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 a