands in opposition to the lived
reality. These vulnerable walking bodies presented the only alternative to the
official socio-political and cultural systems. Buren and Knižak employed
the metonymic negation of their own (temporary) presence trying to resist the
politics of meaningless reproducible culture. Their performance art works
introduced a different way of looking at and making art in a context in which
the communist or capitalist systems promoted conformist and easily reproducible
art works.
Spirituality in the works of Richard Long, Marina
Abramović and Ulay
There
are other performers whose walks examine the question of the spiritual in
nature. Richard Long, for example, in one of his early performances consisting
of repeating walking a line on the grass in 1967, presents a beautiful work of
the absent performing body (Appendix 10). This minimal intervention in Somerset
field can be related to the search for the spiritual experience of a subject.
Just as any repetitive action can lead to a mesmerizing state that puts one's
body into a trance, the repetitive walking experience in nature represents the
same artistic urge to go beyond a given reality. Longs work was documented in
a black and white photograph, which became the only object testifying to his
ritual- based, private performance.
A
different kind of walk on the borders of the natural and cultural is presented
by Marina Abramovićs and Ulay's walk on the Chinese Wall in 1988 entitled
The Lovers; a Wall that is over
six thousands kilometers long. The artists commence their journey separately:
Marina started to walk from the East and Ulay from the West, from the Gobi
desert (11). They were to meet each other in the middle of the Wall and marry,
to symbolically mark a long-awaited ceremony between two performing partners.
It is interesting that the Wall was built by the Chinese Emperors to keep
strangers out of China, yet Marina and Ulay were determined to go through
painstaking international negotiations to obtain permission to walk this human
wonder. The resulting photos and beautifully shot film on location became an
important part of this difficult and quasi-sublime walking experience. After
the walk was completed, Marina and Ulay left each other to start new personal
and artistic lives. Marina and Ulay wrote extensively about their walking experiences
and interacted with locals, asking them about the legends and the mythical
stories about this impressive architectural structure. Even though it was an
exhausting physical experience, it was also a ritual-based walk. The experience
of walking the wall was very important for both artists; however, it was only
Marina who made subsequent spiritual and object-based art works following the
arduous three month long experience of walking over the wall (Marina
Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers).
Philosophical Meditations in Vito Acconcis and
Sophie Calles Works
The
third pair of performances that touch predominantly (but not exclusively) on
the philosophical aspect of walking are Vito Acconcis and Sophie Calle's
ambulations in New York and Paris. Both performances involve walking as
following someone or as being followed. In 1969 Acconci follows a pedestrian
chosen at random in New York as if playing a detective who has no clear object
in mind. He follows a person until he/she enters a private space and then he
chooses someone else as his object (Appendix 12). Acconci needs a scheme, he
needs to follow someone as if wanting to annihilate himself as a subject who
has a purposeful reason for dwelling in a metropolis. In his written accounts
about the performance he states that he wanted to step out of himself
(Acconci, Following Piece, p.31)
by following someone elses itinerary. Acconci seems to respond to the concept
of the lost aura of the postmodern walker in the city. He reinforces his
artistic activity with compulsive walking exercises that transform him into a
tragic and homeless figure of the postmodern flneur.
Sophie
Calle, on the other hand, in a walking performance from 1981 entitled La
Filature (The Shadow) asked her
mother to hire a detective to follow her in Paris. After the performance was
completed she gathered the photos that the detective took of her as well as his
and her notes taken about the work. She displayed the evidence of being
followed as objective information documenting her intersubjective and extremely
self-conscious performance (Appendix 13). These two performance art works are
very much about the disappearance of the subject; they are spurs of memory
that can be activated by making a different kind of performative gesture.
Phelan informs us that performance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance
(Unmarked: the politics of performance p. 146). I find the performative retracing of someone elses footsteps
to be a beautiful act of creative writing. Among other things, it expresses the
innate human desire to translate a given text (text as understood in
Derridian philosophical discourse) and to perform it. It also presents an
empowering gesture of the subject that decides to countersign a text within
which he/she has always already been inscribed. Artistic walking in the city
calls for a particular kind of writing; because the performative texts cannot be
always visible and easily perceptible in the thicks and thins of city language.
They invite a different kind of meditation on the state of contemporary art.
The task of decoding the language of the walks is not an easy one, especially
as their elusive status seem to break away from well-formed discourses.
Further, it is impossible to talk about performance art without considering a
context in which it is generated, as well as a crucial subject/object
constitution that defines it. These two performers, Acconci and Calle, walk in
contemporary metropolises, places that are eo ipso complex texts, which, and while offering many
possibilities and interpretations, also challenge the subjects freedom to act.
Technically Mediated Performances in Janet Cardiff
and Anette Weintraub
Last,
but not least, I would like to introduce two more walking art performances that
are technologically mediated. These art works are executed by Janet Cardiff in
an interactive audio work entitled Missing Voice (Case Study B) from 1999, and by Annette Weintraub in her creation of a website
entitled Pedestrian in 1997. Both works rely upon technology to enhance the
physical walking experience. Cardiff, for example, composes a carefully
scripted story that she records on CD and juxtaposes with other audio tracks
(environmental and other sounds). The participant literally wears it while
walking in the city, listening to the prerecorded narration and following
Cardiffs instructions that direct the participant where to walk and where to
pause. The Missing Voice(Case Study B) presents one of Cardiffs layered stories that occurs in London,
England. It starts at the White Chapel Library and takes the beholder out into
the streets. The environmental city sounds recorded on the CD both attract the listener
to and alienate from the actual urban context. Weintraub's interactive website
piece, on the other hand, can be experienced by playing CD-ROM or by connecting
to the following internet address: Weintraub invites the beholder to walk in a virtual
agora built of 0 and 1 binary switches. The participant, immobilized at his/her
computer, experiences the limits of the simulated urban walk in a virtually
designed agora. He/she participates by moving the computers mouse and by
clicking the cursor on the highlighted icons to move along. Cardiffs and
Weintraubs art works do not comment exclusively on aesthetics; rather, since
they involve the question of technology, they challenge even further the limits
of performative representation. They introduce a new, interactive media element
as an aesthetic category in perceiving and evaluating art. Introduction of the
performing body through technological mediation makes these two art works further
fragment the body by highlighting its performative limits. What is particularly
at stake with technologically supported art performances is the further
intellectualization of aesthetic pleasure that makes the judgement of taste
conceptual rather than purely subjective. The postmodern countersignature of
performance as this is art is about a conceptual play of ideas that are often
socio-politically and culturally conditioned. This is one of the reasons why
the question of performance art presents a challenging and thought-provoking
art form and does not seek to enclose itself within prescribed and preconceived
ideas.
In this introduction I have presented the thesis statement, its purpose, rationale and main research sources. I have outlined my paper, briefly introducing its five main chapters. I have presented an overview of the history of walking, organized into four distinct categories, and have subsequently applied these categories to a discussion of eight contemporary works of performance art that involve walking in both urban and non-urban settings. While referring to two theoretical discourses regarding philosophy and art, I have shown that performance art, as an art form that emerged in the 1960s, displays exilic characteristics, as it is marginalized by being constantly displayed by and within mainstream art. To justify this claim I have applied Jacques Derridas and Peggy Phelans engaging theories, written from deconstructive and interdisciplinary critical positions. The introductory remarks argue that the phenomenon of exile, understood either in a literal sense as banishment from home or in metaphoric and symbolic ways as marginalization and alienation from officially and socio-culturally accepted norms, does not have to be perceived negatively. On the contrary, acknowledgment of and working from the exilic place can impress an empowering meaning. As I briefly discussed in an overview of two performative theories (Derrida, Phelan) and in a description of eight walking art performances, the exilic qualities of performance art play in favor of the artists who manage to transcend difficult alienating contexts of their socio-cultural and political contexts.
The next chapter, Walking in the City, introduces and critically analyzes the nature and main characteristics of the figure of the modern urban walker, the flneur. This particular city stroller was presented for the first time in Charles Baudelaires literary accounts and was later examined in Walter Benjamins, Michel de Certeaus, and Susan Buck-Morss critical re-readings of the solitary urban traveler. Following critical Benjaminian thought, I will argue that the flneur, who assumes diverse marginalized alter egos, is an exilic figure. He/she is not welcome to participate in mainstream urban life. Finally, metropolis, a phenomenon of modern and postmodern architecture will be analyzed as an increasingly uncanny and alienating place of the city dwellers and especially of the urban minorities.
Chapter One Walking in the
City
This chapter discusses the phenomenon of walking in the city as exemplified by the figure of the flneur. I will introduce the literary beginnings of the flneur and the cultural and socio-political contexts in which it emerged in the middle of the XIXth century. I will argue that the figure of the flneur was historically and artistically represented as marginalized and exilic. The phenomenon of flnerie will be discussed in selected Modern and Postmodern theoretical texts regarding the notion of the urban stroller. Since the flneur is a creation of Paris, as Benjamin claims (Return of the Flneur, p. 263), I analyze the nature and characteristics of this urban stroller by applying some of the best of Charles Baudelaires and Walter Benjamins creative and critical writings on the Parisian city walker. I enrich their texts with selected contemporary writings on urban walking by such writers as Susan Buck-Morss, Michel de Certeau, and Elizabeth Wilson. The analyzed readings give significance to an exilic walking figure who remaps the modern city. Even though most of Baudelaires and Benjamins critical texts concern Paris, the act of walking in other metropolises also acquires a paramount importance in defining the limits of moving through urban spaces.
A flneur does not exist without a city, and a city does not exist without a flneur. Thus the phenomenon of walking in the city will be also analyzed by taking into consideration the uneasy social and architectural contexts of the modern metropolis. It was with the growth of modern cities in the middle of the XIXth century that contemplation of the sublime spectacle shifted from observing the natural to observing urban phenomena. This emerging new urban stage for awe-inspiring experience will be examined as an alienating place where the urban strollers have strong aesthetic feelings. The socio-architectural order of modern cities produces a new type of stroller who questions the limits of free urban movement. Thus the modern metropolis will be primarily presented as an alienating and exilic place for city dwellers.
Etymology
of the Word Flneur
In her informative essay, entitled Invisible Flneur, Elizabeth Wilson examines the early uses of the word. The fact that the origins of the word are uncertain yet the first dictionary definitions support the gendered meaning of flneur is very critical for Wilson. She claims that the XIXth century Larousse Encyclopaedia already two gendered entries. There are definitions of both flneur and flneuse. The latter denotes a kind of reclining chair [] it looks like an extended deck chair, and welcomes its occupant with womanly passivity (Invisible Flneur, p.76). In spite of the fact that there is no clear etymology of the word flneur, Wilson writes that Larousse provides a long entry on flneur stating that its linguistic provenance comes from the Irish word libertine[4].
Wilsons feminist reading of the XIXth century origins and social functions of the flneur makes her examine the identity of the modern stroller as a typically masculine activity of loitering, frittering away of time(p. 62). The flneur presents the male figure in the Parisian metropolis whose favourite activities consist of disinterested walking around Paris, observing the urban marvels and the crowd:
The flneur [] could exist only in the great city, the metropolis, since provincial towns would afford too restricted a stage for his strolling and too narrow a field for his observations. [although] the majority of flneurs were idlers, there were among them artists, and [] the multifarious sights of the astonishing new urban spectacle constituted their raw material (Invisible Flneur p. 62).
Wilson follows a historical development of the term flneur by examining its earliest literary uses. More
specifically, she points to the novels by Balzac, Zola, Proust, and Dickens in
which the city strollers play the main literary characters. Further, she
examines in greater depth an anonymous French pamphlet from 1806 that
introduces the figure of the flneur in
the context of Bonapartes era. A passage from the pamphlet entitled Le
Flneur au salon ou M.Bon-Homme: examin joyeux des tableaux, mele de
vaudevilles exhibits some of the key
characteristics of the flneur
that will become critical in Baudelaires and Benjamins later scrutiny of the
same subject:
No one knows how M. Bonhomme [the flneur] supports himself, but he is said to be a rentier, seemingly set free from familial, landowning or mercantile responsibilities, to roam Paris at will. The flneur spends most of his day simply looking at the urban spectacle; he observes in particular new inventions: for example he stops in Place Louis XIV to examine the signals of the marine telegraph, although he understands nothing about them (Invisible Flneur p. 62).
Wilson explains that M. Bonhomme engages in aesthetic
activities because either he was an artist or he associated himself with the
artists in the modern public spaces such as salons, boulevards, arcades, cafes,
bars, theaters and brothels. M. Bonhomme, however, performed a marginal flnerie;
he was a solitary stroller with a blas attitude towards the
modern city.
Examination and comparison of
the most recent comprehensive French and English dictionary entries of the word
flneur, the similarities with the
XIXth century Larousse definitions of the same French word are striking. Along
with the literary quotations of the literary uses of flneur, the eight volume Tresor de la langue
Francaise-Dictionaire de la langue du XIX et du XXe siecle offers two main definitions of the word which
describe walking in the city as a rather disinterested, care-free strolling
about town. More specifically, flner,
as a transitive verb is first defined as avancer lentement et sans direction
prcise, and the second meaning denotes perdre son temps; se complaire dans
linaction, dans le farniente (p. 953). Further, under the entry flneuse there is a simple explanation of celui, celle, ce
qui flne, as well as the definition of flneur as a long chair already quoted by Wilson: siege
pliant en bois ou en osier pouvant faire office de chaise longe (p. 953). The
latter definition of flneuse as
chaise longe does not come from the XIXth century entry; it is quoted after
Sandry-Carrs publication in 1963. By comparison, the Oxford English
Dictionary from 1989 has a much
shorter entry of the word flneur,
and the definition of flneuse
does not appear at all. The verb flnerie is defined as the disposition or practice of an idler or lounger,
and flneur as a lounger or
saunterer, an idle man about town (p. 1003).
My contention is that flneur does not actually denote an individual figure. While Wilson claims that flneur never really existed, being an embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium, and horrors aroused by many in the new metropolis (p. 74), I argue that flneur represents a complex symbolic figure that embodies diverse and mostly marginal, socio-cultural phenomena of the modern city. Flneur cuts across distinct personal or class identifications. The figure of the flneur is critical to understanding the actual and symbolic urban order. There are different socio-political and cultural reasons for which the flneur moves through the city. From the XIXth century Eurocentric experience of the modern metropolis, the notion of the flneur travels to other large cities in the world to manifest the exilic limits of walking while critically re-walking the contested urban spaces.
Modernity
and Modernism
In order to critically understand the context in which the figure of the flneur was born, it is important to present the concept of Modernity and relate it to Modernism, the socio-political ideology that brought about the figure of the flneur.
Modernity, a historically defined epoch,
started in Europe at the end of the XVIIIth century with the French
Revolutions desire to define a democratic society and to shape a new era of
humanity. Many discoveries emerged from this Eurocentric concept of modernity
that significantly changed peoples perceptions of all aspects of human
life. The invention of the steam
engine, electricity, the camera and the telephone, among others, accelerated
the experience of modern times, making it appear instantaneous and more
immediate. While the time before the French Revolution could be described as
linear and slow, the time of the XIXth century seemed to be undergoing
unprecedented development of consistently faster and more efficient
communication around the world. Additionally, the inventions of a number of
visual devices such as the zootrope, phenakistiscope, zoopraxiscope,
stereoscope, and finally the first Kodak camera in 1880 gave new importance to
vision. Hence, the experienced eye became one of the crucial instruments not
only for the scientific evaluation of the modern world, but also for aesthetic
judgement of modern works of art. It is perhaps not surprising that, in such an
accelerating world of new technological inventions, the humble act of walking
in the city became valued not only as an activity free of charge, but as both a
pleasurable and a marginal urban pastime. While eyes were trained to scrutinise
the wonders of the modern metropolis, pairs of strong and healthy legs were
performing an engaging yet marginal flnerie.
Modernism, on the other hand,
presents a doctrine, a constructed ideology that claims authority for an
objective knowledge. One of the most prominent XIXth century critics, Charles
Baudelaire (1821-1867), constructed the first influential account of what it
means to be modern. Speaking from an informed artistic position, Baudelaire
finds the modern times to be the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent (The
Painter of Modern Life, p. 41).
Later, while analyzing one of the modern painters art works, Baudelaire argues
that, He [the painter] has everywhere sought after the fugitive, fleeting
beauty of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality which
we have called modern (The Painter of Modern Life, p. 40).
The Baudelairean concept of Modernity is
closely linked to the experience of the Modern world, a world that in
Baudelaires accounts, is obsessed with beauty, fashion, scientific inventions,
the spaces of the demi-monde, and the numerous
walking figures embodied in the flneurs alter
egos: the dandy, the detective, the conspirator, the prostitute, and the
homeless person. The complex
interaction between all these modern occurrences and a growing number of
walking figures constituted a new type of European society, one which Guy
Debord, defines as the society of the spectacle.
The Society of the Spectacle
The society of the spectacle is based on occulocentrism, which was institutionalized in the XIXth century. The new revolutionary visual devices, the stereoscope in particular, shifted the monocular perception of the world to the binocular view. This new binocular vision improved the proximal perception of registered images as both the eye and the body of the observer became stationary. Vision was changing towards disembodiment. The spectator, like an internalized machine, started to project himself/herself onto the preconstructed images. These images were often juxtaposed with cinematic and dioramic views, and their fourth wall effect made the viewers identify themselves with illusionist and imaginary vistas.
It seems that the modern euphoria with the new devices of vision had at least two crucial consequences. First, it allowed the viewer to identify with the illusionary projections; and second, it reduced the world to two dimensional, easily reproducible images. This development of a monocular vision, however, started to train the body in a uniform, rational order in which everything had a potential for classification and structure. Furthermore, the society of the spectacle became disembodied and docile, easily manipulated by the institutionalized authorities. Benjamins colleague, sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, investigated an increased use of vision in rapidly growing modern cities. Simmel observed that before the inventions of urban means of transportation, people were never put in a position to stare at each other while waiting for a streetcar, a subway, or a train. The new urban reality increased the scopophilic pleasures of the modern crowd, turning it progressively into a docile and obedient body. In addition, in many of his philosophical works, contemporary French thinker Michel Foucault, scrutinizes the conceptual grounds of modern times. He argues that it was during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries that personal identity became a product of power relations. It seems appropriate then, to use Guy Debords society of the spectacle and the Foucauldian term, the society of the surveillance.
Crucial
modern changes occurred not only as a result of institutionalisation of
principal human activities, but also of the changing way in which people saw
and perceived the world. More specifically, while XVIIIth century use of the camera
obscura required
operating the eye in a more metaphoric sense, the great optical discoveries of
the following century shifted towards metonymy, through which the viewer, while
walking and looking at the wonders of modern architecture that had never been
seen before (i.e. large boulevards, arcades, Eiffel Tower etc.), simultaneously
experienced the state of being both within and without the frame of the image. A fragment of the city
(such as the Eiffel Tower) was enough to stand for the whole picture. The eye
became disembodied and there was no mediation between the person and the
projected image. Consequently, in the society of the spectacle, sight became one of the most
important senses in experiencing the new and rapidly shifting world. Even
though the metropolitan walking figure became a very important subject in
observing and therefore constructing the ideology of the society of the
spectacle, it was not an empowered and autonomous subject.
Baudelaires Flneur
In his literary artworks Charles Baudelaire struggled to define not only what constitutes the phenomenon of Modernity, but also the characteristics of the Modern hero. In a certain way, Baudelaire himself was a flneur, a fallen bourgeois, and an outcast who often portrayed himself as a tragic modern hero. Benjamin states that, the hero is the subject of Modernism. In other words, it takes a heroic constitution to live through modernism (p. 74). Benjamin quotes Jules Laforgue referring to Baudelaire saying that he was the first to speak as someone condemned to live in Paris (Return of the Flneur p. 55). Baudelaire describes the characteristics of a dispossessed flneur and a modern hero in a decadent way:
Regarding the attire, the covering of the modern hero, does it not have a beauty and a charm of its own? Is this not an attire that is needed by our epoch, suffering and dressed up to its thin black narrow shoulders in the symbol of constant mourning? The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality, but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality an immense cortege of undertakers, political undertakers, amorous undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We all observe some kind of funeral. The unvarying livery of hopelessness is proof of equality (Return of the Flneur p. 77).
A modern hero then, a socially powerless artistic figure, an intellectual, is dressed in black as if he were mourning something essential and disappearing from his life: the very originality and liveliness of Modernity. This funeral-like image of the metropolis and its inhabitants is certainly not an optimistic view of one of the most developed XIXth century European cities. Benjamin says of Baudelaire that:
when he abandoned one part of his bourgeois existence after another, the street increasingly became a place of refuge for him. But in strolling, there was from the outset an awareness of the fragility of this existence. It makes a virtue out of necessity, and in this it displays the structure which is in every way characteristic of Baudelaires conception of the hero (p. 70/71).
