http://www.artleak.org/AWalkToRemember.html
A WALK TO REMEMBER
10 February - 15 May, 2005
Organized by Jens Hoffmann
Opening reception: Wednesday 9 February, 2005 7-9 pm
Tuesday 8 February 2005 at 7pm
Panel discussion with Jens Hoffmann and artists from "A Walk to Remember."
John Baldessari, Jennifer Bornstein, Meg Cranston, Morgan Fisher, Evan Holloway, Paul McCarthy, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Allen Ruppersberg, and Eric Wesley.
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”
- Charles Baudelaire
A Walk to Remember is an exhibition that invites a group of Los Angeles based artists to conceive and carry out guided tours through neighborhoods and areas of the city with which they have a particular relationship or affinity and that deal specifically with the rich cultural history of the city.
The exhibition relates to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur as a figure who derives pleasure from the hustle and bustle of the city streets, who moves purposelessly among the urban crowd with the eye of an artist: a spectator of contemporary life and urban scenes. Yet, A Walk To Remember diverts from Benjamin’s idea when it examines a specific European phenomenon of the early 20th century: the postmodern condition of Los Angeles in which walking is clearly a thing of the past. In addition, in giving each walk a purpose and in trying to bring various locations and social and cultural relations of the city to the audience the exhibition reaches beyond what Benjamin described as an “aimless affair.”
Members of the audience taking part in a walk will each be given a disposable camera to document their individual impressions of the artists’ walks from their distinct perspectives. The cameras will be collected at the end of a walk and the developed photographs will be presented inside the gallery space along with maps of the city outlining the different routes. A small brochure including descriptions and maps of all the walks will be available enabling the audience to realize the tours themselves, should they wish.
The Walks:
JOHN BALDESSARI
For John Baldessari’s walk each member of the audience is asked to photograph all intersection street signs from his studio at Bay and Main Streets in Santa Monica to his second studio on 6th Street and Vernon Ave. in Venice Beach. The artist will provide a map of the exact route.
Dates: 18 February 2005, 11:00 am
27 March 2005, 11:00 am
JENNIFER BORNSTEIN
The walk of Jennifer Bornstein is based on the artist’s fascination for Griffith Park in North Hollywood, which the artist has described as her “studio.” Bornstein will introduce the audience to the history of Griffith Park and lead a tour through the park that will mimic the regular nature walks one can take in the park.
Dates: 12 March 2005, 3:00 pm
3 April 2005, 3:00 pm
MEG CRANSTON
Meg Cranston will take the audience to Sherman Indian High School in Riverside. The Sherman Indian High School is one of three remaining off reservation Indian boarding schools in the United States. The students at the school come from many different tribes and from all over the United States. The school has a rich (sometimes tragic) history which Cranston will relate to the lesser-known parts of Los Angeles’ urban Indian history.
Dates: TBA
MORGAN FISHER
Morgan Fisher’s walk will connect two places in Santa Monica where he has lived for a total of more than 20 years. Along the way, the walk takes a digression to visit the site of a house where a friend of the artist lived, then follows the path that he took each morning to buy a newspaper, and ends with a visit to the former location of an art gallery that helped Fisher to enter the Los Angeles art world. The walk illustrates the cliché that in Los Angeles buildings are liable to disappear. The first place where the artist lived was torn down and replaced by apartment buildings. The second place, although still standing, will doubtless be torn down and replaced with condominiums. The house where his friend lived is already gone.
Dates: 16 February 2005, 3:00 pm
27 February 2005, 3:00 pm
EVAN HOLLOWAY
The walk of Evan Holloway starts at his studio and finishes at the subway station at 7th and Alvarado. The walk includes a great deal of information about Los Angeles’ history. Large Victorian style homes, the only evidence of this neighborhood's once glamorous past, form a perverse backdrop to the most degraded and sad prostitution market in LA. Pedestrians are regularly offered opportunities to purchase fake IDs, illicit subway tokens, black market cigarettes, and various illegal intoxicants. The walk will stop on the way at LA’s oldest deli to enjoy what is widely regarded as the finest pastrami sandwich in the region.
