Category Archives: Spectacle

Tracy Hanna “Hill Walker” 2009

video projection, 58 seconds, 25kg plaster

a hill of plaster with a walker projected on it

Tracy Hanna “Hill Walker” 2009

“Tracy Hanna works with video projection and three-dimensional media to explore perception and our physical relationship to sculpture. ‘Hill walker’ is perhaps uncharacteristic of her work in that it otters both overt comedy and bathos. We encounter a lone, heroic figure, seen at a miniature scale. Footage of a walker, climber or mountaineer struggling up a snow-covered hillside is projected onto a bag of plaster that has been formed into a cone shape that looks like the ur-form of a mountain. The form is not unrealistic enough to be cartoon-like or alarming. But nor is it realistic enough to be any mountain in particular. It merely evokes the category of ‘mountain’ with the minimum means required. The hill-walker’s progress from bottom to top takes only a minute, after which it is repeated – again and again. The brevity of the process renders the arduous efforts expended on the task seem ludicrous. It is as though men’s motivation to walk, climb, explore and conquer was merely a pathology, or an adjunct to a will to-power. ThewalkerseemsmorelikeSisyphus than the single-minded hero that a mountaineer must be to stay alive.

Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

multimedia installation: helmet, sail, wall drawing and monitor

: Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

: Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

: Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

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“Tim Knowles creates photographs, films and abstract drawings by undertaking walks. Knowles’s working methods are deliberately improbable, idiosyncratic and inventive. He makes use of chance in innumerable ways, ensuring that the outcome of each walk is unknown in advance. As the critic Jessica Lack has written in The Guardian, 11 June 2009, his works are “generated by apparatus, mechanisms, systems and processes beyond the artist’s control”. They are “akin to scientific experimentation, where a situation is engineered in which the outcome is unpredictable. There is a poetry, English eccentricity and wit to the work”.

For ‘Walk On’ Tim Knowles presents an excerpt of a larger work, showing one of a series of seven walks made from Seven Dials, London. Each of these walks is guided solely by the wind as Knowles steadfastly follows a windvane mounted on a helmet worn on his head. He has no ability to affect the windvane and simply acts as a servant to the system he has devised. The wind takes him on a meandering route, at times blown directly down a street, at others caught in eddies repeatedly circling on street corners or joining the city’s other debris down some cul de sac. His meandering path collides with the rigid structure of the city; his route tracing out buildings, railings, ventilation shafts, parked vehicles and other boundaries. Knowles devises a new method of exploring the city and reveals how the wind moves through and is shaped by its structure.”

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup “Search” 1993

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“‘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]

Catherine Yass “High Wire” 2008

Catherine Yass, High Wire (2008)

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“‘The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress.’ Catherine Yass

Presented in the Berwick Gymnasium is the multi-channel video installation High Wire (2008) by acclaimed British artist Catherine Yass. The work follows the French high-wire artist Didier Pasquette, who was invited by Yass to walk a wire strung between two towers on the Red Road Estate in Glasgow. Stepping out between what were once the highest social housing blocks in all of Europe, Pasquette offers us the ultimate vertiginous perspective.”

[credit] – Duration: 6min, 48sec

High Wire is a room-sized video installation consisting of four projections and two lightboxes. Filmed at Red Road, a high-rise housing complex in Glasgow, it shows the noted French tightrope walker Didier Pasquette attempting to cross from one tower to another over a thin metal wire at a height of 90 metres. The large projections occupy the four walls of the space in which the work is exhibited, offering different views of the event. One shows a long view of the two tower blocks against the distant landscape, highlighting the dominance of the high-rise in its urban context. The second projects footage filmed from the top of one tower, the camera shifting shakily between the roof itself and the line of wire. The third and fourth projections offer further views of the rooftop, one from a distance and one close up. As the films begin Pasquette enters the frame, stepping off a small platform down to the level of the wire. A camera is strapped onto his helmet, revealing the source of the eagle-eye view of the scene, and captures a sweeping, panoramic view to the left, then to the right. It then catches glimpses of Pasquette unclasping his hands and feet, and calmly and purposefully lifting the long pole prepared for him to aid his balance. As he sets off into the void, Pasquette looks down, and his head-camera view provides a reeling, vertiginous sensation. He moves with precision and grace, carefully touching the wire with his toes before resting each foot on it. One third of the way along the wire, Pasquette stops and appears to be in trouble, with the rope shaking beneath him. Retaining his focus, he steps backwards, fast and composed, and in a few seconds he reaches the roof again, his crossing frustrated.

High Wire was made by the British artist Catherine Yass in 2008. It continues a preoccupation, seen in Yass’s earlier work, with architecture and urban systems, in particular the ways in which they can convey wider social and political concerns (see, for instance, her 1994 series Corridors, Tate T07065–T07072, and Descent 2002, Tate T13569). The choice of Red Road was originally a practical one, but it came to symbolise the aspirations of an apparently misconceived architectural utopia. Built in 1964–9 as part of Glasgow City Council’s slum clearance project, Red Road was the tallest residential building complex in Europe at the time. Inspired by the utopian ideas of the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965), this dream of a brighter future was embraced by the local community. Yet a rise in crime and gang violence, bad maintenance, and perhaps a lack of a sense of ownership and engagement due to the scale of the complex, made residents feel vulnerable and insecure. Red Road became emblematic of the ill-fated housing ambitions seen across Britain in this period. In 2005, three years before Yass made High Wire, Glasgow Housing Association announced a £60 million regeneration plan for Red Road, slating the towers for demolition, to be replaced by around 600 low-rise private and council homes.

