at ground levelfinal
TRANSCRIPT
At Ground Level:
London Walking in the Works of Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff and
Patrick Keiller
Coline Milliard
MA Curating Contemporary Art, Final Dissertation
‘C’est à ce carrefour que nous nous somme trouvé, et perdu.’
It’s at this crossroads that we are both found and lost.1
Guy Debord
Critique de la Separation, 1961
1 Author’s translation
3
Abstract
This essay investigates walking as an artistic practice and a method of
interaction with a city specifically, London. It is based on the analysis
of three works: Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994), Janet Cardiff’s
audio walk The Missing Voice (Case Study b) (1999) and Francis Alÿs’
Seven Walks, London (2005). These artists develop the theme of urban
walking as a tool to decipher and appropriate territory, to engage with
an immense metropolis and to carve out a place for the human. This
dissertation also considers how walking in these works contributes to
the constitution of the self, provokes and conveys remembrance and
facilitates the excavation of local history and myths, as well as
inscribing new stories in the urban fabric. Walking becomes a way to
reassess the specificities of the city against the standardization of
urban spaces.
4
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my supervisor David Batchelor for his help and advice, to Patrick
Keiller for kindly providing still images from his film London and to Tom
Perchard for his constant support.
5
Contents
Introduction______________________________________________________________6
Patrick Keiller, London, film, 82 mins, 1994______________________________6
Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), Audio walk, 1999_____7
Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5________________________________8
‘Walking as a Conscious Cultural Act’________________________________10
Historical Antecedents_____________________________________________________10
A Territory of One’s Own: Reading and Appropriation of the city_______13
Greetings from London________________________________________________16
From a Different Point of View: the Place of the Artist in the City______16
Identifying the City: Uses and Détournements of London Landmarks__17
Walking as Critique________________________________________________________20
Urban Walking as a Quest of Identity________________________________23
Personal Memories_________________________________________________________23
Urban Walking, Sexual Identity and Eroticism___________________________24
Walking to Reinvent the City: History and Urban Myths____________28
Constructing a Past: Cardiff, Keiller______________________________________28
Francis Alÿs, Rumour Whisperer__________________________________________31
Conclusion: The Walkers in a New Urban Space_____________________33
Bibliography_____________________________________________________________35
6
Introduction
‘Upright walking’ writes Rebecca Solnit, ‘is the first hallmark of what became
humanity’.2 It is mostly utilitarian, the human way to move from one point to the
other: walking to go to work, to visit a friend, to go the pub. Walking is moving
through spaces, from A to B, when A and B are the only things that matter. In an
urban context, walking is often obsolete: defeated by the long distances one has
to cover on a daily basis, one walks only to the bus stop, to the car park.
Yet walking can be a very direct way to engage with our environment. According
to Michel de Certeau, it is ‘the elementary form of experience of the city’, a first,
immediate and physical encounter with our surroundings.3 And from the 18th
Century onwards, walking has been invested of a very different purpose than
reaching a destination. In literature and in the visual arts, the aim of the walk
became the journey itself.
This essay will focus on contemporary works which use urban walking as a
device to explore the city specifically, London: Seven Walks, London (2005) by
Francis Alÿs, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) (1999) by Janet Cardiff and
London (1994) by the filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The key questions in this essay
are: how do these artists use London’s striking features to comment on and
critique the city? How, in these works, can walking be read as a personal quest
for identity? How can the walk challenge the traditional understandings of
gender? How walking can define a relationship to history and memory, and what
is the practice’s relevance today?
Many other works could be as relevant when dealing with this topic, London
being a recurring source of inspiration and subject matter for artists. The
purpose of this selection was not to be exhaustive but to focus on a cluster of
works that could touch on a wide range of issues while remaining contained and
coherent as an ensemble. These works cover a time span of 11 years in which
London experienced tremendous transformations in its inner organization as
well as in the image it promoted outside its borders. The three artists had
different levels of knowledge of the city when they started working on their
2 Solnit, R., 2001, p.323 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.93
7
pieces, from the insider to the complete foreigner; this, as well as their different
genders, resulted in diverse approaches the city.
Patrick Keiller, London, film, 82 mins, 1994
Patrick Keiller’s London is a filmic journal following the peregrinations of two
unseen characters, Robinson and the narrator, throughout the year 1992. The
narrator, voiced by Paul Scofield, reports on his return to London after 7 years
working as a photographer on a cruise ship, and on his reunion with his old
friend and ex-lover, Robinson. The film unravels in series of long, static shots of
various locations in the city. Robinson is a part-time teacher ‘in the School of
Fine Art and Architecture at the University of Barking’. He has a complicated
relationship with London, slightly nostalgic for the past, yet looking for
modernity, intrigued by the city’s quick transformations. He has asked his friend
to visit him in order to tell him about his project on ‘the problem of London’.
Robinson believes that the ‘surface of the city’ is readable. In order to decipher
this city ‘language’, the two characters set out on a series of long walks, taking
place between January and December 1992. They become two flâneurs, two
observers of London mundane reality. As they go along, the narrator reports his
conversations with Robinson. This monologue is a mix of anecdotes and
comments delivered in the driest, most sardonic tone, where fictions and facts
are coupled without distinction.
8
Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still
Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), Audio walk, 1999
In 1999, Janet Cardiff was invited by Artangel to produce an audio walk for
London. The Missing Voice (Case Study B) takes the listener for a walk in East
London from the Whitechapel Library to Liverpool Street station. In order to
experience the work, one has to go to the Library and ask for a walkman. As the
participant puts on the headphones, Cardiff’s voice slowly but firmly takes
control of their movements. She orders the visitor to go to the crime section and
reads with them a passage of a detective novel, before leading them to the
streets. The participant has to match their pace with Cardiff’s, almost becoming
her shadow for a short while. As the walk develops, four voices intertwine. The
first voice is Cardiff’s, the narrator, who comments on the city, and tells the
story of a missing woman and how she hired a detective to find her. The second
one is another female voice, again the artist’s, now in a different character. She
could be the disappeared woman, losing herself in the city. Two male voices are
also mingled with these two: the detective looking for the woman, and another
man, possibly Cardiff’s lover.
The Missing Voice (Case Study B) constructs a complex narrative which mixes
anodyne observations, personal memories, comments on the past and the future
of the city, and multiple references to film noir and pulp fiction. But this
scenario is unresolved, wilfully confusing. The point of the piece is less to
deliver a readable story than to provide the viewer with the opportunity to
complement it with their own stream of thought.
9
Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999
Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5
Francis Alÿs’ Seven Walks, London is another projects commissioned by
Artangel. Both are part of the ‘Inner city’ series which ‘aims to make a part of
the city seem temporarily transformed, re-mapped or revealed in some way’.4
This project took five years to develop and was finally exhibited at 21 Portman
Square and at the National Portrait Gallery in 2005. Seven Walks, London is an
ensemble of seven works, of varied scale, involving video, performance,
photography as well as a large amount of notes and scribbled maps, altogether
documentation, relics and works. It is the reaction to London of an outsider, a
tourist finding ways to tackle the city. Walking is for Alÿs a way to engage with
and observe the city, the opportunity to develop ‘a rich state of consciousness’.5
Each of the seven works of this project (Guards, Shoeshine, Shady / Sunny, The
Commuters, Railings, Ice 4 Milk, The Nightwatch and L’Imprévoyance de la
Nostalgie) is a ‘walk’. Favouring a poetical approach, they engage with London’s
complex and multi-facetted identity, as well as the multiplicity of its codes.
