Urban Tourism

from a workshop presentation by Philip Barnes

Introduction

"The artist is a map-maker...Poetry is a place."

-William Burroughs

In recent months I have been developing an idea that I have called 'Urban Tourism'. This is a title that I give to numerous artistic processes, be they performances, sculptures, photography or writing. The project relates to my position- geographic and 'political'- as an artist working in Hull and, more specifically, off the River Hull.

At a presentation that I gave in Newcastle in March I described how, although I have always lived in the same town, my appreciation and perception of it keeps changing. I have adopted the curiousity of a visitor when looking at my everyday landscape. In essence, Urban Tourism is about being re-enchanted by what one finds on one's doorstep. This ties in with other aspects of my work that are also 'immediate', such as using cheap materials and found objects.

It is by no means a new idea, more of an attitude to things, and there are several Art Historical precedents that relate to it.

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i. The Surrealist Eye

"The localities that we passed through...even the most colourless ones, were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness that never faltered and that needed only a street-turning or a shop window to inspire a fresh outpouring." -Andre Breton

The Situationists, and before them the Surrealists, adopted practices and ideas peculiar to the life of city-dwelling artists. The 'flanuer', for example, is the 19th Century name given to the individual who takes desultory strolls through the city, spending time in cafes and parks, and taking the time to consider the curious migrations of the population.

Latterday flanuers- often artists with a disposition towards social criticism- use the term 'psychogeography' to describe the process of making these individualistic journeys. Whilst the 19th Century flanuer was a creature of inordinate leisure- a man of means, and something of an 'idler'- the modern day psychogeographer regards his behaviour as being 'political'. Rather than being buffeted between the economic poles of Work and organised Recreation, he is literally 'taking to the streets', seeking out his own peculiar encounters with life. This might be in the more Surrealistic tradition of finding poetry in the boulevards and municipal squares- see the quotation from Breton, above- or in the Situationist spirit of social upsurgence (an immediate example being the Reclaim the Streets protests).

A book that really conjures up for me this business of artists exploring the city is George Melly's Paris & The Surrealists. This is a fascinating work which, rather than plotting the formal development of Surrealism, combines original photographs of Paris with Melly's numerous reminiscences and apt quotations from Surrealist literature. The book looks at arcades, city parks, shop windows and cafe interiors. The photographer's camera comes to rest on shop signs, shadows in doorways, ornamental railings, and furniture piled up haphazardly in antique shops.[images from book?]

Photographs by Michael Woods from Paris & The Surrealists.

When I looked through the book, rather than wanting to go to Paris to follow in someone else's footsteps, I reflected on similar experiences availiable in my own city. I thought about Hepworths' Arcade, about walking through the oddly-named Land of Green Ginger (home of England's smallest window), and looking at the haughty Victorian statues that stand proudly (if somewhat dishevelled) in Pearson Park.

The pictures in Melly's book look at the city through a Surrealistic eye. Rather than exposing the drudgery and banality of modern life, they tease out the charming details that a busier, less-attentive personality might easily miss. It is a manual in looking, and its methods can be applied just as readily to a Northern English town once known for its fishing industry, as to the centre of European bohemianism.

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ii. Performance Art, 'intervention' & mapping.

One of the first projects that took me away from working in a 'controlled' space- such as in a studio or a gallery- was called Wond'rous Life. This was a series of performance art events that took place across four sites in August 2000, organised by Dr. Roland Miller of Huddersfield University.

The places that were chosen- a courtyard, a private wood, a former mill and a beach- were done so as they corresponded to a 'map' that Roland had devised beforehand. Roland's map was a curving line stretching from Sheffield to the East Coast. Thus the performanaces were overlaid over some very diverse locations, and as a result of this our audiences were a mixture of invited spectators, casual passers-by and, in one instance, just the artists themselves.

There were numerous responses to the sites. My own theme was to carry the frame of a Wendy House with me and use it differently each time. At the Garden Rooms in Sheffield, a cluster of artist-run studios, I took on the rather absurd role of an 'architect' of sorts, building the house as children, visitors and dogs passed freely through the venue. As there were other activities going on around me- a blacksmith at a forge, a DJ playing music and people eating- my figure in his helmet served as one diversion amid several.

