Category Archives: Flânerie

Daniel Crooks, On Perspective and Motion – Part II (2006)

On Perspective and Motion – Part II from Daniel Crooks on Vimeo.

video still of people walking in a warped reflection

“I Love walking, particularly as a flaneur getting Lost in the back streets of foreign cities. I also spend a Lot of time watching and filming people walking in cities. It might have something to do with my training as an animator analysing people’s ‘walk cycles’.

There is something about the speed of walking; that rate of movement with a particularly human scale – not too fast, not too slow – the Goldilocks point for objects moving through a frame. And walking is not only a Linear movement through space, it also contains the internal pendulum cycles of swinging arms and Legs, the sine wave bobbing of the head, the Last-second infinitesimal raise of the toes.

As a subject for exploring normally unseen temporal structures, walking is almost perfect. There is a fundamental familiarity to it that offers the viewer a thread or a bridge between the known experience of the everyday and the abstract objects of our imagination.” (credit)

Alex Karaconji, The Flaneur (2016)

The Flaneur from Alex karaconji on Vimeo.

“The creative relationship between walking and my art practice is clear in The Flaneur, which depicts on autobiographical walk from Sydney’s Taylor Square to Circular Quay.
Walking played two roles in the animation. It helped me hunt down images and combine them into a more ambitious and meaningful whole. Walking’s slow pace ensured that nothing in my
environment was overlooked, and its maneuverability meant I had more areas to explore – like empty lanes and lesser-known parks.

Walking also ensured that the animated scenes had a longer life span than mere impressions. In this sense, walking made storytelling possible. It has introduced me to new subject matter, and a new way of making art that is narrative-based and keenly aware of time and art.”

[from catalog, From Here to There: Australian Art and Walking]

Wrights & Sites, “A Mis-Guide to Anywhere” 2006

[credit]

“Wrights & Sites are a group of artists and researchers whose collaborative work is focused on their relationships to walking, cities and landscape. The group was founded in 1997 by Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner.

They argue that “walking and exploring the everyday remains at the heart of all we do. What we make seeks to facilitate walker-artists, walker-makers and everyday pedestrians to become partners in ascribing significance to place. We employ disrupted walking strategies as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning making. Our work, like walking, is intended to be porous”. Walking is accompanied by “dramaturgical strategies” – i.e. the outcomes of their works are often site-specific performances.

Their ‘Mis-guide to Anywhere’ is, they claim, “a utopian project for the recasting of a bitter world by disrupted walking”. Their work “links the tangible and the imagined” and is a form of “serious play”. It is an activity in which the role of the artist “might become that of guide, or mis-guide, rather than the narrator or interpreter of a particular place”.

Wrights & Sites make use of the intellectual toolbox associated with the canon of writing about the role of ‘the flaneur’, in order to arm us for a consumerized and militarized world. Wrights & Sites observe that in this strange era of the twenty-first century, to go walking in many parts of the world, from war zones like Afghanistan through to most British city centres, is to be under continual surveillance.”

Guy Debord, Drifting / Dérive (1958), Situationists

an abstract map with red arrows

Guy Debord, The Naked City

Guy Debord established the Situationist method of the dérive (drifting) as a playful technique for wandering through cities without the usual motives for movement (work or leisure activities), but instead the attractions of the terrain, with its “psycho-geographic” effects. (credit: Walk Ways catalog)

While similar to the flâneur, the dérive is influenced by urban studies (especially Henri Lefebvre). (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012).

Read a more detailed account of the dérive from Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” first published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958): Debord-Theory_Of_The_Derive

Definition: Letting go of the usual reasons for walking – and being drawn by the affordances and attractions of the place.

The Drift or Dérive is one of the basic situationist practices advocated by Guy Debord and others. It’s a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and an awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

Merlin Coverley mentions psychogeography has these core elements: [credit]

the political aspect,
a philosophy of opposition to the status quo,
this idea of walking, of walking the city in particular,
the idea of an urban movement,
and the psychological component of how human behaviour is affected by place

Recently the idea of the drift has been extended in the practice of Mythogeography, where its characteristics are described thus:

