Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Emma Cocker discusses the practice of wandering, and considers the critical resonances of such an artform.
Reviewed by: Emma Cocker
Wandering describes a form of ‘drift’ or purposeless action, distinguishable from the habitual types of ‘motivated’ walking typically encouraged within the public realm. It advocates the value of deviating from normative patterns of behaviour, by proposing an errant model of traversing the city where journeys are not undertaken in anticipation of some future destination, but rather as a process for creating tangential experiences. Navigational aids and maps can be misused for wilful disorientation, whilst guidebooks become tools for de-familiarisation and misdirection as much as for finding one’s way. Within the field of contemporary art it is possible to witness a resurgence of interest in acts of walking, wandering and other spatial practices in recent years. Various national and international exhibitions and events in the last year alone reflect the divergent possibilities within the act of wandering as or as part of a contemporary art practice. Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition focused on the artist as an individual wanderer following in the tradition of W.G Sebald’s sojourns, whilst the Stedelijk’s Mapping the City positioned the practice of ‘wandering’ within a series of artistic strategies for interrogating the city’s social communities and urban rituals. Angel Row’s Shifting Ground reflected on the city as a space of inhabitation, where ‘place’ became inflected with traces of past experiences and the desire lines of personal narrative. For example, in The Climb Sorrel Muggridge (in Nottingham) and Laura Nanni (in Toronto) invited the public to assist them in their absurdly impossible quest to climb to 699km in order to (hypothetically) see each other over the horizon. Undoubtedly propositional, the task was nonetheless attempted through a series of walks and climbs in their respective cities (scaling front steps, churches, fire escapes and car parks).
Additionally there has been a plethora of critical conferences and seminars – including the recent Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives (Manchester) and the forthcoming The Hidden City: Mythogeography, Writing, and Site-Specific Performance (Plymouth) – which are indicative perhaps of the broader interdisciplinary ‘turn’ within academia, towards the intellectualising of all things quotidian, peripheral and seemingly ‘everyday’. Rebecca Solnit’s texts, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) and Wanderlust: a Short History of Walking (2006), attempt to locate an historical context for the act of errant footfall. Roam: A Weekend of Walking brought the “sauntering, shuffling, ambling, rambling, wandering, striding, strolling, hiking, dawdling, pacing, strutting, and stalking” practices of artists including Tim Brennan, Clare Blundell Jones and Duncan Speakman to Loughborough, in conjunction with a symposium which explored walking as a form of place-making or ethnographic practice. Alternatively, Performing Space – an interdisciplinary seminar coordinated by Frank Abbott in Nottingham – interrogated the different ways that public space is encountered and ‘performed’ in relation to the challenges and possibilities afforded by ICT and wireless technologies. The seminar presented a critical context through which to consider recent projects within the city by artists such as Heath Bunting, Active Ingredient and Willi Dorner, whose practices often simultaneously reveal and resist the control of technology’s invisible infrastructures, by identifying and creating ‘seams’ or moments of discontinuity in the ‘network’ that might be inhabited differently, or by drawing attention to ‘blindspots’ when the system’s authority lapses. The dangers of such critical attention, I suppose, are that the volatile and uncertain practices experientially witnessed in the public realm become overly conceptualised and a little over-burdened by the weight of theory; that these practices are engaged with only as long as the ‘quotidian turn’ lasts and are then abandoned, or even that the ‘attention’ given fails to attend to the nuances of a particular practice in the desire to make it fit a predetermined theoretical model. These are dangers that I feel acutely aware of in my own research practice.
Last year I was invited to write an essay about different modes of ‘wandering’ for a series of publicly distributed postcards as part of the project Open City, which took place within nottdanceO7 in Nottingham. Within the project, various instructions and invitations encouraged non-habitual forms of behaviour in the public realm: dawdling in the busiest thoroughfare; camouflaging oneself in the city’s shadows or in the shadow of a person followed; closing one’s eyes to read the city through a different sensory register; or using the memories of other journeys to puncture the present with a sense of the past. I have since begun to work more collaboratively with the artists – Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday and Simone Kenyon – to further explore how the public realm is encountered as a lived experience and how disorientation or the process of ‘getting lost’ can be discussed as critical conditions of artistic practice. What has become apparent from our tentative conversations is a sense of the complex (often contradictory) histories and preoccupations that influence and inform our individual relationship to and interest in the project, for the practice of wandering (and other acts of pedestrian creativity and resistance) operates at the crossroads of innumerable disciplinary, cultural and theoretical paths.
