I have been working with the form of organised walking since 1993. I refer to these walks as manoeuvres. They exist in a region between traditions of performance art, the historical tour, loco-descriptive poetry, pilgrimage, expanded notions of sculpture, curating and plain old pedestrianism.
Manoeuvre started out as a collaborative organisation with fellow artists: Dean Brannagan and Gillian Dyson. Our initial aims and objectives being:
'to re-negotiate the given, inflexible and hierarchical institutional system which governs and commissions live activity by artists... to be an innovative, non-profit making organisation seeking to locate critical performance behaviour within the social fabric... to develop works on a bimonthly basis... to be located in its first stages in London... to evade seeking out a given 'audience' in favour of being approached by the viewer...'
Some of these have been maintained and realised, others have diminished in importance. Since 1995 I have developed Manoeuvre less as an organisation and more as a working methodology.
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/index.jhtml
Stalker: ‘I’m not sure. I think it lets those through who’ve lost all hope; not good or bad but the wretched. But even the most wretched will perish if they don’t know how to behave here.’ (Andrei Tarkosfky, 'Stalker', Mosfilm, 1979)
The manoeuvre utilises found materials and texts to assemble the possibility for a particular chronotope by which I mean a modelling organisation of time and space which engages with historical contexts. In this way sites can be defined as chronotopes (chronos meaning time, topos meaning place or topic [in discourse]). A walk of intention manoeuvres through space and time forming a web of interrelated chronotopes (websites) amounting to what might be termed heteroglossia.
My role in each of these walks is one of grammarian as opposed to conventional ‘guide’ involving me in a process of highlighting ideologically unselfconscious phenomena and ‘pointing out’ bodies of pre-existing information. Out of textual material the possibilities of a parallel intertextual work of imagination is opened to the participants. These works/walks are intellectually organic, each involving the active participation from a wide range of individuals whilst retaining a pedagogic aspect.
Within a discursive performance of this kind the production of meaning does not depend on the subjectivity of any one walker. Through the use of real space and time the engagement of the group in constructing chronotopes involves an absence of authorship and a process of construction of subjectivity which could be laid bare and examined in terms of its blockages, ironies, dissonances, collective dependencies and radical and inescapable historicality.
‘Raizl Kibel on the march westward for girls from the Union factory, later recalled: In a frost, half-barefoot, or entirely barefoot, with light rags upon their emaciated and exhausted bodies, tens of thousands of human creatures drag themselves along in the snow… Even today I still cannot understand with what sort of strength and how I was able to endure the death march and drag myself to Ravensbruck camp, and from there, after resting a week or two, to Neustadt, where I was liberated by the Red Army.’
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page8.html
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page6.html
TEXT > Three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan in London E1/E2
http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=11&p=4
TEXT > Monograph: Tim Brennan
http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=105
http://newton.sunderland.ac.uk/~vardygallery/timbrennan.html
http://www.pavilion.org.uk/consights/shepofarcstuff/shepofarc2.html
http://einscafe.eins.org/einscafe/angels.html
http://www.kahve-house.com/society/walking/references.html
Posted by walkinginplace at January 20, 2005 12:55 AM