It is in walking, the most humble human experience that the city stroller becomes aware of the fragility of modern existence. Benjamin recalls that Baudelaire used to walk a lot in Paris (public means of transportation cost money), thus completely wearing out his shoes. The poor artist, one of the greatest French poets, actually had to stick pieces of clothes and newspapers into his shoes to conceal the visible holes. Benjamin writes that the Baudelairean concept of the flneur is, first and foremost, based on a voyeuristic experience of the city. At times, the flneur is a poet who walks in the metropolis, at times he/she is an amateur detective and a homeless person. Benjamin recounts:
Baudelaires flneur was not a self-portrait of the poet to the extent that this might be assumed. An important trait of the real-life Baudelaire that is, of the man committed to his work is not part of this portrayal: his absentmindedness. In the flneur the joy of watching is triumphant. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the gaper; then the flneur has turned into a badaud (p. 69).
Baudelaire epitomized the figure of the Modern hero in the artistic activities of his friend and admired artist, Constantin Guys. In the second chapter of his Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire introduces a figure of the flneur exemplified by the artistic endeavour of a genius. He defines him in the following way:
observer, philosopher, flneur call him what you will; but whatever words you use in trying to define this kind of artist, you will certainly be led to bestow upon him some adjective which you could not apply to the painter of eternal, or at least more lasting things, of heroic or religious subjects (The Painter of Modern Life p. 4).
The modern painter then is concerned with both eternal and fugitive beauty. In the Baudelarian view he is an empowered man of the crowd, a great traveler and cosmopolitan who observes life unfolding around him with the curiosity of a child. The Modern artist becomes a flneur who examines contemporary Parisian life. However, the Baudelairean literary concept of the flneur is linked to and supports the discourses of power existing in the XIXth century society of the spectacle. The question of who could visually scrutinize the modern world became an important socio-political issue. Baudelaire draws the characteristics of the flneur as follows:
For the perfect flneur, for the passionate spectator, it is immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world (The Painter of Modern Life p. 9).
It would seem that Baudelaires flneur, a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito (p. 9) represents a privileged figure of the XIXth century public life because the flneur defines space by his anonymous and carefree mobility through the city; however, the flneur does not have the privileged status of the city walker. In reality, a flneur has no social or political power whatsoever. In his persistent homeless walks, the flneur spies in and out of the urban frame and keeps moving.
In order to collect data for his new sketches on modern life, he walks in the city and engages his body and his eyes to take mental notes and, sometimes, to sketch on site. It is perhaps the first time in art history that an artists peripatetic journeys in the modern city become a condition sine qua non of artistic practice. This important trait of collecting urban data while walking makes modern art a mnemonic art. Baudelaire states that after Guys preliminary studies of modern life (i.e. walking, observing the city, and taking mental notes) the artist returns home and draws passionately from his memory:
He works in this way on twenty drawings at a time, with an impatience and a delight that are a joy to watch and are amusing even for him. The sketches pile up, one on top of the other in their tens, hundreds, thousands. Every now and then he will run through them and examine them, and then select a few in order to carry them a stage further, to intensify the shadows and gradually to heighten the lights (The Painter of Modern Life p. 18).
For Baudelaire, Guys is an exemplary artist of Modern
times because he is able to express at once the attitude and the gesture of
living beings, whether solemn or grotesque, and their luminous explosion in
space (The Painter of Modern Life
p. 18) [5]. Constantin Guys sketches of Parisian life show the
changing attitudes of XIXth century European art that are produced when working
in and with the city.
The flneur presents a new performing identity that was born in rapidly changing mid-XIXth century Paris. More specifically, Baron Georges Haussmann, a chief administrator in Paris, appointed by the Emperor Napoleon the Third, not only widened the existing streets of Paris and built twenty two new boulevards, but also modernized the whole city plan, producing great traffic arteries, the sewer system, and the impressive construction for the Exposition Universelle of 1867. In his thoughtful critique of the new urban spaces, Benjamin deconstructs the modern architectural image exemplified by the World Exposition:
World exhibitions were places of pilgrimage to the fetish commodity [] The world exhibitions glorified the exchange-value receded into the background. They opened up a phantasmagoria into which people entered in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry made that easier for them by lifting them to the level of commodity. They yielded them by its manipulations while enjoying their alienation from themselves and from others (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 165).
All the XIXth century architectural transformations were made at a high cost by destroying most of Old Paris and its living social structures. On one hand, Paris proudly showed off its enhanced architecture, streets, and boulevards; on the other hand, a growing number of homeless, dispossessed people were pushed away from the cleaned-up, public spaces of the Modern City. In his essay Haussmann, or The Barricades Benjamin scrutinizes Haussmanns restructuring of Paris. The German thinker argues that the main decision to make the streets into new wide boulevards and thoroughfares was primarily a political one. By constructing wider streets, Haussmann wanted to prevent the building of barricades by potential revolutionists; however, the results of Haussmanns politico-architectural decision to reconstruct Paris were to push the proletariat workers out of their downtown quarters, and to increase the rent for those who stayed. Consequently, Paris started to become an estranged city for its own inhabitants. The major reshaping of Paris was initially based on politico-urban reasons, but it resulted in fundamental urban, social, and individual changes that altered the life and concept of the city forever.
The
Modern Metropolis
Until the XIXth century, the development of cities proceeded more or less with the same classical idea of building up more living and working structures for the community around a centrally positioned urban place developed in ancient Greece, the agora. As Lewis Mumford informs us, the city was primarily a geographical plexus with a number of people living according to societal rules and performing a number of private and social activities. However, the American urban critic claims that a city always had a place for artistic enactment, because a town could not be solely defined by the rigidly imposed rules. A city is a living organism that can be compared to that of theatre. Mumford says:
[the city] is a theatre of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art. The city creates theatre and is the theatre. It is in the city, the city of theatre, that mans more purposive activities are caused, and worked out, through conflict and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations (What is City, p. 94)
Mumfords definition of city valorizes urban sites over natural ones, making the city a more desirable place. In the modern metropolis, the theatre-like place, individuals have strong aesthetic feelings, and it was in the middle of the XIXth century that architectural transformations invited pedestrians to take part in a different type of walking performance. Thus, the modern metropolis became a special place for a new type of individual and collective experience, the experience of the sublime spectacle.
The Urban Sublime
Even though for Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant the
spectacle of sublime was an object-less spectacle of the overpowering qualities
of nature, the XIXth century provided the metropolis as another, more perverse
perhaps, site for such feelings. Kant reminds us that sublimity does not
reside in anything of nature, but only in our minds, in so far as we can become
conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature
within us (The Critique of Judgement,
p. 104). In other words, sublimity is a combination of being in a suitable
context where the meditating subject is able to experience sublime feelings.
The human cognitive faculties collapse, so to speak, in front of the spectacle
of the sublime. In addition, there is no accord between the imagination and
reason, the judgment of the sublime is not objective, and it is elevated to a
sort of excessive transcendental experience.
It seems that the modern city stroller is caught up in
a similar conceptual play that allows him/her to experience the spectacle of
sublime in the new emerging metropolis. Even though the experience of urban
sublime spectacle is named differently by critics, it talks about the same
issue of self-preservation when experiencing the powerful and delightfully
fearful experience. There are numerous theoretical writings on cities that
refer to urban dwelling as problematic. Contemporary metropolises, pressured by
the increasing politics of commercialism, gentrification and political power
relations, create uncanny places for city dwellers. In fact, the city has
always been an exilic space where disinterested walking was never possible.
Contemporary Urban Space
The contemporary aspect of the exilic urban space is
investigated by one of the contemporary architectural historians, Anthony
Vilder. In his book, The Architectural Uncanny, Vilder presents studies on the concept that the city
is an alienating and unhomely space that complicates an individual urban
dwelling. The uncanny leifmotif denotes for Vidler what is estranged from the
human body and projected as prosthetic extension into the public space. The
peculiar domestication of absolute terror (The Architectural Uncanny p. 3), the sublime qualities of the modern and
postmodern cities, presents the political and cultural aspects of the
non-belonging of the city dwellers. The writer argues that urban unheimlich is that quality of the architectural unhomely which
turns against its owners and becomes fragmented, disembodied and derealized.
Vidler references transcendental philosophy and the writings of Heidegger,
Lukacs, Bachelard and Kristeva to reinforce his contention that there is a
resurgent interest in thinking about estranged dwelling places. In the chapter
entitled Unhomely Houses, Vidler
explains how the human body created a myth for architectural balance, standards
of proportion, symmetry, and functioning. In reality, however, buildings,
especially buildings constructed in large populated cities, started to form an
uncanny feeling against their inhabitants. In other words, the metropolis was
formed as an exilic space. Vidler observes how the person and his/her
individual bodily and psychic characteristics were threatened by the unhomely
forces of the city he/she erected. The writer explains:
The history of the bodily analogy in architecture,
from Vitruvious to the present, might be described in one sense as the
progressive distancing of the body from the building, a gradual extension of
the anthropomorphic analogy into wider and wider domains leading insensibly but
inexorably to the final loss of the body as an authoritative foundation for
architecture (The Architectural Uncanny p. 70).
The body-less qualities of contemporary metropolitan architecture create the feeling of estranged and ambivalent dwelling in between private and public spaces. Benjamin once wrote that dwelling [in modern cities] becomes a kind of casing (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 46). The German critic was not far from Vilders critique of the contemporary body-less and uncanny casings of the urban dwellers that do not make them feel at home, either in private or public spaces.
Exilic
Qualities of Modern Metropolis
Modern urban architecture is not the only aspect of the sublime and exilic spectacle. There are at least two other sublime elements produced by the populated modern cities that contribute to the exilic qualities of the solitary stroller.
One of these elements is the phenomenon of the increased intensification of urban life. More specifically, in an essay, On Some Motifs on Baudelaire, Benjamin refers to his compatriots studies of certain sublime aspects found in the individual experiences of the modern metropolis. In particular, Benjamin introduces his compatriot, Goerg Simmel and his Metropolis and Mental Life. Penetrating into the modern consciousness, the German sociologist presents a troubled figure of a city stroller that seems at once both to offend and defend. In Simmels interpretation, the modern inhabitant dwells in the ambivalent state of powerlessness and empowerment. The writer draws the figure of the flneur in the following way:
The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolis individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli (Metropolis and Mental Life p. 70).
Simmels description of intensification of emotional life in the city echoes the Burkean and Kantian preoccupation with the excessive, overpowering and sublime spectacle. Here, the modern city, Simmel suggests, produces physical and psychological tensions in a dweller every time he/she crosses the street. Later on, the writer elaborates on those constantly present violent stimuli that the modern metropolis presents to its inhabitants. He writes:
the
metropolis creates these psychological conditions [unexpected violent
stimuli]-with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of
economic, occupational and social life (Metropolis and Mental Life
p. 70).
The second exilic quality that defines the identity of the flneur seems to be the crowd, the agitated veil (p. 168) of modern cities. This fact creates the cityscape as one of the most powerful spectacles of the sublime. Benjamin draws a compelling image of the Parisian metropolis as site for a possible strong aesthetic experience. In particular, he refers to E.T.A. Hoffmanns short essay, The Cousins Corner Window, where the immobile cousin observes the passing crowd from the interior of his private place. The binoculars allow him to pick a person at random and symbolically follow the individual without leaving his chair. There is a certain fascination with experiencing fear, revulsion, and horror (p. 174) that makes the Hoffmann character observe the crowd, moving like programmed automatons. Further, Benjamin states that the flneur is with the crowd while, simultaneously experiencing a painful alienation and social isolation in public spaces.
In the critical analysis of the Baudelairean modern world, Benjamin scrutinizes the experience of the flneur as a discontinuous and rhapsodic performance. It is the phenomenon of the flneurs ability to be within and without the urban crowd that intrigues the German writer the most. Benjamin argues that the ambivalent state of attraction and repulsion towards the city forms a new type of modern stroller. The flneur botanizes on the asphalt while walking on the large Haussmannian boulevards. Benjamin compares this basic urban activity to the emerging phantasmagoria of Modernist space experienced by the flneur whose frequent movements echo those of the gamblers portrayed in Baudelaires poetry. In the confused dream-like state in which real things are challenged by imagined ones, there appears a utopic wishful state that stands in opposition to the estranged reality of modern cities. The new urban situation presents itself to Benjamin as a situation of modern socio-cultural crisis:
To the phantasmagoria of space to which the flneur abandons himself, correspond the phantasmagorias of time indulged in by the gambler. Gambling converts time into a narcotic (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 38).
In the short texts entitled Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, and Baudelaire, or The Streets of Paris, Benjamin further examines the estranged qualities of modern metropolitan life. In the first essay, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, the German thinker problematizes the epitome of modernist architecture, the Parisian Arcades. The flneur strolls in the arcades, the recent invention of industrial luxury. The form and use of the Arcades were conceived during the time of great industrial and engineering inventions, a time of social and commercial production occurring in the middle of the XIXth century. Benjamin observes that The arcades are a center of trade in luxury goods. In their fittings art is brought in to the service of commerce (p.34). The emerging modernist places of power, the arcades, were well fit to wear the new architectural material of modernist technology: iron and glass structures lit by gas lamps. This modernist architecture par excellence, became a strange hybrid creature that merged both the successful and the threatening achievements of engineers (originating in the revolutionary wars) and the decorators knowledge (originating in fine arts tradition). Furthermore, the arcades became yet another problematic, utopian wishful image of modernity. Benjamin writes:
These images are wishful fantasies, and in them the collective seeks both to preserve and to transfigure the inchoateness of the social product and the deficiencies in the social system of production. In addition, these wish-fulfilling images manifest an emphatic striving for dissociation with the outmoded which means, however, with the most recent past (Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century p. 35).
Modern
Hero
In Baudelaire, or The Streets of Paris Benjamin
makes a meta-critique of Modernity. In particular, he scrutinizes the identity
of the modern artist, a hero, as exemplified in the figure of the flneur. Baudelaire, himself a modern flneur seeks refuge in the crowd and [his] genius is fed
on melancholy (p. 37). Benjamin argues that there is a dialectical tension in
the images Baudelaire presents in many of his poems. For example, he often
refers to women (the fallen women, such as prostitutes) and death (fetish
images). Benjamin states that the dialectical treatment of the French poets
images re-creates a reality of ambivalence and uncertain values. Baudelairean
poetry artistically represents transformations of the product and
consumer-oriented modern world:
Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics, the law of dialectics seen at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectic image therefore a dream image. Such an image is presented by the pure commodity: as fetish (Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century p. 37).
Benjamin also elaborates on the identity of the crowd
that is often described by Baudelaire as an agitated veil. Benjamin shows how
the French poet creates the figure of the solitary flneur, always
defined against the metropolitan crowd:
He [the flneur] seeks refuge in the crowd. [] The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city lures the flneur like phantasmagoria. In it the city is now a landscape, now a room. Both then constitute the department store that puts even flnerie to use for commodity circulation. The department store is the flneurs last practical joke (Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century p. 37)
The dispossessed flneur who dreams of becoming a modern hero seems to metamorphose tragically into a commodity product when he strolls along the arcades and boulevards. He is an objectification of all the modern promises and desires that cannot be obtained by an ordinary stroller like himself. By which impossible ends does this degraded city stroller measure the streets of Paris? To which impossible ends does he insist on walking? He certainly does not walk to buy anything because he is not able to afford it; the flneur never has enough money. In his impossible desire to become totally free and independent from any societal constraints, he finds himself walking with no purpose, as if an automaton, passively looking at the goods and people.
On his peregrinations the man of the crowd lands at a late hour in a department store where there still are many customers. He moves about like someone who knows his way around the place. . If the arcade is the classical form of the interior, which is how the flneur sees the street, the department store is the form of the interiors decay. The bazaar is the last hangout of the flneur (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 54).
A homeless flneur figure, circulating in the city tries to feel at home in the public space. The harder he tries to accommodate the new social and economic changes in the city, the more he seems to be out of place. How did it happen that an artistic walking model of the society of the spectacle who strolled at leisure in modern Paris became a dispossessed a window-shopper?
Identities
of the Flneur
The flneur is not only the subject of Modernity, he is also privileged subject matter in the visual arts. Constantin Guys drafty sketches exemplify the identity shift of the modern artist who becomes independent from the academic canons and turns his attention to portraying the scenes of life unfolding around him. Benjamin examines how the flneur, a symbolic figure of the modern city, performed and actualized the XIXth century city-scape by acquiring many distinct identities and displaying diverse social functions.
There are several figures that complement the flneur. They are exemplified in the Baudelairean literary heroes such as the apache, the dandy, the detective, the conspirator and such social outcasts as the prostitute and the ragpicker (the homeless person). One of the most prominent and challenging figures of the contemporary flneur, who will be analyzed in Chapter Three, is the exilic figure of the intellectual.
One of the flaneurs alter-egos is the figure of a rag-picker or a homeless person. An urban rag-picker incessantly walks the streets of Paris because he works for middlemen and constitutes a sort of cottage industry located in the streets (Benjamin, p. 19). The rag-picker, the one who collects the refuse of the modern city, certainly does not belong to bohemian society. He forms a part of the literary and conspiratory figures who can be identified with the image of the itinerant and cast-off members of modern society. In Baudelaires essay, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, the figure of the rag-picker draws an allegorical and potent image of a dispossessed modern hero, be it an artist or an intellectual. Benjamin recounts:
Here we have a man who has to gather the days refuse in the capital city. Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum (stockpile) of waste. He sorts things out of and makes a wise choice; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, the refuse which
will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 19)
Further, Benjamin theorizes how the marginalilzed collecting work of a rag-picker and that of a poet complement each other. The German thinker critically examines their daily activities and concludes that they do not stand in social opposition to each other. On the contrary, the methodology of their work is similar:
Ragpicker or a poet the refuse concerns both, and both go about their business in solitude at times when the citizens indulge in sleeping; even the gesture is the same with both. Nadar speaks of Baudelaires jerky gait (pas saccade). This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it must also be the gait of the ragpicker who stops on his path every few moments to pick up the refuse he encounters (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalismp.79/80).
In Flneur, Benjamin introduces another alter-ego of the city walker: a detective. The writer persuasively argues that, in times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play a detective (p. 40). Following someone is not exactly walking in the city; however the detectives job consists of walking after a person, taking notes and/or photos concerning their itineraries, and submitting the report to the employer. Benjamin seems to redefine the meaning and the position of the detective in an urban setting when he says that any city dweller, any flneur can be turned into an unwilling detective. Benjamin writes that the social context for the detectives job and his story are the consequence of the erasure of the individuals traces and stories from the modern crowded metropolises. Benjamin says:
a public man and one whose walks to and fro in the city have been mostly limited to the vicinity of the public offices he passes to and fro, at regular intervals, within a confined periphery, abounding in individuals who are led to observation of his person through interest in the kindred nature of his occupation with their own (p. 44).
Another marginalized alter-ego of the flneur is a prostitute, called in French, peripateticienne, the one who walks the city. The Parisian world of demi-monde presents one of the most complex features of the socio-historically understood Modernity. From Baudelaires and Benjamins writings, we learn that Modernity and its last exhaustive years of the fin de sicle were obsessed with the female body. In formal, theoretical discourses as well as in the artistic and literary representations, the female nude was very desirable to the ruling white, heterosexual bourgeois class. In assuring the pleasure of looking, scopophilia, the bourgeoisie had not only to be surrounded by prostitutes and their images, but had also to have the power of controlling the situation.
In a detailed study of Manets painting of a well-known Parisian prostitute, Olympia, Timothy Clark refers to the social and controlled necessity of making the prostitutes circulate in the modern city. He states:
The category prostitute is necessary, and thus must be allowed its representations. It must take its place in the various pictures of the social, the sexual, and the modern which bourgeois society puts in circulation (p. 103).
The images of women were often disguised in painted, photographed and literary representations as mythological, primitive, or Oriental. This was not the case of Olympia, however, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1865, causing a public scandal. Manets Olympia challenged the bourgeois scopophilia; the woman allowed the public to look at her, while at the same time reflecting their gaze back on to themselves. She, a mere prostitute, was defying the modern society that was manipulated by desire, money, and corruption.
In such a complex, sexually charged socio-historical discourse, a prostitute became one of the dispossessed walking symbols of the commercialized and commodified modern city. While she was becoming a desirable and salable modern object, she was simultaneously disappearing as a subject. In his Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism Benjamin examines the sexual status quo of the modern city that is similar to objectified, massively produced products:
Prostitution opens up the possibility of a mythical communion with the masses. The rise of the masses, is, however, simultaneous with that of mass production. Prostitution at the same time appears to contain the possibility of surviving in a world in which the object of our most intimate use have increasingly become mass produced. In the prostitution of the metropolis the woman herself becomes an article that is mass produced (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p.56).
