De Chirico, the Situationists, and architectural morphology

It was exactly one year ago today that I posted this brief synopsis of the history of Situationist International. And coincidentally I found myself reading the situationists and the city (ed.Tom McDonough) on the metro today. In the first essay by Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the first to put the theoretical ideas of the Situationist movement down on paper, he refers to a painting by Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of the Street.

Side note: I found the book at a shop in New York that I only discovered two days before I moved to Madrid. Van Alen Books at 30 W. 22nd Street is a required stop for anyone interested in architecture, and the design of the tiny store itself is uncommon. It made me kind of sad to be leaving nyc, so I made sure to buy two books as inspiration for my new adventures. One is the situationists book I mentioned and another titled An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris by Georges Perec, in which he sits at different locations in Paris and records his observations of otherwise overlooked details.

Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914

De Chirico painted urban spaces that seem to contain the dual sentiments of emptiness and possibility. He is a visual narrator of the hidden layers of the city, using strong symbolism and oddly placed shadows for emphasis of the ominous - or promising - aspects of the story. I wrote about his American contemporary, Edward Hopper, here. Both painters capture the essence of the street to convey a distinct emotion, and through the artists eyes we uncover hidden aspects of a place and understand it on a new, previously unseen level.

After reading so much about the Situationists, I'm longing for Paris. BUT, being that I am in Madrid, these concepts can easily apply to the urban milieu "aqui".

SI fought valiantly against the sterile modernization of urban spaces in and around Paris, through artwork, performance, film and architecture. They were preoccupied with the history of the city, as successive layers of each generation add to or cover the remnants of the past. Clean, unfriendly and overly geometric architecture doesn't add any life, character or play to the city, and in their opinion, suppresses the potential for creative living.

In the introduction of the book, McDonough describes their views: "...cities were for them profoundly historical landscapes, whose current appearances were shaped - as geological strata underlay physical landscapes - by the successive events that time has buried, though never completely effaced." Their desire to reconnect with the history of the city, in particular the radical and revolutionary legacy, reminds me of my thesis exhibition that told the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Seeing that event as a precedent for the current events is timely, considering that the attack targeted J.P.Morgan bank as a symbol of unfettered capitalism.

America's First Age of Terrorism, an installation that
tells the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing.
Images from my thesis installation at Pratt.

Also, I learned a new term to describe this idea: architectural morphology. A micro level of urban morphology, it is the study of the layers of history and forces that have created the built environment. Love it.

What is all this psychogeographic stuff?

In the hopes of learning through making, I've explored a few possibilities for maps of my own.

This isn't really a map but I wanted to include it anyways because when I started writing this post I was reminded of it. My friend Betsy asked me to contribute to an exquisite corpse project she was working on for the Michael Rock lecture, and this is what I sent (above).

I handed this out for my presentation today - a map of my ideas in a Situationist style. I realized that psychogeography is an umbrella topic for many different things:
a. the personal experience of the street
b. the alternate experience of the street enabled by another person (artist/performer)
c. an artist who aggregates many people's experiences.

The experience can include emotions, atmospheres, encounters with people, play, and letting the contours of geography guide you.

Another topic entirely is the memory map - recording all of the associations you have with a place.

Ok, glad I got that all organized for myself. Here are a few drawings I made with colored pencils based on the symbol exploration (I posted earlier). Using the abstract grid and symbols I recreated my personal experience on Rivington street. So these are memory maps, not psychogeographies. But how can you represent the psychogeography you experience on the street? Through memory, unless there is a way to record it in real time. Oh, video does that. But video doesn't capture the moods, feelings and energy of a place as well as being there. I'm feeling the limitations of all mediums for this idea but I'm prepared to embrace those constraints. I have a relatively interesting idea for my next project, and I'm excited to see where it takes me.

There are three different types of symbols that I used for these: actual symbols, letters that are similar in form to the symbol, then a "free draw" of what I felt represented the symbol. I'm using the word symbol loosely here, and maybe I should look into other word options.

I'm not going to go much in depth about my critique with Bruce Mau last Friday, but the most important thing I learned was to NEVER say the word preservation in association with my thesis. EVER AGAIN.

Exhibitions and installations based on psychogeography

Of the two festivals that offer installations and performances roughly based on psychogeography, Conflux and AIOP seem to have lost a strong thread tying all of the exhibitions together. The individual installations and performances included in these events are only scratching the surface, but when viewed as a collective festival it infuses the urban landscape with experimentation. Conflux has more of a technology focus, and AIOP is mostly different groups of performance artists set up in different locations in the city. In one performance, a group of artists from the collective Flux Factory wear t-shirts with waivers printed on the back of them. One artist stands across the street and waves to someone walking down the street (they choose specific people to wave at - people in hats, boots, etc). If the person waves back, another artist on that side of the street stops them and asks them to sign the waiver on the back of their shirt. The performance is called Sign a Waiver. I don't know about you but one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone stops me on the street, to ask me something, hand out something, etc. I'm usually in a rush, being a New Yorker and all, and it bothers me that someone assumes that my time is not that important. If I'm meandering through the city on a derive, however, I probably wouldn't mind that much. Unfortunately I don't usually have the luxury of that freedom.

This brings up an interesting point about time, psychogeography and who really cares? I think it's fascinating that there can never be two identical psychogeographies of an area, because each person will have different memories and experiences in a place. However, who has the time to drift through the city, letting the contours and encounters guide you. The only purpose you have is to keep your awareness open to chance and circumstance and a sense of play and adventure. Is this aimless navel-gazing for jobless people with too much free time? Or is it something that everyone, even people whose jobs and families prevent them from having much freedom, would benefit from experiencing?