4 cf www.innercity.demon.co.uk 5 Seven Walks, London, 2005, p.48
10
‘Walking as a Conscious Cultural Act’6
Historical Antecedents
What the historian Solnit calls ‘walking as a conscious cultural act’ is a relatively
new phenomenon.7 Solnit establishes its inception with the French thinker and
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).8 In his Confessions (1782)
Robinson narrates the first fifty-three years of his life, with an emphasis on the
long walks he did in his youth. From then on, the notion that walking could
contribute to develop intellectual activities started to develop. While walking,
the body and the mind are in concordances and, as Solnit puts it ‘the passage
through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of
thoughts’.9 In an interview with James Lingwood, Alÿs also acknowledges this
creative power of walking: ‘It’s a perfect space to process thoughts. You can
function at multiple levels simultaneously’.10 But Alÿs refers to urban walking.
Rousseau’s walks, if they emancipated walking from its solely utilitarian
function, were exclusively linked with nature and an idea of harmony with the
elements in an almost ‘pre-civilized’ state.
In the 18th Century, walking in a city meant negotiating a path through dirty
pavements, amongst beggars and prostitutes. This is exemplified in John Gay’s
(1685-1732) Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) where the
art of walking is the art of keeping oneself clean and safe. Yet gradually, this
activity became linked with a subjective knowledge of the city, as well as a
physical experience of its transformations. In Daniel Defoe’s (1660-1731) A
Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the narrator describes London as a
labyrinthine city, devastated by the plague. This account is at once observation
and recollection, the report of a situation and memory of what is no longer
there. The city is reorganised through subjectivity, appropriated through the
narrator’s perambulations. This became a common feature to all the following
pedestrian explorations of the city in literature or elsewhere. Thomas de
Quincey, (1785-1859) in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821),
wanders the streets under the influence of narcotics, using the effects of drugs
to explore the power of imagination and transfigure – in Merlin Coverley words – 6 Solnit, R., 2001, p.147 Ibid8Cf Ibid9 Solnit, R., 2001, p.510 Seven Walks, London, 2005, p.48
12
‘the familiar nature of our surroundings into something strange and
wonderful’.11 Cardiff’s Missing Voice (Case Study b) resonates with this first
attempt to weave imaginary into the mundane, throwing the viewer participant
in the middle of a pulp fiction. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-
1855) chose his city, Copenhagen, to examine human nature, each passer-by
being a specimen to study. Others went down the esoteric route, most famously
Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) who revived at the beginning of the 20th Century the
theory of ley lines supposedly linking London’s Hawksmoor churches.
The 19th Century marks the emergence of huge and complex cities, estranged to
its inhabitants. The anonymous crowd is part of the phenomenon. A short story
by Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd (1840) has proved influential in
framing the motive of the solitary man walking in the city. In the story, the
narrator follows a stranger for 24 hours before finding himself at his point of
departure. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) translated Poe’s writing, and he
developed this theme in his famous essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863)
where he describes the flâneur, the dandyish figure of the man walking in the
city witnessing its transformations into a modern metropolis. The flâneur
embodies a new type, which can only exist in this new context. Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940) pushed further this theme in his Arcades Project (written between
1927 and 1940), a collection of essays and notes posthumously edited and
published. If Benjamin’s version of the flâneur is more linked with the arcades –
the glass-covered pathways in Paris – and their shops, he is quintessentially, like
his Baudelairian counterpart, the observer of the tableau vivant of modernity.
The flâneur is a recurring character in literature, sociology and urban art,
crystallizing an attempt to understand modernity and post-modernity. Patrick
Keiller also used this motif in London, his character strolling in the post-
industrial city as the Parisian flâneur strolled in the boulevards. However, the
flâneur is also a very problematic figure: a symbol of fin-de-siècle decadence.
But maybe more importantly it is a figure that doesn’t exist. As Rob Shields
pointed out, the flâneur is ‘essentially a literary gloss’: ‘flânerie was […] always
as much mythic as it was actual’ Shields continues, ‘[i]t has something of the
quality of oral tradition and urban myths.’ 12 Yet it seems that it is the flâneur
which validated walking as an investigative method.
11 Coverley, M., 2006 p.4212 Shields, R., 1994, p.62
13
The Surrealists also produced texts of significant importance dealing with urban
walking which allowed them to physically experiment free associations, chance
and coincidence, central to the preoccupations of their movement. Louis
Aragon’s (1897-1982) Paris Peasant (Le Paysan de Paris, 1926) and André
Breton’s (1896-1966) Nadja (1928) both investigated the potential of drifting in
the capital. In a process similar to automatic drawing – where the unconscious
was supposedly taking control over the educated, reasonable mind – the
surrealist free-floating exploration of Paris should bring out new mappings of
the urban territory and facilitate a more poetical approach of the everyday. The
three works studied, and more specifically Alÿs’ Seven Walks, are infused with
this sensibility. Surrealist automatic walking provided the blueprint for what
was to become the Situationist dérive.
According to Coverley, this period marked a transformation in the goals of
conscious urban walking. ‘If the urban wanderer was to continue his aimless
strolling’ he writes, ‘then the very act of walking had to become subversive, a
means of reclaiming the streets for the pedestrian.’13 One could argue that
wandering the city was never an apolitical act. The Baudelerian flâneur was as
much an observer as an embodied critique of the transformations of the city. Yet
whatever he represented, the flâneur was willingly detached, separated from the
mundane urban reality. Like the Surrealist automatic walking or indeed the 19th
flâneurism, the dérive and other psychogeographical practices that appeared
first in the Lettrist Group around 1950, and were soon developed and theorized
by Guy Debord, involved urban wonderings, an imaginative reworking of the
city, and prized unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by drifting. But
unlike the earlier artistic tradition of urban walking, the dérive was not
purposeless: it was a revolutionary device to explore the city in order to propose
radical alternative solutions. Psychogeography divided the city in various
emotional zones according to the responses they provoked on the individuals.
These zones could be defined by the urban wandering, or dérive, which then
produced a new mapping of city. Debord’s 1957 Paris map The Naked City
physically represents this subjective organisation of the space, with its areas of
the capital cut up and seemingly randomly reorganised.
13 Coverley, M., 2006 p.77
14
Guy Debord, The Naked City, poster, 1957
In 1957, the Lettrist movement merged with other avant-garde organisations to
create the Situationist International (SI, 1957-1968). The desire of the new-born
movement to be accessible for a wider audience triggered the creation of a
Situationist glossary in which dérive was defined as ‘a mode of experimental
behaviour linked to the condition of urban society: a technique of transient
passage through ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of
continuous drifting’.14 Yet the SI soon focused on another political agenda and
lost interest in psychogeograpy (possibly due to the lack of results of the first
actual derive experiments).15 Psychogeograpy not even evoked in Debord’s
seminal text La Société du Spectacle (1967).
However, the dérive didn’t disappear. From the ‘70s onwards it found a great
critical and intellectual favour, resonating in works such as Lyotard’s Driftworks
(1973) and later in the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as well as in the
popular infatuation for psychogeography. Sinclair, writes David Pinder,
‘positioned himself as a kind of born-again flâneur’, observing the city to gather
evidence against the Tory government and engaging a fierce critique of the
Thatcherite redevelopment of London.16
London, Seven Walks and The Missing Voice (Case Study b) share an ensemble
of preoccupations that has been defined through a long literary tradition of
urban walking: a physical engagement of the artist and /or the participant in a
14 Coverley, M., 2006 p.9315 See Coverley, M., 2006, p.10116 Pinder, D., 2001, p.11;
15
specific context, a comment, a critique, a subjective rethinking of a place.17 Yet
they also differ drastically from their antecedents. The three pieces, if they all
involve urban walking, are all meticulously constructed which contrast with the
free-floating quality of flâneurism or dérive. In the Missing Voice (Case Study b)
each step of the participants has been planned, there is no place for drifting.