Both Baudelaire and Benjamin knew that the development of the modern metropolis was paid for dearly with the massive commercialization of every possible product. The limits of modern transactions were set as high as the sale of Paris own inhabitants. This situation is exemplified by the growing business of buying and selling the services of prostitutes-peripateticiennes.
On the other hand, Baudelaire glorifies the prostitute as the muse of the modern poet in many of his poems. He writes, holy prostitution of the sound which gives itself wholly, poetry and charity, to the unexpected that appears, to the unknown that passes (p.56).
Other so-called fallen women, or women in revolt against society (The Painter of Modern Life, 37), such as lesbian, single, and independent women became a source of fascination for Baudelaire. Exalted by their imagined mythical power and freedom, Baudelaire writes that, Lesbian is the heroine of modernism because she combines with a historical ideal the greatness of the ancient world (p. 90).
There is also another embodiment of the modern hero, a figure of an everlasting idler, the dandy, who appears to be strong and perfect in his every gesture (p. 96). As Benjamin scrutinizes the British economico-cultural context that produced the figure of the dandy, he argues for his marginalized societal status. In particular, he says:
The dandy is a creation of the English who were leaders in world trade. The trade network that spans the globe was in the hands of the London stock-exchange people; its meshes felt the most varied, most frequent, most unforeseeable tremors. A merchant had to react to these, but he could not publicly display his reactions. The dandies took charge of the conflicts thus created. They developed the ingenious training that was necessary to overcome these conflicts. They combined an extremely quick reaction with a relaxed, even slack demeanor and facial expression. The tic, which for a time was regarded as fashionable, is, as it were, the clumsy, low-level presentation of the problem (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 96)
These soft and pleasing traits of dandies were certainly not the characteristics of Baudelaire who did not want to please anyone by selling his personal and professional skills. The French poet was well aware of the increasing commercialization and politicization of the writing profession. Benjamin justifies:
This is how the figure of the London dandy appeared in the mind of Paris boulevardier, and this was its physiognomic reflection in Baudelaire. His love for dandyism was not successful. He did not have the gift of pleasing, which is such an important element in the dandys art of not pleasing. Turning the things about him that by nature had to strike one as strange into a mannerism, he became profoundly lonely, particularly since his inaccessibility increased as he became more isolated (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 86/97).
In her essay, Wilson informs the reader that from about the 1830s to the 1840s there was a community of dandies living in Paris in the Maison DOr and CafToroni on the Boulevard des Italiens. Their fashionable strolling on the streets and their flamboyant lifestyle was quickly known in the Parisian neighborhoods and made its way into literature (The Invisible Flneur, p.63). Their over-stated savoir vivre was in a certain way a protest against the increased commercialization of everyday life in the modern metropolis.
In the first essay, of Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, entitled The Bohme, Benjamin examines yet another minor alter-ego of the flneur, the figure that belongs to la boheme - the conspirator. Benjamin distinguishes two groups of conspirators: the occasional conspirator (conspirateur doccasion) and the professional conspirator (conspirateur de profession). While the first type of conspirator is defined as the worker who carries on the conspirators job only in occasional meetings, readings, and other tasks; the latter type embraces conspirators who devote their life to conspiracy and make a living out of it. The professional conspirators walk the streets in the habit noirs, in black coats, and they have no other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing government (p. 13). The conspirators, are marginal figures because they are wanted by the government; they are conspirators who are responsible for building the barricades in the Parisian streets during the political upheavals. Benjamin refers to Baudelaires Fleurs du mal, in which the powerful presence of the conspirators is well stated. In particular, Baudelaire evokes the supremacy of the barricades through the magic power of the cobblestones, which rise up in the form of a fortress. Blanqui was one of the conspirators who walked in a habit noir and was one of the most important advisors in building the barricades. In his critical writings about the conspirator, Benjamin claims that the conspirator is a symbol of the creative and independent spirit. More specifically, he compares Baudelairian conspiring with language to the conspirators conspiring with the political system:
Behind the masks which he used up, the poet in Baudelaire preserved his incognito. He was as circumspect in his work as he was capable of seeming provocative in his personal associations. The incognito was the law of his poetry. His prosody is comparable to the map of a big city in which it is possible to move about inconspicuously, shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. On this map the places for the words are clearly indicated, as the places are indicated for conspirators before the outbreak of a revolt. Baudelaire conspires with language itself. He calculates its effects step by step (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 98).
In critically summarizing Baudelaires writing on the modern hero and his alter-egos, Benjamin observes that the flneur, apache, dandy and ragpicker were so many roles to him [the flneur]. For the modern hero is no hero, he acts hero. Heroic modernism turns out to be a tragedy in which the heros part is available (p. 97).
There is an important transition for some unemployed, and marginal Parisian walkers who become part of the new bourgeoisie. Benjamin quotes Rattiers utopic novel from 1857 entitled Paris nexiste plus that describes the modern city as a place where making rapid social changes in the city dwellers is possible, because of the rapid economic and political modifications happening in the metropolis. In particular, Rattier says:
The flneur who we used to encounter on the sidewalks and in front of the shop-windows, this nonentity, this constant rubberneck, this inconsequential type who was always in search of cheap emotions and knew about nothing but cobblestones, fiacres, and gas lanterns has now become a farmer, a vintner, a linen manufacturer, a sugar refiner, and a steel magnate (p. 54).
Analyzing one of Baudelaires poems from Les Fleur du mal, Benjamin interprets the Parisian crowd as anonymous and detached, but also as inspirational for the poet- flneur. There is a serious preoccupation with the paradoxical entrapment of the flneur in the metropolitan transient sites that produced him, and with the same sites that also started to erase the flneurs individuality. Benjamin calls a modern flneur an accomplice who takes part in the overpowering urban spectacle. The phenomenon of the modern city acquires the quality of that which defies human physical and psychical limits. In other words, the city becomes an artistic locality where individuals have strong aesthetic feelings. In that powerful sublime spectacle, however, the identity of the modern flneur seems to be threatened by the very fact that he is one among many. Benjamin argues that the modern stroller finally acquires a commodity value that renders him the grotesque figure of the anti- flneur.
Arcades
Project
In a contemporary re-reading of Benjamins critical
writings on modern urban spaces, Susan Buck-Morss undertakes an impressive
examination of Walter Benjamins last and unfinished book. In Arcades
Project The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcade Project, Buck-Morss states that her contribution presents a
story (of XIXth century Paris) told without a story (of Benjamins own
historical experience) with the goal of bringing to life the cognitive and
political powers of the Passagen-Werk
that lie dormant within the layers of historical data of which it is composed
(p. ix). The Arcades Projects was written between 1927 and 1940 (the year of
Benjamins suicide) and grew from the initial 50-page essay to a manuscript of
over a thousand pages that still survives today. The saved pages, however, do
not present a draft that is coherent enough; Benjamin left behind rough
sketches rather than a comprehensive draft of a future book. His pages display
36 files-Konvoluts with key words and phrases carefully classifying transcribed
records regarding different aspects of Parisian life from the fin de sicle. Benjamin pulled out and copied his entries from the
Berlin and Parisian National Libraries. Because the Arcades Project develops a highly original philosophical method,
Susan Buck-Morss argues that Benajmins critical approach is marked by a
dialectic of seeing (p. 6).
In the second chapter of Part I of the book entitled
Spatial Origins, Buck-Morss
draws a conceptual diagram where Benjamin examines four major metropolises of
the XIXth and XXth centuries as critical places of dwelling. The horizontal
axis leads from Paris and the origins of bourgeois society in the
political-revolutionary sense, to Moscow with its aristocratic decline and
rising socialist consciousness; from Naples and its classical origins, Benjamin
concentrates on Berlin, the place of his own origin. Buck-Morss states that the
Arcades projects are located in
the null point of these two geographical axes (p. 25/26). Examining Benjamins
writing on Naples, Buck-Morss stresses the importance of the German critics
new approach to critical observation. In particular, the act of walking through
the city presents not only a subjective, but also an objective way of
collecting important data regarding the modern society. She argues:
There is no explicit political
message [in Benjamins essay]. Rather, hardly noticeable to the reader an
experiment is underway, how images, gathered by a person walking the streets of
a city, can be interpreted against the grain of idealist literary style. The
images are not subjective impressions, but objective expressions. The phenomena
buildings, human gestures, spatial arrangements are read as a language in
which a historically transient truth (and the truth of historical transiency)
is expressed concretely, and the citys social formation becomes legible within
perceived experience (Spatial Origins p.
27).
Benjamins Parisian sojourn was marked by intense
reading, walking, and researching the interdisciplinary material in the
Parisian Bibliothque Nationale. It is in the metropolis of the XIXth century
that Benjamin started to collect his notes for the never finished Arcades
Project. If it were not for
Benjamins walking in the city, the most intriguing and critical items of his
research list would never have been collected.
Benjamins
research on the Parisian Arcades contains the following entry: arcades,
fashion, boredom, kitsch, souvenirs, wax figures, gaslight, panoramas, iron
construction, photography, prostitution, Jugendstil, flneur collector, gambling, streets, casings, department
stores, metros, railroads, street signs, perspective, mirrors, catacombs,
interiors, weather, world expositions, gateways, architecture, hashish, Marx,
Haussemann, Saint-Simon, Grandville, Wietz, Redon, Sue, Baudelaire, Proust (p.
33).
Buck-Morss states that there were already present in
Benjamins preliminary research the key
methodological words such as: dream image, dream house,
dreaming-collective, ur-history, now-of-recognition, dialectical image (p.
33). Berlin, the city of Walter Benjamins upbringing is reflected by his
insightful observations expressed in a series of radio programs he was doing in
Berlin. In the climate of fascism Buck-Morss argue that Passagen-Werk, a presentation of history that would demystify the
present, had become all the more urgent (p. 36). Later on, Buck-Morss states
that the critical writing on Berlin is in the core of Benjamins methodology of
thinking:
Benjamin was concerned, rather with how public space, the city of Berlin, had entered into his unconscious and for all his protected, bourgeois upbringing, held sway over his imagination (p. 38).
While
in the XIXth century Arcades housed the consumer dream (p. 37), in the
twentieth century they turned to commodity graveyards containing the refuse of
the discarded past (p. 38). Buck-Morss references Franz Hessels book Spazieren
in Berlin (A Walk in Berlin) in which the main character experiences ambivalent
feelings by being trapped in a commercial mall. Buck-Morss states that when
Benjamin came back to his Arcades Project in Paris, he was engaged in a more critical undertaking of the project
in terms of investigating the Arcades in sociological, philosophical and
political contexts:
The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century
were Benjamins central image because they were the precise material replica of
the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of dreaming collective.
All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity
fetishism, reification, the world as inwardness) as well as (in fashion,
prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were
the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived
experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation (p. 39).
It is not a coincidence for Buck-Morss that the
phenomenon of Arcades, the hallmark of the modern metropolis (p. 40) could be
found in Berlin, Naples, Moscow and Paris, the four cities where Benjamin lived
and conducted his research.
Everyone who strolled the boulevards and parks, or
visited its department stores, museums, art galleries, and national monuments
could experience the splendor of the modern city. Paris, a looking glass
city, dazzled the crowd, but at the same time deceived it (p. 81).
Leaving the strolling in the XIXth century metropolis, we will walk towards the end of this chapter with another contemporary interdisciplinary text written by Michel de Certeau, which presents the poetics of walking. In his book, Practice of Everyday Life, the writer includes a short and beautiful essay entitled Walking in the City. As a former Jesuit, erudite historian, ethnologist, critical writer, and a member of the cole Freudienne de Paris, de Certeau brings to his writing unusually rich readings that are complemented by diverse scholarly references. To walk with de Certeaus text is to experience the philosophical, anthropological, ethnological, phenomenological and cultural steps that weave together a challenging piece of writing about the primacy of the humble act of putting one foot in front of the other in New York City, a contemporary American metropolis. De Certeau understands the city not only as a rich and complex text, but also as a constantly shifting environment activated by the daily journeys of pedestrians. The pedestrians, the anonymous (minor) heroes of the city, are the key players in making stories out of their walks. The act of walking in the city is so critical to De Certeau that he dedicates the whole book to the anonymous, yet heroic city strollers:
To the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets (dedication, Practice of Everyday Life)
At the
beginning of the essay, de Certeau draws a picture of New York read as a
peculiar instance of city-Text that can be read in terms of its invisibly
written and unwritten stories in an expanding palimpsest. The city is composed
of places that are fragmentary, that have their inward-turning secret
histories. Most of their parts might never be read. De Certeau explains:
A city is composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidation oppositiorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production (Walking in the City
p. 152).
De Certeau, however, seems to play and to subvert the concept of pleasurable strolling on the urban streets, because his body is positioned above the border that marks the experience of walking in the metropolis. He stands on top of the World Trade Center, elevated 110 feet above the ground, and observes the sublime urban spectacle. De Certeaus vision of the city is described from a perspective of the Icarian fall, which makes him assert the importance of descending and discovering the real wanderers of the city. It is in walking, the primary human activity often taken for granted, in the poetics of humble strolling through the city where de Certeau finds daily heroism. De Certeau also reminds the reader that walking in the city can recreate lost myths. It seems that only a ritual story could open up spaces for new urban possibilities. In other words, the act of walking is understood as the most important material for making a meaningful story, for recreating disappearing myths about the habitants of the city, about their unique daily itineraries.
De Certeau describes the scenic and infinite urban landscape from memory, remembering the movements of his body walking through space. He compares the walking city to the complex Barthesian Text where the reader is invited to stroll between the lines of the Postmodern open work. Moreover, most of the metaphors and expressions employed by De Certeau refer to the materiality of language; they come from rhetoric and they emphasize the relationship between walking and writing/reading a complex text. De Certeau says that walking offers the spaces of enunciation that involve spatial turns of phrase (walking tours and detours). Like walking, writing proposes a phatic aspect that initiates, maintains, or interrupts human contact in public spaces. Putting one foot in front of the other makes a path and has followers that create and activate the whole environment. Walking creates a sequence of phatic topoi, situations by which a meaningful communication can happen.
Further, walking in the city is complemented by the rhetorical figures of synecdoche and asyndeton. The first term is a literary device by which the part is taken for the whole. It names parts instead of a whole. When applied to spatial logic of moving through space, synecdoche expands the spatial element in order to make it play the role of a more total experience. For example, a fragment of a neighborhood, a particular space or a building stands for the whole city. Synecdoche makes the space dense; it amplifies detail and miniaturizes entire rhetorical operations. The walkers activate the urban space and make some parts of the city disappear, exaggerate others, distort them, fragment them, and divert them from their immobile order. Asyndeton, on the other hand, is an omission of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs between coordinate parts of a sentence. Similarly, walking in asydeton selects and omits traversed space. While walking, we pass certain parts of the city and miss others. Each time we walk we create a unique story with our itineraries. De Certeau says that every walk constantly leaps or skips, every step cuts out the space which it constructs its legendary story. The operations of the rhetorical figures that de Certeau applies to the movements of the walking body make the space swell, shrink, and fragment. The use of literary figures emphasizes the importance of the disappearing poetic of walking in metropolises.
De Certeau argues that there are three main mechanisms that organize the topoi or discourse about and around the city: legend, memory and dream. While the legendary story is always produced by the walking body, memory, which ties us to place, replaces absences with fictitious desirable presences, and dream plays on effects of spatial displacements and condensations.
The pedestrian, an anonymous hero, unfolds the stories accumulated in a place as he or she moves about the city. Comparing heroic city strollers to anonymous lovers who create a special type of text, the writer poetically asserts that:
Summarizing, the figure of the flneur presents a complex urban phenomenon created in Paris, one of the most modern European metropolises. Its marginal and exilic characteristics are well presented by Charles Baudelaire and critically discussed by Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Michel de Certeau. Since the XIXth century there has been a successive development of the modern urban logic that challenged the classical understanding of space. While on the one hand Modernity built numerous architectural city wonders, on the other, it produced marginalized city spaces. Consequently, the solitary and powerless walker began to emerge as a marginal yet important figure of the big cities. The flneur was never an economically or politically privileged figure of the modern world. He/she was often an artist who engaged in artistic activities, someone who knew the sacrifices of his/her works and therefore could not sell them to the commercially conditioned metropolis. The phenomenon of modern cities, on the other hand, such as Paris, Berlin and New York, exemplify cases of exilic dwellings in which the city dwellers do not feel at home. As in Baudelaires, Benjamins, and Buck-Morss analyses, the artist was aware of his marginalized situation. The dispossessed flneur witnessed and often commented upon the growing commercialization and degradation of his/her own social and economic position in modern society. The images of mourning and the funeral-like settings, along with the visual and literary importance given to the outcast alter-egos of the flneur testify to the increasing imbalance and ambivalent experienced regarding urban dwelling.
The next chapter, Walking in Exile, draws on several interdisciplinary texts that help to problematize the nature and key characteristics of the flneur understood as an exilic figure.
Chapter Two - Walking in Exile
In this chapter I will examine the phenomenon of
walking in exile understood as mobile, estranged, and marginal flnerie. My contention is that one of the flneurs most challenging alter egos is the figure of exile, a
figure that is expressed in the work of the contemporary intellectual. The flneur in exile works in the cultural milieu and includes
the work of the artist. The arguments for informed artistic walking exile, both
real and metaphoric, will be drawn from selected theoretical texts written by
exemplary exiled intellectuals: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and
Julia Kristeva. Additional reflections complementing the exilic aspects of
displacement, strangeness, and minority manoeuvers will be supported by the
diverse critical and literary writings of Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt Bauman,
Sherry Simon, Eva Hoffman, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Understanding Exile
Defining the exilic figure requires not only an
examination of appropriate writings on exile, but also a sharing of the
crippling sorrow of estrangement when translating the unpresentable strong
feelings into theoretical or artistic discourses. This is one of the reasons
why I will draw primarily on critical and creative texts regarding exile that
are written by displaced intellectuals. Their works express a scholarly desire
to seize the meaning of banishment; they also offer potent images of exile
supported by moving and affective testimonies.
Exile moves between different disciplines and lends
its voice to many discourses. It is an interdisciplinary term whose dialectics
constantly challenge logos and pathos. While demanding serious cultural and
political scrutiny, exile bleeds with an intense personal history that speaks
about the unbearable lightness of being[6]. I will wrestle with the notion of walking in exile
by proposing a threefold analysis of this rich and complex phenomenon whose
multi-layered aspects are evocatively announced in Edward Saids essay,
Representations of the Intellectual:
To be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who
is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the
traveler rather than the potentate to the provisional and risky rather than to
the habitual. To innovation and experiment rather than the authority given status
quo. The exilic intellectual does not
respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to
represent change, to moving on, not standing still (Representations of the
Intellectual p.53 )
Before engaging in a discussion of mobility, one of the most important aspects of exilic identity, it is important to meditate on a definition of exile, to present a brief history of banishment, displacement, and human deportation. The New Websters Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language reminds us that the primary meaning of exile denotes a banishment or expulsion from ones home or country as well as, a voluntary living outside ones country. Exile is also identified with long absence from ones home or country or from some place or activity dear to one (Webster, p. 331).
Edward Said, a Palestinian-born, North-American educated literary and cultural critic, offers an affective and effective examination of the term exile. In Reflections on Exile, Said claims that exile, while it remains one of the oldest and most universal terms denoting personal and metaphorical displacement, carries a touch of solitude and spirituality (p. 362). Even though most uprooted people can be called exiles because
they all share the estrangement of exile, they form different political categories; they obtain different human rights because they are classified by different immigration laws. Said describes the spaces of political non-belonging that create a geopolitical image of the contemporary world in the following way:
Refugees [] are a creation of the twentieth-century State. The word refugee has become a political one, suggesting a large herd of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance []. Expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons []. migrs enjoy an ambiguous status. Technically, an migr is anyone who emigrates to a new country (Reflections on Exile, p. 362/263).
The history of humanity is marked by many exilic
events, which will always remind us that there is no justification for the
re-mapping of the socio-political and cultural reality by the national and
international powers if one of the consequences of this restructuring results
in the forced displacement of innocent people. The accounts of exile cannot
present a complete and satisfactory history because its records are marked with
many hiatuses that talk about unnecessary human sufferings and tragic losses.