The concept of psychogeography is deeply rooted in the theory and circumstances of the Sixties. This new approach to the city was a rebellion against the "spectacle". In these days, the spectacle is more powerful than ever, so much so that we don't even notice it anymore. Many of these street installations are surface treatments of a larger issue that is underlying but not mentioned. Or maybe people aren't interested in making political statements anymore. The closest any of the artists get to making a political statement is Rebecca Nagle who stands in the middle of Times Square with a sign saying "I can't compete with this". She attempts to bring awareness to the increasing competing advertisements that make up the texture of our urban environment.

This project is interesting - the artist Todd Jokl proposed to track participants paths on a map of nyc. Each person has a hand-held GPS device that they use to check-in at every Conflux event they visit. The map he draws in the simulation is beautiful, the line quality is organic and each path combines to create this nice visual harmony. When you see the actual results of the project the feeling completely changes. It looks so unnatural and forced. There are 12 lines, some follow identical paths, and others just meander around the small space of the parks. Also, that shaky, natural line quality is gone. Maybe there were technical restraints to actually creating a path on Google maps but I would have liked to see the artist draw the path lines himself then. I'm struggling to see the purpose of this project, beyond trying to make a beautiful composition at the end of the festival.

I just played three of these gnome games and they're very addictive. The artist's name is Mateusz Skutnik and he highlights little known or abandoned places by creating a scavenger hunt for gnomes hiding in the structures and behind walls. His images are high contrast black and white, so very expressive and mysterious, and during the game an ominous melody plays in the background. The gnomes themselves are adorable and have so much personality that it makes me so happy to find them. This game makes me smile. Thanks Mateusz!

This is a lovely audio tour by Jeremy Dalmas that infuses the city with some mystery and adventure. He started in Golden gate park and by popular demand created an audio tour for the southwest part of New York City. You are meant to download the tour on an ipod and begin at the start of the tour. He takes you through back streets and down staircases, through parks, sometimes providing true historical facts and other times embellishing a little. He makes the experience of the street so intimate amidst the hustle and bustle, and even unearths some hidden creatures and forgotten stories along the way. The various music is a rich complement to his relaxing voice. The tour encourages a playful approach to the city and gives the participant a new sense of wonder while walking through ordinary surroundings.

oooooh! I'm starting to get it

Michelle also said something in our meeting on Thursday that made me think. How do I see this work entering the community itself? What do I see as the site-specific application of my abstractions, symbols and drawings? I just discovered a Brooklyn artist who places tape in geometric (mostly cubes and rectangles) shapes in the street environment. This is the description from the Art in Odd Places festival in 2008: "In a city made up of rectangular buildings, windows, and blocks the artist plays with a shape that is symbolic of New York City. In the attempt to draw attention to forgotten dimensions and overlooked layers, he creates reminders and portals with cubes that allow pedestrians to see the lines they are surrounded by in a new light."

Image from Art in Odd Places.

Aakash Nihalani currently has his first solo show at the Bose Pacia gallery and I'm actually so happy for him it's as if I knew him as a friend. I feel such a kinship and understanding of the work he's doing in the street environment, and he also has beautiful abstract paintings.

I'm putting together a presentation for Seminar class that started out trying to define psychogeography and it's really interesting to track the trajectory of my research. I started with psychogeography on Wikipedia. Apparently the term was coined by a man named Ivan Chtcheglov in the 1953 essay "Formulary for a New Urbanism". He was then banned from Situationist International (SI) and was eventually committed to a mental institution where he went through shock therapy and eventually died in 1998. It's horrible how fickle the SI and Lettrist movements were and there was constant turnover in the membership of both movements. Guy Debord seems to be the only constant name throughout, and also the only member with a full theoretical work, Society of the Spectacle. I read this book over the summer after finishing Naomi Klein's No Logo and was inspired by the lofty language and theory of the former while learning about case studies through the more practical language of the latter. Both books are essentially about the "spectacle" of contemporary society, and not having to accept the way it is just because that's how it is.

You can see the similarity in beliefs from the biography of Guy Debord on the European Graduate School site: "At the beginning of the SI movement their goal was to transgress the boundary separating art and culture from the everyday and make them part of common life. They theorized that Capitalism has the effect of diverting and stifling creativity, dividing the social body into producers and consumers, or actors and spectators. The SI saw art and poetry as a production by all people, that this was a way to make art the dominant power rather than having power rest in a small group of designated men. They argued for complete divertissement, and were against work. By 1962 they were applying their critique to all aspects of capitalist society, and no longer limiting it to arts and culture."

It also turns out that Debord was quite the heavy drinker and the SI movement did most of their theorizing in bars around Paris. Not the upscale bars that philosophers like Camus frequented, but smaller, seedier places. Debord tragically committed suicide in France in 1994, at which time the French press memorialized him after never acknowledging or recognizing any of his work before.

Psychogeography began in this way as a critique of urban geography. In the late 50's and 60's the French intellectuals and artists that made up SI were contemporaries to the Beat generation in the US. They rejected the traditional experience of the street, which they considered part of the spectacle itself with expressionless, cold modern glass towers. Le Corbusier was their nemesis because of his insistence on homogenous architectural structures and spaces that left little adventure in their chance and exploration. They proposed a more organic and spontaneous encounter with the city landscape. Debord describes the theory of the derive: "In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones"

Chance. That was the theme of the latest Art in Odd Places festival in New York City. It's surprising that this event (or series of events) is so related to the theory of Dada and Situationist movements but they make not one mention of it on their site. In the opening sentence of the curatorial statement they mention the word spectacle, which is an obvious nod to the work of Debord without literally saying it. As the statement goes on, they suggest that chance gives us the opportunity to move past our cultural conditioning to see the world in a new way. They aim to reveal undetected aspects of the city through performance and sound-based work.

Coming soon: a critique on this event series and also the Conflux festival.