High Wire found an immediate resonance within this context, which for some exemplified the failure of the modernist utopian project, and in the installation this is paired with the frustrated attempts by Pasquette to realise his own dream. As Yass stated in 2008:

High Wire is a dream of walking in the air, out into nothing. But it has an urban background and the high-rise buildings provide the frame and support. The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress. Every time I see Didier turning back I remember hearing him shout, from where I was standing on another rooftop, ‘C’est pas possible!’ But something was possible, he returned safely. And something emerged from the actuality of the walk, which was a moment when reality became more of a dream than the dream itself.
(Quoted in Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art 2008, p.94.)

Yass’s four-screen video installation is accompanied by two photographic works of the same sky walk, printed as black and white negatives and presented on lightboxes. While the videos elicit an empathetic, almost physical response from the viewers, the grey, backlit landscape of the lightboxes presents a world that is unfamiliar and distant.

Further reading
Catherine Yass: High Wire, exhibition catalogue, Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art, London and Glasgow 2008.

Sofia Karamani
October 2011

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

Emma Sulkowicz, Carry That Weight (2014)

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Content Warning: Sexual Assault

people with a mattress in front of a building

Emma Sulkowicz, Carry That Weight (2014)

“On October 29th, a group of Columbia University students left 28 mattresses on the steps of university president Lee Bollinger’s house. Within an hour, the mattresses were in a dumpster, and the students responsible were hit with a $471 fine to cover the clean-up cost. But while Columbia’s administration was quick to dismiss the incident, students around the country have done the opposite.The mattresses were part of Columbia undergrad Emma Sulkowicz’s senior art thesis, a protest project called Carry That Weight. Sulkowicz has pledged to carry a mattress with her everywhere she goes on campus until the man who she says sexually assaulted her is no longer at Columbia, whether he is expelled, chooses to leave, or graduates in May 2015. Her protest has received a degree of national attention that would be unlikely if it happened anywhere other than an Ivy League university based in Manhattan – but Sulkowicz and her fellow campus activists have acknowledged their privileged position and are focused on directing that attention to other schools. On the day that students carried those 28 mattresses, representing the 28 students who have filed Title IX complaints against Columbia, organizers at over 130 schools participated in a national day of action in solidarity with survivors of sexual and domestic violence on campuses. “

Phil Kline, Unsilent Night (1992- )

Phil Kline, Unsilent Night

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Unsilent Night is an original composition by Phil Kline, written specifically to be heard outdoors in the month of December. It takes the form of a street promenade in which the audience becomes the performer. Each participant gets one of four tracks of music in the form of a cassette, CD, or Mp3. Together all four tracks comprise Unsilent Night. The fact that the participants play different “parts” simultaneously helps create the special sound of the piece. Participants carry boomboxes, or anything that amplifies music, and simultaneously start playing the music. They then walk a carefully chosen route through their city’s streets, creating a unique mobile sound sculpture which is different from every listener’s perspective.

It all started in winter 1992, when Phil had an idea for a public artwork in the form of a holiday caroling party. He composed a multi-track electronic piece that was 45 minutes long (the length of one side of a cassette tape), invited a few dozen friends who gathered in Greenwich Village, gave each person a boombox with one of four tapes in it, and instructed everyone to hit PLAY at the same time. What followed was a sound unlike anything they had ever heard before: an evanescence filling the air, reverberating off the buildings and city streets as the crowd walked a pre-determined route. Phil says: “In effect, we became a city-block-long stereo system.”

The piece was so popular that it became an annual tradition, and then an international phenomenon, spreading across the USA and to other countries worldwide. Since 1992, it has been presented in 101 cities and four continents, drawing thousands of participants in cities like New York and San Francisco.

About his inspiration in starting Unsilent Night, Phil says: “It was a combination of my love for experimental electronic music and memories of Christmas caroling as a kid in Ohio.”

Flavorpill describes the New York event as:

“An annual seasonal favorite, Unsilent Night is an open procession for an unlimited number of boomboxes that starts under the arch of Washington Square Park. Musically, it begins with delicate strains of Phil Kline’s composition rising as marchers turn their boomboxes up to 10 and wind their way through the streets of the East Village, enveloped in the bubble of Kline’s glorious ambient score. Unsilent Night’s pageant ends under the giant elm in Tompkins Square as the final notes once again reach up to the heavens, offering thanks for the past 45 minutes of joy and redemption.”

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) [1997]

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“Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997) is the record of an action carried out under the rubric of “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” For more than nine hours, Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melted. And so for hour after hour he struggled with the quintessentially Minimal rectangular block until finally it was reduced to no more than an ice cube suitable for a whisky on the rocks, so small that he could casually kick it along the street.”

Nevin Aladag, Session (2013)

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“Session is a video triptych shot in Sharjah’s urban areas and desert. In this musical composition, different kinds of Arabic, African and Indian percussion instruments, all found in the United Arab Emirates, are played by the elements – the sand, the sea and the wind.”

From Wanderlust catalog: “Aladag’s work explores the textures of socio-spatial environments and global cultural identity. In Sessions we are thus invited to become not only viewers and listeners, but also voyagers and cartographers, navigating the enigmatic edges of our surrounding environments through surfaces and socially activated gestures.”

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Walking Sculpture (1967)

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people rolling a large ball in the streets

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Walking Sculpture (1967)

Pistoletto (1933-) rolls a ball made of newspaper down the streets, beckoning the participation of the whole community. This work is considered part of the Art Povera movement.