Thought the ever-changing nature of London guarantees that each visitor will
have a different experience of the work, they nevertheless are going to see the
very same places. Likewise, Alÿs worked for each ‘walk’ on precise locations:
The video Guards is a highly choreographed performance despite an element of
indeterminacy. The Nightwatch – a CCTV video of a fox in the National Portrait
Gallery – takes place in a contained environment; and in Railings – a video of the
artist playing with a drumstick on the railings of well-appointed West London
houses – each barrier had been carefully selected. Even the ‘psychic
landscaping’ of Keiller’s London, though referring to the flâneur tradition both
in its script and in its method of shooting, is a skilfully edited combination of
images, each contributing to the critical goal of the film.18
Moreover, despite the numerous links between these pieces of urban walking
and their antecedents, walking is about reacting to a very specific context, and
contemporary London has little to do with the 19th or even 20th century Paris of
Baudelaire and the Situationists. It is a cosmopolitan, post-industrial city were
the issues at stake revolve not around the emergency of modernity, but multi-
ethnicity, surveillance and the consequences of major, late capitalist political
decisions taken throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Yet these works share with the
literary tradition of the walker the supposition that a city can be read as a text,
that it is covered in signs that can be picked up and interpreted.
A Territory of One’s Own: Reading and Appropriation of the city
17 David Toop in the Seven Walks, London catalogue also details musicians and composers who have taken their audience for a walk in the city. In Philip Corner’s I Can Walk Through the World (1965), the composer asked the spectators at New York’s Town Hall to accompany him around Times Square. Drifting along the same lines, Walk, composed by Michael Parsons in 1969, was to be performed by ‘any number of people walking in a large open space’. Randomly selected numbers determined the speed and the length of the walks to be executed. Despite their focus on sonic rather than visual perceptions, these musical pieces aim – like the three works under study here – to provoke fresh encounters with the urban well-known. Cf Toop, D., 2005, pp.63-69s18 Because of the improvised nature of the shooting method, Sinclair positioned the film against the documentary as ‘the justification of a script-approved argument’.Sinclair, I., 1994, p.13
16
‘Walking the city makes the invisible legible’.19
The desire to comprehend the territory one occupies is urgent when faced the
immensity of London. In his essay ‘Walking in the City’ Certeau theorized two
possible attitudes.20 One can decide to be a voyeur, who looks at the city from
the top of a building and perceives it as an architectural model. The voyeur
simplifies the complex urban reality to a network of easily recognizable signs,
fooling himself in the illusion that she or he can comprehend the urban fabric in
its totality. Certeau’s alternative attitude is to be a walker experiencing the city
at ground level and constructing a fragmented image of the metropolis. The
‘walker’ or the walkers: Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller’s characters choose to explore
the cityscape through the subjective. Like Rachel Lichtenstein and Richard
Wentworth’s works discussed alongside Cardiff’s in Joe Kerr’s essay ‘Mapping
with Latitude’, their walks ‘complicate their representations of the city, rather
than abstracting them’. Following the steps of Certeau’s ‘walker’, they
understand and recreate the city bit by bit, step by step.21
One could argue that Certeau’s dual system only takes into consideration a
small fraction of the possible attitudes when dealing with a city. The Certeauian
walker, because he doesn’t reduce the territory to a map of clearly identifiable
signs, seems to be denied the capacity to read the urban landscape. Yet, if Alÿs,
Cardiff and Keiller’s character’s walks don’t operate by simplification, they are
also a form of reading. As in the flânerie or the dérive, contemporary urban
walking allows its practitioners to decode the city. ‘When you walk’, says, Alÿs
‘you are aware or awake to everything that happens in you peripheral vision, the
little incidents, smell, images, sounds’.22 Everything becomes a sign to be
deciphered. In the ‘walk’ Ice 4 Milk, Alÿs juxtaposes photographs of milk bottled
delivered at Londoner’s doorsteps with images of ice blocks used by street
sellers in Mexico City. Both are barely noticeable events in the daily reality of
city dwellers and yet they reveal the unwritten tradition of tiny industries,
almost obsolete but persisting in the megalopolises. This series unveils the
poetic of the mundane and focuses on the fragility, the ephemeral in the
concrete landscape.23
19 Baker, B., 200320 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.91-11021 Kerr, J., 200222 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.48
17
Francis Alÿs, Ice 4 Milk, 160 colour slides on 2 slide projectors, 2004-5
In Keiller’s London, the narrator says that Robinson ‘believed that if he looked
at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the
molecular basis of historical events; and in this way, he hoped to look into the
future’.24 Robinson sets out on his walks to pick up and interpret the city signs
and make assumptions about the capital’s fate. Passing by a Portuguese-run
driving school, Robinson evokes the expansion of the Portuguese community in
South Lambeth after Portugal joined the EU in 1987. Seeing a ship on The
Atlantic pub sign just out of Brixton market, he reminds his companion of the
history of the Jamaican immigration after WW2, and how the newcomers were
housed in air raid shelters in Clapham Common. Drifting around London,
Robinson decodes for the viewers the innumerable signs to be found in the
Londonscape and deciphers for them a city that one tends to take for granted.
This decoding reaches another level of complexity in Cardiff’s The Missing Voice
(Case Study b). Her audio-walk combines her personal observations of the East
End – the buildings, the sounds in Brick Lane – with the story of a detective
following a woman through the city. He is looking for clues, finding and losing
her trace. In his aforementioned essay, Shields reminds us that the imagery and
theme of flânerie or urban walking is closely linked to the emergence of the
genre of detective novel.25 The figure of the detective represents an attempt to
dig out secrets, to make sense of the unintelligible, it evokes the need and
difficulties to master and comprehend the city. Hence in The Missing Voice the
detective figure is not only a character, and an evocation of a certain type of
cinema or literature, but also a mirror of the position of the artist, gathering and
making sense of traces scattered around the city.
23 Richard Wentworth also draws on the poetical power of minor urban incidents. His ongoing photographic series Making Do and Getting By reports banal events: a pea tin open abandoned on a doorstep, a lost glove on a low wall. They construct together a coherent narrative, a documentation of the artist’s emotional understanding of the city. 24 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199425 Shields, R., p.63
18
To read is an attempt to understand, and to understand is to appropriate. If
walking is reading, it is perhaps an attempt to make an unknown territory one’s
own. According to Certeau, this appropriative quality is common to walking and
speech. ‘The act of walking is to the urban system what speech is to language’
he writes.26 For Certeau, walking would be the appropriation of a system, its
transformation from the abstraction of a map, to the personal experience of
moving through spaces. London, Seven Walks and The Missing Voice are three
subjective readings of London’s territory, a selection and an investigation of a
small part of the city, and in that sense can be read as an appropriation of the
territory. Yet if these works are an attempt to comprehend the city, none of
them leave a permanent mark. The artists refuse to assertively inscribe their
presence in the urban fabric: perhaps their works should be understood more as
a reaction than as an appropriation. Each proposes a personal interpretation of
London, ‘speaks’ the city, but all refuse to write on it, favouring an ephemeral
response to what they consider striking features of the capital.