One of the first human exiles is the symbolic Biblical
Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, masterfully represented in Masaccios XVth
century fresco in the Branacci Chapel in Florence. The God-driven expulsion of
the first human parents seems to suggest that our destiny is inescapable and
incomprehensible. From the Babylonian Captivity and the Exodus of the Jews in
the VIth century B.C., to the more recent events of the massive departure of
people from Russian after the Revolution; the slave trade from Africa to the
United States; refugees from Nazi Germany; the displacement of the D.P.s,
former slaves and captives in German concentration and labour camps; the
massive exile of Eastern-Europeans during and after the time of the Iron
Curtain; the Middle-Eastern wars and displacements since the 60s; the tragic
journeys of the Boat People from Vietnam; the forced migrations of the Balkan
people in the former Yugoslavia; and the most recent suffering of thousands of
displaced Afghan and Iraqi people, victims of international conflict. Each of
these fragmented stories of exile are reminiscent of a discontinuous, and to a
large extent, problematic history.
In Reflections on Exile, Said argues that exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible in the XXth century (p. 357). However, being himself an exile, Said is conscious of the enormous ethical and political responsibilities of being an exiled intellectual who writes about exile without falling into a trap of trivial objectification and theoretical banalization. Exile can be something that is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience (p. 357). Elaborating on Saids thought, I would add that being in the state of exile means profoundly understanding the nature and the responsibilities of being an intellectual and an artist.
Mobile Flnerie
From thought-provoking and highly affective discourses
on loss, travel, and displacement, Said moves beyond the pathos of exile in
another essay entitled Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals. In this
text, Said makes an important conceptual transition: exile is no longer
understood as a personal displacement, but rather as a metaphor denoting the
figure of a conscious intellectual. Said meditates on the responsibilities of
the intellectual who is fashioned after the exilic figure. More specifically,
the critic describes the figure of the contemporary intellectual as an
itinerant thinker who responds to the audacity of daring and representing
change, to moving on, not standing still (Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and
Marginals, p. 64). The mobility of the intellectual, who carries the sorrows
of a shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense with the
land, not on it (p. 59), becomes an advantageous feature for the contemporary
thinker. Physical and metaphorical mobility allows the intellectual to engage
more critically in cultural discourses because he/she is able to speak from
more than one perspective. The condition of being mobile enables the
intellectual-exile to look at the cultural and political status quo from the position of the outsider with an acute and
critical eye: to see things not
simply as they are, but have come to be (p. 60). An intellectual is a
traveler; in a literal and symbolic sense, the exilic intellectual is a
provisional guest, not a freeloader, a conqueror, or raider (p. 60). Said
emphasizes the importance of movement as the condition sine qua non of a meaningful human performance. Since the pathos
of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and satisfaction of earth,
homecoming is out of the question (p. 361); therefore, the exiles
discontinuous state of being can acquire a positive and productive homecoming.
Homi Bhabha, an Indian-born and British-educated scholar, one of Saids contemporaries, and also an intellectual exile, is respected in the international academic community for his critical writing on a postcolonial minor subject. His two essays, Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multiculturalism and the later Minority Manoeuvers and Unsettled Negotiations complement the mobile exilic identity differently than Saids writings. First of all, Bhabha does not write from the pathos position; unlike Said, he is very much aware of the materiality of discourse and his language is therefore highly theorized. In Bhabhas reading of the Postcolonial and multicultural subject, the figure of Saids intellectual is translated into a minor subject. Secondly, Bhabhas main concern seems to lie not in defining minor identity, but rather addressing the political and ethical implications of performing a minor subjectivity. Thus, the theorist proposes a model of a moderate and moving identity that could conciliate radical and offensive views. Bhabha disagrees with fundamentalist and essentialist positions. He proposes a conceptual image of the third person whose ethics are in opposition to the more active, self-aware first-person perspective (p. 434). In other words, Bhabha offers an ambitious model of a minor identity that cannot be fixed by any spatio-temporal or political discourse. The minor identity fluctuates within and without its own fragile boundaries:
is in the movement that a narrative of historical becoming is constituted not as a dialectic between first and third person but as an effect of the ambivalent condition of their borderline proximity the first-in-the-third/the one-in-the-other (Minority Manoeuvers and Unsettled Negotiations, p. 434).
For Bhabha, the condition of living only with the first or the third person presents a limitation of the performative and itinerant possibilities of the self, understood as the performance of moderation as a practice of life (p. 435). The minor subject should perform the poetics of proximity in the midst of things whose movement should be ec-static, fluctuating between dominant and marginal powers. The minor subjects movement, its bending towards freedom, is opposed to a stationary condition. Further, Bhabha understands an excess of the minor subjects performativity as the state of being beside oneself, in proximity to other multiplicities. Dwelling in a constantly disjunctive and interruptive state of becoming encourages the subject to relate to others. Minor walking and talking demonstrates the problematics of proximity: the internally ambivalent subject structured through the temporal disjunction of present being (p. 450). The exilic and itinerant identity resists any fixed definitions and labeling. It splits and inverts the identificatory politics by applying the rhetorical figures of its parts: synecdoche refers to parts in order to signify the whole; asyndeton omits elements in order to present the whole; and metonymy uses a name to symbolize something else. All three figures of speech, often employed by postmodern cultural critics and theorists when examining mobile phenomena, argue that the act of walking in the city remains a discontinuous urban performance[7].
It seems that the quality of being mobile is essential for Said and Bhabha in the formation of contemporary intellectual agency. The exilic walk, with its desire for change and its restless movement in defining the postmodern identity, relates to and complements the figure of the modern hero that was presented by Charles Baudelaire, examined by Walter Benjamin and revisited by Susan Buck-Morss. The figure of exile, that, elaborating on Saids provocative suggestion, can be read as a figure of the contemporary intellectual par excellence comments on the mobile fantasy of his predecessor, the flneur, who walked the city of Paris almost two centuries ago.
In Baudelaires and Benjamins critical accounts of
the modern stroller, the flneur
is essentially presented as a marginal and transitory figure who aims only to
walk aimlessly in a modern metropolis. Similar to the figure of the exile
(intellectual or otherwise) who circulates primarily outside national and
international commercial exchanges, the flneur is a social outcast disguised as a ragpicker, a
prostitute, a detective, a conspirator, a dandy, as well as intellectual and an
artist. With rare critical force and lucidity, Benjamin writes about the
dialectics of flnerie, the
counter-walk of the modern hero who, excluded from official political and
cultural life, becomes an estranged prince who everywhere rejoices in his
incognito (The Painter of Modern Life p. 9). The dispossessed stroller, the anti-hero of the modernized
society can only make virtue out of necessity, good value out of something that
he truly possesses an awareness of the fragility of this existence(Charles
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, p. 70/71). He continues
to walk through the city, even though he knows that this commercialized and
alienating space will never become his home. The flneur is an incessant traveler who is aware of the
contingency of meaning; for this reason he collects fragmentary images of
disappearing Paris while walking around feeling like an intruder in public
spaces:
The city is now a landscape,
now a room. Both then constitute the department store that puts even flnerie
to use for commodity circulation. The department store is the last practical
joke (Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth century, p. 37).
So
why does the flneur walk
incessantly, never standing still? Why does he metamorphose himself into a
paradoxical perpetuum mobile? In
an essay Desert Spectacular, an exile, disguised as a figure of the
post-modern flneur fascinates
another contemporary intellectual. Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish born and
British-educated sociologist, says that a modern man cannot stand still because
there is no constant place upon which to stand (p.138). The critic writes that
while Modern aesthetic, social, and economic crises rendered Baudelaires and
Benjamins flneurs walks
purposeless, the contemporary flneurs
ambulations are caught up in a paradoxical, Disneyland-like, fictitious
reality. Moreover, while the modern flneur participated in gratuitous and free strollings in the
streets of Paris, a contemporary player no longer identifies himself/herself
with the relaxed and disinterested homo ludens. He/she is rather an internalized and tragically
immobilized version of his predecessors ludic identity. Bauman claims that
life for the flneur, the
travelling player, can be compared to a bagful of episodes, none of which is
definite, unequivocal, irreversible; life as play (p. 142). The main
difference between the modern and postmodern flneur lies in the contemporary loss of the disinterested
playful condition, the as-if
reality where one does not have to feel obliged to play. Moreover, in the
contemporary world, there is a significant denigration of the very idea of
walking in the city because urban walkers have increasingly become alienated
players in an estranged reality. The city creates uncanny situations in which
everyone becomes a stranger to oneself and to others. The streets of postmodern
metropolises become stages for the spectacle of solitary exiles. While the
modern flneur wanted to play his
game at leisure we are forced to do so (p. 153). The contemporary flneur became a player of expropriated and privatized
reality. It can be said that modern cities presented themselves as perfect
settings for free games; the postmodern urban spaces became estranged and
exiled realities that were suddenly out of the players control. Bauman
recounts:
Disneyland and its earnest imitations are instances of
the degenerate utopia of life as flnerisme much as that utopia could be, in
the classic era, diffuse and inarticulate, before it has been seized by the
merchants, reprocessed, and liquidized into the lubricant of the
profit-churning contraptions. Blatantly and unashamedly, it presents the dream
as reality, the world this world here and now, in this enclosure as a play
and nothing but a play (p. 151).
Inverting Benjamins claim of heroic urban flnerie, Bauman concludes with resignation that in the
postmodern and postindustrial age when flneurism is commercially triumphant in its political defeat
it takes a heroic constitution to refuse being a flneur (p. 156).
In her informed critique of Walter Benjamins Arcades
Project, Susan Buck-Morss argues that
the modern intellectual was modeled on the figure of the flneur. The XIXth century itinerant outcast, the
begger-philosopher, emerges as a key intellectual figure in the modern and in
the postmodern metropolis. The outcast will assume the identity of a reporter,
a journalist, a detective, a photographer whose intellectual accounts will
become critical for negotiating his/her own consciousness and personal work
ethic on one side, and for informing the official discourse that supports the
state apparatus, on the other. In Saids call for the marginal and
undomesticated exilic thinker and in Homi Bhabhas concern for the emergence
of a minor performing subjectivity, there is a strong and clear ethical
position. Both contemporary theorists notions of the exilic figure stands in
opposition to a corrupted intellectual flnerie. Saids and Bhabhas mobile intellectual would never
work at any cost for the State; he/she would never become an intellectual
conformist, working at any wage. An exile that would accept unethical work and
conspire against its own society would present a scenario in which Said and
Bhabha would never want to see the performing exilic intellectual. The flnerie of the intellectual, his/her intelligence,
responsibility and ethical code are all understood as great assets, never as
situations from which to profit and to risk commodifying himself/herself. Said
and Bhabhas conceptualization of the figure of the itinerant intellectual
presents a healthy political and social provocation to walk and think
differently in the world that turns out to be increasingly commercial and
estranged to its own inhabitants.
Estranged Flnerie
The second significant trait of walking in exile,
suggested by Said, is an estranged aspect of intellectual performativity. In
Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals, Said writes about the
intellectual risk involved in innovation and experiment that stands in
opposition to the fixed and authoritative status quo. Further, an intellectual-traveler displays the
qualities of being risky rather than habitual and finally, he/she responds to
the audacity of daring (p. 63/64). Each of these estranged qualities that
affect the individual psyche demand enormous strength from the exilic
intellectual in order to perform successfully. At the same time, it seems that the exile partakes in and
distances himself/herself from the intellectual milieu. The perilous territory
of not- belonging (p. 359) represents a space that separates every exile from
a larger group, a community or a nation. Said is concerned about the quality of
the potential activities that can be carried out in a space that marks the
solitude of exile and nationalistic belonging. He asks a rhetorical question: What
is there worth saving and holding on to between the extremes of exile on the
one hand, and the often bloody-minded affirmations of nationalism on the
other? (p. 259/360). The psychological qualities of the estrangement and
alienation of the exile-thinker complement and sublimate the intense state of
being in a real exile. Said shares the solitude and estrangement of exile
(p. 362) with many people who are displaced, personally as well as
geographically, with people who deal with the emotional burden of the
displacement of the self.
The psychologically complex and uneasy state of
migration is well analyzed by the cultural critic. In fact, ideas such as,
exile is strongly compelling to think about but terrible to experience, the
achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left
behind for ever, and the pathos of exile is in loss of contact with the
solidity and satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the question (p. 61)
could only be conceived by someone who is able to artistically translate his
personal and migrant experiences into potent and intelligent discourse. An
exile that seems to stand with the others is always apart from the group. This very state of non-belonging is
valuable to Said. He acknowledges this ambivalent state of estrangement in the
following way:
Most people are principally
aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two,
and this plurality of vision gives to an awareness of simulation dimensions, an
awareness that to borrow a phrase from music is contrapuntal (p. 366).
Said has the courage to intellectually transcend the
afflicting experiences of exile and transform them into productive thinking.
His own personal state of estrangement offers an alternative to the mass
institutions that dominate modern life (p. 365). Thus, a generous teaching and
learning about each other, an exchange between the self and the other presents
for Said a critical step towards a meaningful understanding of our cultural and
political history.
Saids
exilic intellectual speaks from the perspective of a nomad, a decentered and
contrapuntal individual. The exile-intellectual proposes an ambitious
intellectual premise because she/he not only reconciles the personal with the
social, but she/he is also forced to constantly question the cultural, social
and political status quo. Now, if
the exile does not conceal anything that
ought to remain secret and hidden but has come to light (Freud, Uncanny, p. 225), this would present a new challenge to what
is personally and publicly understood as homely and familiar.[8] For Sigmund Freud, the very movement between the heimlich and unheimlich denotes a longing for a secure place that we often call home. The
prefix un in uncanny illustrates the human ambivalence of dwelling
in-between the canny and uncanny, in-between the estranged self and the
societal other that has to move on and never stand still.
Saids
concern in making the self speak in relation to others echoes the views of
renowned theorist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, herself an immigrant
herself who left Bulgaria for France in 1965. Kristeva writes about the
phenomenon of strangeness in a compelling way. Strangely, the foreigner lives
within us, says Kristeva. He is the hidden face of our identity, the space
that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder (Strangers
to Ourselves, p.1). Like Said,
Kristeva is concerned not only with seizing the meaning of otherness or
strangeness and solidifying it, but rather with acknowledging its uncanny
features in ourselves and setting them into perpetual motion. Moreover, what
seems to be critical both for Kristeva and Said is the fact that the
foreigner-exile has always been a symptom of the psychological impossibility
of living with the other. The foreigner points to the limits of nationhood and
the concept of citizenship. Kristeva claims that the reason why many national
governments have a problem with foreigners is the fact that they mark the
distinction between a person and a citizen. Furthermore, based on her
experienced and researched situation of the exiled people who immigrated to
France, she states that Western democracies deprive foreigners of certain
rights. For example, with a few exceptions, the exile is always excluded from
public service in all countries. Overall, foreigners are deprived the right to
own real estate and are not granted the right to inheritance. Kristeva
concludes that both Christian ethics and the Rights of Man are based solely
on the states economic necessities. These rights deny the foreigner political
rights, particularly the right to vote. As a result, there are too many
restrictions and paradoxical regulations that welcome the foreigner to a
newly adopted country, but really leave the exile on the margins of political
and social reality. The dispossessed exilic figure is left with the resigned
exclamation: I belong to nothing, to no law, I circumvent the law, I myself
make the law (Strangers to Ourselves,
p. 103). In a closing chapter of the book, Kristeva reminds the reader, that
since we live in increasingly multicultural communities and countries, we
should exercise our openness to others more than ever. We should respect others
and welcome the performance of strangers in our community. In particular she
says:
We must live with different people while relying on
our personal moral codes, without the assistance of a set that would include
our particularities while transcending them (p. 193).
The
idea of being or feeling like a stranger always refers to the language in which
the exilic identity redefines itself. In his moving text, Monolingualism of
the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin,
Jacques Derrida examines the linguistic aspect of estrangement. The French
philosopher deconstructs the notion of monolingualism by stating that he has
only one language yet it is not his (p.1). In order to wrestle with the complex
proposition of linguistic exile, Derrida introduces some of his personal
memories of growing up in a Jewish family in Algeria and developing an identity
that is marked by a silent hyphen: Franco-Maghrebian. He claims that it is very
difficult to define a hyphenated person, and to write an autobiography from
the position of a personal anamnesis. Derrida evocatively narrates:
I dream of writing an anamnesis of what enables me to
identify myself or say I from depths of amnesia and aphasia, I know, by the
same token, that I can do it only by opening up an impossible path, leaving the
road, escaping, giving myself a slip, inventing a language different enough to
disallow its own reappropriation within the norms, the body, and the law of the
given language (p. 66).
Kristeva has already shown us that the two-fold exilic
identity challenges the rights to citizenship. Derrida is also aware of the
fragile boundaries set between a person and a citizen when he says:
citizenship does not define a cultural, linguistic, or in general, historical
participation [but citizenship is] more artificial than ever (p. 15). The
Cremieux decree of 1870 gave Algeria the status of a French state; therefore
Jacques Derrida was born a French citizen. In 1940, he was stripped of his
French citizenship when the French government abolished the decree, only to
have it returned to him in 1943. For Derrida, this political arbitrariness
exemplifies an estranged construction of the very concept of citizenship. The
fact that a group of people were given political status and then had it taken
away is not a natural one. There are some serious personal and national (if not
international) repercussions of such political games, namely, bloody upheavals,
suffering, and the deaths of innocent people. Many survivors of such extreme
political situations internalize their pain, which results in internalized
exile and traumas that might never be healed. Derrida writes about his
disorder of identity that has long been troubling the formation of his
identity vis a vis his national
belonging. He poses a thought-provoking question:
Does this disorder of identity favor or inhibit
anamnesia? Does it heighten the desire of memory, or does it drive the
genealogical fantasy to despair? Does it suppress, repress, or liberate? All of
these at the same time, no doubt, and that would be another version, the other
side of the contradiction that set us in motion. And has us running to the
point of losing our breath, or our mind (p.18).
The problematics of self-identification become
critical when Derrida attests that, in order to construct a biographical
anamnesis, one must have a well-defined concept of I. But is it possible for
a mobile, estranged, and exilic figure to have a stable sense of self?
Derrida claims that it is impossible to point to the clear socio-political and
cultural formations of his identity. He was born into a Jewish family in
Algeria, in the Maghrebien culture, yet he learnt neither Hebrew nor Arabic nor
Berber; rather, he acquired his education in the only language he ever knew:
French, a language of metropolis.
Derrida claims that the situation in which he was born
and raised did not make him enter into monolingualism, or bilingualism or
plurilingualism. Consequently, the formation of his self was neither one,
nor two, nor two + n (p. 29). Thus, the pre-originary, primal master language
does not exist; it is pure fiction. A clear origin of language is lacking. The
colonizing countries invented monolingualism to impose Law on the dependant
colonies, always perpetuating the illusion that there is a mother tongue for
everyone when, in fact, there is only a prosthesis of (imagined) origin.
Lost in Translation
Derridas
philosophy corresponds with the intellectual exiles comprehension of their
situation who talk and walk between at least two languages. Eva Hoffmans
autobiographical novel, for example, Lost in Translation. Llife in a New Language, presents a moving literary testimony of someone who
walked in exile in-between two languages. The book is not only about her
immigration from Cracow, Poland at the age of thirteen and her endeavour to
make a new home for herself in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, but also about
the geographical and physical displacements from communist Poland to capitalist
Canada that were marked by the drastic change of having two cultures and two
languages. Hoffman constructs a well-controlled story, but her subtle
evocations of the very unpresentability of the exilic experience are challenged
by her anguish that is narrated in rich and eloquent English. She divides her book
into three parts: Paradise, Exile, and The New World. While the first
part presents Hoffmans life in her native Cracow and describes her departure
from Poland on the ship Batory in 1959, the Exile presents a fragmented narration from the middle, a
compelling story that masterfully unfolds in the exilic space of in-between. In this most engaging section of the book, it seems
that the writers representation of her critical walks towards the New World
are coupled with her self-conscious metamorphoses manifested through the use of
English and her slow adaptation to Western manners. It is precisely Hoffmans
hybrid walk with the Canadian rules that prompts her to meditate upon the
reconstruction and the meaning of her metamorphosing self. She recounts how,
in her turbulent teenage years in Canada, she was trying to match up signifier
to signified;, how she was struggling to see and name the aura in the English
semantic field. Dwelling here in Canada and yet, belonging to her beloved
Poland, the inevitable there, Hoffman narrates:
I cant afford to look back, and I cant figure out how to look forward. In both directions, I may see a Medusa, and already feel the danger of being turned into stone. Betwixt and between, I am stuck and time is stuck within me (p. 116).
