Category Archives: Urban

Francis Alÿs “The Green Line” (2004)

video stills of a man dripping paint as he walks

The Green Line, Jerusalem, Israel, 2004; 17:41 min
In collaboration with Philippe Bellaiche, Rachel Leah Jones, and Julien Devaux.

Alÿs performed this walk by carrying a can of paint with a hole in it as he traced a portion of the “Green Line” that runs through the municipality of Jerusalem. There is a filmed documentary of the walk.

—

“In the summer of 1995 I performed a walk with a leaking can of blue paint in the city of São Paulo. The walk was then read as a poetic gesture of sorts. In June 2004, I re-enacted that same performance with a leaking can of green paint by tracing a line following the portion of the ‘Green Line’ that runs through the municipality of Jerusalem. 58 liters of green paint were used to trace 24 km. Shortly after, a filmed documentation of the walk was presented to a number of people whom I invited to react spontaneously to the action and the circumstances within which it was performed.” (credit)

Matthew McCaslin “Check It Out” (1998)

stack of tvs

Check it Out, 1998; TVs, VCRs, handtruck, clock, electric liights, electrical hardware. Photo: Courtesy Feigen Contemporary

This messing looking sculpture features TVs stacked on a rolling cart in combination with other objects. The screens show shots of urban commuters hustling to and from locations. It showcases the walking ritual of commuting. (credit: Walk Ways catalog)

—

“In the beginning, video artists used television sets simply to present videos tapes; later, people realized the monitor had its own potentially sculptural presence. Matthew McCaslin, who has focused on the technological infrastructure of everyday life (his installations bring into view wires, pipes, studs and other normally hidden stuff), has filled two galleries with sculptures that incorporate television sets. Surrealistic essays on the mechanization and the mediation of modern experience, they range in tone from dryly clever to mysteriously meditative.

Though the materials used are similar, Mr. McCaslin’s shows in Chelsea and SoHo are as different as night and day, literally. The pieces in Feigen’s well-lighted space deal mostly with work, transportation and other daily processes. At the entrance, a boombox in a wheelbarrow plays the sound of a cement mixer. In ”Check It Out,” a stack of four televisions broadcasting tapes of pedestrians hurrying in an airport is punningly strapped to an industrial hand truck.” [credit]

—

“Check It Out has a single stack of four video monitors accompanied by a large clock face sitting on the floor to its left, and by two yellow construction lanterns, one on the ground beside the clock, the other hanging over the far side of the screens. The screens project the image a shifting mass of people as viewed through security cameras in shopping malls or train stations. The mass of bodies, filmed in such an indiscriminate manner, based upon spatial position within a particular building, becomes both a current of human activity and a narrative of human reflection when shown in intermittent movement or listless waiting. There is a great pleasure in being able to view this mass as it mills about, and then sometimes one “actor” steps close to the camera lens, even notices it, and shows the depth of individual self-consciousness in a tic, a nervous smile, or a look of slight horror. When the film loop ends, as in other works, these images are replaced with a fine mist of static, which tends to heighten the sense of visual pastiche formed by the combination of recognizable entities with a nonrepresentational depiction of space. The visual images and even the flow of static enter into the context of narrative and drama, made physically approachable by the lamps and by the constantly moving clock beside the screens.”

Gibson, David. “Mining the Urban Divide: The Work of Matthew McCaslin.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 26, no. 2, 2004, pp. 66–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3246367. Accessed 17 Jun. 2022.

Richard Wentworth “To Walk” (2001)

photos of a printed brochure

Richard Wentworth

Wentworth works with photography as an archive for walking.

For this piece he published a number of his walking photos to a broadsheet/folded-poster, “To Walk,” for the English towns of Charleston, Ramsgate, and Rochester to encourage the public to take a fresh look at their urban and rural landscapes.

