Category Archives: Power Dynamics

Clare Qualmann, Perambulator (2012-)

Via Qualmann: Perambulator is an ongoing artwork that explores the experience of walking with a pram (or pushchair, stroller or buggy). Working from an auto-ethnographic standpoint the project explores gendered spaces, maternal narratives and shifting identities, inequality and mobilities. Elements of the work have been produced for Lewisham Arthouse, London, Deveron Projects, Huntley, and Flux Factory, New York.

Please visit the perambulator website for more information: https://huntlyperambulator.wordpress.com/

Robert Watts and students, The Human Celebration (1969)

class photo

Credit: Hendricks, Geoffrey. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972. Rutgers University Press (2003).

The First Secession, Ancient Rome (494 BCE)

a painting of romans

Lucius Sicinius Vellutus organized the first of the Pleb strikes. Source: (quora.com)

[credit]

“In 494 BC, the plebs were fed up with the senate passing tax laws that increased the debt of the working class without offering them useful services in return. Lucius Sicinius Vellutus, a working-class pleb, suggested that the workers unite in a walk-off to protest the doings of the senate. In large numbers, the plebs walked out of the city and congregated on the Mons Sacer (“sacred mountain”) while Vellutus and others negotiated with the patricians.

The strike was a rousing success, resulting in the expungement of many plebs’ debts and the creation of the Tribune of the Plebs, the first government position to be occupied by a member of the plebeian class.”

These early strikes show civil rights have always been a human interest.

Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (2007)

a hiking path

[credit]

“Atul Bhalla’s digital slide presentation ‘Yamuna Walk’ is a photographic account of the four-day walk that the artist undertook along the banks of the Yamuna River which passes through his home town of New Delhi in India. The 53 km walk reveals how the river shapes the life of the city across its different zones. The images include some grand projects of civic engineering – four-foot wide overland pipes built on a vast scale. They also include the most ramshackle or absurd constructions, including a temporary kitchen built (if that is the word) on top of the pipes.

Bhalla’s walk captures contrasting aspects of modern India in all its beauty and brutality. Waste and breathtaking beauty sit side by side. Indeed, the work begins with a photograph of a riverbank covered with litter. Bhalla alerts us to the contradictions of polluting the natural resource that allows the city to exist. He also alerts us to the fact that, while it has a sacred character in the culture, being associated with rituals of purification, it is also used for refuse disposal. The river is the primary symbol of the divine – and yet it is treated in ways which would suggest the opposite.”

bags of marigolds on a walking path

Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (2007)

Documentation of this walk is available as a photo book: “In Yamuna Walk, photographer and multimedia artist Atul Bhalla documents a five-day trek along the sacred Yamuna River as it passes through his home city of New Delhi, India.  Through his vivid and haunting photographs, Bhalla explores the myriad ways that modern life along the Yamuna is shaped by water, from the rural outskirts of the city to the polluted landscape of urban Delhi. Climbing over fences, crossing concrete overpasses, and navigating between blooming fields and piles of waste on his journeys, Bhalla also shows the diverse marks of human development that can be read in the image of the river.

Bhalla describes his practice as an attempt to understand water, the way he perceives it, feels it, drinks it, swims in it, and sinks in it. The personal and humanized but still mysterious Yamuna that emerges through his photographs sheds an unusual and compelling light on issues of water and the urban environment.”

Francis Alys, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002)

“Five hundred volunteers with shovels gathered at a huge sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and over the course of a day moved it by several inches. Alÿs developed the idea after first visiting Lima in October 2000. The political context was inescapable: “This was during the last months of the Fujimori dictatorship. Lima was in turmoil with clashes on the streets, obvious social tension and an emerging movement of resistance. This was a desperate situation calling for an epic response: staging a social allegory to fit the circumstances seemed more appropriate than engaging in a sculptural exercise.” The principle that drove When Faith Moves Mountains was “maximum effort, minimal result.” The most apparently minimal change was effected, and only by means of the most massive of collective efforts.

The action itself, as documented in photographs and video, is extraordinarily impressive, but in the end the “social allegory” takes over from the work’s undeniable formal presence. The action was completely transitory. The next day, no one could recognize that the huge sand dune had been moved. The true aftermath of the work lies in the ripples of anecdote and image that radiate out from it.” [credit]

Francisca Benítez, “Property Lines, New York” (2008)

[credit]

76 floor rubbings
made on the sidewalks of New York
18″ x 24″, graphite on paper, 2008
Edition of 3

There are seventy rubbings in the series and they were installed as a grid on the wall, with varying dimensions depending on the location. The simple act of tracing in this set of walking-based drawings asks questions about borders, public versus private space, and how people mark space.