In order to get rid of that unbearable weight of tęsknota, nostalgia
for her old homeland, Hoffman makes a conscious decision to discipline her body
and her mind to perform her best in the New World. One of the forms of her
immersion into the Western system was to acquire an education, culminating in a
Ph.D. in Literature from Harvard University. However, even after a successful
doctoral ceremony, when everything finally seemed to come together, Hoffman is
gripped with fear (p. 227) and she asks her self, as if in real
psychological analysis, a perplexing question: Who is this thats behaving
this way, anyhow? (p. 227). In spite of the gratitude to her family who, as
she says, gave her the first world and to her friends who taught her how to
appreciate the New World after all (p. 1), Hoffman, a
Jewish-Polish-Canadian-American exiled intellectual, realizes that her self
remains forever forsaken. She has become, borrowing Kristevas expression, a
stranger to herself (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p.1).
While Hoffman leads the reader through frequent
geographical displacements and habitats (Cracow, Poland; Vancouver, Canada;
Houston, Texas, New York, United States; and London, England), Homi Bhabha
theorizes this exilic state of displacement and proposes critical studies of a
performative minor self. The minor subject is the exile, the foreigner and
the other. Its uneasy movements between the center and the margin are examined
by Bhabha as an important act of enunciation because it is a performative act
of emergence (p. 441). Drawing on several psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund
Freud, Andres Greene, Edward Glover and Jean Laplanche, Bhabha argues that the
identity emerges through affects that are manifested in states of anxiety. For
Bhabha, the minor subject is the most affective and anxious. Its internal and external intensities
make it into an exilic borderline identity:
Anxiety represents an ongoing, vacillating process of translation that iteratively crosses the border between external/internal, psychic/somatic, between the ego as the actual seat of anxiety and the inner attack of id and superego (p. 442/443).
The anxiety of the emerging subject is very critical
for Bhabha. The product of these intensities, the affect, marks the
psychological disjunction between the subject and the object:
Within the enunciation of anxiety, then, there is a disjunction between the subject as object of itself, to be made anxious, and, in a double move, the object as subjected to itself, myself as anxious (p. 443).
It is the estranged subject, positioned on the
borderlines that is able to generate a meaning of contemporary co-existence in
an increasingly multicultural world.
It
seems to me that what Said aspired to achieve with an experimental individual
is actualized in Homi Bhabhas personal and professional walks that displaced
him from India through Great Britain and to the United States. In the
conclusion of the essay Beyond the Pale: Art in the age of multicultural translation,
Bhabha gives us a good sense of his multicultural and anxious upbringings,
and of his early desire to go beyond colonized India:
Once, a boy in Bombay [], I
opened a museum catalogue and discovered a late Giacometti. [] A meager man,
naked to the bone, legs like hollowed bamboos, buttocks like empty dugs, the
icon of Independent Indian: Mahatma Gandhi. From that moment on, for me, the
Father of the Nation lived in the shadow of Giacomettis Walking Man 1. And
when I read of the Mahatmas defiant march to the seashore at Dandi, to draw a
handful of free salt from the water and thus oppose the British Governments
iniquitous salt tax, I saw the other figure marching too: the walking man []
In that walk that hither and thither, that turns salt into the symbol of
freedom, or bronze into a human image, I felt the need to translate, to create
something else, somewhere between art and history; and with it the desire to go
beyond (p.30)
Marginal
Flnerie
The
third and the final characteristic that complements the notion of the mobile
and estranged exile is that of being marginal. It is in fact the essential
condition for Said that makes him explicitly compare the figure of the
intellectual with that of a displaced person: to be as marginal and as
undomesticated as someone who is in real exile (p. 63). Having the courage to be marginal, Said
continues, means being free from always proceeding with caution, not being
afraid to overturn the applecart, and not being anxious about upsetting fellow
members of the same corporation (p. 63). Saids intellectual position is highly
ethical and demands from the exilic intellectual a clear ethical integrity.
Paradoxically, this noncomformist position is one of the main reasons why
Saids exilic intellectual would have to remain a minor figure. The exiled
intellectual cannot identify with Benjamins notion of a pseudo-intellectual, a
salaried flneur, who accepts without
hesitation economic benefits in exchange for producing manufactured pieces of
information.
It
is also the same ethical and intellectual integrity of the minor subject that
makes Bhabha re-map the socio-political territory and bend towards freedom
(p. 440). However, when Said proposes the idea of a marginal subject, Bhabha
rethinks this opposition and presents it as a minor performativity. What is
critical for Bhabha is the rejection of the essentialist and pluralist
positions in which a marginal subject would naturally be on the margins
instead of in the center. Bhabha is not interested in a discourse of dichotomy;
his minor subject is not in competition with centralized powers. For the
critical thinker, the minor subject performs a contiguous movement with
forceful eccentricity. It draws perpendicular lines that aim to de-territorialize
the social and the personal. The phenomenon of proximity that is created as a
result of the movement of the minor subject with the others is the space where
everyone has the potential to become minor. It is Bhabhas sincere wish that
we have the courage to act from the middle, dwelling in the ambivalent space
that can even acquire an agonistic quality. When we identify ourselves with
others there is ambivalence, anxiety and, applying the psychoanalytical
Lacanian term used by Bhabha, extimit. What is critical for Bhabha is the
demand for a psychological and social situation in which a minor subject
identifies itself as an active and free agent. Bhabha explains:
This agonistic state of
hybridity, this state of acting from the midst of identities, takes us beyond
the multicultural politics of mutual recognition that, for all its seductive
reasonableness, too readily assumes coevality at the point at which difference
is being adjudicated and cultural judgement passed (p. 438).
Minor
Literature
Bhabhas
theoretical desire to transcend the multicultural politics of mutual
recognition is put to a practical test by two French intellectuals, Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In their essay, What is minor literature? the two
French philosophers examine a specific linguistic identification of the minor
performing subject. And since it is often language through which a minor
subject represents itself, Deleuze and Guattari analyze a case of minor
literature. The essay declares: A minor literature doesnt come from minor
language; it is rather that which a minor constructs within a major language
(p. 59). The philosophers argue that Kafka experimented with all the
intensities and possibilities of the German language that by swelling and
stretching its syntax to the limits, Kafka masterfully deterritorialized and
then reterritorialized his own German language. Moreover, the writer recreated
the German language to the point that Deleuze and Guattari saw it as a plateau
of pure intensities. Writing from a minority position, a Jew living in Prague,
Kafka showed that there exists no language that is immune to larger
politico-economic factors. Deleuze and Guattari show that Kafka always used
German in relation to Yiddish and Czech languages thus allowing the writer to
create new possibilities. The authors argue that Kafkas reterritorialization
of the German language resulted in original, powerful becoming-images. They
raise a fundamental question: How many people today live in a language that is
not their own? (p. 61). The situation of living in a language that under
certain conditions, might become estranged creates challenging new
possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari offer a provocative critique of the minor
language when the linguistic notion of the other can also signify the
situation where one becomes a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy to ones own
language (p. 62).
To
continue our discussion of the minor exilic language, Canadian Sherry Simon
examines its phenomenon from a slightly different theoretical angle in her
book, Hybridit Culturelle. It is worth
noting how the term hybridity traveled between diverse disciplines and acquired
different connotations. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,
Culture and Race, Robert J.C. Young claims
that the historical meaning of hybridity had mostly negative connotations.
There were highly racist speculations regarding newly produced plants, animals,
or humans that were created from two different sources, types, or races. They
were hybrids, offspring resulting from crossbreeding. The new hybrid identities
were perceived as impure and inferior to the dominant race or class. Thus,
hybridity, being both physically and intellectually contaminated, presented a
threat to other species (often understood as a threat to the dominant white
European colonizers). The discourse of hybridity, fertility, and reproduction
is certainly related to the discourses of power and the colonial desire to
dominate others. Because of non-experienced before massive and frequent
international displacements of people, hybridity started to develop a positive
connotation and denote a cultural phenomenon. It is in contemporary theoretical
discourses that hybridity celebrates its renewed cultural and post-colonial
critical applications. Moreover, hybridity seems to be one of the postmodern
terms whose denotation can neither be easily fixed nor fully explained. Youngs
open definition of hybridity echoes Simons meditations on the fluidity and
mobility of the cultural phenomena. Young states:
There is no single, or correct
concept of hybridity: it changes as it repeats, but it also repeats as it
changes. It shows that we are still locked into parts of the ideological
network of a culture that we think and presume that we have surpassed (Colonial
Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race,
p. 27).
Simon
claims that a hybrid text displaying more than one cultural reference and that
is often written in more than one language can be called a minor text:.
Analyzing the characteristics of a hybrid text, she writes:
Le texte hybrid est donc une
texte qui manifeste des effets des traduction, par un vocabulaire disparate,
une syntaxe inhabituelle, un dnuement deterritorialisant, des interfrences
linguistiques ou culturelles, une certaine ouverture ou faiblesse sur le plan
de la matrise linguistique ou du tissu de rfrences. Ces effets esthtiques
sont le rsultat de la situation de frontire que vit lՎcrivain, qui par sa
prise de conscience de la multiplicit, choisit de crer un texte crolis,
selon lexpression dEdouard Glissant, cest--dire un texte o la
confrontation des lments disparates produit du nouveau, de limprvisible (p.
45/46).
Simon
examines a few instances of hybrid texts that were written in-between languages by different exilic figures. For example,
she recalls novels by A.M. Klein, a Jewish Montral writer, Marco Micone, Dany
Laferrire, Rgine Robin, Gail Scott, and Robert Majzels. Simon is fascinated
by the unique features of the hybrid texts. All of the hybrid-exilic texts have
features of the hybrid text that Simon requires.
Simons
marginal exilic flnerie is concerned
with promenading in the streets of one of the well-known multicultural
neighborhoods in Montreal, the quarter where many exiles settle down, and where
the author herself lived when writing her book, Le Mile-End. In her personal narration about walking in and
observing this multicultural Canadian quarter, there is a serious academic
concern about the phenomenon of the contemporary culture in-transit, un lieu
de passage (p. 17). The landmark of the multicultural quarter is represented
by the prominent architecture of Saint Michel and Saint Anthonys Church
located in the heart of Mile-End.
The church reflects eclectic architecture in its merging of Byzantine, Islamic,
Gothic, and Roman styles, as well as multilingual places of worship in that it
served as an English Canadian, then an Irish, and finally, a Polish Christian
Catholic parish. The phenomenon of being hybrid is very close, if not interchangeable,
with the phenomenon of being in exile. Simon examines the hybrid cultural status
quo as un mode de circulation,
dinteraction et de fusion imprvisible des traits culturels (p. 19).
There are numerous instances in Simons
book where she evokes the necessity of walking in a multicultural metropolis as
the most primal activity to create better zones of contact in urban
socio-cultural exchanges. Moreover, there are many passages in the book where
the author draws evocative images of the strolling city, a mobile and exilic
place eo ipso. The phenomenon of
hybridity does not recount a linear narration; but rather, it negates the
progressive and dialectic logic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (p. 32).
It evokes heterogenic elements (p. 33), it creates a situation of physical and
mental limits (p. 45), and it prompts form displacement and relocation (p. 53).
Finally, hybridity, a postmodern trope par excellence, pushed the limits of what is understood as
aesthetically acceptable and cognitively possible. The writer states that:
Lhybride est un lieu de
contestation quand il force les catgories et nous oblige a redfinir les
critres de la beaut et du savoir (p. 28).
Further,
Simon claims that the hybrid quarter of Mile-End is founded on la mmoire et
loubli (p. 23). These key narrative tropes, memory and forgetting, present
the most critical elements of every exiles story. This palimpsest-like history
with partially revealed stories regarding Mile-Ends exilic past and present is
exemplified in Simons neighbourhood by the multi-layered fragments of divers
signs, architectural buildings, and different spoken languages in the public
spaces. An exilic space breathes with anxiety and with nostalgia, and it
prends vie dans les coquilles vides que ces rgimes laissent en mourant (p.
25). The hybrid and exilic place is a transitional site; it is always shifting
and redefining its identity because it is composed of many diverse elements.
These elements constantly adjust to each other, and they challenge the notion
of the stability of the newly adopted home.
The
complication of walking in the city can be exemplified by walking in exile
because exile presents a powerful translation of the most unpresentable states
of the flnerie-intellectual who is
always in transit. In this chapter, I argued that Saids reflections regarding
the condition of the contemporary thinker can be seen as a triadic concept of
the exilic identity. More specifically, I analyze the figure of walking in
exile, understood as mobile, estranged, and marginal flnerie. Since exile is one of the oldest terms denoting
human banishment and displacement, it contributes to a complex
culturo-political notion that challenges the homogeneous performing identity.
By examining texts of selected exiled intellectuals such as Edward Said, Homi
Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Eva Hoffman, Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt
Bauman, and Sherry Simon, I endorse the thought-provoking image they draw of
walking in exile. The written accounts on exile become successful translations
of the crippling sorrow of estrangement that transcends intense personal
experiences. Saids proposition to fashion the figure of the contemporary
intellectual into the figure of the exile presents an ambitious task. The
cultural critic is aware that, becoming a responsible contemporary thinker is
not only a personal but also a political decision.
Charles
Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Buck-Morss show how the ambulant
intellectual, a modern observer of life, metamorphosed from a disinterested
bohemian out-looker into a salaried intellectual for the Nazis and other
totalitarian regimes. Zygmunt Baumans reading of the contemporary flneur enriches the discussion of walking in exile because
it shows how the increasingly commercialized postmodern world has become a
contested ground for the immobilized player. It is perhaps no longer a solitary
flneur-player, but rather an
estranged and degenerate utopia of the contemporary metropolis that traps the
dispossessed flneur, itself
exemplifing deserted and exilic characteristics. On one hand, the critics are
interested in the urban site that can be exilic and unhomely; on the other,
they present an exile as a displaced person that lacks a place, an eternal
outsider who moves in between geographico-political and cultural borders.
Exile, then, and particularly the contemporary phenomenon of walking in exile,
is an embodiment of complex concepts and ideas that balance the image of the
exiled city with the image of the degraded urban stroller. There is no city
without city dwellers; similarly, there are no flneurs without the metropolis. Now, the
pseudo-intellectual, the sandwich-man stands in opposition to Saids,
Bhabhas and Kristevas figure of the accountable thinker.
In
addition to the itinerant quality of the intellectual, Bhabha and Kristeva see
the aspect of the estranged and the uncanny as the complementing and beneficial
other facets of the emerging identity. And if each of us carries, in fact, a
stranger within ourselves, then it is our ethical and intellectual
responsibility to recognize the strange qualities in ourselves before we
appreciate them in the others. Bhabha argues for a much more demanding
moderate position in which the enunciation of the minor subject would happen
through an intensely psychological situation where the subject is affective and
anxious. The marginality of the exilic subject seems to be the condition sine
qua non of its successful performance. As
Said, Bhabha, Deleuze, and Guattari tell us, being on the margin does not
mean being downgraded to recycle the effects of the dominating power. On the
contrary, the minor is constructed within the politics and dynamics of the
major powers; therefore, we are all, in a certain way, minor subjects.
Walking
in exile is that borderline performance that provokes a confrontation within
ourselves and with others who are facing with courage the most uncomfortable
situations and desires. Exilic identity performs, explicitly or implicitly, on
the borderline of the self that can be exemplified by some of the best
intellectual and artistic endeavours. I sense a common thread in the analyzed
writings, that seems to emphasize the urgency of the ethical acknowledgement of
others who become a part of our human exilic condition. And if the notion of exile deprives us
from having one privileged point of view, it encourages us to learn about our
unsettled intensities and fears; it positions us on the margin to teach
ourselves and others how to participate more fully in our cultural and
political lives. In the metaphorical and intellectual sense, we are all exiles;
we all live in exiled estranged urban places. Perhaps not all of us cross one
geographical border for an other, but all of us are able to cross creative
borders if we aspire to go beyond art and history promising to deliver a
culturally valuable and ethically sound performance.
Chapter Three - Walking in Warsaw with the Vehicle
One
of the most significant Eastern European walking art performances that draws on
the Baudelairean flneur and
elaborates on the politicized figure of the exiled intellectual is Krzysztof
Wodiczkos performance with his first Vehicle. This performance is important not only because it was
one of the very few politically engaged public art works executed in Warsaw,
Poland, in the early 1970's, but also because it was entered into the art
historical canon as a significant work of art. Wodiczkos Vehicle presents an aesthetically pleasing and politically
loaded artwork that announces Wodiczko as a politically engaged artist who, for
the next thirty years, would become actively involved with a public discourse
and make us rethink the limits of walking in the contemporary metropolis.
I will introduce his first public sculpture, the Vehicle, in terms of its formal qualities with special
attention to the history of two replicas of this performative object.
Wodiczkos performance will be discussed in relation to the Polish political
and cultural status quo of the
early 1970's and will be analyzed in terms of its important contribution
towards the artistically understood urban flnerie. The interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko conducted in
New York in November 2003 as well as my April interview with Wiesław
Borowski, director of Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, enrich my presentation of this
particular performance. My private walks and talks around
Washington Roundabout in Warsaw (I did not walk with the Vehicle, but with video and photo cameras) form a creative part
of this chapter. From the perspective of an absent yet affected participant, I
aspired to represent the unpresentable. I needed to get in touch with my past
when living in Poland and perform my exilic memory by retracing the steps that,
as with Wodiczko, brought me from Poland to Canada in the late 1980's. The
images and thoughts collected during and after my one-day walk in Warsaw in
April 2003 are enclosed in the attachment at the end of this chapter.
Before I
discuss the historical and artistic importance of Wodiczkos performance of the
Vehicle, it is critical to situate
the artwork within socio-political, cultural, and historical contexts of Poland
in the 1970s. Warsaw, the artists hometown and the city that played a crucial
role in Wodiczkos performance, will be discussed within historical, political,
and cultural frameworks.
Situated in the middle of Europe, Poland divides the
West (Germany) from the East (Russia, former Soviet Union). The geographic position
of Poland is very strategic; sometimes it works against Polish national
interests, other times it is in their favor. Since the countrys inception in
the Xth century, the Polish national boundaries have often changed as they have
been put into question by many internal and external wars and political
upheavals. Warsaw is located in central Poland and has been the countrys
capital since the XVIth century. It is one of the largest cities in Poland, and
is known not only for its historical buildings, beautiful sights, and rich
history, but also for its remarkable indestructibility. It has risen out of the
devastation caused by the occupation of the Swedish and the Prussian (1655-56),
the Russians (1813-1915) and the Germans (1915-1918). After the third and final
partition of Poland amongst Prussian, Russian and Austria in 1795, Warsaw no
longer appeared on the map as the capital of Poland. The Eastern part of Poland
that contained Warsaw was annexed by the Russians; then, during a brief
Napoleonic sojourn, Poland was the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw
in 1807, which was abolished by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. There were
several Polish revolts and national uprisings against the Russian occupation
that were harshly put down (1830, 1846, 1848, ands 1863); all of these
patriotic movements had their headquarters in Warsaw. After more than a century
of absence from the map, Poland was reestablished as an independent state with
Warsaw as its capital from 1918 to 1939.
During the devastating Nazi occupation (1939-45),
Warsaw was razed by Hitlers order in 1944. In 1943 the Nazis ordered a Jewish
ghetto to be built in Warsaw, which first amassed several hundred thousand of
Warsaws total population and was liquidated after a month-long Ghetto Uprising
in April 1943. Consequently, about half a million Jews (approximately 40% of
the citys population) were exterminated by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto;
those who survived were killed in concentration camps. In 1945, after the
so-called liberation of Poland from the Third Reich by the Russian soldiers,
the people of Warsaw returned to their city and began to rebuild a devastated
capitol. For example, the ruins of the picturesque old city with the Royal
Castle were rebuilt according to existing paintings, drawings and photographs.
The restructuring of Warsaw was so well done that in 1980 The Old Town entered
into the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.
Warsaw is home to many industries, several
universities and higher learning institutions, as well as the Philharmonic
Orchestra, National Art Museums and Galleries, and the National Theatre Opera.
Todays capital is divided into 18 distinct entities, each with its own
administrative body. While Śrdmiescie, Żolibrz, Mokotw, Ochota,
and Wola are the oldest and the richest boroughs of the city, Praga, Rembertw,
Białołęka, Targwek, and Wawer are economically disadvantaged.
Praga not only is considered destitute, but also it is the most dangerous part
of the city. Brzeska Street, for example, has the reputation of being one of
the capitals most unsafe places. Warszawa-Wilanow used to be the out-of-town
residence of the Polish King, Jan III Sobieski, with a spectacular Palace and
Park; today it is a national museum. Warsawa-Ursynow, -Włochy, -Ursus,
-Bemowo, -Bielany and -Wesoła are the newest administrative districts to
be adopted by the growing Polish metropolis. In 1970 Warsaw had 1,315,600
inhabitants; according to the 2003 national census, that number has almost
doubled, reaching 2,269,000 inhabitants. Historically speaking, Warsaws
population is homogenous, composed of over 90% Slavic (i.e. Polish) people with
a small percentage of Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Tatar, and other
minorities.