Dates: 13 February 2005, 11:00 am
19 March 2005, 11:00 am
PAUL MCCARTHY
Paul McCarthy’s walk proposes defining the parameters of a walk that could then be "performed" by anyone who cares to do so. The artist is interested in the idea of walking the same route a number of times and how one sees things differently as they become familiar. For McCarthy ‘s walk the audience will not need to come together as a group but can simply devise a walk for themselves that they will then walk at least ten times. The start and finish for the walk should be Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on Hollywood Boulevard.
Dates: On going
RUBÉN ORTIZ TORRES
In Rubén Ortiz Torres walk we will visit and experience “El Pedorrero” (The Farter) on Whittier Boulevard in the core of East Los Angeles. This muffler shop is also a museum that holds a collection of a “million” items. Its founder and director, Bill Al Capone Mufflers, describes it as a corporation while also functioning as a laboratory and an architectural marvel. At “El Pedorrero” Bill customizes cars, invents new 3D chessboards and self-standing ice cream cones while at the same time developing his own life philosophy.
Dates: 10 February 2005, 12:00 pm
10 March 2005, 12:00 pm
ALLEN RUPPERSBERG
Allen Ruppersberg’s walk will be a personal WHATEVER BECAME OF tour looking for glimpses of what was and still partially is. The axis of the tour will be a visit to some of the major sites that figure in his particular history. By looking to compare the What’s Here to the What’s Gone, exclaiming to each other “Yes, that is the same!” or “No, it’s lost forever,” the artist hopes the tour can find and enlarge the details of the art and the life that once existed there.
Dates: 13 March 2005, 11:00 am
2 April 2005, 11:00 am
ERIC WESLEY
Eric Wesley will do a guided walk through a particular section of Griffith Park. The walk will start at the base of the park near Los Feliz and extend upward, to a peak in the park. It will be a nighttime hike through the dark wilderness accompanied by the telling of ghost stories based on the rumor that the property which is now Griffith Park was donated to the city by Griffith J. Griffth near the turn of the century as a bribe to get him off attempted murder charges (he shot his wife in the head).
Dates: 25 February 2005, time TBA
6 March 2005, time TBA
http://www.theportable.tv/folly/index.html
Distance Made Good: Flow Lines is based on a set of 34 walks taken by the artists with people who live or work in Morecambe and Lancaster. The walkers were invited to take them to any location they wanted, with the suggestion that the walks, or journeys in some way represent who they are in conjunction with a landmark for the city they live in (e.g. a dog walker living in Morecambe took us for a walk along the seafront, as for him the seafront represented Morecambe, and it was a route he regularly took when walking his dog).
These walks were recorded using a global positioning system (GPS) device. The GPS uses satellites to determine where it is on the surface of the earth, in terms of latitude, longitude, and altitude. If taken on a journey it records a string of these co-ordinates, like a trail of breadcrumbs dropped along a route. When these dots are joined together an exact drawing of the route taken is created. Each of the 34 journeys were mapped in this way.
A map can be seen as an abstract generalisation of a landscape. It can not tell us about the way in which people use that environment. A city is made up of more than buildings, roads, and railways, it is also shaped by the activities of the people who use it. The gps device allows us to make a new map that shows the routes of the inhabitants of Morecambe and Lancaster. Through the walks around the different geographies of the two places patterns began to emerge and perhaps describe the significance of geography for the people that live there. This new installation for Folly brings together the abstraction of maps, with the physical and spatial experience of an urban or rural environment.