- Best with groups of between three and six.
- There should be no destination, only a starting point and a time. A journey to change space, not march through it.
- To drift something has to be at stake – status, certainty, identity, sleep.
- In a drift, self must be in some kind of jeopardy.
- There may need to be a catapult: starting at an unusual time of day, taking a taxi ride blindfold asking to be dropped off at a spot with no signage, leaping onto the first bus or tram you see.
- There may be a theme: wormholes, micro-worlds, peripheral vision – whatever you want.
- Be tourists in your own town.
- Use the things around you as if they were dramatic texts, act them out.
- “…on a ‘drift’ we found ourselves at a Moto Service Station on the edge of the city. In the restaurant they had a guarantee printed on little cards. They’d give you your money back if you weren’t “completely satisfied” with your meal. So we organised to meet there on our next drift with about 10 other people; we ate big breakfasts and asked for our money back, because, philosophically, a cooked breakfast could never ‘completely satisfy’ a socially and culturally healthy person, not ‘completely satisfy’ all their desires and passions, not a human being. We got the money, but more importantly numerous staff were commandeered to interview us and we turned a restaurant into a debate about desire and fulfilment.”
- The drift should be led by its periphery and guided by atmospheres not maps.
- A static drift: stay still and let the world drift to you.
- When you drift, use wrecked things you find to make new things (this is called détournement – using dead art and uncivil signs to create unfamiliar languages). Make situations: build miniature wooden villages, giant insects from branches, ritual doorways from burnt remnants, make a small model shed from the wood of a full-sized one and process it from shed to shed until you reach the sea. Construct things from what you find, enact imaginary searches, bogus investigations, gather testimonies for new religions. Just build!!! Leave stories, situations and constructions for any drifters that follow you, they’ll re-make them in their own ways.

Transcript of a Dérive

Credit to Jesse Bell, Notes on My Dunce Cap.

Time/Place begun:
Person/Persons a Party to the Initial Plan:
Description of the Dérive’s Shape:
Misunderstandings Created/ Discovered:
Signed/Dated:

Occupy Oakland protesters (2011) Photo by Noah Berger, Oakland

Connections to 21st Century

“In addition to inspiring artists, architects and urban planners, the Situationist International’s take-back of public space is credited as catalyzing the The Occupy movement.

“We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement…One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Spectacle. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme … and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.” – Kalle Lasn, editor and co-founder of Adbusters, the group and magazine credited for Occupy Wall Street’s initial concept and publicity.” (credit)

Exercises:

Credits and references:

Surrealism Connections

Definition of surrealism (credit): “A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary”

“As André Breton transferred his alliance [from Dada] to Surrealism, he continued hosting nocturnal strolls. In his 1937 novel with Jacqueline Lamba, “L’Amour Fou,” “he evokes the clamour of workers as well as revellers as they linger in the area, along with vegetables and rubbish spilling on the pavements and a profusion of other sensory experiences…past other personal ‘hubs’ in Breton’s sense of the city’s geography.”” (credit; David Pinder, “Urban Encounters: derives from Surrealism”)

Blois to Romorantin

Walk from Blois to Romorantin

In May 1924 the three founders of surrealism [including André Breton] set off haphazardly on foot on a 10-day stroll from Blois, a town picked at random from a map, to Romorantin (28 miles). Largely they “resolutely followed their lack of itinerary”, composing automatic texts during rest stops, and explored the relationship between waking life and dream life. The trip was peppered with hostility, fatigue, and disorientation, so they cut the erratic journey short.

This and further déambulations, or hypnosis via walking with disorienting loss of control, practised on the outskirts of Paris, were found expression in three novels:

Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) – describes two places in Paris in great detail, providing a realistic backdrop for surrealist spectacles such as the transformation of a shop into a seascape
André Breton’s Nadja (1928) – “one of the iconic works of the French surrealist movement”
Philippe Soupault‘s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928)
see also Readux’s A little guide to the 15th Arrondissement, “a playful piece of surrealist flâneurie and psychogeography” by Roger Caillois, translated by Ryan Ruby; see article

“For the surrealists walking was about chance encounters and irrational meetings, an inspiration for their experimental writing (source).”

(credit)

Dada Connections

Tristan Tzara reads to the crowd at a “Dada excursion” at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church (1921) Paris

Shortly before the Dada group broke up, they advertised a series of excursions to “places that have no reason to exist.” (see poster below) These were banal places; they didn’t count the picturesque, historical interest, or sentimental value.

These trips were a way of rejecting art’s assigned urban spaces. They saw these trips as anti-art or a negation; a type of urban readymade that values spaces, actions, and experiences over objects. The dadaists wanted the total secularization of art to achieve a union between art and life, and the sublime and the quotidian. They took flânerie and raised it to the level of an aesthetic operation.

“Only one such field trip came to pass on April 14. At 3 p.m., a gaggle of Dada devotees met in the nondescript churchyard of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. André Breton read a manifesto and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes parodied an official tour guide, reading arbitrary definitions from a dictionary as keys to monuments in the church yard. A scheduled auction of abstractions was cancelled due to rain, and a porcelain-repairer and peanut-seller orchestra never performed because they never showed up.”

The Dadaists understood the entertainment system of the tourism industry, which turns the city into a simulation of itself. They wanted to draw attention to this cultural void and celebrate banality or the absence of meaning.