At
the end of the Second World War, Poland became a communist country with a new
socialist ideology imposed by the Soviet Union that made Poland, as with many
other Eastern European countries, culturally and economically dependent on the
Big Brother. From the end of World War II until 1989, all Polish political
leaders were appointed directly by the Central Soviet Committee (the
Politburo), run in Moscow by such known dictators as Stalin and his successors
Khrushschev and Brezhnev. Even though Poland appeared on the world map as an
independent country, freedom of expression was controlled by the ruling regime.
The only official politics was that of socialism (eventually leading towards
communism), based on the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of dialectical
materialism. Appointed by the Russian Communist Party, Wladyslaw Gomułka,
one of the Stalins disciples, became the First Secretary of the Central
Communist Committee (PZPR) in postwar Poland. The Gomułka Period of the
1960's was known for this leaders ruthless implementation of socialist
ideology into the Polish cultural and political infrastructures that largely
resisted his politics. Edward Gierek and his relatively open politics to the
West followed Gomułkas leadership in the 1970's. During my interview with
Wodiczko, the artist distinctly recalled that Gierek, the First Secretary of
the Communist Party, used specific mechanistic terminology to lay down new
directives or guidelines for Polish citizens. In particular, Wodiczko recalls:
Gierek had a very specific way of directing Polish culture, industry, and science. He wanted Poland to become equal to the West. He always talked about starting and stopping the progress. He used Newtonian terminology to serve his political ends. He talked about the road to the future, a highway. He was interested in things such as gears; we could analyze the whole language of progress, this postępowizm, progress of Giereks that was a one-way progress: one had to follow the only movement that went forward, the communist or socialist progressive movement (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
For over forty years after the end of World War II
there was a paradoxical situation in Poland: it was supposedly a unified
communist country, but almost all its inhabitants disagreed with the communist
system that was imposed on them. However, because of the consistent and massive
prosecution, imprisonment, and so-called czystki, clean ups of Polands pre-war patriots and
anti-communist leaders, no one dared to defy the overwhelming power of
communism that was present in official politics, in the military forces
(including the ever-present police), and in the networks of all the
institutions (including the cultural ones). Many of the patriots and
anti-communists were tortured and killed in Polish and Russian prisons. Some of
the independent leaders, pre-war intelligentsia, and high ranking officers were
not in a position to negotiate with the Communists; they were either killed or
forced to leave Poland (i.e. the independent government of Stanisław
Mikołajczyk went in exile to Great Britain after World War II).
The
increasing totalitarian measures imposed upon the country terrorized the Polish
citizens who were not able to walk and
talk freely. Hence, the frequent
anti-communist uprisings singled out Poland as a brave Eastern European nation
that repeatedly opposed the political system that was enslaving them. The
persistent struggles to gain personal and national freedom are exemplified by
the massive June 1956 manifestation by workers in the city of Poznań
demanding better living conditions (at least 600 workers were killed); the
March 1968 University of Warsaw student uprising, demanding freedom of speech;
the December 1970 strike when the Polish workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk
demanded changes in food prices (at least 44 people were killed); the June 1976
workers uprising in Radom, (although there were no fatalities, 2000 workers
were arrested and heavily beaten); and the major 1980 strike in the Lenin
Shipyard in Gdańsk led by Lech Wałęsa who demanded that the
government set up an independent trade union. After a few months of long and
difficult negotiations between the workers and the government, in November
1980, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarność Solidarity was officially registered.
In fact, the existence of Solidarity was a precedent
in Eastern Europe. It was the first time in postwar history of all the
communist countries that there was a truly self-governing workers union, not
imposed and not controlled by the Soviets. During the interview I asked
Wodiczko if he took part in any of these anticommunist demonstrations or
strikes. He informed me that between 1968-70 when he was graduating from the
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he was in the middle of the political conflict
between the communist government and the students. He explained:
I participated in all the meetings, I saw what was going on. I was in the Academy when they [the police] surrounded us in 1972 or 73 there was a strike in Ursus [one of the largest car factories in Warsaw] and the police locked us up for one day in the Stadium of the Decade. They rushed everyone from the factories to the stadium to cut off communication between the intelligentsia and the workers, because the workers were on strike. (Krzysztof Wodiczkos Vehicle, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Anticommunist
sentiments had always been present in Poland and soon after World War II, a
network of underground newspapers, books and meetings was established amongst
the intelligentsia. These functioned as unofficial structures that filled in
the missing links of untold stories, forbidden by the state. Moreover, the
alternative culture, often supported by the Christian Catholic churches, was
developing an antidote to the ills of the everyday communist reality. These
free patriotic, political, and cultural debates took place in carefully
selected private, public (i.e. special coffee spots), and church-related
uncensored places.
The
phenomenon of Polish conceptual art is closely linked to the complex
socio-political situation in postwar Poland. Since World War II, Poland had
been culturally divided between the socio-realist style imposed by the
government and the alternative conceptual art movements that started to emerge
in the early 1970s. Paweł Polit and Piotr Woźniak the editors of Conceptual
Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975, critically examine the first decade of Polish
conceptual art. In an interview with Paweł Polit, Andrzej Turowski, one of
the most prominent Polish art critics, says that there were essentially three
major conceptual centers in Poland in the early 1970s: the Cracow and Warsaw
group around the Foksal Gallery; Poznań with the Akumulatory Gallery; and
Wrocław with the Mona Liza Gallery. Moreover, Turowski claims that
conceptual art enjoyed a very special status not only in Poland, but in all
ex-communist countries where the practice of conceptual art became the Eastern
European special. Turowski argues:
In some cases it [conceptual art] allowed the artist
to smuggle in contesting and irony, ridicule, caricature of political
bureaucracy. In other situations it created alternative circuits (mail art,
gallery in form of a sheet of paper, photocopied materials), allowing artists
to operate outside the monopoly of state institutions and exhibitions (Conceptual
Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975, p. 213)
One of the conceptual practical and theoretical approaches
is exemplified by senior artist and critic, Jan Świdziński. He coined
the movement named Contextual Art,
art whose meaning is contingent upon its context; therefore, this artists
interdisciplinary actions often acquired a political dimension. It is in the
tradition of conceptual art where many Polish performers sought to understand
the meaning of art and to question the existing political and moral codes.
Świdziński was one of the very few Polish artists who, during the
communist regime, was allowed to frequently travel to Canada to develop his
artistic and intellectual career.
At that time there was very little financial support for artists,
especially for the avant-garde and performance-based art works that produced
nothing salable. There was only one cultural institution, the Ministry of
Culture, and it promoted socio-realist doctrine. The artists who questioned
these imposed cultural politics were not sponsored by the Ministry. During our
interview, Wodiczko referred to these difficult living and working conditions
of 1970s Poland. In particular he said:
Our role as artists and intellectuals in the 1970s,
Poland was supposed to be passive. As long as we would work in experimental
ways, searching for new means of expression, (there was a slogan those days
that said: artists are searching for new means of expression) as long as
artists followed this way of working, they would get special benefits such as
studios, extra living spaces, and passports to travel abroad. If the artists
were searching for new means of expression, experimenting with new media, and
did not interfere with the
politicians work, then the artists position in social hierarchy was very
high. The artists could have undertaken existential themes, but artistic
existentialism could not include political questions. Obviously, it was a
paradoxical situation. (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November,
2003, New York).
Andrzej Turowski claims that Polish conceptual art
became more a rationalized catalyst between official realist and formal art
than an engaged critique of the official cultural system. In his essay,
Wodiczko and Poland in the 1970's, Turowski writes:
The Conceptual Art, which was just developing in the
early 1970's and had come out decisively on the side of the avant-garde by
appealing to the well-known opposition between realism and formalism, turned
out to be not so much a critique of formalism as a rationalized version of it (Public
Address, p. 29).
During our interview Wodiczko informed me that he did
not take an active part in the conceptual or critical Polish art of the
1970s. He, in fact, was misunderstood by his colleagues who could not accept
his radically different way of thinking and making art that was exemplified by
his first Vehicle. Wodiczko told
me that there was a great number of so-called ego-conceptualists in Poland
who understood I as idea and art. During the interview, Wodiczko informed me:
There was general surprise why the Vehicle did not move forward and backward. I rejected the
idea that the Vehicle would move
forward and backward and it was received with great anger and refusal from my
colleagues because during that time there was an artistic movement based on a
rather superficial understanding of Wittgenstein phenomenology of language and
existentialism found in body art. If the Vehicle would move in opposite direction to my walking on the
platform, it would be accepted by my colleagues in Poland because it would, in
fact, have had this philosophical Wittgensteins characteristic (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
The conceptual- and ritual-based art that developed in
the late 1960s and 1970s had strong interdisciplinary and performative
elements. This is exemplified by the diverse performative actions of Jan
Świdziński, Jerzy Warpechowski, Jerzy Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa
Partum, Jerzy Truszkowski, Jzef Robakowski, and a performing couple,
KwieKulik. These avant-garde performances challenged censorship and communist
control over free artistic expression. According to Krzysztof Wodiczko, the
most accomplished Polish conceptual artist was Jarosław Kozłowski,
with whom he used to spend a lot of time and learned a lot about his
conceptualism that was based on the dichotomy of language and image.
Conceptual and Political Aspects in Tadeusz
Kantors and Andrzej Partums Art
One
of the strongest authorities and the most influential interdisciplinary Polish
artists was Tadeusz Kantor. His innovative drawings, paintings (often called assemblages),
happenings and experimental spectacles of his renowned theater Cricot 2, drew extensively on artistic iconography in order to
subvert and problematize its latent meanings. In his early happening Letter,
for example, performed in January,
1967 (a year before the students uprising of March, 1968), Kantor built a
registered letter that measured 14 meters long and weighed 87 kg, and had it
carried by eight professional mailmen through the streets of Warsaw. The Letter, marked with the name of an unknown receiver, Mister
X, was addressed to the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. During the performance,
Kantor was in the gallery waiting for the letter. He received telephone
messages from his collaborators situated in different parts of the city
informing him of the Letters
journey. When the mailmen reached the gallery, a monologue played from the tape
recorder of the unknown receiver of the letter communicating all sorts of
emotional states. Finally, the mailmen deposited the Letter on the gallery floor and stepped on it, thus executing
the last gesture of artistic catharsis. This happening, Letter, exhibits some of the critical traits, not only of
Kantors unique performative gesture, but also of the conceptually and
contextually encoded artwork specific to the Polish context. The Letters monumental size was similar to the communist
banners carried through the streets of Polish cities during Communist
celebrations (i.e. May 1st compulsory marches); it mimicked familiar
iconography while offering a different content. Most of the early
happening/performance actions were supported by the conceptually based Foksal
Gallery that promoted experimental art as well as critical and cultural
discussions that stemmed from the art as an idea and grounded the art work in
a socio-political and cultural status quo. The Letter draws on
familiar signifiers (the image of
politically correct banners), but it challenges them by offering a different
reading of a signified, although
there is no explicit political message on Kantors letter/banner. Kantors
artistic translation of the difficult socio-political Polish reality is fueled
by deconstructing the concept that uses a familiar form, but conveys a very
different type of message.
Wodiczko remembered another politically engaged
performance that he appreciated as an intelligent comment on the silenced
cultural discourses of the time. The work was executed by Andrzej Partum who
connected Warsaw University with the Warsaw Academia, two buildings that face
each other from opposite sides of Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. He
connected them with a banner carrying a two-word ironic message: milczenie
awangardowe - avant garde silence.
One can say that the notions of conceptual and
political art have always been related, if not intertwined, in critical Polish
art production. Conceptually-based artworks manipulated the political message,
playing with the existing, officially accepted forms. Most of the conceptual
artworks of the 1960s and 1970s critiqued the imposed truths of the communist
ideology in a witty and intelligent ways.
Defining Eastern European Performance Art Before
and After the Demise of Communism
There
are important differences in defining Eastern European performances before and
after the demise of communism in 1990.
The comparative evaluation of this ephemeral art form performed in
Eastern Europe presents an enriching way of looking at and evaluating
performance art.
Even though there were some texts written about
conceptually based performance art works, it was not until the demise of
communism with the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall in 1990, that more
critical thought regarding the contextualization of Eastern European art, and
body and performance art in particular emerged. For example, in her introductory
essay to Body and the East, the
first comprehensive catalogue from 1999 that put the Eastern European
performers on the international Western art scene, Zdenka Badovinac, a Yugoslav
curator and art critic, claims that the notion of Eastern European Art should
be understood not in geographical terms but as a term of popular politics,
referring to the countries of the various former socialistic regimes(Body
and the East, p. 18). The critics
main concern is the question of redefinition and representation of the Eastern
European artistic practices that involve the body, which had been censored by
the communist governments and were thus largely unknown to the Western art
world. Badovinac claims that the body from the East was marked by different
socio-political situations than the formation of an artistic identity in
Western countries. The critic warns about possible theoretical difficulties
while recontextualizing the Eastern body in the new political context of the
1990's. In particular, she says:
If we talk about art creativity in Eastern Europe,
which until recently was relatively isolated from the world, as being a
separate phenomenon, we risk pushing it even further into the world of
otherness (Body and the East, p.
9).
The fact that most artists from Eastern Europe were
unknown to the Western public (except certain rare and exceptional cases) was a
result of the Iron Curtain politics that did not facilitate political and
cultural exchanges with Western countries. There was either a complete
prohibition or difficult situations created by the Eastern Europe governments
regarding performing in public spaces under the communist regimes.
Consequently, most of the early performance based art works were executed in
private spaces, which is why the performances were often poorly documented.
These difficult political constraints were coupled
with economic ones. Badovinac compares the uneven economic situations of the
Western to those Eastern European countries, thus elucidating the very
different understanding of market in these two worlds:
From the sixties on, artists in the West have been
acting, in one way or another, against the manipulation of the art market. In
the East, where the market was non-existent (nor has it developed to date),
artists acted against manipulation by the state-ideological apparatus (Body
and the East, 15).
Further, Badovinac claims that body art in the Eastern
European context became a metaphor of the political powers in the 1970's. As a
radical countersignature to the oppressive political system many performing
artists bodies were marked with scarifications, inflictions of pain, and
self-mutilations. Drawing on Peggy Phelans reflections of the metaphoric and
metonymic use of the performative body, Badovinac states that contemporary performance
uses a language of metonymy more than metaphor because it simply does not
describe the aggression, suffering and traumas, that the Eastern European
performances embody. Badovinac is also interested in how the Eastern European
artists were deconstructing the notion of identity and redefining the complex
politics of the body. The understanding of performance in public vis a vis private
spaces presented different notions in the East and in the West. Badovinac says
that police surveillance and censorship were omnipresent so even appearing
naked in public spaces could have a political dimension (p. 16).
One of the most radical examples of politically based
body art can be illustrated by the action of the Czech artist, Tomas Ruller. On
the eighth of August, 1988 he walked in an industrial site with his back ablaze
to protest, amongst other things, the fact that the Police refused him his own
passport to travel to the West Germany to participate in Documenta 8. Rullers performance was not only a protest against
the lack of human rights, his artwork was also significant because it was
executed on the 20th anniversary of Jan Palachs suicide as a
protest against the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1967. In this dangerous and extreme body art action, Ruller
was making a strong statement about the regimes constraints of the basic human
and artistic freedom in communist Czechoslovakia [9].
It
is in such oppressive socio-political and cultural contexts that Polish artist
Krzysztof Wodiczko was born to, grew up and worked as an industrial designer
and as an artist. Wodiczko began to work on his first Vehicle in 1970 in Warsaw, in a workshop that belonged to the
Foksal PSP Gallery. Wodiczko had been associated with the gallery since the
late 1960's, where he came into contact with such important artists and critics
as Tadeusz Kantor, Wiesław Borowski, Andrzej Turowski, Zbigniew Gostomski,
and Henryk Stażewski; in this way, Foksal Gallery provided the forum for
Wodiczkos artistic formation. He was influenced by Andrzej Turowskis book Short
History of Constuctivism and by the
semiotics introduced in texts by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Wodiczko was
also very familiar with ArtForum,
one of the Western art magazines that circulated in Poland.
When the artist started to work on the Vehicle he had already executed a few conceptually based art
works that investigated the role of the individual in an urban context; his
urban performances with Personal Instrument in 1969; and that of self-representation using photography
and mirrors in his Self-Portrait
show in 1973. Wodiczkos subsequent investigations of drawings of various
objects such as a stool, a ladder and free-floating lines exemplified his
interest in the conceptualization of everyday objects by applying the laws of
illusion. Between 1970 and 1973, Wodiczko worked and performed with his first
public sculpture. It was during that time when his vocation began to shift from
industrial designer to artist working in the social space, even though, as
Wodiczko clearly expressed during our interview, he never wanted to be
perceived as an artist, he simply wanted to be useful to society (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Formal Description of the Vehicle
Lets start with the Polish and English titles of
Wodiczkos first Vehicle. In
Polish the work is called Pojazd which translates into English as Vehicle. During the interview Wodiczko specifies that Polish
Pojazd means something else that Wz, Pojazd translates into English as Vehicle. He explains:
Vehicle in English has more connotations than Polish Pojazd. I actually prefer the English term, because in Polish there is a saying wehikuł czasu [vehicle of time], but since it has wheels and it has to move forward, it has to be Pojazd, not Wehikuł (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
It is important to describe the sculpture in
iconographical terms since the object was essential to Wodiczkos walking
performance. The formal description of the Vehicle, however, posits
a few troubling questions. First of all, the prototype of the Vehicle does not exist. There is a second replica of the
sculpture (i.e. the third Vehicle)
in a permanent collection at the Ldź Museum of Contemporary Art, Muzeum
Sztuki in Ldź, Poland. The
replica has the same dimensions as the second Vehicle that was made by the Ldź Museum according to
the parameters of the first sculpture that is no longer in existence. According
to the Museums classification, the Vehicles dimensions are: 69 x 444 x 82 cm. The currently
displayed sculpture was acquired by the Muzeum Sztuki in Ldź from the De
Appel Gallery in Amsterdam. It is on display in the Museums permanent
collection, placed in a narrow corridor on the second floor. The sculpture is
made out of white-painted wood and metal parts: four bicycle wheels, cords and
gears (Appendix 14).
There
is a revealing history of Wodiczkos performative object(s), the three Vehicles. Although Wodiczko claims that a book could be written
about the history of the object that exemplifies the problematics of museology
and the politics of the contemporary museums, he insists that the history of
the object is not important because it is not part of the work. Nevertheless, I
appreciated the artists detailed explanation of the history of his Vehicles because it helped me to unravel the formal
proprieties of the object(s) that had quite unusual museological and exhibiting
adventures.
Wiesław Borowski, the director of the Foksal
Gallery told me that the original sculpture was left outside in the gallerys
courtyard after Wodiczkos solo show at Foksal in 1973. There was no space at
the gallery or in Wodiczkos apartment to store it. The Vehicle slowly decomposed over time until it was discarded.
There was no solo exhibition of the Vehicle at Foksal Gallery per se, because the sculpture appeared as an unwanted
child (interview). However, since it was made in the Gallery Foksal Visual
Workshop, Borowski insisted that the sculpture be shown in the gallery between
two officially scheduled shows. Vehicle was properly exhibited in another alternative gallery, Akumulatory
Gallery in Poznań, and was presented to Stanisławski, the director of
the Ldź Museum who refused to take it in a deposit. Consequently, the Vehicle
was placed outside the Foksal Gallery
and someone destroyed it and removed it before Wodiczkos permanent departure
to Canada in 1977. According to the official institutionalized judgment of
taste as defined by the Polish Ministry of Culture and exercised by the art
museums and official art galleries of the 1970's, the Vehicle did not qualify as a true work of art, because it
was made with everyday recycled materials. There was no support to store the Vehicle in galleries or museums storage.