(credit: Walk Ways catalog)

Flânerie (To be a Flâneur/Flâneuse)

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842

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

Gail Burton “Crawl” (2010)

[CREDIT]

Crawl


On Saturday 29th May 2010 I performed ‘Crawl’ as part of ‘Look Harder,’ an exhibition of site specific and performance art at Alexandra Palace Park. ‘Look Harder’ was organised and curated by Tony Peakall and Judith Brocklehurst of Rekindle Arts, and included art work by Judith Brocklehurst, Tim Flitcroft, Calum F. Kerr, Miyuki Kasahara, Marco, Tony Peakall and Sarah Sparkes, amongst others. Art works and performance were situated in the vicinity of the lake in Alexandra Palace Park. (Click on Look Harder exhibition for more details of the exhibition). This was the second year that the exhibition had taken place; I also participated in the first exhibition, when I created a banner and performed three solo marches carrying it. (Click on over, banner, march, Alexandra Palace, protestation or tags in the sidebar for posts about the banner march and the first exhibition.)

Crawl was proposed as a counterpoint to a march; its antithesis. It was intended to embody a private world of defeat. I envisaged a temporary escape to a different world; different to our usual sensory experiences, to our ordinary measures of temporality, to notions of patience and endurance:

‘I will crawl on my hands and knees, my face and fingers in the dust and dirt.  Crawling, I will exit the biped world, relinquishing verticality and the customary plane of society.  I will move slowly, perhaps painfully, aware of my body’s awkwardness.  Conscious of the detail, detritus and texture of my passage, the aromas and acoustics of movement close to the ground, I will crawl a complete circuit of the lake of Alexandra Palace Park. The antithesis of a march, the crawl will embody the private, the broken, the beaten, the small and the slow.’

The invitation to watch my crawl was also extended to visitors to the park who might wish to perform their own crawl; letters suggesting and inviting a crawl, addressed to ‘Dear Visitor,’ were left in the Lakeside Café. (View or download a Crawl letter here).

Vito Acconci “Following Piece” (1969)

[credit]

a paper with photos, notes, and a map

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969)

For 23 days he chose random people on the street to follow. He did so until they entered a private residence or office. He typed accounts of the pursuits and sent them to different arts people around town.

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969) Mixed media, 30 inches x 40 inches

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969) Mixed media, 30 inches x 40 inches

This piece has many critics due to the problematic nature of following a person without their consent.

Francis Alÿs, “Narcotourism” (1996)

“I will walk in the city over the course of seven days, under the influence of a different drug each day. My trip will be recorded through photographs, notes, or any other media that become relevant.”

“Thus, the experiment conducted by the artist consisted of imbibing the following substances May 5 11 of that year: spirits, hashish, speed, heroin, cocaine, valium, and ecstasy. The process of creating the work involved preserving (ostensibly) a state of intoxication for fourteen hours each day. Alys later displayed a page of text, including diaristic accounts of his experiences (“Awareness of a change of state, but not followed by a visual echo. Auditory acuity enhanced. Appetite gone. Smoking diminished. At night, nausea and thirst.”) and a photographic image of the artist’s walking feet clad in Converse high-tops was used to represent the piece.” [credit]

Further reading:

  • “Walk Ways” exhibition catalog. Essay by Stuart Horodner. Foreword by Judith Richards.

Todd Shalom, Elastic City (2003-2019)


Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.

Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own participatory walks for the public, often using sensory-based techniques, reinvented folk rituals and other exercises to investigate and intervene in the daily life of the city, its variously defined communities, and the politics of individual and group identity.

In 2019, a book detailing artists’ prompts from Elastic City walks along with a guide to create your own participatory walks will be released this summer.

Elastic City is directed by Todd Shalom. He realized the idea while suffering from altitude sickness in Cusco, Peru.

For a complete list of organizational partners and those who have commissioned walks, please click here.

Click here to learn more about who works with the organization; here to read what people think about their experience, here to view an archive of all events, and here to see photos galore.

Finally, please see our FAQ for some practical Q&A.