26 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.97
19
Greetings from London
From a Different Point of View: the Place of the Artist in the City
Despite the great variety of reactions to London in this three works, one thing
seems to be recurring: at different levels they are reactions of outsiders,
whether actual foreigners (in Alÿs’ and Cardiff’s case), or just slightly eccentric
like Keiller’s characters. Being a walker is in itself an estranged position, Solnit
writes: ‘in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveller
rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group’.27 The
stranger is, according to Georg Simmel, a positive position.28 He is part of the
group, but he hasn’t mastered the codes of this group; he therefore is in a
privileged position of observation.
Cardiff didn’t know London when she started to work on The Missing Voice
(Case Study b) and was acutely aware of her alien-ness.29 This was doubled by
her position as a woman in the city who is more likely to feel endangered. If
Keiller’s Robinson is a Londoner, a local, then he has very few social contacts,
and he is gay.30 Mike Hodges reminds us that ‘[i]t’s worth remembering that
queers of Robinson’s age know what it’s like to be pariahs – outsiders –
subversives’.31 Being a stranger then can be understood in its broader sense as
being outside a common conception of the social norm. To a certain extent
Robinson is a stranger in his own city. In this, he is quite close to the traditional
figure of the flâneur, with which he identifies, part of the crowd and yet
alienated from it as in Stephen Morawski’s definition: ‘a kind of tourist at home,
a native who feels partly homeless’.32 The narrator is also, a stranger: he has
been away for long enough to have a ‘fresh eye’ on the city, and is constantly
amazed by the difference between the reality of London and his memory of it. ‘I
was shocked by the increase in the number of people sleeping out in the seven
27 Solnit, R., 2001, p.2128 Cf Simmel, G., 195029 ‘For me The Missing Voice was partly a response to living in a large city like London for a while, reading about its history in quiet libraries, seeing newspaper headlines as I walked by the news stands, overhearing gossip, a being a lone person getting almost lost in the masses… the London experience enhanced a paranoia that I think is quite common to a lot of people, especially women, as they adjust to a strange city.’Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice, (case study b),1999, p.66 30 But one could ask: What is a Londoner, a born and breed Londoner, after 30 years of residence, 10 years, 5 years, is a Londoner someone who has no other home? Or is it enough to feel part of the city?31 Hodges, M, 1997, p.332 Morawski, S., 1994, p.185
20
years I had been away’, says the narrator, ‘but Robinson seemed quite
accustomed to it’.33 Robinson and the narrator have a different relation to the
city which enriches London with different perspectives. Their distance to the
world they are witnessing enables them to be critical. Keiller needed this
alienation of his characters to serve his own politicized discourse.
Starting when he settled in Mexico, Alÿs was to make the fragility and the
advantages of this position the bulk of his practice. For the performance Tourist
(1994) he sat outside the cathedral in Mexico City amongst the workers
advertising their skills on little signs – plumber, electrician – Alÿs’ sign said
‘tourist’. This piece comments on the precariousness his situation and
affirmation of his artistic role as a professional observer. This became a strategy
to interact with specific contexts, an approach he also favoured for the London
project. Alÿs says that he was overwhelmed by the vastness of the capital, and
by his inability to ‘build [up] a mental image of the city’34. Seven Walks is
infused with this sense of alien-ness. When for The Nightwatch Alÿs puts a fox in
the National Portrait Gallery, or when for Guards he releases Coldstream guards
one by one into the City of London, he injects interlopers, outsiders, mirroring
his own position in the city.
Alÿs’ other strategy to engage with London was to find points of entry. They
were always ‘a detail, an aspect of architecture, or some social mechanism, a tic,
some kind of phenomena that recurs throughout the city’.35 When dealing with
one of the first tourist destinations in the world, the clichés images are waiting
to be seized. Alÿs recalls his first trips to London were he would gather all the
postcards presenting the ‘must-sees’, the sleek image the city has of itself and
want to promote abroad.36 Then gradually, he started to twist these archetypes.
33 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199434 Buck, L., 200535 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.1636 Ibid
21
Identifying the City: Uses and Détournements of London Landmarks
Francis Alÿs(in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), Guards, video, 28’, 2004-5
Seven Walks, London and The Missing Voice reinterpret London’s symbolic
lexicon; landmarks and striking features are used in a détournement strategy, a
Situationist approach designed to subvert an ideology by appropriating and
transforming its messages. The video Guards (2004-5) best exemplifies this
appropriation of London symbols.37 It features a Coldstream regiment and
evokes the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, possibly the
quintessential ‘London’ experience in popular imagination. The guards bring to
mind the folklore of the British monarchy. The city in which the Queen’s
presence in the palace is announced with a flag on a mast is also the city with
the most developed CCTV system in the world; out-of-date traditions and ultra-
modern technologies cohabitate and Guards responds to both. The video was
first to be only recorded on CCTV and edited, but it turned out that despite the
legal theoretically rights allowing anyone to get hold of the videos on which he
or she appears, the crew would not have been able to get access to it. The video
had to be shot in the CCTV ‘style’.38
The video shows Coldstream guards in the City of London. At first they walk
alone, then, locating each other by the sound of their steps, they congregate and
start their military march. The guards gather until the full formation of 64 is
completed. Then they walk together towards the river and break, returning to a
37 Guards, like Railings and numerous others of Alÿs’ projects, was realized in collaboration with Rafael Ortega. 38 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.30
22
passer-by state. At the beginning of the work, the guards seem lost, out of place,
strolling around the streets or sitting smoking on public benches. For the first
time, and because they are remote from their normal setting, they become
normal men again, not the interchangeable dummies guarding the gates of the
Queen’s residence. But they also seem threatened by this fall into the civilians’
world. As they gather in formation, they retrieve their power as a military unit,
as well as their anonymity. Under the electronic eyes of the cameras, the guards
seem to be invading the City, evoking a metropolis on the verge of collapsing,
devouring itself.39
The 5-track video Railings (2004) deals with another well-known image of the
capital: the railings surrounding houses in affluent areas of London. They are
reminiscent of an archaic idea of Britishness, linked with imperial power and
wealth coming from overseas, but they also evoke a contemporary situation,
London’s social inequalities and class division. Alÿs relates: ‘Richard Wentworth
suggested to me that the railings are an echo of the moat around a castle. They
play a role of protection, they filter’.40 Railings is an immediate, physical
connection between the artist and the architecture of the city, and by extension,
its socio-economic stratification. On each track, Alÿs runs a stick against
railings, playing on the noise provoked by this simple gesture, reminiscent of a
kid’s game. At first very simple, the sound becomes more a more complex, drum-
like rhythm. The video points at the protectionist attitude of London upper-
middle class and makes a melody-mockery of it.
Francis Alÿs, Railings,
39 Guards is a video but it is also the documentation of an event. Alÿs’ piece ironically came full circle when he decided to publicise the performance in pubs and tourist booths, side by side with London sightseeing coaches. He also made a postcard available for free on a rack at the entrance of the exhibition space, at 21 Portman Square.40 Ibid, p.20
23
five-track video projections, 2004
Alÿs tests the validity of London’s symbols and operates on the complex of
associations that accompany them. Even the venue hosting his Seven Walks,
London exhibition, an 18th Century building at 21 Portman Square, is a symbolic
space, a throwback to the issues dealt with in the work and as well as a
comment on the position of the artist, commissioned by the bien-pensant
intelligentsia.