Borowski had no doubts that the Vehicle was a work of art, but he admits that he was not aware
of its great historical value. When Krzysztof came back to Poland in the early
1980's with his artistic accomplishments from Canada and elsewhere, interest in
re-examining his art works in a retrospective exhibition developed. In the new
context of his other vehicle-projects (Vehicle-Caf, Vehicle for the Worker,
Vehicle-Coffee Shop, Vehicle-Platform, Vehicle-Podium, Homeless Vehicle,
Poliscar), it became necessary to re-build the first Pojazd, the lost first Vehicle in order to
illustrate Wodiczkos long interest in public art. The Vehicle was re-built by the Art Museum in Ldź for the Presences
Polonaises group show at Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1983. Maria Morzuch, one of the Ldź Museums
curators, explained that the Vehicle
was in high demand by various art galleries and museums in Poland and abroad
after the exhibition in France, and the Ldź Museum was reluctant to lend
the sculpture because of the high risk of damage. According to Wodiczko, the
replica was not a good one because it was constructed very quickly, and it did
not work properly because it was too heavy. Instead of closely following the
artist's instructions and building it from plywood with wooden ribs inside the
podium, the second Vehicle, its
first replica, was built in wood. Wodiczko heard that the sculpture was
supposed to be sold to Centre Georges Pompidou, but it was quickly arranged
without his knowledge that the Vehicle ended up at the Ldź Museum in Poland. When Wodiczko came to
Ldź to confront the situation, the director confirmed that the museum had
the sculpture; Wodiczko then suggested that he would like to sell it to them,
asking for proper documentation of his artwork.
According to Maria Morzuch, the lending issue emerged
again in the 1990's when the De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam wanted to borrow the
Vehicle from the Muzeum Sztuki.
Morzuch claims that the Museum refused to lend it for Wodiczkos Amsterdam show
due to numerous scratches already visible on the sculptures surface and to the
fear of further damage to the Vehicle.
In this situation, De Appel made a second replica of the Vehicle so it could be included it the show. However, at the
same time, a second replica of the Vehicle already existed that had been built by the Walker Art Center for the
artists show. According to the previous arrangements between the artist and
the American art center there could only be two replicas of the Vehicle; therefore, the artist decided to destroy the old
heavy replica and replace it with the new better one so that there would be
only two replicas of the Vehicle.
Maria Morzuch and the director of the Art Museum in Ldź claimed that
Wodiczko demanded that the Museum publicly destroy the second replica of the Vehicle and replace it with the one made in Amsterdam in
1990.
The institutionally supervised destruction of the Vehicle
became a peculiar counter-walking
performance that took place in 1992, during Wodiczkos solo show at the
Ldź Museum. It consisted of having five gallery workers carry the Vehicle from the Museums permanent collection located on the
second floor, through the narrow Museums staircases into the museums
courtyard. Once in the courtyard, the Vehicle was dismantled and replaced by its third replica. The
black and white documentation photos show Wodiczko present during the
disassembling and replacing of his two Vehicles (Appendix 15).
The director of the Museum and the curators who worked
closely with Wodiczko at the time did not feel comfortable explaining or
discuss this matter with me. Looking at the numerous photographs taken during
the dismantling of one Vehicle and
the exchange of it with the other replica in the Museums courtyard, I get a
sense that from the very beginning of his artistic career, Wodiczko was aware
of the dense political and cultural contexts in which his first, second and
even the third Vehicle would be
institutionally challenged and that he would be put in positions to explain
himself and to defend his artwork. According to the Museum workers, the artist
not only insisted that the Museum destroy the sculpture, but also that this
uncanny performance be documented by video and photo cameras The artist
himself, however, insists that he did not ask for documentation of this event.
Except for a few black and white photographs of the Vehicles replacement, Wodiczko does not have any other
documentation.
Constructing the Vehicle
The
origins of the first Vehicle reveal
an intriguing story about Wodiczkos personal and professional interests and
vocation. It is during the work on the Vehicle that Wodiczko realized that he could no longer
exclusively work as an industrial designer, an employee for the Polish Optical
Works (Polskie Zakłady Optyczne), and a lecturer/instructor at the
Technical University of Warsaw. The three year long work on the Vehicle became a significant turning point in Wodiczkos
life: the project made him a politically engaged artist, an artist who would
consistently question the public space for the next thirty years.
During our interview, Wodiczko explained to me the
context in which he conceived his first Vehicle. During the 1970s, Wodiczko and Krzysztof Meissner,
a leading Polish designer, responded to the call of an international
competition for a new model of a vehicle/bicycle. The winning project had to
successfully translate the work and power of human muscles into a
machine/vehicle that would move forward. Wodiczko consulted a mechanical
engineer from PZO to select a design that would be the most workable, given the
lack of sophisticated equipment and humble working conditions. Being trained as
a designer and having excellent draftsmans skills, Wodiczko was thinking about
building the Vehicle according to
scrupulous, engineer-like precise technical drawings (Appendices 16-20). A lot
of hard work involved in designing and rejecting many versions of Vehicles technical drawings. Wodiczko distinctly recalls the
moment when he realized that his future Vehicle represented something other than a competition
project for a bicycle. He says:
Suddenly, I saw something totally different in the
translation of the muscles work into gears. I distinctly remember the moment -
I made a sketch and instantly knew that it was not a bicycle. It had all the
elements that a bicycle was supposed to have, but it was no longer a bicycle.
It carried something different in itself; it was a cluster of metaphors, some
kind of hybrid that would be very hard to justify in a competition for a
bicycle model. I told Meissner that he would have to continue working on the
project alone (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New
York).
Borowski says that Wodiczko, like the other artists
exhibiting at the Foksal Gallery, was given a space to work on his project. His
plans to build the Vehicle began
in 1970; however, the sculpture was built during 1971-73 in the PSP - Pracownia
Sztuk Plastycznych, Visual Arts
Workshop that used to be connected to the Foksal Gallery (Appendix 21). At that
time, Galeria Foksal was named Galeria Foksal PSP. While the gallery with its
one room exhibiting space is still located downtown Warsaw on 1/4 Foksal
Street, its extended work place, PSP no longer exists. Borowski says the work
on Vehicle aroused a lot of
excitement and controversy amongst the Foksal Gallerys artists, because
Wodiczkos approach was different from that of the other artists; his project
was carefully planned, and was made according to detailed technical drawings.
Such an approach proposed different ethics and aesthetics than the other
artworks made in the Foksal Gallery which promoted mostly conceptually based
artworks and spontaneous happenings and performances made possible through
consultation with and the influence of Tadeusz Kantor. During our talk in New
York, Wodiczko emphasized that he always presented himself as an industrial
designer, not as an aritst. I was forced, he says, to be an artist and a
conceptual one. But really, my first Vehicle was a peculiar hybrid of design, art, and sculpture
(interview).
The members of the gallery helped Wodiczko to build
his first Vehicle because, as
Borowski recalls, there was a very casual and friendly working relationship
amongst the gallery artists. The gallery artists passion to make art works in
spite of a difficult economico-political context challenged the
institutionalized working relationship in other galleries and museums. Due to
the limited resources and the lack of sophisticated technological equipment at
that time, Wodiczkos first Vehicle was
created mostly with recycled materials and with the help of his friends.
Borowski recalls that one of his friends took apart a bicycle so that Krzysztof
could have a pair of wheels; someone else arranged appointments with the
wood-shop workers to cut and assemble the plywood for the Vehicles base; and other friends brought Wodiczko gears,
cables and metal parts etc. The Gallery director remembers that he was
initially very skeptical about the Vehicle, because it presented a very different kind of art that he was used to
seeing in the gallery and in the Polish artistic context in general. He even recalls being unsure whether
the Vehicle would work the way the
artist designed it. He clearly remembers that Wodiczko primarily focused on the
idea of the apparatus, in terms of its technical aspect, and that he had not
discussed the performative aspect of the Vehicle while making it. The act of walking that makes the
sculpture move only in one direction was critical for Wodiczko. During the
interview Wodiczko told me that his Vehicle presented a Newtonian machine. According to the
first law that governs the motion of material objects, an object moves in a
straight line unless acted upon by force. Therefore, in theory, when Wodiczko
walked on the Vehicles podium in
the same direction as the Vehicle,
the sculpture would stop, because there would be a counter-power at work that
would make the Vehicle want to
move in the opposite direction. In spite of the Newtonian logic, the Vehicle only moved in one direction.
Contextualization of the Vehicle
The Vehicle
draws on socio-political and cultural contexts as well as Wodiczkos personal
experiences and skills as both a designer and an employee of the Polish Optical
Work (PZO). At the time, Wodiczko was also an active board member of the
Industrial Form Association (Zarząd Stowarzyszenia Form
Przemysłowych), an association
that was financially independent from the state; the artist was actively
involved in the politics of progress; he worked with the workers and with
other industrial designers employed by the state (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal
interview, 23 November, 2003, New York). He worked right in the middle of the
functions of the partys ideology in the industry and of the filtration of the
ideology of progress as a fifth column that tried to heal or prevent the
basic human rights from the communist slogans (interview). Wodiczko had a
great respect for the hundreds of engineers who worked with him. I saw, says
Wodiczko, how some of the engineers died of cancer or heart attacks because
they designed their projects the best they could, but everything was going
wrong because the system did not have democratic elements and it was breaking
down within its own autocratic structure (interview).
After his initial tests of the Vehicle in the PSP and after making the final technical
corrections, the sculpture was ready for its first promenade. It was one of the
instruments that Wodiczko reserved for his exclusive artistic use. In order to
protect himself and the situation he created with the Vehicle, Wodiczko insisted that the Pojazd was only for himself. He did not want the Vehicle to be classified too quickly into certain social
utopias, or to be annexed as something dangerous (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal
interview, 23 November, 2003, New York). He explains:
In a certain sense, I played ironically on autonomy. If you want something only for myself, or for an artist, here it is! Here is something only for the exclusive use of the artist, but, of course, everyone imagines themselves in my position (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
It was critical for Wodiczko that Vehicle proceeds only in one direction. The closed relation
between the socio-political system, and his reflection on the Giereks ideology
of the system of progress was as follows:
The Vehicle
is a machine that moves only forward, it does not turn to the right or to the
left; it follows a straight line. The instrument requires a reflexive movement
back and forth, that is, it requires an intellectual-philosopher who has two
perspectives: he can look towards the back and towards the front, walking and
thinking about the basic problems. However, the basic function of the Vehicle
is determined beforehand, so until he
believes that he thinks it is a certain type of prison that is called freedom,
so-called freedom from, as Marx used to say, and not to (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
The Vehicles
logistics of movement were outlined by the artist:
the movement of the mass is pushed cyclically forward
and backward by a worker along a titling platform causing a seesaw motion; the
energy thus generated is transmitted through an adjustment of gears to the
rotation of the wheels; the momentum of the vehicle and the dynamism of the
labor sustains the vehicles motion in a straight line and in one direction
only (Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, 77).
The large size of the sculpture presented an
exhibiting challenge; it was discovered while storing the Vehicle between two shows that the object filled almost all
of a small one-room gallery space at Foksal Gallery. However, Wodiczko never
intended to make an art object for an exhibition; rather, he wanted to
construct a peripatetic instrument outside of the institutional context.
Performative Aspect of the Vehicle
The aspect of performance presents an interesting case
of hybrid efforts of design, sculpture, and performance, all of which equally
important to the artist. During the
interview I asked Wodiczko to define for me his walking performance with the Vehicle. He did not remember exactly if he walked one, two or
three days, but it was definitely during the very cold January days of 1973.
Moreover, Wodiczko does not define his walk with the Vehicle as a performance stricto sensu. He says:
It is difficult to say if it was a real performance,
but in a certain sense it was performance. I would rather call it a test, a
performance-test (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003,
New York).
The
apparatus for reflection or the machine for walk, as Wodiczko often used to
call it, was taken to Washington Avenue for its first walking test because it
was a public space that was much more quiet and less supervised by the police.
Borowski remembers this first walk with the Vehicle in the following way:
In those times [the 1970's] if we wanted to place the Vehicle
in Aleje Jerozolimskie, for example
[one of the largest Warsaw avenues] a policeman would most likely appear and
tell us that we were disturbing the public space, and we did not want to make
any type of public demonstration because it was not the object for this type of
action. We did not want to argue with the police and explain to them what
exactly we were doing, so we made a compromise and took the Vehicle to the much more quiet Aleje Waszyngtona (Wiesław
Borowski, Personal Interview, April, 2003, Galeria Foksal, Warsaw).
There are number of black and white photographs taken
by Elżbieta Tejchman which document Wodiczkos performance with the Vehicle along the Washington Avenue and at the nearby Washington
Roundabout (Appendices 22-27). During the interview I asked Wodiczko about the
status and function of these photographs. He told me that during that time it
was very important to document such alternative events. However, Wodiczko
claimed that he did not mystify the documents as the final products of his
performance; they simply remained for him documents of his 1973 public action
(interview). Wodiczkos performance consisted of walking on the Vehicles white platform that moved, as designed, in one direction
only. By strolling back and forth along the elevated platform, which tilts in a
see-saw manner, the gears and cables connected to the wheels are triggered
which in response move the entire Vehicle forward. There are no turns to the right or to the left, the Vehicle can only proceed in one direction. All the
photographs from 1973 show Wodiczko in his well-composed posture, dressed
casually, typical fashion of the 1970s Eastern Europe; bright raincoat, dark
pants, shoes, and a hat, strolling on the elevated and moving platform.
Wodiczko told me that he had many layers of sweaters underneath the bright
raincoat since the Polish winters in the 1970s were much colder than they are
today. The light gray color of the
Vehicles podium matched the light
gray color of his raincoat. When Wodiczko told Borowski that he had searched
for a proper coat for his walking performance for two weeks, Borowski
exclaimed: stop it, you drive me nuts! (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal
interview, 23 November, 2003, New York). Borowskis friendly remark shows how
different Wodiczkos meticulous conceptualization of his walking performance
was from his colleagues conceptualization of the same event.
The photographs taken during the performance show only
a few casual passers-by who seem intrigued by the unusual public performance;
however, afraid to make close contact with the stroller, they walk by, most
likely unaware that they are participating in a performance art work. Wodiczko,
a philosopher-flneur, always
walked with his hands behind his back and with a serious look on his pensive
face. The artist told me that most people preferred to pretend that they did do
not see the Vehicle; they did not
wanted to get involved. In particular, Wodiczko says:
At that time there were stories circulating that some
intellectuals made certain actions and they got arrested. The intellectuals
were not under massive arrest, and there were no particularly big problems, but
overall there was a pretty depressing situation back then (Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Borowski describes Wodiczko as an individual who never
tried to assume a flamboyant artistic identity, he was always very much in
control of his artistic plans and public actions. He did not want to draw
peoples attention to focus on the extravagant aspect of the performance.
Wodiczko says that the context of 1970s Poland is so incomprehensible today
that it becomes almost an archeological work; one would have to look at the
Polish culture of the 70s as staging for it was, in a certain sense, a work of
art and politics (interview):
The Polish situation of the 1970s was not an authentic work of art, because the autocratic system copies and strengthens itself when it becomes a work of art; the central politics becomes a great work of productivity or constructivism and our role as artists, as intellectuals was to be part of that work of art (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
In addition, Wodiczko was always a hard-working
person, who took care of every detail in every stage of his work. This fact
explains his lengthy devotion to making a perfect walking machine activated
by human muscles. Borowski admires Wodiczkos analytic mind and total
commitment to the work, which set him apart from the other artists. He is known
as one who prepares in advance for everything, who ponders every detail, and
who checks all the pro and contra before making the critical decision to execute an
actual artwork. Borowski claims that this important artistic characteristic is,
unfortunately, a very rare quality of many contemporary artists (interview).
Urban Flnerie
There
are many conceptual layers to Wodiczkos 1973 performance that problematize the
notion of walking in the city. One of the most critical features of Wodiczkos
work is his testing of the limits of politically and aesthetically understood
urban flnerie in a way that had
never been done before in Eastern Europe. In his interview with Piotr Rypson
and Adam Szymczyk, Wodiczko explains that the first Vehicle expressed his desire to make contact with people, not
in a real, but in a fictitious way. The artist was conscious that the social
body that trained under the communist regime was docile and cautious to make
contacts in public spaces. The artists speculations were proven right by the
people who were afraid to establish communication with a man walking on a
strange-looking object. The city dwellers did not interact with Wodiczko. They
knew that if they visibly acknowledge Pojazd by making closer contact with the artist, they could
be taken by the police as accomplices trying to take part in what could have
been understood as an illegal ( i.e. anti-communist) public operation. Wodiczko
states that, in case he had been stopped by the police, he had a special letter
prepared in his pocket stating that he was an artist and a member of the Foksal
Gallery and that he was conducting an artistic experiment with a mobile
sculpture. The letter asked for support and understanding of this experiment
that was important to the artist. Wodiczko remembers that during one of his
promenades, a police car, intrigued by the strange looking object acting in the
public space, followed the Vehicle. However,
since Wodiczkos Vehicle mimicked
four to five kilometers per hour walking speed of a pedestrian, the police car
had to significantly slow down and walk after the Vehicle (Krzysztof Wodiczko: Sztuka Publicza, p. 11).
Since
Wodiczkos walking performance was not advertised through official public
announcements, it presented one of the most direct, powerful, and
anti-institutionalized statements regarding the limits of walking in the
Eastern European metropolis that are understood as works of art.
Polish Flneur
The figure of the walking artist became a charged
political translation of its Western counterpart, the Baudelairean flneur. Wodiczkos performance on the balanced wooden
platform can be problematized by the two-fold conceptualization of the flneur understood as a marginalized artistic figure and an
exiled citizen. During our interview, Wodiczko was initially very skeptical
about my analogy between his walking on the Vehicle and the Baudelairean conceptualization of flneur. The artist understood the figure of the flneur not as an engaged and thinking artist, but as a
privileged and distant observer who does not get involved. My reading of
Wodiczkos performance as urban flnerie, however draws on further elaboration of Baudelairean term as
reexamined in Benjamins critical re-readings of a walking figure who does not
participate in the decision making of the city. Wodiczko says:
Lets see the city from perspective of people walking
and sleeping on the streets; these are the real people who walk in the city. To
see the city with their eyes is to see the city as a wound. In such context we
can meditate on the concept of flneur It is quite probable that all my work has been involved in fighting
with the notion of flneur. From
my point of view, I deconstruct the figure of the flneur by questioning flneur [in my first Vehicle] in an ironic way. (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal
interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Further on, Wodiczko refers to the 1973 photo
representing him walking on the Vehicle on Washington Avenue in Warsaw. He says that, in a certain way, he
showed all Polish people and especially intellectuals of the 1970s as flneurs. They are suspects, not in the positive sense, but in
their assumed flnerie as active
participants in the ideological system. From here to here is flneur, says Wodiczko and points to his Vehicles wheels rolling on the ground. There is no flneur
here, and he points to his feet,
above the ground, resting on the Vehicles podium. Wodiczko explains:
There are two parts of this Vehicle and in a book, Critical Vehicles, I especially cropped the photos of the first Vehicle to show the lower part, touching the ground, and the Vehicles upper part, the podium (Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
In a context of his later vehicles designed and build in Canada and United States (Vehicle for the Worker, Homeless Vehicle, Poliscar, The Mouthpiece (Porte-Parole), Alien Staff, Disarmor, video and sound projections of abused and powerless city dwellers etc.) Wodiczko tells me that he wanted to give a chance to other people. He wanted other people to become significant and empowered flneurs who would speak the truth about the citys real life; the life that no one wants to talk about. Wodiczko says:
If I in the 70s, 80s and 90s and in 2000 keep walking in the city and helping people to cope with their living in a more narrative and performative sense than I used to do alone, then these people become artists, thanks to my works. I am interested in reading the city, in listening to the silence of the city, not only to what the city is saying, but also to what the city is not saying. I want to render invisible people visible, to see the city with their eyes, with their ears, with their thoughts and memories (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Because of Polish social and political context that was drastically different from the XIXth century France and other Western countries, the Eastern European flneur seemed to be especially challenged by numerous limitations constraining individual actions in public spaces. Performance with the Vehicle, amongst other things, presents a thought-provoking statement regarding the oppressive Eastern European status quo. Walking on a bright, long platform becomes an image of asserting ones never-ending, discontinuous, marginal flnerie.
Wodiczkos paradoxical promenade with the Vehicle can be understood as a beautiful and canny metaphor
of an exiled artist who becomes an inverted figure of the Romantic genius and a
tragic modern hero. In fact, Wodiczko was greatly influenced by the poetic
writings of the Romantic Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz. In his famous national
epic, Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz
depicts turbulent life in a small Polish village of Lithuania at the beginning
of XIXth century during the patriotic upheaval. The poet wrote his long
narrative epic while in exile. Mickiewicz left Poland for France in order to
escape possible Russian prosecutions after his long involvement with
anti-Russian activities. In an interview with Rypson and Szymczyk, Wodiczko
talks extensively about the figure of the Wandering Jew, Jankiel, as portrayed
in Mickiewiczs literary opus. It is the story of a wanderer who carries with
him philosophical artifacts that interest Wodiczko. In particular he says:
The foreigners always tell you stories [...]. They
create history by recounting stories. Since they do not have the rights of free
speech or the right to vote, they sing along because by singing they can warn
the world in a prophetic way. The foreigners are artists in a basic meaning of
the word. They have to try out different tricks, they create metaphors, just
like Jankiel, who - perhaps by chance, chose to live by chance or be played by
chance (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Sztuka Publicza, p. 26).