In a wood where a railway line had once operated I gathered materials from the ground into the square frame of the house (which I had lain on the floor). This action included dragging part of an old railway sleeper along, which was tied to my leg, and soaking stones in a bowl of red liquid.

Above: Instruction & Inside/Outside Actions, by the artist. Photographed by Pippa Koszerek.

Two pieces which really evoked the qualities of their location were Pip Wain & Cathy Wilson's tour through the wood, and Pippa Koszerek's Meridian Monument at Tunstall beach. In the wood Cathy and Pip led us through the trees, which had been drapped with objects such as shimmering fabrics and mirrors, and the piece ended in a nearby field, where Cathy posed as a scarecrow.

Above: performances by Pippa Koszerek and by Cathy Wilson & Pip Wain. Photographed by the artist.

Tunstall beach is the point at which the zero meridan line leaves the English coast. This is the international time line that has its base in Greenwich, London, and which all clocks are set by. On the beach is a peculiar 'monument' to this fact- peculiar in that it pays homage not to a historical figure or physical feature, but to a conceptual idea (the line, of course, does not physically exist). Pippa's action was to soak sheets in the sea and arrange them around the concrete pillar erected by the local council. This site in particular appears to hold a 'psychogeographic' attraction for artists.For example, in the 2002 Degree Show at the Hull School of Art Gavin Hutchinson (unbeknownst to our project) had also used the Meridian marker as the culmination point during a documented bicycle journey (motivated, he says in the catalogue, by "an unfounded belief of a conspiracy of cartographers.")

There are other precedents in adopting these man-made 'conceptual' boundaries as performance sites. Dutch artist Johan Cornelissen spent a year travelling as closely as possible along the equator, sending documentation back to a gallery in Amsterdam. Kerry Trengrove made a two-week journey along the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, encountering suspicion and interrigation at military checkpoints as he did so (his notebooks were examined by the British Army, who were trying to figure out what he was up to). The Welfare State, a performance art/community theatre troupe, have used historical leylines as a basis for their own work. It seems that in such cases, when a performance takes place out of doors, it blurs the boundaries between art and some kind of comment on the place itself, be that social or geographical.

Although it was an overt politcial action and not an 'art piece', a protest reported in the Guradian in 2002 [Jan 19th, p.3] employed a similar tactic. In Cornwall three men systematically removed 18 signs outside sites now administered by English Heritage, such as Pendennis Castle and a stone circle on Bodmin moor. The protesters were members of the Stannary Parliment, resurrected in the 1970's but which dates back to the 12th Century, when Cornwall had its own laws, customs and Royal Charter. The protesters were offended by English Heritage's management of these sites, which they argued rode roughshod over their indigenous Celtic culture. It is not unreasonable to imagine artists carrying out a similar action as a form of commentary on man-made definitions of physical places.

Above Left: Christian Philipp Muller's Illegal Border Crossing between Austria and the Principality of Liechtenstein. Above Right: The January 2002 story in The Guardian newspaper.

On a more formal art history level, Lucy Lippard attributes artists' interest in maps and mapping to the development of Minimalist and Conceptual art, which was (and is) concerned with numbers, time and measurement. There is also a relationship, I think, between the imposition of boundaries, their 'factual' representations through maps, and the artistic query into the nature of Truth.

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iii. The 'painter' & the place

In 2002 I have been making work that is inspired by and directly represents aspects of my hometown- of Kingston Upon Hull. Generally speaking I have resisted doing this too blatantly in the past as the term 'local artist' is regarded with dersion: unfairly or not, it conjures up associations with amatuerism and a rather narrow, parochial outlook on life. Earlier in the year, in an essay published in The Cutting Edge, I discussed the idea of artists as 'deracines', or as 'rootless people'. The writer Stuart Holroyd took a similar position in the 1950's, stating that it was important for artists not to be confined by the class and region-consciousness that he felt was prevalent at the time.