The exhibition can be described as two outsized, double faced maps, folded into the gallery. Each made from 13 wooden panels they are also like long screens or room dividers. These map/screens themselves create a 'route' or routes through the gallery. An internal route coloured blue and yellow, evoking the sea of Morecambe and the sandstone of Lancaster. Pierced with wooden posts (matchsticks) describing the turning points in 34 walked routes, it remains abstract with no key or clue. On the reverse, 'behind the scenes' the matchsticks are a support system for threads describing each of 34 walks, just as behind the scenes in Morecambe and Lancaster local residents shape the nature of the both places. There is a stringy-ness, a busy-ness, an activity and noise to this side. It is unfinished and more brash than the front. It has a look of craft and do-it-yourself and is purposefully left in progress. Loops of extra thread collect where journeys stop at the edge of panels. For each walk a different coloured thread is anchored at its start by an individual sandbag made of patterned fabric. Written on the back of the boards are the names of people who took each of us on our walks.
Behind the scenes you see the chaotic trails of 34 walks begin to make a co-herent geography, the busy centre of Lancaster, the sprawling sinuous wave of the seafront in Morecambe. Although the back of the screens are expressing a lived and personal experience they are also the most 'map like'. The fronts of the screens, whilst more abstract like a map are also more evocative of an experience of place. The sweeps of matchsticks appearing to flock, to group like isobars, to flow like tides.
In this way each side of the two maps is both an abstraction and evocative of the lived landscape.
The construction in the gallery serves to make three definite routes through the work. As the process of taking walks with people was integral to the work we didn't want the process to stop when we started installing, thus the process of installation was also a process of play, and the process of viewing the work is also a process of travelling through the work, seeing multiple readings from multiple view points. Indeed as the screen/maps are on wheels they imply mobility in themselves (although they cannot be moved by the audience). As modular and mobile structures they also imply a continuing process, they could move into different shapes, they could be added to as further walks are made, indeed the screens and sandbags necessary are in the gallery ready to enhance this implication.
Jen Hamilton is an artist based in Saskatchewan, Canada. Jen Southern is an artist based in Huddersfield, UK. Their collaborative work with GPS has been exhibited in Canada and the UK. They are currently working on a research commission supported by FACT, the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology, Liverpool, UK, NESTA and the Arts Council of England.
A geo-referenced walking work at Racetrack Playa / May 15th, 2K4
Navigational inquiry
The history of navigation is addressed across many disciplines. Interestingly, the history of land navigation is barely existent in almost any literature, no doubt because it represents a fundamental pre-historic aspect of nominal hominid experience; predating the particular hominid Homo sapiens. Although there are many resources on orienteering and land navigation ("how to"), very few of these engage in historical or genealogical analysis. The history of navigation as a technology generally seems to 'begin' in the literature with the citation of celestial navigation techniques (and the development of related technologies, often in reference to sea navigation), which were developed over time to traverse larger distances than the domains typically wandered by small scale, non-industrial (hunter-gatherer), pedestrian cultures; although there is, quite interestingly, no shortage of navigational literature on small scale, non-industrial seagoing cultures. The history of navigation somehow connotes voyages of exploration, dislocation, or endeavors involving significant distance; not quotidian walks to the water hole or shorter overland journeys between patches of resource in the landscape.
Navigation over smaller distances, the matter of how humans navigate in the landscape using tactical landmarks and other opportunistic features for orientation (foliage change, animal trails, geology, human markings such as cairns, shelters, rock art, etc.) via the use of concepts such as mental maps or "cognitive maps"[1], has been a matter of research explored a to a great degree in archeology, anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology. Presently, navigation is mediated by maps as well as wireless technology such as GPS, location aware mobile phones, and wireless networks that deliver traditional internet connections. Somewhere in the interstice between innate navigation, the history and techniques of applied land navigation, the history of navigation technology utilized for long distance travel, and contemporary networked navigation should lie a theory that somehow encompasses both voyages of exploration requiring well developed cultural technologies for wayfinding over long distances (long paths) and the types of cognitive and cultural processes that let one move in a motivated manner toward a food cache when hungry, or in a more contemporary sense, toward an entertainment station when bored, or through the lobby, up the correct escalator, and down the correct corridor for the next meeting (short paths).
http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=13618&text=26000
http://www.c5corp.com/research/landscapeculture.shtml
http://www.c5corp.com/index.shtml