Category Archives: Urban

Eric Andersen, Idle Walk (1984)

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Copenhagen, Denmark: “At The Idle walk of the Year, the 29 th August 1984 he invited the Anarchistic drama group Berserk, and instructed them to carry a variety of objects from the museum to Amalienborg Square while walking as slowly as possible without standing still. As a result all traffic in central Copenhagen came to a stand still for six hours. Eric describes:
“The police was completely in on it. You could see a motorcycle police officer wearing a Year of the Idle badge on his chest pocket while driving his bike as slowly as he could through the city. Nothing at all happened that required their attention throughout those hours, so of course they were happy.”
Eric himself polished the Palace Square using Petroleum, like the Ethnological Museum had done to their wooden floors since the nineteenth century. A tradition Eric found so fascinating that hebrought it to the Palace Square.”

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 Mayday Protest (1971)

Mayday Protest 1971 Poster

Mayday Protest 1971 Poster

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“The 1971 May Day protests brought tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators to Washington D.C., the culmination of weeks of anti-war activity in the city that spring. The announced goal of the protests was to disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action; the immediate focus of the protesters was on snarling traffic to prevent government employees from getting work on Monday, May 3. Their slogan was If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.

By the end of May 3, more than 7,000 Vietnam war protesters had been arrested across the city; 5000 more were arrested on May 2, 4 and 5. These represent the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. Ultimately, however, only 79 people were convicted of any offense related to the protests.

In a Washington Post article dated September 23, 2019, longtime political organizer and historian L.A. Kauffman called the event the most influential protest you’ve never heard of and noted that It contributed to helping end the Vietnam War and pioneered a new model of organizing that would shape movement after movement in the decades to come.”

Benjamin Patterson, Man Who Runs (1963)

This work was presented as a map of the midtown New York Public Library, with arrows showing the route to run, from the main entrance up to the third floor and out again.

Critic Lori Waxman compares this score to Robert Filliou’s One-Minute Scenario (1963), and points out how race and place deeply affect these scores. Filliou is a white French Protestant with a glass eye referencing a hotel, while Patterson is a Black man and references the library.

 

Credit: Waxman, Lori. Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus. Sternberg Press, 2017. Page 232.

Robert Filliou, One-Minute Scenario (1963)

“A man runs out of the Chelsea Hotel, 222 W. 23rd Street, N.Y. He runs east to 7th Avenue

then south to 22nd Street

then west to 8th Avenue

then north to 23rd Street

then east to the Chelsea Hotel which he reenters at the same speed.”

Critic Lori Waxman compares this score to Benjamin Patterson’s Man Who Runs (1963), and points out how race and place deeply affect these scores. Filliou is a white French Protestant with a glass eye referencing a hotel, while Patterson is a Black man and referenced the library.

 

Credit: Waxman, Lori. Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus. Sternberg Press, 2017. Page 232.

Atul Bhalla, Yamuna Walk (2007)

a hiking path

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“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.”

Joe Bateman, Nomad’s Land (2010)

video stills of a performance

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“Joe Bateman’s expansive video works present the artist adopting the persona of a post­ apocalyptic survivor in a perfectly ordinary English landscape, roaming free. Without any machinery or means of transport, he walks everywhere on foot. He appears as a kind of tragic or sacrificial figure – the “ghost of the environment future”, perhaps. His anomalous behavior is meant to make us question our own.

For a large part of the work, every cue suggests that civilization has ended and only solitary hermits remain alive, scavenging for roadkill for sustenance. The picturesque landscape suggests that the character inhabits a rural and suburban version of the film ’28 Days Later’. Only some way into the work we realize that, with the protagonist excepted, life continues unabated – albeit invisible to him.

The work recalls the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s best-known book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life of 1998. Agamben and Bateman allow us to imagine what unadorned ‘bare life’ might yet look like when the fossil fuels under our feet are exhausted. At this point, when production grinds to a halt, our cities will become uninhabitable and we will be forced to give up the idea that we control the planet, rather than vice versa. Bateman’s character also resembles Agamben’s description of Roman criminals whose punishment was to be excluded from all society and have their rights as citizens revoked. Their exclusion meant they became sacred men (‘homo sacer’), akin to holy fools.”

a man crawling and eating

Joe Bateman, Nomad’s Land (2010)

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

Marching British Guards

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” “A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” Francis Alys, 2005

Francis Alys walks a lot. The city is his open-air studio. ‘Guards’ (2004) is one component of ‘Seven Walks’, the body of works commissioned by Artangel and developed over the course of five years spent walking through the streets of London, which includes paintings, drawings, and works in moving image. ‘Guards’ draws upon many of Alys’s long-term concerns: how street-scapes structure behavior, the unspoken rhythms of the city; and the use of daily walking to encounter new phenomena and ideas. The artist provided a series of instructions which form the basis of the film: 64 Coldstream guards enter separately in the City of London, unaware of one another’s route; the guards wander through the City looking for one another; upon meeting, they fall into step and march together; when a square measuring 8 by 8 Guards is built, the complete formation marches towards the closest bridge; as they step on to the bridge, the guards break step and disperse.”

a marching british guard

Francis Alys, Guards (2004-5)

 

Jeanne Claude & Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (1977-78)

documentation of wrapped walk ways

Jeanne Claude & Christo “Wrapped Walk Ways” (1977-78)

“Wrapped Walk Ways, in Jacob Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri, consisted of the installation of 12,540 square meters (135,000 square feet) of saffron-colored nylon fabric covering 4.4 kilometers (2.7 miles) of formal garden walkways and jogging paths.

Installation began on Monday, October 2, 1978, and was completed on Wednesday, October 4. 84 people were employed by A. L. Huber and Sons, a Kansas City building contractor, to install the fabric. There were 13 construction workers, four professional seamstresses and 67 students.

After 15,850 meters (52,000 feet) of seams and hems had been sewn in a West Virginia factory, professional seamstresses, using portable sewing machines and assisted by many workers, completed the sewing in the park. The cloth was secured in place by 34,500 steel spikes 
(each 7 x 5/16 inch/17.8 x 0.8 centimeters) driven into the soil through brass grommets along the sides of the fabric, and 40,000 staples into wooden planks on the stairways.

All expenses related to Wrapped Walk Ways were borne by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as in all their other projects, through the sale of preparatory works created by Christo: drawings and collages, as well as early works and original lithographs.
 The artists did not accept sponsorship of any kind.

The temporary work of art remained in the park until October 16, 1978, after which the material was removed and given to the Kansas City Parks Department for recycling, and the park was restored to its original condition.” [credit]