To begin with, I wasn't sure how valid my idea of 'rootlessness' was, as I haved lived in Hull all my life and have never experienced the upheaval of migration. Yet I think rootlessness relates to Urban Tourism in the sense that the creative processes of observing, recording and working in the city require one to be a little standoffish about that very place- I would relate it to the traditional painter deciding to set up his easel at a location, not to take part in the life around him, but to work at a slight remove from his subject.

The 'flanuer' or 'psychogeographer' does not, properly-speaking, participate in the urban process with the same intention or involvement as the citizen going about his or her daily business. Such an individual retains a critical eye: it is probably reasonable to say that if one feels entirely 'at home', one lacks critical perspective, and can come to accept localised assumptions as being the truth or the norm.

The extent to which an artist might participate in a place varies. Barry Miles, in his book The Beat Hotel, describes how the American poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso initially made few efforts to engage in the contemporary Paris where they lived for a time. They did not contact any of the notable figures living nearby- such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre or Samuel Beckett- and instead lived in what Miles calls a "Paris of dreams", symbolised by the figures who had passed through there some thirty years earlier (such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound).

I think this is applicable to the concept of Urban Tourism, in that the 'tourist' process involves being selective, in a similar way to the photographs in George Melly's own Paris album.

In February 2002 I made a sound-piece for the Baltimore-based art@radio station. It was hosted by Steven Bradley, who had undertaken a residency in Hull as part of Hull Time-Based Art's River Comissions. The piece I made- All Points North- used a bicycle journey along the River Hull as its basis. To this I applied an idea inspired by a small plaque that I had found on a building. This plaque, seemingly overlooked by the city's tourist information, commemorates an early broadcasting experiment made by the BBC. It records a transmitter that operated between the Old Town and the industrial riverside district known as Wincolmlee.

I combined the idea of cycling along the river- which I do anyway- with the 'conceptual' notion of broadcasting my thoughts throughout the journey, in homage to the event recorded on the wall of a side street.

In June 2002 I continued this direction with a series of photographs and texts for The Journey Web. This is an internet project that encourages artists from around the world to consider the question, "What makes you feel at home?" In my own case I had been developing particular bicycle routes, and paying special attention to the streetsigns that I passed. I have become fascinated by sidestreets and overlooked thoroughfares, and at how distinct areas of the city operate: the early morning activity at the fruit and veg depots, for example, or the sights, sounds and smells particular to heavy industry or to the fish markets.

Above: one of the Journeyweb text-photo pieces. For more information about this project, click here.

In a sense, these impulses- looking at streetsigns and their districts- is an everyday kind of activity, the kind of thing one might do as one commutes to work. Yet such observations can oil the wheels of creative thought. The travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith has said that he dislikes the term 'Travel Writer' because, for him, his favourite journeys are his shortest. In an article in The Guardian (06/07/02) he describes his daily writing routine. What is most important to him is the 2 minute walk to a nearby restuarant for breakfast, which means he can be back at his typewriter by 8am, and then the 5 minute walk to the market to buy Qat, a mildly stimulant leaf that helps him work. These journeys of his, less than ten minutes each, are to help him research the life of Ibu Battutah, a 14th century Moroccan globetrotter.

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iv. Land Art & Life Rituals.

“A horse in a field is seen as part of the field, a man in the field is not.” -Gillian Jagger

In the summer of 2001 I staged a project called Free Games For May, an unannounced series of performance actions on the nearby Beverley Westwood. The Westwood is normally reserved as open pastureland for grazing cattle, although during the Foot & Mouth crisis it had been left to grow wild. The area was still being heavily used for picnics and for exercising dogs. I researched the site and discovered that it had a long and varied history as a ‘leisure space’. In the Victorian era it had been used for cricket matches, brass band concerts and pony races, as well as for more clandestine activities such as betting, dog fights and bare-fisted boxing.