—

“Francisca Benitez (b. 1974, Chile) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York (2014); Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, Chile (2013); Die Ecke, Santiago, Chile (2011); and Nada.Lokal, Vienna, Austria (2009). Notable group exhibitions include Mapping Brooklyn, Brooklyn Historical Society and BRIC House, Brooklyn (2015); Efemérides, Museo Histórico Nacional, Santiago, Chile (2014); Pier 54, High Line Art, New York (2014); One Minute Film Festival 2003 – 2012, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2013); The Street Files, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2011); and Contaminaciones Contemporáneas, Museu de Arte Contemporánea da USP, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2010). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2015); Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal (2013) the Beijing Biennale, China (2009); and the LA Frewaves 10th biennial of film, video and new media, Los Angeles (2006).” (credit)

Bradley Davies “Echoing Movements” 2012

stills from surveillance video

Bradley Davies “Echoing Movements” 2012

[credit]

“Bradley Davies’s work is a kind of re-enactment of Vito Acconci’s seminal performance work ‘Following’ (1969). Acconci created a set of instructions which he had to follow to create a work. ‘Following’ saw the artist follow a random individual through the streets of New York until he could no longer do so, at which point he chose another individual at the location he found himself, throughout the day. However, Acconci’s photographs were created retrospectively: they were ‘staged’ rather than documentary images.

Davies’s work is, therefore, a reconstruction of a work which only ever really existed in the artist’s head, and which can only be known through images shaped and edited for our consumption subsequently. Davies’s work is also created for an age in which CCTV cameras are now endemic in urban space: walking in the city is impossible to undertake without being observed almost constantly. Britain, in particular, has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other nation. Accordingly, any attempt to create ‘Following’ today would be quite different: the artist would be seen hundreds of times by security cameras – and his potentially threatening behavior recorded as evidence throughout the duration of the work. Davies’s work acknowledges this – our point of view being precisely that of a CCTV camera.”

Echoing Movements, 2012, film from Bradley Davies on Vimeo.

“Echoing Movements is a performance/exercise that looks at the gap between an artist, its subjects, and its viewers, from the studio to the public domain.” [credit]

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

surveillance stills

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

[credit]

“‘Search’, by Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup, consists of silent video footage documenting a synchronised walk undertaken by the artists [in two separate locations] in the city centre of Newcastle-upon-Tyne [on Monday, May 17th] 1993 [at 1pm]. It was the first commissioned project undertaken by Locus+ and was part of the 2nd Tyne International exhibition of Contemporary Art. ‘Search’ was recorded on the then­ brand-new 16-camera surveillance system run by Northumbria Police, and the resultant footage was given to the artists who edited it into twenty 10-second sequences that were then transmitted unannounced during the commercial breaks on Tyne Tees Television between 21 June and 4 July 1993.”

“The artists wanted to demonstrate their concerns towards the recently installed massive surveillance systems through the city of Northumbria (Newcastle upon Tyne was the first city centre in the UK to install a Closed Circuit Television network). Pat and Wendy recorded it on the 16 camera surveillance systems and its vision was capable of recording 16 separate views of the city in any one second. ” [credit]

plan b “All GPS traces in Berlin in 2011-2012” 2012

a map

plan b

two people tracing

plan b

[credit]

“plan b is the name that Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers take when working collaboratively as artists. They are amongst the leading figures to engage with GPS technologies since their widespread availability over the last decade or more. Their practice is based on both walking and on data collection including, most notably, their GPS traces. Rogers has tracked every single one of his journeys for a whole decade. New has done the same since 2007. On several occasions they have exhibited an entire year’s worth of traces in one space, effectively making every action they take become public knowledge.

Such actions present ethical problems for us, as much as for the artists. The viewer becomes privy to the artist’s habits and, hence, inner life. If information about apparently innocuous activity such as walking through one’s own city can be timed, monitored and recorded by an artist, such information can easily be known by technology providers and sold to others. Those who might want to observe, redirect, restrict or control our behaviour have new ways of doing so. Most recently, plan b have engraved a whole year’s worth of GPS data onto a transparent acrylic sheet. The journeys that they routinely or repeatedly undertake are ‘dug’ out of the material in an almost archaeological manner. Their habits and ways of inhabiting the city are simultaneously made both monumental and as ghost-like traces.”

Simon Pope “A Common Third (With Hayden Lorimer) 2010

two people walking

[credit]

Simon Pope (1966-)

“Simon Pope’s work has been central to the way in which walking as a method of art production has been rethought in recent years. Pope has remarked that “My recent work has focused on walking as a model for processes of dialogue and negotiation”. He views walking as analogous to the processes of what might be called ‘togetherness’, and describes his work as fundamentally “dialogic”.

To create ‘A Common Third’, Pope undertook walks with invited guests to places that neither he nor his collaborator knew beforehand. Accordingly, both were required to take decisions spontaneously and to negotiate what route and course of action to take.

Pope’s work presents audio recordings made later by the participants about the process – about the mental pathways taken as much as the literal ones. The romantic tradition of walking often refers to solitariness and less often to walking as a form of sociability. Pope examines how relationships, including power relationships, determine or structure our experience and expectations of landscape. His works are experiments in discovering how we approach walking, and what we expect from it. In ‘A Common Third’, he draws our attention to the ways in which law, cultural practice and tradition impact on us – challenging the ahistorical, asocial idea of walking offering a realm of infinite liberty that supposedly sits in contrasts to urban experience.”