Keiller also uses well-known images that can function as a metonymy for the
city. London starts with a static shot of Tower Bridge, immediately establishing
the geographical area under scrutiny, as well as the issues at stake in the film:
‘the problem of London’.41 Contrasting with this glorious figure of the capital,
the narrator offers a sardonic portrait of the country:
‘Dirty old Blighty. Undereducated, economically backward,
bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries. With its fake traditions,
its Irish war, its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges. Its
hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food. Its sexual
repression. Its hypocrisy and racism. And its indolence. It's so
exotic. So home-made.’42
This discrepancy between what is said and what is shown sets the tone for the
film. Likewise, when watching the Trooping of Colour for the birthday of the
Queen, the narrators reflect on the stark contrast between the grandeur of the
parade and ‘the squalor of the surrounding city and its suburbs’.43 London is a
provocation; it undermines the sleek, official version of the city’s identity and
points at its failures. The narrator relates that Robinson prepared his own
series of postcards, for which he asked homeless people to pose for him.
London underlines the superficiality of the city public image, alienated from its
social reality.
Even if it’s less obvious, Cardiff also plays with elements belonging to London
mythology. The structure of the audio walk in Whitechapel could in itself be a
reference to the famous ‘walks’ proposed to tourists, investigating local history
41 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199442 Ibid43 Ibid
24
or famous inhabitants (the most famous in the area being the Jack the Ripper
walk). Yet she focuses on mundane events: street furniture, cars, passers-by,
and rubbish, always avoiding the ‘spectacular’, at odds with tourist attractions
always seeking ‘sensational’. The Missing Voice (Case Study b), like Alÿs’
Guards, reacts to the omnipresence of surveillance cameras. ‘I watch your
movements on the, a small dot walking through the streets’ whispers an
unidentified man’s voice.44 In Cardiff’s work, the panoptical system has
developed as in a sci-fi story, where Big Brother can interact with anyone,
anywhere and at anytime. The participants are made aware that in London, they
are a dot on a screen, constantly being scrutinized. The ‘readers’ become
written into the fabric they attempt to interpret. They become, by being
observed and recorded, readable objects themselves.
Cardiff and Alÿs recognize the aesthetic of surveillance as part of the London
lexicon, alongside the Coldstream guards or Jack the Ripper. Their walks use the
CCTVs as an artistic tool, appropriating its visual identity or using its possibility
to multiply perspectives, hence undermining the principle of secret surveillance.
Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller all have an ambiguous relationship to London well-
established iconography, all at once admitting their identification to it and
perverting its messages. Walking allows them to engage with the striking of the
city, but also to comment on it. From observers, they become critics.
Walking as Critique
Social history has often been written in the streets. Rallies and marches are one
of, if not the oldest manifestations of protest, one of the first degrees of active
citizenship. Criticism is embedded in the tradition of urban walking: from what
Coverley calls the ‘spirit of dissent that animated both Defoe and Blake’ to the
political radicalism of the Situationists, which contributed to the social
movement culminating in May 68.45 Cardiff’s work seems primarily concerned
with the subject, but perhaps, Keiller and Alÿs’ works could be understood as
subversive and critical of London’s political situation.
London can be seen as a two person march, an open protest against – in
Keiller’s words – ‘the decline of London under the Tories’.46 The film takes the
44 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199945 Coverley, M., 2006, p.1246 Keiller, P., 2003, p.353
25
form of fictional journal of the year 1992, reminiscent of Defoe’s 1721 Journal of
the Plague Year. Historical considerations and anecdotes about figures such as
Poe, Sterne or Rimbaud lead the pair to reflect on the topicality of London – its
port losing importance, its run-down transport system – and the progressive
degradation of the quality of life in general. 1992 was a pivotal year in British
history. John Major was re-elected Prime Minister, several IRA bombs were set
off in the city and coal mines were being closed, which led to important miners’
demonstrations in the capital. Month by month, Robinson and the narrator
witness and comment on these events, building up a fierce critique of the Tory
government and of the aftermath of Thatcherism. This critique is supported by
the structure of the film and its long static shot, each contributing to the general
purpose of the film. Often the image speaks for itself, as in a shot showing
workers wearing the British Rail uniform while working on the recently
privatized South East train network. Keiller’s critique is also based on a
ferocious if understated humour: When the narrator evokes the costs
implemented to build a tunnel under the Thames between the headquarters of
MI5 and those of MI6 – costs comparable to the costs of the construction of 8
new general hospitals – the camera shows a street sign advertising a Magritte
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery: ‘It seems that everyday we were faced with a
new reminder of the absurdity of our circumstances’ concludes the narrator
(John Wrathall refers to the ‘low-key, very English Surrealism’ of the film).47 The
images are emancipated from the text, developing and complementing what is
being said. London denounces the lack of interest the Tory government had in
social welfare, in the city itself, and critiques the abuses of privatization. The
film also presents a city from which industry has moved away; this observation
led to Patrick Keiller’s second film Robinson in Space (1997), in which the two
characters undertake a tour of provincial English cities and industrial sites.
47 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 1994; Wrathall, J., 1999, p.10
26
Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still
Keiller’s political engagement is at odds with Alÿs’ stategy, which favours a
poetical approach to the city. For Alÿs, only ‘the poetics provoke a sudden loss
of self that allows a distancing from the immediate situation, a different
perspective on things, and might then have the potential to open up a political
thought’.48 Each ‘walk’ functions like parasite in the urban fabric. They point at
a distinctive social phenomenon: protectionism, surveillance, class division, but
leave the viewer to articulate her or his own conclusion. Alÿs’ practice centred
on walking also promotes a ‘counter-productive’ attitude that could be read as a
comment of capitalist society, obsessed with speed and efficiency. Like the
flâneur analysed by Chris Jenks, he is promoting a ‘[r]esistance wrought through
a change of pace, or walking ‘out of step’ with the late modern rhythm of the
city’.49 Alÿs starts with the official routes, the London landmarks, to better
escape them. He re-inscribes the human in a city where pedestrianism runs the
risk of obsolescence, endangered by what Debord called the ‘dictatorship of the
automobile’.50
48 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.5649 Jenks, C., 1995, p.15050 Debord, G., 1994, p.28
27
Urban Walking as a Quest of Identity
Personal Memories
The walker is alone in the crowd. If this alienation allows an acute observation,
one could argue that it also contributes to the creation of a space for
introspection. The walker is looking for himself while looking at the world.51 Like
the pilgrim seeking redemption, the walker is on a quest on something
intangible: the self. This theme of walking as a quest of identity was introduced
by Poe’s The Man of The Crowd. At the end of the story, it is unclear if the
narrator has been following a person or merely his own whims, looking for
himself within the throng of anonymous. Of the three works under study,
Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study b) could best demonstrate this quest of
self. Yet, in her work, the notion of identity is confused from the start by the
multiplicity of perspectives: the narrator-artist / the disappeared woman / the
detective / the lovers. These various points of view build an intricate fiction and
could hint at the artist complex sense of selfhood. How then does this piece,
despite its fictional nature, illustrate how walking can contribute to the
construction of oneself?