Wandering could be understood as part of a broader set of strategies within contemporary art that draw attention to the unnoticed, uneventful or overlooked aspects of lived experience. The ‘blurring of art and life’ is not a new concept, but what is perhaps interesting about the current turn towards the ‘everyday’ or pedestrian, is that it has been mirrored (even anticipated) by a wider engagement with the writing of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau in other disciplinary contexts. However, in the recent publication The Everyday (2008), Stephen Johnstone asserts that art practice is synchronous to rather than produced in illustrative response to theory. Non-habitual (even discouraged actions) such as wandering might be recuperated by artists as a subversive or even political strategy. They offer small acts of resistance through which to protest against increasingly controlled and legislated conditions of existence, where they function as slight or quiet performative acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent, ineffective or insignificant – still remind us that we have some agency and might not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Johnstone describes the multifaceted approaches used by artists working within the context of ‘the everyday’, where a practice might attempt to restore a critical value to the unassuming moments “when nothing happens”, unveil the possibilities of chance for creating unexpected moments of rupture, or alternatively offer political resistance to “the bureaucracy of controlled consumption” by advocating alternative or dissenting modes of existence, and drawing attention to aspects of reality habitually overlooked or marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies.
The politically resistant possibilities of wandering have been explored at other historical moments, not least within the Situationists’ dérive – a form of wilful drifting developed in the 1950s that reflected the everyday users’ or pedestrians’ experience of the city. However, it would be unfortunate if this particular precedent (and the notion of ‘psychogeography’ coined by Guy Debord as the “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”) became adopted as the defining critical context for thinking about the practice of wandering within contemporary art, eclipsing other potential readings or histories. It seems counter-intuitive to view wandering according to such a chronologically linear trajectory of ideas, and it might be more appropriate to look towards the possibility of an alternative genealogy that rescues and critically recuperates earlier models of ambulant digression or deviance including the genre of picaresque literature; the practice of ‘sauntering’ adopted by medieval ‘vagabonds and idlers’; the Romantic or even quixotic quest; the disinterested stroll of the flaneur; the surrealist practice of errance; as well as various conceptual strategies and propositions witnessed in the work of artists such as Vito Acconci, Stanley Brouwn or even Jirí Kovanda. The potentiality of these other ‘histories’ and the interrogation of the work at a level of its intellectual concerns as much as the exploration of its shared form, would appear more appropriate for the range of approaches within contemporary art practice, which are more idiosyncratic and conceptually meandering than we might be led to believe. Again, with any critical attention comes some degree of interpretation, which without due care might serve to standardise or homogenise practice. For the gesture of wandering to have any meaningful longevity within contemporary art, it is crucial that we continue to attend to the nuances and differences between these divergent and eclectic practices, as well as interrogating them according to shared concerns and commonalities. Equally, in the attempt to ‘make sense’ of the current resurgence of interest in wandering, it is perhaps necessary to also acknowledge the worth of straying from or drifting between specific ‘interpretative’ frames of reference, alongside the value of the physical act of spatial digression or navigational detour.
Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition (touring)
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, 3 February – 15 April 2007
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 30 January – 24 June 2007
and The Collection, 15 September 2007 – 13 January 2008
Mapping the City
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
16 February – 2 May 2007
Shifting Ground
Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham
28 July – 22 September 2007
nottdanceO7
Nottingham
12-21 October 2007
Performing Space – AHRC ICT Methods Network
School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University 22 January 2008
Roam: A Weekend of Walking,
programmed by Radar, Loughborough University
15-18 March
Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives – A psychogeography festival
Manchester
19-21 June
The Hidden City: Mythogeography, Writing, and Site-Specific Performance
University of Plymouth
4 October
Writer detail:
Emma Cocker
not-yet-there.blogspot.com
Venue detail:
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