“A month after the performance, André Breton wrote off the event’s failure, charging the audience’s expectations of and saturation in Dada antics with rendering them innocuous.” (credit; Claire Bishop, “Artificial Hells”, 66-70)

André Breton and Tristan Tzara, Excursions & Visites Dada / Premiere Visite (1921) Paris

“It was not a success, and remained the sole example. However they had an influence on getting people to look and look again, to notice and how to notice what you notice, daring to leap into the abyss and explore things in a different way.” (credit)

A dada poster and description

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin 1928

General info

“Walter Benjamin’s [1892-1940] importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin’s writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of philosophy’s actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin’s efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht.” (credit – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Flânerie-specific info

“In the twentieth-century Walter Benjamin returned to the concept of the flâneur in his seminal work, The Arcades Project. This weighty, but uncompleted, study used Baudelaire’s flâneur as a starting point for an exploration of the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche.” …

“In The Arcades Project, Benjamin puts forward two complementary concepts to explain our human response to modern city life. Erlebnis can be characterised as the shock-induced anaesthesia brought about by the overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city, somewhat akin to the alienated subjectivity experienced by a worker bound to his regime of labour. Erfahrung is a more positive response and refers to the mobility, wandering or cruising of the flâneur; the unmediated experience of the wealth of sights, sounds and smells the city has to offer. Benjamin was interested in the dialectic between these two concepts and cited Baudelaure’s poetry as a successful medium for turning erlebnis into erfahrung. As Benjamin wrote in his section of Illuminations entitled On Some Motifs in Baudelaire:

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis).

Walter Benjamin, ‘Illuminations’

For Benjamin, the environment of the city, in particular the arcades of Paris, provided the means to provoke lost memories of times past:

it is the material culture of the city, rather than the psyche, that provides the shared collective spaces where consciousness and the unconscious, past and present, meet.

Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’

…
“What we can be clear about is that Benjamin does not just write about the flâneur but, in The Arcades Project, he writes as a flâneur. As noted earlier, he metaphorises his textual practice into ragpicking, unearthing ‘the rags, the refuse’ from his extensive reading, his cutting and pasting from all manner of sources, into the text of this, his best known work. The origins of The Arcades Project are in the textual detritus of Benjamin’s research; a method that echoes Baudelaire’s ragpicker and which he refers to when he writes that:

poets find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it were, superimposed upon their illustrious type. … Ragpicker or poet — the refuse concerns both.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism’

The ragpicker is recurring motif in Benjamin’s writing and offers a useful metaphor for his textual methodology. Benjamin focuses on the margins of the modern city, scavenging amongst the texts and oral histories that have been omitted or neglected. Literary ragpicking resurrects discarded texts, forming them into new texts. Benjamin was interested not just in what is, but in what was and what might be. He is looking for where the imagined city meets the material one.”

(credit)

Charles Baudelaire

Étienne Carjat, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, circa 1862

General Info

“Charles Baudelaire was a French poet born on April 9, 1821, in Paris, France. In 1845, he published his first work. Baudelaire gained notoriety for his 1857 volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). His themes of sex, death, lesbianism, metamorphosis, depression, urban corruption, lost innocence and alcohol not only gained him loyal followers, but also garnered controversy. The courts punished Baudelaire, his publisher and the book’s printer for offending public morality, and as such, suppressed six of the poems. Baudelaire died on August 31, 1867 in Paris.” (credit)

Flânerie specific info

“The concept of the flâneur, the casual wanderer, observer and reporter of street-life in the modern city, was first explored, at length, in the writings of Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s flâneur, an aesthete and dandy, wandered the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris looking at and listening to the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the life of a modern city. The flâneur’s method and the meaning of his activities were bound together, one with the other. ” (credit)

Flânerie (To be a Flâneur/Flâneuse)

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842

The ‘Flâneur’/‘Flâneuse’ (‘roamer’ or ‘wanderer’) is a person who strolls the city in order to experience it, as a detached, gently cynical observer. (credit) There is an idleness attached to flânerie. The flâneur is a passive figure, they observe the dynamics of the city from a disengaged point of view. While the idea originated with Charles Baudelaire, it was Walter Benjamin who popularized it and connected it to the idea of escaping capitalist control. Benjamin helped define the flâneur as an observant solitary man perusing the city of Paris. Sometimes also referred to as a “dandy.” According to Merlin Coverley, the flâneur “is more playful for a start, it is also purely aesthetic, there is nothing revolutionary in its design, it doesn’t take itself too seriously in the sense of a political agenda.” [credit]

The Surrealist version of the flâneur was to devise experiments involving randomness and chance in order to experience the city without being blinded by mundanity. (credit) For example, follow interesting strangers across the city, or visit a city while guiding oneself using the map of another city, or draw a circle on a map and try to walk as accurately as possible along the circumference.

Similar in some ways to Guy Debord’s dérive later on, both flânerie and the dérive describe a figure seeking new experience and insight by defying the commercial logic of the modern city. (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012). However the flâneur privileges the street over the studio, and treats walking as an aid to achieving the avant-garde dream of merging art and everyday life. (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012) Debord explicitly takes position against letting chance take a too important role in a dérive, because ‘the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable to our purposes.’ (credit)

Exercises:

Flaneur exercise

Resources:

Blog post comparing flânerie to dérive