The process of remembrance is crucial in the construction of a sense of
selfhood. It provides a ground on which build one’s personality and way to be in
the world. The steady rhythm of walking facilitates reverie, a travel through
time, as one is moving through space. Observations are interwoven with
recollections, temporalities are disjointed and recombined. This constant shift
between past and present is at the core of The Missing Voice, where fragments
of the past are constantly invoked by the narrator. As she goes along, the
narrator stops in a church (and invites her audience to do so as well). Inside she
is transported back to a childhood scene, in another church with her parents
51 Alÿs has long acknowledged the introspective qualities of urban walking. He played them out in the performance piece Doppelgänger (1999):
When arriving in ……. (new city), wander, looking for someone who could be you. If the meeting happens, walk beside you doppelgänger until your pace adjusts to his / hers. If not, repeat the quest in …… (new city).
The artist / performer walks in the city to find himself, or his doppelgänger, his double, as if anyone would have a double in each city, a double that would know the city, and share his or her insider knowledge with the new arrival. Following one’s doppelgänger is finding a point of reference that could be oneself, and abandon to his or her will. Some versions of the myth of the doppelgänger imply that meeting one’s double provokes death which gives to the piece an existentialist turn: looking for oneself, one’s double, one’s death.
28
and siblings: ‘my little brothers next to me [...] the sound of my father’s heavy
breathing, his tan neck rough against the white shirt’.52 This immersion in her
past could suggest that the artist / narrator is looking for the roots of her
identity.
Memories also come back through sensations. The smell of incense and feeling
of the cold wood against her legs surely take Cardiff back to her (or her
character’s) childhood memory, as quickly, if not more so than the sight of the
church, a Proustian mémoire involontaire. Walking allows collecting these
sensations. It stimulates the senses and transforms our understanding of the
present, which becomes, as Mirjam Schaub suggests, ‘the sum of all the
impressions, sensations, thoughts and memories which are active at the same
time’.53 The Missing Voice (Case Study b) draws a complex network of
recollections. Cardiff mingles what could be true memories, those of a woman
who grew up in a farm in Canada, with her character’s memories, hence
blurring the limits between her character’s quests of self with her own.
Moreover, for the listeners, all these memories are part of their present
experience; they are caught between contradicting temporalities, Cardiff’s and
their own. Finally, The Missing Voice piece encompasses the audience’s
memories. In this sense it not only invites the listener to assist at someone else’s
introspective moment, it also begins to create for them a meditative space.
Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999
52 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199953 Schaub, M., 2005, p.248
29
‘Have you ever had the urge to disappear, to escape of your own life, even just
for a little while?’54 asks Cardiff of her viewer. She attempts to tease out the
desire to let go, to abandon, to stop being a cog in the well-oiled city-machine, to
vanish. This theme of disappearance is very present in literature dealing with
crowd. The flâneur ‘is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I'’ writes
Baudelaire.55 Cardiff takes on this tradition, playing out her urge to disappear, to
walk the step that separates anonymity and nothingness. In the same way the
search for one’s identity can often be interrupted by the desire to let everything
down, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) complements an active existentialist
search with a desire to lose oneself in the throng.
Urban Walking, Sexual Identity and Eroticism
If the position from which the artists interact with the city – whether insider or
insider – is important in shaping their intellectual perspectives, the role of
gender is also crucial. Chris Jenks suggests that ‘women are not at home in the
city’ and it is evident that from the start, they have been excluded of the
tradition of urban walking.56 In literature, Baudelaire and Benjamin’s flâneur
was a wealthy male, disposing of his time at leisure and not feeling endangered
anywhere in the city. This figure has also been intermingled with the Victorian
bourgeois leaving his quiet area of residence to look for a cheap thrill in
disadvantaged part of town.57 From Baudelaire to the Surrealist, the female
counterpart of the man strolling in the city is the prostitute. In Benjamin, the
woman who shares the territory of the arcade with the flâneur is a shopper.
Consumable or consumers, women are in both cases incapable of distance with
the urban commerce. Moreover, there is an understanding of the women being
in the streets to be seen, on display. They can’t be active observer, they are
there to be observed, available for the male gaze. Jenks argues it is this
understanding of women ‘performing’ for men that lead to intimidation:
‘[w]omen do not look, they are looked at. Thus in the public arena, the streets of
the city, women are prey to the harassment of male optical gratification. Women
cannot simply walk, they do not stroll, they certainly do not loiter.’58 The flâneur
54 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199955 Baudelaire, C., 1995, p.1056 Jenks, C., 1994, p.15057 Cf Walkowitz, J., 199258 Jenks, C., 1994, p.150
30
has also been criticised by feminist scholars such as Judith R Walkowitz (1992)
and Janet Wolff (1985). Wolff points out that the gendered nature of the flâneur
left literature with a gap in the knowledge of women’s experience of the modern
city. ‘There is no question of inventing the flâneuse’, she writes, ‘the essential
point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of
the nineteenth century’.59
In light of critiques such as these, the flâneur became too problematic to simply
be re-adopted by late-20th Century artists. Even Iain Sinclair, who embraced the
idea of the flâneur in his first novels and poems, repudiated it eventually in his
recent London Orbital (2002), choosing the more ‘gender-politics neutral’ image
of the man walking to escape.60
One could wonder what relevance these kinds of affirmations have in a post-
feminist society, where women are (supposedly) free from these old social
stereotypes. Moreover, it is easy to fall into a caricatured understanding of
gender difference, pretending that all men would feel comfortable anywhere
when women would constantly threatened. Yet misogynic clichés are still
embedded in popular unconscious, even, as Solnit reminds us, in the language:
‘English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women’s
walking. Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the
streets, women on the town, and public women’.61 There is still a belief that if a
woman is abducted, she is somehow herself partly culpable, and young girls are
told to be careful how they dress in order to avoid trouble. Women are made
responsible for their own security in the streets. Still today, they can feel like
prey walking in the streets, they are denied the freedom to go wherever they
feel like.62 Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study b) operates as an affirmation
of the artist’s female position in the city. So how does this piece challenge these
59 Wolff, J., 1985, p.4560 Cf Baker, B., 2003One could also argue that Sinclair abandoned the figure of the flâneur because of its link with a 19th Century understanding of the urban space. In Lights Out For the Territory he replaced the flâneur by the stalker: ‘The concept of ‘strolling’, aimless urban wandering, the flâneur has been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent –sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker as our role-model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing[…] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.’ Sinclair, Lights Out For the Territory, quoted in Coverley, M., 2006, p.12061 Solnit, R., 2001, p. 23462 ‘Two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, according to one poll, and another reported that half of British women were afraid to go out after dark lone and 40 percent were ‘worried’ about being raped.’Solnit, R., 2001, p.240
31
outdated codes of access to urban space, and perhaps of simplistic
understandings of gendered possibility?
First, Cardiff’s presence as an active observer in the streets is in itself a
perversion of the traditionally male flâneur. But she doesn’t achieve it by
mimicking masculine models. On the opposite, she encompasses women’s fears
in cities: walking alone, being followed, going missing. ‘I sometimes follow men
late at night when / I’m coming home from the tube station’, she whispers, ‘I
pick a man that’s going my way and / then stay behind him it makes me feel
safer / going through the dark tunnels to have / someone near me it’s like a
guardian angel’.63 Yet she perverts the idea of the woman-victim: in order to feel
more secure, she becomes a stalker.
Eroticism is for Cardiff a tool to re-affirm her female identity, in ‘a reaction to
art history and to our culture’s obsession with male desire’.64 For the duration of
the audio walk, the listener becomes an active participant in an almost
cinematic experience, one who willingly gives up free will and submits to
Cardiff’s authoritative voice. Almost like an erotic game in which the pleasure is
abandoning oneself to another’s will, Cardiff builds a sensual bond between
herself and her listener. The listener is then caught between the pleasure of
letting go and the panic of going astray, getting lost, hurt. Like a lover, Cardiff
demands absolute trust from her audience.
Cardiff also plays on the noir cliché of the femme fatale, both controlling and
ultra feminine, and invites the listeners into her intimate experience, her train of
thought. Not only do they surrender entirely to her will, but for the duration of
the piece, they accompany Cardiff in her constant shifting of perspective. During
the walk, Cardiff all of sudden describes a scene of abduction: ‘I’m blindfolded /
my hands tied behind me’.65 It is unclear if she is dreading an old nightmare – as
earlier she seemed to recall an actual event – or daydreaming S & M fantasies.
The listeners, like Cardiff, are altogether controlled subject and dominator,
participant and victim.
63 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199964 Christov-Bakargiev, C., 2002, p.2265 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 1999
32
Cardiff indulges in fantasies of victimisation of women, perhaps as to reclaim
her power over them. But this reclaiming of her sexuality isn’t achieved by a
direct confrontation of her body with a male audience, as in several feminist
performances of the ‘60s and ‘70s.66 Cardiff is protected by her absence. Her
body is evoked – ‘I walk naked across the floor’67 – yet it is unavailable,
mysterious, resistant to what Jen Harvie defines as ‘voyeuristic or physical
appropriation’.68 Cardiff defines another relationship between art practice and
femininity, away from its historical tendency to objectify both female subjects
and artists.
Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999
Cardiff complicates the often too simplistic critical dialectic ‘woman’ / ‘male
gaze’. She endorses an authoritative voice, submits the viewer to her will, but
also admits the pleasure of being submitted. She claims the right for women to
control and enjoy their sexuality and promotes a sensual encounter with the
world. In the same way her personal / fictional memories are included in the
walk so as to weave the narrative as well as to trigger the audience’s own
recollections, Cardiff’s promotion of sensuality allows her public to reflect on
their own relationships to their bodies. Establishing an erotic tension between
her voice and her listener, she re-defines female identity. She doesn’t confront
male stereotypes but instead appropriates dominating sexual codes.
66 See for example Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) or Valie Export’s Touch Cinema (1969) where the audience was invited to have a direct contact with the artists’ bodies. 67 Ibid68 Harvie, J., 2004, p.202
33
Walking to Reinvent the City: History and Urban Myths
Constructing a Past: Cardiff, Keiller
London, as any city, is a palimpsest, constantly erased and re-written. It’s a
puzzle of historical debris, physical objects, houses, roads, monuments, each
revealing a facet of the area’s history. London is also built of phantom
landmarks: Knightsbridge, Crystal Palace, Temple. These absences continue to
mould the character of the urban. ‘The long gone King’s Cross casts a shadow so
permanent it’s like a stain with an unfixed edge’ writes Richard Wentworth.69
Yet, in the race of everyday life, one could forget these thick layers of history
and see only the latest addition, oblivious of what it’s build on. Cardiff affirms
that walking allows weaving links with the past. ‘How can one just walk over the
footsteps and not remember?’ she asks.70 Yet, what makes walking such an
appropriate way to engage with a place’s past? And, leaving Alÿs’ work aside for
the moment, what kinds of relationships with history do The Missing Voice (Case
Study b) and London offer to their audience?
In The Missing Voice (Case Study b) Cardiff evokes the scaffolding everywhere
present, the impermanence of the urban landscape especially in Spitafields area
and its accelerated gentrification. ‘I wonder if the workers ever think about
themselves as the changers of the city, the men that cover up the old stories,
making room for new ones’, she says.71 Yet, there is no condemnation in her
voice; she is observing the changes of the cities taking place under her eyes.
She counters the transience of the city by excavating the memories of the place.
She tells its legends, these scraps of facts that slowly become mythological. In a
book, Cardiff has found the history of a man living in the street where she’s
walking. He played the violin, waiting for his beloved to come back. As the
listener strolls down the street with her, string notes resonate, the ghosts of
Brick Lane re-emerging from the shadow. As we walk with Cardiff, we overhear
a guide, talking about Whitechapel when it was inhabited by a large Jewish
community. Quickly after, we listen to the Southern Asian music pouring out of
the curry houses. Cardiff combats forgetfulness, and exposes the complex
overlaying of histories. Just as personal memories contribute to the construction
69 Off-limits, 40 Artangel Projects, 2002, p.4870 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199971 Ibid
34
of a sense of selfhood, the city’s memories form the core of its identity. Cardiff
guides us through its meanderings.
In London, history is even more ‘present’. ‘He was searching for the location of
memories’ says the narrator of Robinson.72 He studies emblematic figures of
British history as well as the large number of French writers that came to
London: Rimbaud and Verlaine, Mallarmé, Appolinaire. They are the landmarks
of Robinson’s cognitive mapping of the capital. The pair’s long walks are a way
to connect with its history and free from the yoke of efficient travelling, they
make themselves available to the city’s past. Robinson has a limitless knowledge
of the city and each neighbourhood brings to his mind its famous inhabitants:
Soho evokes Montaigne who used to live in Wardour St, Hammersmith William
Morris, and Strawberry Hill Horace Walpole, who wrote the first Gothic novel
The Castle of Otranto (1764). Clapham North was the theatre of Apollinaire’s
rejected love; the docks were the favourite haunt of the young Rimbaud looking
for the muse of poetry and easily available drugs. These historical figures
surround Robinson and his friend like a crowd of ghosts. Occasionally, they are
only evoked: Robinson declares Twickenham as ‘the site of the first attempt to
transform the world by looking at its landscape’.73 It is unclear if he is talking
about historical precedent or his own exercise of ‘psychic landscaping’. Only the
sign of the pub ‘Pope’s Grotto’ suggests the comment refers to Alexander Pope’s
innovative gardening and his nearby artificial grotto. Robinson seems to identify
with many renowned Londoners, seeing himself as an enlightened gentleman.
The paths his illustrious predecessors followed guide Keiller’s character through
London, allowing him to make sense of the fragmented metropolis. London
doesn’t favour any period. The characters constantly travel through history, of
which the last deeds of the Tory government would be only the latest
development.
Robinson reinvents London; he makes it in accordance to his fancies.
‘Sometimes I see the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’, he says.74
Monuments play an important role in the constitution of local myths, as they are
the marks of what a city chooses to remember, and in this sense they contribute
to shape history. As Robinson and the narrator walk, they pass by the unveiling
72 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199473 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199474 Ibid
35
of a statue of Arthur Harris, Bomber Command’s leader during WW2 and
responsible for the death of thousands of German civilians. This statue was
highly controversial and covered with red paint just a day after its unveiling.
Robinson answers these dubious celebrations by turning whole parts of London
into monuments: he imagines that Leicester Square is a monument to Laurence
Sterne, who came to London after the first success of Tristam Shandy (1759)
and met Hogarth and Reynolds who both lived on the square. BT Tower, close to
the location of house where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived as lovers, becomes for
Robinson a monument erected to their tempestuous relationship. This resonates
with Braco Dimitrijević’s plaques and statues dedicated to anonymous passers-
by, scattered in London by the artist in the early ‘70s. ‘John Foster lived here
from October 1961 to February 1968’ says one of them. Dimitrijević, like
Robinson in Keiller’s London sought to reassess what is usually understood as
important and worth remembering. They both acknowledge that history is above
all a constructed narrative and desire to take part in its rewriting. Yet
monuments also contribute to oblivion, relieving us from our responsibilities and
marking the beginning of a process of forgetfulness. ‘Memorials are a way of
forgetting, reducing generational guilt to a grid of albino chess pieces, bloodless
stalagmites’ writes Sinclair.75 Soon, the memorials become part of the cityscape,
present, yet invisible to the passer-by. Yet, Robinson’s monuments – because
there are only valid for himself – don’t run the risk of becoming mundane or
invisible, hence retaining their role as powerful reminders of the past.