The figures of the wanderer, the foreigner, and the
other become prototypes of the estranged status of the contemporary artist in
the communist Poland of 1970's. Given the challenging socio-cultural conditions
in which he must perform, the artist-flneur decides to stroll in the city to exercise his rights
to tell a different type of story. Walking on the elevated machine without
touching the ground expresses the artists Romantic desire to transcend a given
situation. On the other hand, since Wodiczkos performance is grounded in a
specific public space, it suggests that it acknowledges and works within an
actual social reality. The representation of an artist situated on a
peripatetic instrument presents a dichotomy of the artists reality. Wodiczko
walking on the Vehicle almost
touches the sky, yet he still rolls his Vehicle, on the urban ground. The artists moving image is
torn between the conceptual and the metaphysical (an elevation on the
platform), and the everyday realm (the platform rolls on the city sidewalks).
If Wodiczko were to walk with other people on the ground, it would signify his
illusive freedom, his desire to escape from reality and to join the ideological
system of progress. If I stepped down from the Vehicle and walked with others, I would have to join KOR or Solidarność [both were anticommunist organizations], to step into
a lived reality of other people (interview). The artist walks on an instrument
designed for his exclusive use. He seems to be with the others, yet
simultaneously, he walks alone, much like his alienated Parisian predecessor.
Wodiczko identifies with the urban landscape by
creating an ambiguous relationship with it. His walk, one of the most humble of
the human activities, is not taken for granted in this performance; it is
metamorphosed into a symbol of freedom, representing an artist who can produce
his work without watching for the ever present governmental censorship and
public surveillance. Wodiczko seems to meditate on the impossible question of
whether an artist is ever truly free to execute and perform his/her artworks.
Ironically, even though the podium moved in one direction, in the 1973 artistic
promenade with the Vehicle seemed
to be motionless; Wodiczko made his steps in the same spot, over and over
again; thereby, rendering the white platform an ironic metaphor for the one
officially sanctioned political or cultural discourse, for an artwork executed
according to the socio-realist parameters that praise communist dogma.
Can an artist transgress given cultural conditions? If
so, how? The absurd and brave strolls along Washington Roundabout proved that
Wodiczko was not afraid of making a statement, even though his walk did not
convey any explicit message. The great strength of this artwork lies both in a
formal beauty of the Vehicle as
well as in a potent latent message encoded within this performance. The very
insistence on walking a straight line in a controlled city becomes an idiotic
act of heroism invested with a powerful artistic statement. Wodiczko
recontextualizes his peripatetic walks in the following way:
[the Vehicle]
became a translation of the situation of an individual in an autocratic Polish
reality into a metaphorical object. I, as an artist functioned in this
performance as a symbolic and mechanical user. I was also a part of an artwork
(you could have looked at me), who was using the instrument. I was part of the
instrument, a never ceasing machine of progress. I was an automated thinker (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Sztuka Publicza, p. 12).
Wodiczkos walking exercise imitated neither official
communist marches, nor long Catholic processions that often occupied the main
streets of Polish cities to manifest the predominant ideologies or religious
credos. Contrary to the officially sanctioned walks, the artist was promenading
alone, and was not disseminating a clear message to the public.
In spite of the fact that Wodiczkos
performance with the Vehicle was
executed in a specific political and cultural context, it transcended cultural
specificities, making it a critical art work that found its place in important
art historical discourses. At the time of executing his performance, Wodiczko
was not understood by many people. It seems that he was very much ahead of his
time, and his remarkable personal and artistic journeys that took him from
Poland through Europe, to Canada, and to United States, started right there and
then, in 1973 with his insistence of walking a straight line along Washington
Avenue on the mobile sculpture.
There
is a great conceptual similarity between Wodiczkos insistence on free walking
in a city controlled by the state and the mythic figure of the Sisyphus who was
condemned to eternal punishment. Even though Wodiczko later designed a Vehicle
for the Worker, a Sisyphus Vehicle,
the first Vehicle displays certain
similarities with the Greek anti-hero. During the interview, Wodiczko told me
that Sisyphus punishment was to reflect on his work. Sisyphus was walking down
the hill to climb up it and push a stone, over and over again. Wodiczkos Vehicle
for the Worker (1977-79) moves in
only one direction on a tilted platform and is sustained by the movement of the
worker who pushes the Vehicle all
the time, without a break.
Sisyphus, on the other hand, pushes the stone in a
progressive and reflexive way. Sisyphus story comes from Greek mythology in
which he is best known as a canny, trickster-king of Corinth, who often lived
by lies, theft, and by murdering unsuspecting travelers. Sisyphus betrayal of Zeuss secret got
him sent to the underworld. When Sisyphus managed to escaped from Hades first
time, Hermes brought him back to the underworld by force. Sisyphus exemplary
punishment, as Robert Graves recounts, consisted of pushing large rock up
Hades hill, a punishment that was much more severe than those of the usually
condemned souls in the world of the Dead. In his book, Greek Mythology, Graves emphatically narrates:
As soon he has reached the summit, he is forced back
by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounces to the very bottom once more;
where he wearily retrieves it and must begin all over again, though sweat
bathes his limbs, and cloud of dust rises above his head (Greek Mythology, p. 218).
It is the unresolved phenomenon of Sisyphuss
impossible struggle between life and death, just and unjust, and between
meaningful and meaningless activities that make this Greek anti-hero into a
frequently quoted symbol in both Western and Eastern cultural history.
Wodiczkos paradoxical walk that gets him nowhere parallels the ambivalent
movement of Sisyphus. Both figures are paradoxical workers that negate the very
definition of their profession that expect them to deliver a product. Both
engage in apparently meaningless, powerless actions in which bodily movement
plays a great part. As rolling the shameless stone up the hill in the Greek
myth becomes an eternal image of a degraded status of the worker, so does
Wodiczkos walking a podium four meters long podium become a powerful symbol of
the suppression of personal and artistic freedom in a totalitarian country.
During the interview, Wodiczko specifies the Sisyphus-like function of his
first Vehicle:
[the Vehicle] is about the consciousness of your place, that is the philosophico-reflexive functioning within the frame of the system, that thanks to that movement goes forward, without that reflection there could be no progress. The irony here plays on the Vehicle contact with reality, because the Vehicle moves on the ground, while an intellectual, an artist is above the ground, as if in the clouds. People walk around on the real ground. (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal interview, 23 November, 2003, New York).
Wodiczkos
promenades, empowering gestures of a socially powerless artist, become a potent
statement about a profession that has been consistently marginalized,
especially in communist countries. The fact that Wodiczkos performances from
1973 and the subsequent presentation of the Vehicle at Foksal Gallery (1974) did not receive much public
attention in terms of the official critical art reviews and media coverage is
perhaps unsurprising. When I was researching Wodiczkos two thick files that
Foksal Gallerys workers have been scrupulously collecting since the artist
involvement with the gallery, I was struck by the lack of public announcements
and written responses to Wodiczkos performance with the Vehicle and to his subsequent presentation of his mobile
sculpture. Wodiczko informed me that the Vehicle did not have a proper show, as it was not accepted by
many of the gallery colleagues as a real work of art. No invitations,
brochures, or other press releases were done. The only one-page text about the Vehicle was written by Andrzej Turowski, a Polish artist
critic and a close friend of Wodiczko after the two-week presentation of the Vehicle
at Foksal Gallery. It is regrettable
that none of the alternative and official art galleries discussed Wodiczkos
walking on the tilting platform, since it was an important performance art
work. Moreover, most of the contemporary publications regarding performance
art, conceptual art, or Polish art focus on the artists later artworks made in
Canada and the Unites States (i.e. his slide projections on diverse public
buildings and his later vehicle and instrument projects).
The
overlooked artistic importance of Vehicle by both the past and current artistic and cultural publications might
be caused by the very impossibility of classifying this artwork as performance,
conceptual art, or sculpture stricto sensu. In the later
comprehensive book, Critical Vehicle,
Wodiczko reveals the Vehicles latent context. In particular, he says:
One could say that the subject operating the vehicle
was in fact an object, a part of this machine. And yet there was, in this
vehicle, a certain illusion of freedom, moving back and forth and seeing the
world independently, in peripatetic fashion. And for all that the independence
was limited by the dimensions of the machine and the manner in which one moved
upon it, there emerged a dubious dialectic based on this dual point of view.
The thesis and antithesis were to influence the synthesis, but the synthesis
had a direction determined in advance. It was not a simple locomotion, just
moving along the ground - dangerous terrain - but rather involved elevation
above it, to the level of the platform of the vehicle, somewhat closer to the
clouds (Critical Vehicles, p. 76).
Wodiczkos Vehicle seems to escape a rigid art historical classification
because his artwork addresses the poetics and politics that lie on the border
of many cultural discourses. The performance with the Vehicle comprises at least three diverse elements: design,
sculpture, and performance artwork. The artwork, being conceived ahead of its
time, exists in rich interdisciplinary fashion as performance-based art that
has sculptural, photographic and drawing-based documentation.
One of the very few critical texts about Wodiczkos
performance was written by Andrzej Turowski. The text displays the theoretical
language of Polish conceptual context in the 1970s. This very short, one page
text, archived by the gallery, is dated February 1974, a few months after
Wodiczkos presentation at Foksal Gallery. Turowski briefly describes the Vehicles functions and argues that Wodiczkos object served
the real replacement in space as a result of the authors changing places
within the Vehicle itself.
Further on he adds, Wodiczko was defining the movement of space by movement in
space. The object (apparatus, Vehicle)
was becoming a mediator allowing an understanding of the situation in which the
artist assumed a role of an object. Applying a modernist understanding of what
constitutes a work of art, Turowski concludes: This is the reason why the
vehicle never pretended to be called a work of art, because it acquired a
meaning in the act of becoming that is outside of the performance (Gallery
brochure). Turowskis critique of Wodiczkos performance presents a
contradictory statement. On one hand, he seems to be aware of the special
status of Wodiczkos work; on the other, he claims that the sculpture that is
integral to the artwork, cannot be called a work of art because it does not
conform to the official aesthetics, the definition of which Turowski provides
as the modernist judgment of taste, that which ruled at the time. In a later review
regarding Wodiczkos conceptual Line
art works, Wiesław Borowski contextualizes the artists action with the Vehicle slightly differently. He writes that the performance
wanted to demystify as well as contemplate on the stereotypical imagination of
the everyday (Kultura, 1976). In
Wodiczkos own words, Pojazd
functioned as an ironic self-portrait as well as a portrait of his close
friends. In a later interview conducted by two Polish art critics, the artist
eloquently summarizes the rich conceptual dichotomy of his 1973 walking
performance:
The first Vehicle is not very active. I walk on it in circles, in one place, back and
forth. It is not a peripatetic exercise in a sense in which one walks and
meditates upon the issues of being and on the knowledge of others. The walking
back and forth expressed an illusion of being free, of being transparent,
erected, alienated, yet simultaneously, of being a useful power that drives a
social machine forward. [...] For the designer of the Vehicle it was important that the intellectual does not cease
to think. (Krzysztof Wodiczko, Sztuka Publicza, p.16).
An image of an artist/intellectual who is always in
motion leads to the second important aspect of Wodiczkos walking performance,
in particular, to the performative political message. Wodiczko, at that time a
Polish citizen, performs as if he were already exiled from communist reality
controlled by the oppressive political powers from which he felt estranged.
Performing his artistic and solitary flnerie in Warsaw in 1973, at a time when it was extremely
difficult to obtain a passport to travel abroad (especially to the West)
Wodiczko could not know that his emigration to Canada in 1977 was about to
challenge his nomadic national status. In a few years he would acquire
Canadian, French and American national identities. It is as if the very idea of
building an itinerant instrument and performing with it in the difficult Polish
context of the 1970s invested the object with latent exilic meaning. Wodiczkos
socially and politically conscious art, an argument that would be developed in
his subsequent vehicle projects executed in the West, was already present in
the first Vehicle from 1973. The Vehicle
argued for meaningful artistic
gesture. Amongst other things, Wodiczkos object engaged in a critical public
art. It presented a significant intervention in a context that always
challenged art by forcing it to bend towards prescribed political ideas.
The
director of Foksal Gallery, Wiesław Borowski, remembers the artist as an
avid critical thinker who brought a lot of positive energy into the gallery,
not only with his unusual art projects, but also because of his eager
engagement in organizing and participating in critical discussion regarding
global cultural issues. In Borowskis words, Krzysztof was contributing into a
very important dialogic platform
that existed in the Gallery (interview, 2003). That platform consisted of
uncensored and engaged discussions with fellow artists and with the students
from the Fine Arts Academy who were often invited to these meetings. When
Wodiczko was making his Vehicle,
the critical art discussions were already taking place at the Foksal Gallery
and at the nearby Skarpa Caffe. Borowski remembers that there were series of
engaging meetings regarding Wodiczkos art works and the Vehicle in particular. He recalls that these stimulating
discussions became essential both in the formation of the artist and of the
gallery. Even though the grassroots of Wodiczkos artistic criticality stem
from these engaging discussions, there are no written recollections of these
meetings. Wodiczko is remembered as an individual with the unusual propensity
to zoom in on details, and to simultaneously, understand and make crucial
analyses regarding broad cultural phenomena.
What
is critical about Wodiczkos walking performance with the Vehicle is the fact that it can be understood as an exiled
walk that tests the aesthetic and political limits of strolling in public
space. Wodiczko prepares himself very carefully for this walk that will become
a landmark of his artistic style, dealing critically with the issues of public
art. It is because of the performance with the Vehicle that Wodiczkos career changed from that of being a
designer to that of being a socio-politically engaged artist. He mades detailed
drawings and time consuming tests with a Vehicle to ensure that the paradoxical, yet indispensable,
artists apparatus would work.
Even though Wodiczko got a lot of help from the Foksal Gallery, he knew
that in order to test his work he had to be in the public space, within the
context of everyday life, yet apart from any institutionalized art commodified
by art galleries and art museums. Performance, a new contested art form, was
the best medium to test Wodiczkos artistic limits. The technical drawings and
the photographs that became a part of the walking experience have been
displayed together with the Vehicle
in the Foksal Gallery and in the Ldź Museum of Contemporary Art.
The
struggle to preserve the second Vehicle and the insistence upon building two more replicas based on the first
forgotten and decomposed object, displaces the initial significance of
Wodiczkos powerful performative act from 1973. In a later interview Wodiczko
states that after the performance is done his diverse vehicles function as set
of relics, reminders which are quite capable of continuing their critical
mission even as museum artifacts (Critical Vehicles, p. 218). When I visited the Contemporary Art Museum
in Ldź and saw the Vehicle
for the first time (the third replica), my initial reaction was to step on it
and experience that magical walk. However, a Museums worker pulled me aside at
the last moment because he knew that the Vehicle was permanently fixed to the gallery floor with
unnoticeable brackets. I was disappointed, because the Vehicle looks more like an immobile coffin squeezed into a
gallery corner, and it is actually easy to pass by this artwork without
noticing it. The Vehicle then,
when it became purchasable museum art could not be experienced and touched.
When the institutional judgment of taste finally decided that the Vehicle is in fact a work of art, the object was bought and
preserved by the Ldź Museum. There is a certain contradiction in the
Museums operation. Over a period of ten years, the mobile sculpture became
desirable by the same art institutions that refused to store the original
prototype for free. Finally, I am a bit skeptical to see how the immobile Vehicle can continue its critical mission after becoming one
among many other mute museum artifacts.
Wodiczkos
formal and conceptual design of the kinetic Vehicle comments in a witty and creative way on the political,
cultural and social realities in Poland. In a remarkable way, this ephemeral
artistic act of walking transcended the given politico-cultural status quo. The performance with the Vehicle is an example of a politically engaged artwork and
makes its author a political city stroller, a XXth century Eastern European flneur. There is a theoretical notion that every
contemporary art work is political because it offers a perspective - direct or
indirect - on social relations (Robert Atkins, ArtSpeak: a guide to
contemporary ideas, movements and buzzwords, p.127). However, in works such as Wodiczkos the question of politics
is also linked to the notion of distribution, context and an audience. These
three factors acquire paramount importance in evaluating a political art
artwork. Contemporary artists must make many choices if they want their
artworks to be distributed in the right context. In politically and
economically mapped words, be it in the East or in the West, it seems no longer
possible to execute an artwork that is immune to the structures and the frames
of a lived reality. It is therefore a condition sine qua non that political artists must have total control over
distribution, strategies, and over the audience in order to fully succeed in
their artistico-political practices. Depending on artists social concerns or
actual social involvement with the work, Lucy Lippard distinguishes between
political and activist art. In her essay, Trojan Horses: Activist Art and
Power, she says:
I would describe a political artist as someone whose
subject and sometimes context reflects social issues, usually in the form of
ironic criticism. Although political and activist artists are often the
same people, political art tends to be socially concerned and activist art
tends to be socially involved [...] The formers work is a commentary or
analysis, while the latters art works within its context, with its audience.
(Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power p. 349)
Wodiczkos performative action in Warsaw displays both
political and activist characteristics. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to
separate this works political features from its activist ones, since his art
created an interesting on-the-spot
problem for the pedestrians and for the governmental surveillers of the urban
space. Wodiczkos performance with the Vehicle can be used to show that Lippards distinctions
between political and activist art are problematic. From the very beginning of
his artistic career, Wodiczko was very clear regarding his political, if not
revolutionary ideas regarding art. Talking about the role of the artist in a
democratic society, he speculates:
I believe that as an artist I should have right not
only to my own practice, but also the rights to suggest different things to
others. It does not mean that I have to be a demagogue, God forbid, if I have
rights to speak, so I also should have rights to convince people, as well as
taking responsibility for others. And this is a moment in which we have ethics
of democracy. Democracy gives rights to all, it is a symmetrical [democracy] (Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Sztuka Publicza, p. 19).
Like Wodiczko who was raising the political
consciousness in Eastern European art in the 1970's, another political artist,
Martha Rosler, critically inquired into the Western politicized cultural
context of the same time. In
Place, Power, Politics Rosler posits important questions regarding the role
and responsibility of the artist in a contemporary North American context. She constructs
her arguments based on artistic and theoretical experiences as well as informed
socio-political events. The questions she asks in her essay are concerned with
artistic identification, audience, and distribution: With whom to identify,
for whom to make work, and how to seek patronage (p. 64). Rosler revisits the
history of the counter-cultural, anti-institutional movements that started in
the late 1960's in which performance, happening, and other Fluxus type
activities were taking place. It was at that time that she became aware of the
existence of art space, of so-called third space, the imaginary space where
different tales collided (p. 58). She tried to show that the notion of here
and there are the same realities. We can observe that in
Wodiczkos case the notions of there
and here are also not separate
concepts, but one. The discourse of creating the other space that, as the
Polish artist suggests, could be called democracy, implicates the active use of
ethics and aesthetics. Wodiczkos 1970's performance presents a thought
provoking example of the artist functioning on both sides of the discourse as
an aesthetic carrier and as an ethical citizen who tries to reconcile the two
elements in his evocative artistic acting out.
It
is fascinating that in such an apparently simple automobile model the aspect
of walking is treated in a rich political and metonymic way. First of all, the
artist who walks on the platform acquires an ambiguous function of the abject
that stands in-between the object (i.e. the machine, or restrained individual) and
the subject (i.e. the autonomous individual). Wodiczko ironically combines the
features of human and machine by using the parts of the body that are symbolic
of progressive movement: the foot and the wheels. The Vehicles function can be seen as a replacement of
disinterested travels in the city, as experienced by the Baudelairean flneur to keep pace with the progression of the society.
Wodiczko, elevated from the ground, a peculiar anti-hero not from the Romantic,
but rather from socio-realist Polish context, questions the very idea of
progress through his immobile movement (the artist walks back and forth on the
platform) that propels the Vehicle
that seems to be out of the artists control. Once stimulated by the artists
muscles, the Vehicle is in charge
of its own movement. The question is whether the Vehicle walks towards a better future as suggested in Hegels
philosophy where the thesis and antithesis can achieve the ultimate state of
synthesis. Wodiczko strolls rhythmically, as if producing a personal
mesmerizing incantation that would save him from the totalitarian system that
produced these uncanny walks. Although the artist is capable to walk and talk
freely, at least during the time of the performance, he was confined in the
1970's Poland to the dimension of the platform that can be understood as a
necessary complement of the states politics. Wodiczko states: