Rosemarie Castoro, Gates of Troy (1969)
Castoro walks and drags a roll of aluminum through the streets of SoHo. The unfurling and dragging of metal recollects the parading of Hector’s corpse behind Achillles’ chariot, with Castoro cast as a vengeful Achilles. She is protesting the difficulty of being a woman in an art-world dominated by men.
(credit) Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, video still, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 1989 is a single channel colour video in which the American artist Andrea Fraser leads a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the guise of a fictional docent named Jane Castleton. Dressed in a smart grey suit, Castleton, who introduces herself as a ‘guest’, ‘a volunteer’ and ‘an artist’, speaks directly to the camera as she walks around the museum. Alongside conventional elements of a gallery tour – such as the history of the institution and its collection – Castleton offers her thoughts on the building’s toilets, cloakroom and shop. She also pronounces, in strange digressions and with great passion, on broader political and social ideas. The language Fraser employs in her performance appears to be a parody of the descriptions commonly provided by docents, with Castleton applying extensive and exaggerated praise to the items she encounters. There is often an odd disjuncture between the docent’s words and the objects she is describing, such as when she points to an exit sign and claims, ‘this picture is a brilliant example of a brilliant school’. Throughout the tour Castleton repeatedly returns to questions of personal taste, and the notions of grace, dignity and order that she feels artworks, museums and gallery visitors should embody.
Museum Highlights originated as part of a lecture series organised by the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, with Fraser delivering five performances as Jane Castleton to visitors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February 1989. This filmed version of the tour, which does not feature a live audience, was shot and edited later in 1989. A script of Fraser’s performance was subsequently published with stage directions and footnotes in a German translation in 1990 (in the journal Durch) and in English in 1991 (in the journal October; see Fraser 1991, pp.104–22). The text incorporates multiple sources, listed in the credit sequence at the end of the film although mostly unacknowledged by Castleton during the tour, including historical documents relating to the establishment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, biographical information about the museum’s donors, and quotations from philosophers, sociologists and political theorists.
Fraser created the persona of Jane Castleton after the American artist Allan McCollum suggested that she explore the role of the museum docent. Her first gallery tour, Damaged Goods Gallery Talk Starts Here 1986, involved a series of performances as Castleton, which were not filmed, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. For Fraser, ‘Jane Castleton is neither a character nor an individual. She is an object, a site determined by a function. As a docent, she is the museum’s representative, and her function is, quite simply, to tell visitors what the museum wants – that is, to tell them what they can give to satisfy the museum’ (Fraser 2007, p.242).
In satirical fashion Castleton’s speeches in Museum Highlights draw particular attention to the assumptions that have historically been placed on the value of art, especially in relation to notions of class. For example, the docent claims during the tour, ‘The public, who buy clothes and table china and inexpensive jewelry, must be forced to raise their standards of taste by seeing the masterpieces of other civilizations and other centuries’. As art historian Alexander Alberro explains, ‘Fraser does not critique just the institution of the museum; by extension, she also analyzes the type of viewer the museum produces and the process of identification that artists embody’ (Alexander Alberro, ‘Introduction: Mimicry, Excess, Critique’, in Fraser 2007, p.xxvii).
Although Fraser abandoned the persona of Castleton after completing Museum Highlights, she continued her interest in the role of the docent in Welcome to the Wadsworth 1991, a live performance and subsequent video work involving a tour of the exterior of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut during which the institution’s relationship to the surrounding area is discussed. In her video Little Frank and His Carp 2001 (Tate T12324), Fraser performed as a visitor rather than a docent, walking around the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao listening to the institution’s official audio guide and enacting a series of increasingly sexual gestures in response to descriptions of the building’s architecture.
Fraser’s interest in exploring the purpose of art institutions, the official policies and unspoken assumptions that support their work, and the different roles played by individuals within the art world, have seen her work closely associated with the idea of institutional critique. This mode of practice, exemplified by the work of artists such as Hans Haacke and Michael Asher, emerged in the 1960s to examine the structures and ideologies underpinning museums and galleries.
Further reading
Andrea Fraser, ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’, October, vol.57, Summer 1991, pp.104–22.
Yilmaz Dziewior (ed.), Andrea Fraser: Works 1984–2003, exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg 2003, pp.114–15, 244–53.
Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2007, pp.95–114.
Richard Martin
July 2014
Like the mazes of office cubicles in so many of the buildings that surround Bryant Park, Walk the Walk comes to life over the course of a working day.
From Monday to Friday, Kate Gilmore’s performance-installation creates a spectacle of color, movement and sound from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Gilmore (b.1975, Washington, D.C.) presents a cubic structure, open on all sides, with a flat roof that functions as a podium. Working in shifts, groups of women take to the roof where they perform an improvisational choreography of everyday movement, such as walking, shuffling, and stomping. Neither professional dancers nor theatrical performers, Gilmore’s participants resemble a random sample of female office workers. They vary in age, race, and body type. Free to perform their artist-assigned task as they choose, they must nevertheless conform to a strict uniform of yellow dresses and beige shoes.
Members of the public are invited to observe the piece from the surrounding Fountain Terrace, but also to enter the open structure. The yellow theme of the women’s dresses continues on both the exterior and interior walls of the structure. Once inside, visitors may hear the reverberating sounds of the movement overhead. In this eccentric concerto of irregular footfalls, the physicality of Gilmore’s performance is experienced anew.
Kate Gilmore is best known for her physically demanding performance videos in which she is typically the sole protagonist. Walk the Walk is Gilmore’s first live public project and also her first to deploy other participants. Her interest in striking and often incongruous images continues in this piece, with its unexpected transformation of architecture, figures, actions, and location. In this way, the artist makes us aware of our assumptions about the codes of appropriate behavior and the limits of self expression. How do the attributes of gender, age, and appearance shape our perception of both social roles and personal desires? In Walk the Walk, Gilmore literally and metaphorically turns the inside out, inviting us into a world at once all too familiar and strangely provocative.
Mona Hatoum, Performance Still (1985–95)
Performance Still 1985 records one of three street performances which Hatoum carried out in Brixton for the Roadworks exhibition organised in 1985 by the Brixton Artists Collective. The performance consisted of the artist walking barefoot through the streets of Brixton for nearly an hour, with Doc Marten boots, usually worn by both police and skinheads, attached to her ankles by their laces. Performance Still, printed and published ten years later turns the original documentary photograph of the performance into a work in its own right, and has therefore come to identify this aspect of Hatoum’s practice.
Gallery label, October 2013
Super8 transferred to SD video (silent), 51min
The film 0º00 Navigation Part I: A Journey Across England shows an obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.
Always seen from behind, a figure first swims out of the seawater where the meridian hits the south-coast of Britain at Peacehaven in Sussex. The solitary person emerges out of the water carrying a hand held GPS device and using this implement he proceeds to walk directly north along the 0º00’00” line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via nearest windows, streams waded, hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London, the Midlands and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The figure then slowly swims away into the North Sea heading ever further north.
In 0º00 Navigation the hypothetical, geographic construct that is the zero line of longitude is treated as if it were a real phenomenon – a path mapped out to follow. The Greenwich meridian bisects southern England because it was here that it was once fabricated out of treaties, maps and the mechanics of naval power.
In the Alien Staff project, alien means a state of being and ‘becoming’ both political and metaphysical, nomadic and migrant – a sort of psychological encampment in the space and time of today’s displaced and estranged world.
No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal and illegal immigrants have voting rights, nor any sufficient voice nor image of their own in official “public space”. When given a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or to state their opinions, demands and needs, immigrants find themselves framed and silenced.
The Alien Staff is a form of portable public address equipment and cultural network for individuals and groups of immigrants. It is an instrument that gives the individual immigrant a chance to “address” directly anyone in the city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment and the character of the “broadcasted” program.
The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd’s rod. It is equipped with a high-tech mini-monitor and a small loud-speaker. The central part of the rod, the ‘Xenolog section’ is made up of interchangeable cylindrical containers for the preservation and display of precious relics related to the various phases of the owners history. A small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come very close to the monitor and therefore to the operator’s face, the usual distance from the immigrant, the stranger, decreases.
Upon closer examination, it will become clear that the image on the screen and the actual face of the person are of the same immigrant. The double presence in ‘media’ and in ‘life’ invites a new perception of the stranger as ‘imagined’ (a character on the screen) or as ‘experienced’ (an actor off-stage – a real life person). Since both the imagination and the experience of the viewer are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself reveals unexpected aspects of the actor’s experience, the presence of the immigrant becomes both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger.
As the identities of these persons are not only unstable but also often in antagonistic relation to each other, the only common ground they share is their resistance against any imposed (even self-imposed) uniform or generalised notion of a so-called immigrant identity.
The first model of the Alien Staff was built and tested in Barcelona in June 1993, following the first comprehensive exhibition of Wodiczko’s work in Europe in 1992, entitled Instruments, Projections, Vehicles, at the Fondació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona. A second model was built and its design further transformed in Brooklyn during the summer, fall and the winter 1992-93. The Alien Staff was used by many immigrants in New York, Paris, Houston, Marseille, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw.
In Rotterdam, before and during Next 5 Minutes (1996), local operators walked through the city with Krzysztof Wodiczko projects Alien Staff and Mouth Piece. Aided by electronic walking sticks and mouth-size monitors they demonstrated how to communicate in an unfamiliar cultural environment and language.
Screenshot of the main webpage for the opera
This is a downloadable opera/ walking tour for one; part fiction/ fact, it takes you through London’s financial district looking at impacts on climate change.
In the series, Blees Luxemburg photographed herself and another woman as they approached strangers in London’s Square Mile. The photos could be said to create a pattern of behaviors of people who inhabit in this urban landscape.
Her “Chance Encounters” are by no means actual chance encounters. Luxemburg spends a long time with the landscape itself before she snapped every photo. She is patient with her production, resulting in merely more than 20 photos per year[2]. She put a lot of conscious thought into every single shot because she wants her photos to tell stories and generate possibilities of profound thoughts. She wants her audience to think about what may have happened behind the subjects of these photos. In a way, we can say that they tell stories of the habitat without involving the inhabitants.
Another theme of her photography is the beauty of the unexpected. She loves to visit marginalized spaces in the city where we don’t usually consider appealing. She described herself as a Flaneuse while working on Chance Encounters. She wandered in the city and observed for serendipity. These moments come from the ignored part of our life but it reflects so much of our life.
Wodiczko carried out a sequence of interviews with the New York’s homeless, learning about how they function by day and night in order to survive and protect their belongings. He was especially interested in those who collected glass, metal, and plastic for resale. Based on that, he designed the multi-functional Homeless Vehicle (1988-89) which reflected their real working and living conditions.
This vehicle is not a solution of the homeless crisis. It is an emergency tool for people who have no options, and an intellectual tool, as it articulates the complex situation of the homeless. It doesn’t represent them as garbage-collecting bums, but as people who use a device intended for specific purposes – which should not exist in a civilised world. This vehicle has a life-saving and didactic function, it finds a form for that which no one wants so know and see – the artist continues.
In this device, its user can wash, cook, rest, and sleep. He or she is able to safely store the collected bottles and cans. The inhabitant is also protected – the vehicle is visible enough to be safe from being smashed by, e.g. a reversing dustcart.
Such vehicle in the street provokes different questions. What is this part used for? How many of such vehicles are to be produced? Or: who are you? How did you become homeless? Then, that person is not only the demonstrator of the vehicle, but also a citizen of the city who has become homeless. That person works day and night, contributing to protecting the environment. He or she helps the city and should be paid for that – Wodiczko explains.
30 April 2011, 12.00 – 14.00
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern
Since the late 1960s British artist Hamish Fulton has made sculptures, actions, images and text pieces in response to his direct physical engagement with the landscape. In 1973 he resolved to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks’, a strategy that he maintains today.
Fulton will present Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei) at Tate Modern as a collective action created specifically in response to the iconic architecture of the Turbine Hall and in the context of the recent disappearance of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose work Sunflower Seeds is currently on display in the east end of the Turbine Hall as the eleventh project in the series of Unilever Commissions. Fulton’s Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei) is conceived as a meditative experience to which he invites ordinary people to come together and walk very slowly, in a formation created by the artist over a period of two hours. This is a form of silent activism, where the participants are both art and viewer on a communal journey. Both Fulton and Ai Weiwei explore the role of political and social activism as a force for change in art and as such this action forms a public gesture of solidarity towards Ai Weiwei as a gesture towards freedom of expression.
Example of a slow walk:
