Category Archives: Urban

Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, Mall Walk (2014)

mall walk collage

[credit]

“The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit is a group of artists, writers and educators, co-founded in 2014 by Donna Akrey, Taien Ng-Chan and Sarah E. Truman. The HPU orchestrates participatory events to engage with historical and current ideas around perambulation, and to explore walking in conjunction with artistic practices and research-creation. Our methodologies have included stratigraphic cartography, locative media experimentation, sensory synesthesia poetry-writing, and found material sculpture-making. HPU has given walks in Montreal, Toronto, Windsor, Buffalo NY, Sydney Australia, London England, Galway Ireland, Memphis TN, Tokyo Japan, the online sphere of Zoom, and our home base of Hamilton Ontario.“

PJ Roggeband, Exhaust Garden (UITLAATTUIN) (2017-)

“Is there such a thing as portable green? What role can mobile nature play in the urban environment? The ‘Exhaust Garden’ offers a solution! Suppose you want to get away as a city dweller. You step into your portable garden, put on the shoulder straps and off you go: strolling through the busy city with your nose between the plants and grasses.”

exhaust garden

exhaust garden

“It all starts with a contribution to the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ exhibition in the Museum of Religious Art in Uden. In consultation with sculptor / landscape gardener Hans van Lunteren I make the ‘ENCLASS GARDEN’. The perspective within this portable garden has been reversed; it is nature that walls and shields man. The motif of the enclosed garden refers to the Garden of Eden or the Earthly Paradise where man lived in harmony with nature. The approach to paradise as something small and personal opens up interesting possibilities, of course.

Man destroys nature, man protects nature. The artists have played with this fact. They have reversed the perspective. With them, man is enclosed in a portable garden; the Homo Hortus Conclusus.

The square meter garden regularly goes outside, into nature, around the shoulders of people. The exuberant garden. Later versions of the ‘ENCLASS GARDEN’ have been developed specifically for the theme of an exhibition or respond to current events.”

UITLAATTUIN-model-succulent

UITLAATTUIN-model-succulent

“When I notice a part of a hoe with the striking handle in addition to a wooden container intended for chalks and erasers among the waste at a primary school, a more manageable form of the ‘OUTLET GARDEN’ is born.

The ‘EXHAUST GARDEN’ has a wealth of possibilities. You can fill it with all kinds of herbs, vegetables or plants. You can of course make a statement by using your portable garden for endangered bees and butterflies. But you can also turn your garden into a mobile weather station, for example, by using guichelheil. Because the flowers of this plant close quickly when bad weather is on the way, guichelheil is also used as a (poor man) barometer.” [credit]

Lawrence Weiner, OUT OF SIGHT (2016)

“Lawrence Weiner: OUT OF SIGHT is a participatory artwork and experience that blends hopscotch and word play for a joyful connection of mind and body that speaks to all ages and walks of life.

Known for text-based works that recall visual poetry, literary aphorisms, or Zen koans, American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner frequently transforms gallery walls into artistic messaging boards. In his ground-based mural OUT OF SIGHT, he creates a pathway to be viewed and navigated, both physically and intellectually. OUT OF SIGHT combines wit and whimsy in a game-like format, encouraging learning and self-actualization from the viewer through the use of graphical phrases embedded throughout the work. By being able to stand, walk, or jump from one position to the next, OUT OF SIGHT taps into the dynamic “gamification” of learning and self-discovery. The viewer navigates the creation as they see fit—interpreting the work while interacting with it.

“A person coming in with whatever situation they find it, young, old or indifferent, the minute they have any thoughts about themselves going FROM HERE TO THERE, will be able to stand still and realize they first have to imagine themselves doing it, that’s assuming a position.” – Lawrence Weiner

Like McEvoy Arts’ exhibition Next to You, OUT OF SIGHT reminds us of the connections we make within ourselves and with each other through the shared experience of performance and the arts.” [credit]

On Kawara, I Got Up / I Met / I Went, 1968-79

On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014)

Photomechanical prints, 8.3 x 14.0 cm (3 1/4 x 5 1/2 in. ) each

Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001

“In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple[s] of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

Transcript

Narrator: Here on Rotunda Level 3, you will see three bodies of work organized by On Kawara to be viewed as a single section of the exhibition that he titled Self-Observation. These works all represent a record of ordinary activities—the kinds of things we all do, each day. Every day for 12 years beginning in 1968, Kawara sent postcards for the series I Got Up, recorded lists of names for I Met, and traced his movements on maps in I Went.

Presented here are over 1,500 of the more than 8,000 postcards comprising I Got Up. Kawara used various kinds of stamping tools to date and address the cards, including a return address, which provides another way to plot his whereabouts. Along with this information he stamped the phrase I GOT UP AT followed by the precise time he arose from bed. Assistant curator Anne Wheeler:

Anne Wheeler: In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

Narrator: Curator Jeffrey Weiss:

Jeffrey Weiss: He’s taking advantage of mediums that already exist in the world. What he’s doing is supposed to reflect the parameters of daily life that are decidedly nonaesthetic. Kawara’s work seems to be the residue, in a way, of a practice of these activities. It takes the form of the repetition of modular elements, or units, that are roughly but not quite the same from one to the next.” [credit]

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“Considered the most personal and intimate of his works, I GOT UP is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which each day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard, each stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient. The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture’s repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist’s peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities). Moreover, Kawara’s postcards do not record his waking up but his “getting up,” with its ambiguous conflation of carnal and existential (as opposed to not getting up) implications.

Contrasted with the random temporal shifts conveyed in the text messages are the diverse images of Manhattan featured on the postcard fronts, which accumulate over the piece’s forty-seven day duration into an unexpectedly quasi-cinematic aerial tour of the city-circling around the United Nations (and inside the General Assembly), down the East River along the waterfront to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, and finally roaming around Federal Plaza at street level before coming to rest at City Hall. Like the newspaper pages that line the special cases housing each date painting, these found images juxtapose the infinite variety and quotidian reality of the public world with the elliptical, self-reflexive messages on the back. The sequence also extracts a drifting urban poetry from the mass-produced and anonymous, layering it conceptually over the banal, functional postal route of the objects themselves, as well as reintroducing a formal design to a work that is at first glance anticompositional.

With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.” [credit]

Richard Schechner, Manhattan Passport – 7 Two Token Tours, 1995

“Years ago, theater innovator Richard Schechner got a job as a tour guide to prepare for an article on tourist performances. Creative Time’s 1995 Manhattan Passport – 7 Two Token Tours encouraged New Yorkers to rediscover their borough by “re-contextualizing typical tourist attractions with areas of the island other !than those in which you might live and work.” The seven cleverly titled excursions included “Take the A Train” (Harlem), “More Than Harlem on My Mind” (Washington Heights and Inwood), the “Melting Pot Tour” (the U.N. and Roosevelt Island), and the “Cultural Cornucopia Tour” (Lower East Side and East Village). The latter stopped at the Henry Street Settlement, Gus’s PickJe Stand, Liz Christie Gardens, the 6th Street Indian restaurant row, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, St. Marks on the Bowery, the Russian and Turkish Baths, and four yoga dens. This is cultural tourism at its liveliest, though it is unclear how
actively it addressed the problematics of gentrification, homelessness, redlining and other pressing social ills in relation to cultural issues.” [credit]

Mindy Goose, Art, Access and Urban Walking (2017)

Mindy Goose, Art, Access and Urban Walking (2017)

“On Saturday 7th October, I led a walk as part of the Love Arts Festival 2017 programme.
The ‘Art, Access and Urban Walking’ grew out of the walk I led as part of Jane’s Walk Leeds in May. The idea was to create conversation around accessibility in urban and green spaces, and document it in a creative way through photography, writing, sketching, or spoken word. There were so many snippets of conversation I wish I had recorded, about the spaces we occupy, how we neglect visiting areas outside our neighbourhood; and once we hit the shopping park, conversation moved towards accessibility in public spaces.” [credit]

Michèle Magema, Element (2005)

ELEMENT from Michèle Magema on Vimeo.

“The artistic work of Michèle Magema is erected in an intermediate zone, a mental space, a produced border, an interstice located between the double Western and African projections.
The plurality of his affiliations allows him to question his history and that of a nation, a continent and more broadly of the World. The relationship she maintains with stories and History allows her to invent a critical posture.

Michèle stages herself, and reveals both her questioning and her discernment through her photos and video installations imbued with an intimate femininity, while addressing fundamental points in the history of humanity.

In Element, the artist tries to put into images universal exotic projections that are implied. A humming voice, sensual feet, shod in white accompanies a hand that picks cotton on the asphalt. A head, fragment, advances in profile, balancing a basin. The same chained ankle feet move slowly, in high heels. The three images coexist, carried by a long tracking shot that allows us to follow this woman, like the watermark of an evocation of the female condition in general.
Again, Michèle Magema tells and retells History in images. Drawing from the archives, restoring a balance in a rickety reality, she pursues her singular quest linked to her own cultural diversity as well as to her feminine gender.” [credit]

Glowlab, One Block Radius (2004)

screenshot of a blog

Glowlab, One Block Radius (2004)

“Beginning in January 2004, artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandi-known as Glowlab – have been examining the block on which our new building will rise (Bowery to Chrystie Street and from Stanton Street to Rivington Street). Glowlab’s project, One Block Radius…provides an in-depth focus on this specific microcosm of New York City. This feature-rich urban record will include personal perspectives from diverse sources such as city workers, children, street performers and architectural historian. Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, field recordings and interviews, Glowlab will create a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before.” [credit]

“One Block Radius, a project of Brooklyn artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl [known collaboratively as Glowlab], is an extensive psychogeographic survey of the block where New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art will build a new facility in late 2004. Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, maps, field recordings & interviews, Glowlab creates a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before [and will never be seen again]. This website is an interactive archive for the project, which will continue to grow over time as we build a dense data-map of the block. The information collected is organized into three categories: observation, interaction & response. Click on each category to begin exploring the block.” [credit]

“While the block is bit-size in relation to the surrounding metropolis, the changes it is about to undergo are massive. One Block Radius plays with this idea of scale, aiming to zoom in and physically data-mine the tiny area for the amount of information one would normally find in a guide book for an entire city. This feature-rich urban record will include personal perspectives from diverse sources such as city workers, children, street performers, artists and architectural historians. ” [credit]

 

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

people walking at night

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

“It was back in 2013, when ACVic, the local arts center of Vic, hos- ted the project Deriva Mussol (its literal translation would be “owl drift”), led by artists Jordi Lafon and Eva Marichalar with the collaboration of the Aula de Teatre (a theater group) of the University of Vic [Barcelona, Spain]. They wanted to collectively create a theatrical proposal that would take place in the streets of Vic. Besides this desire, the only thing they knew is that they wan- ted to open the process of creation to everyone, so that everyone who wanted could participate in it. In order to do so, they invited people to go deriving at night with them through the streets of Vic to wherever the walking would take them. Even though a feeling of awkwardness may awaken to some people when hearing or reading the word “derive” (I would not say it is a really “common” word), in fact, the instructions were so simple that they could be reduced to two key- words: night, walk. Nothing else. The invitation was communicated by ACVic. Everyone was invited. By doing this, they had set up a common ground for secret encounters to happen. At least once per week, different peoples, of different ages, coming from many backgrounds and with different interests walked together without any other expectation than simply this: walking together.

There was nothing that could go wrong. The possibility of doing something wrongly did not exist. Even the common civil laws and social rules of political correctness where almost forgotten thanks to the fact of walking by night guided by curiosity, spontaneity and a playful attitude. Streets were empty; no one was watching. They did 12 derives. Some people went just once and it was okay. Some people participated in all of them and it was also okay. In any case, as Marichalar wrote, a stable group of 10 people was progressively constituted (2013, p. 29). Each deriving session was complemented by another session, called “Parlem” (“let’s talk”) dedicated to talking about the experience.

people talking around a table

Deriva Mussol, Night Walks (2013)

All the members of the group met around a table and shared whatever they wanted to with the others; photos, videos, drawings, maps, thoughts,whatever. After the 12 sessions they had an idea for a theatrical proposal that took finally place and that was presented to the public as a street art performance. From my point of view, the fact that this performance was useful to communicate and share the project with more people is something secondary, if we compare it to the importance that it had for the group of walkers and talkers as a self-representation. In other words, it was a representation of, precisely, themselves as a group; a kind of family.” [credit]