75 Sinclair, I., 1999, p.9
36
Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still
Walking lets Robinson read the marks of the past, both physical and fictional.
Indeed, the past is not only communicated to us through official history and
monument, but also legends and myths. London gleefully blurs the limits
between them. Fantastic interventions are never excluded: Robinson describes
the London stone encased in the Overseas Chinese Bank Corporation’s wall in
Cannon St as the air-born vessel of a magician. Fairy-tale-like elements are
freely mingled with precise dates and events, and highlight the constructed
nature of history. According to Certeau, stories, myths and legend offer the
possibility to leave the routine, to get out and are therefore essential to make
the city habitable. ‘[T]heir extermination […] makes the city a “suspended
symbolic order” The habitable city is thereby annulled’.76 For him, history and
legends render human the incomprehensible city; looking for them is escaping
from alienation. One could argue that they could also overwhelm the newcomer.
Yet learning about local history and legends can be a way to feel part of the
place, to appropriate the unknown and in that sense stories transform the
inhospitable environment of the anonymous metropolis into a place of one’s
own. Moreover, local history and urban myths are a silent knowledge, shared
only by people ‘in the know’. They allow inhabiting a space that can’t be
monitored and function like an antidote to the panoptical city.77 Walking is
making oneself available to the marks of the place. In The Missing Voice (Case
Study b) and London it also becomes an act of remembrance.
76 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.10677 ‘There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this invert the schema of the Panopticon. […] This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on “just between you and me”.’Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.108
37
Francis Alÿs, Rumour Whisperer
Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, drawing, 2005
Certeau further argues that walking not only allows engaging with legends, but,
because it also offers a possible escape from the mundane, walking can become
a substitute for them. He writes: ‘Physical moving about has the itinerant
function of yesterday’s or today’s “superstitions” ’.78 In The Missing Voice (Case
Study b) as in London, it appears that the walks are rooted in a quest for these
stories. They don’t replace them, but are used as device to tease out the secrets
of the area. However, Alÿs’ walks seem to resonate more with Certeau’s theory:
perhaps they function as stories in themselves, inserted by the artist within the
urban fabric.
For Alÿs, walking allows the artist to intervene in a territory without modifying
it. This artistic ‘attitude’ started when Alÿs decided to leave the field of
architecture (Keiller also trained as an architect), and ‘not to add to the city, but
more to absorb what was already there, to work with the residues, or the
negative spaces, the holes, the spaces in-between’.79 Alÿs long term residence in
the saturated environment of Mexico City also contributed to this desire to
affect the city without adjoining physical objects. Alÿs refers to Seven Walks,
London as ‘a repertoire of possible scenarios which could develop in their own
way within the envelope of the walk in the city’.80 Each walk, in addition to its
real presence in the city documented by video and photographs, is also
conceived as a possible tale, which could spread around the city. ‘This ‘mythic
dimension” is interesting to me’, says Alÿs.81 His first project for London was to
spread a rumour. This would have been the development of a project instigated
78 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.10679 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.4480 Ibid81 Ibid
38
in Mexico with the help of three local people. They started to ask about a
‘disappeared man’ and answered questions about his physiognomy. In three
days, the local police issued a poster with a ‘photo-fit portrait’ and Alÿs left
town. Even if Seven Walks, London took a somehow more tangible form, the
‘walks’ can also function as rumours. One could easily imagine that after a
certain amount of ‘word of mouth’ propagation, the works could end up as the
Evening Standard’s headlines: Fox Visits the National Portrait Gallery,
Coldstream Guards Lost in the City. ‘Maybe you don’t even need to see the
work’, suggests Alÿs ‘you just need to hear about it’.82 The work then would only
exist in the imagination of its audience. ‘What is exiled walker produces is very
precisely the legendary… it is a story’ writes Certeau.83 Walking, like talking
unravels in space and time. It can be a form of dissemination. Alÿs’ Seven Walks,
London introduces stories, almost starting points of urban myths that could be
perpetually transmitted and transformed whereas London and the Missing Voice
contribute to excavate the myths lurking in London’s streets, waiting to be
discovered and passed on.
82 Ibid83 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.106
39
Conclusion: The Walkers in a New Urban Space
Walking is a direct way to interact with one’s surroundings. In the 19 th Century,
it was linked with a desire to observe and comprehend modernity, a way to
ground oneself in the specificity of a place. How can it be relevant in the 21st
Century?
London – like any metropolis in the world – has become gradually standardized.
The phenomenon of suburbanization has increased the distances between places
of work and places of residence. Each space is designed for a unique function: to
eat / to sleep / to work, moving away from the original design of the medieval
cities where all the human occupations were intermingled. New developments
are built up around the principle of security: reduction of public spaces, gated
areas, from which the stroller is excluded. One spends more and more time in
what Augé (1995) calls the ‘non-places’, the places of transit, airport lobbies,
cafeterias, all looking and feeling the same wherever they are on the global
map; and walking is often reduced to the bare minimum.84
21st Century modernity seems not to be characterised by places but by the
traffic between places, in new means of communications, and faster and cheaper
transport. Walking in the streets appears increasingly obsolete, even, in certain
parts of the world, ‘a sign of powerlessness or low status’ as Solnit writes.85
Solnit argues that walking is endangered, and that ‘if the city is a language
spoken by walkers, then a post-pedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks
becoming a dead language’.86 Bauman concludes that for the unfortunate who
cannot afford the security of the car, the ‘street is more a jungle than a
theatre.87 The urban stroller is said, by these theorists, to have lost his place.
Yet, London, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) and Seven Walks, London all
demonstrate the contemporaneity as well as the emergency of this practice. For
the artists (as for their characters), walking in London is first a way to engage
directly with a city on a physical level, an initial step to appropriate it. Starting
with obvious images, they gradually excavate London’s secret stories, and not
only reveal these myths but complete them with their own, building up a critique
84 Augé, M., 199585 Solnit, R., 2001, p.25386 Solnit, R., 2001, p.21387 Bauman, Z., 1994, p.148
40
and contributing to the constant re-invention of the city. In the pieces discussed,
walking in the capital is also a way to carve out of the unknown territory a space
for introspection, to inscribe a search of selfhood in the specificity of London
and to question the traditional codes of access to urban space.
Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller’s use of urban walking is an assertion of the place
against the ‘non-place’. Urban strolling in a completely globalized city would
have no point, but the artist’s (or their character’s) walks show that if the
standardization of cities has started, it hasn’t yet taken over London. They
unveil the particularities of the city, its unique if ever-changing London-ness.
Walking creates a ground level image of the city, fragmented, subjective and
incomplete, but inhabited by the spirits, the past, the urban myths of the place.
It quietly opposes the cult of speed and efficiency and transforms an
increasingly alienating surrounding into a new space tailored to human
dimensions.
41
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Braco Dimitrijević, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 1979
Faces in the Crowd, picturing Modern Life from Manet to today, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Torino 2005
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Keiller, Patrick, London, BFI, London, 1994
Keiller, Patrick, Robinson in Space, Reaktion Books, London, 1999
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