One of my pieces, Labor Day, focussed on a bricked-up mill. The action was to collect stones from a nearby gravel pit, place them on the steps of the mill, circle the building and then walk in straight lines outwards from it. These actions were repeated over and over, and I chalked a timed record of them onto the wall. I did this without speaking or explaining myself, and people did stop to watch from time to time (including a bemused wedding party).

Above: Labor Day performance. Photographs by Pippa Koszerek.

I was partially interested in the question of “work”. Was my action valid work activity? What was I achieving from it? Was I clocking on and off from my own private “job”? There are other instances of artists willingly taking on such roles. In the 1970’s, for example, Mierle Laderman Ukeles carried out a series of Maintenance Art pieces, which emulated the activities of city street cleaners and garbage collectors. At the same time, I was also interested in the meditative qualities of doing something over and over again. Of how collecting stones or walking particular route can become a charged personal ritual.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: from Maintenance Art series.

In her book Overlay Lucy Lippard asks: “Why do modern artists […] build immense cairns and walls over which the sun will rise on a summer solstice, or perform their own versions of ancient rituals in ghetto streets?” Her book examines the way in which Land and Performance artists have attempted either to tap into ancient rituals and customs, or have used their art form to generate contemporary rituals. She describes this process as ‘overlay’: the modern and technological tapping into and working with landscapes resonant with historical impact.

The impulse for doing this is generally ascribed to urbanised man’s feeling that he has lost a latent connection to Nature; that the creative human being needs some kind of spiritual component in his or her life in order to feel healthy.

Land Art can alert us to the ‘predicament’ between post-industrial man and the landscapes that he inhabits. Nancy Holt’s outdoor sculptural work comes to mind: of mirrors placed in the earth to capture the changing sky above (Hydra’s Head), or her monolithic Sun Tunnels, which also record the progress of the sun’s light. Situated in the grandeur of the open air, Land Art can often employ seemingly simple materials that are alive to the process of nature (such as climate, extremes of weather, or the passing of time). In work such as Donna Henes’ Spider Woman’s Web, something from nature is imitated in the outdoor environment.

Above: Spider Woman's Web by Donna Henes. Below: Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt.

Work like this must be sensitive to its site, and by doing so it invariably makes some kind of comment on the site itself. In April this year I made a series of sculptures using materials that I found on a piece of wasteland near Albert Dock basin. The pieces themselves were very simple. In one of them I cleaned the base of a former power unit, bringing attention to the defunct power cables sprouting from it, and repainted the metal hinges set into the ground. I also repainted part of a dilapidated pier, creating six red posts that now stand sentry-like on the skyline, and made pillars from abandoned truck tyres.

The area- ‘River Wharf’- is currently earmarked as the proposed location for company offices. Local residents are very protective about their views of the River Humber, however, and a previous application to build a University site there was shelved. A local journalist has even suggested building a non-denominational ‘cathedral’ there. When one spends time working at a space- I would go there early each morning- one becomes aware of these issues about what the space has been and what it might become.

Above: photographs taken by Pippa Koszerek during the Marina Projects work

Although there was a definite ‘end product’ with these sculptures, making them reminded me again of the ritual aspect of making art. The journeys to and from the Marina, and the qualities peculiar to the River and to its industry, seemed as important to experience as the action of making the work itself.

This seems to relate back to the idea of the ‘Urban Tourist’ again- of being alert to the creative characteristics inherent in a place, and which can be teased out by walking, recording and making things in that place.

“With us it’s a whole life style, everything blended together- art, life, music, poetry, holidays, hobbies. We don’t see how you can split these things up…We’re doing it like children. It’s all for real.”

-Artists Bruce & Laney on the reasons for enacting rituals

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©Philip Wincolmlee Barnes, July 2002

Sources

-Barnes, Philip: The Society of Dilettanti. The Cutting Edge, February 2002.

-The Guardian. January 19th 2002. Page 3. -The Guardian Review 6th July 2002

-Melly, George: Paris & the Surrealists. Thames & Hudson 1999.

-Miles, Barry: The Beat Hotel. Atlantic Books 2000.

-Morley, Robin: Because it was there. Performance Magazine November 1983.

http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography

http://www.zyarts.com/journeyweb