Artículos

03

colportage of images on the spot: in this place, with one glance.’219 _{I take in the histories that I} have learned compiling a mental layering of the past, the specific site and the present moment – everything at once in one place in one glance.220

There are many terms applied to the elemental act of walking – rambling, meandering, strolling, idling, sauntering, perambulating and the list goes on – and I could see from my window a variety of walking styles. What is important in this scenario is not merely the musculoskeletal activity it is what is happening in the brain, in the focus of the eye and in the imagination that can make the simple act of walking important. Walking can be a portal to the other. Like the experience of wonder, walking is a beginning that has the potential to convey the walker to another universe of the mind. Merlin Coverley says:

For millennia the act of walking and the bodily rhythms it incorporates have been felt to somehow reflect or engender the mental process of abstract thought, as if the metronomic beat of the walker’s step could mark time, shaping the thoughts it provokes into a coherent narrative.221

And further, as he developed his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin, ‘sought the fate of the sudden and the surprising…delivered in glances cast while walking on the streets of Paris.’222

Streets are familiar ‘stages’ to me, having created and directed large-scale, Fluxus-style works in the streets and public spaces of Adelaide in the nineteen seventies and eighties for the

Come Out Festival, the Adelaide Festival and the Sixth World Three Day Event Championships.

These were large performative interventions into public space (the largest consisting of 7,000 performers) changing, albeit briefly, the meaning and activity of street. Among other things these events focused on the act of walking for the performers and the many thousands of spectators who came on foot to view the performances along the designated routes.

The digital moving image work, influenced by The Life of C.B., began to develop under the working title Walking the Dog perhaps the most common activity viewed from my kitchen window. The work would catalogue the journey each performer made as they traversed my front fence. An adult takes approximately twenty-one seconds from the point of appearance, as if from no-where, to traverse my fence line and then disappear just as suddenly. Everything that I would ever know about the performer and the performance would happen in thirty- six steps and twenty-one seconds. Runners, joggers and bicycle riders would take less time while children would most likely take longer. Time however, is only one measure of what is 219 _{Casey, ES 2007, The world at a glance, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, p. 237.}

220 _{Ibid., p. 237.}

221 _{Coverley, M 2012, The art of wandering: the writer as walker, Oldcastle Books, Harpenden, p. 12.} 222 _{Casey, ES 2007, The world at a glance, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, p. 215.}

seen and recognised. Walking the Dog would be a performative work, using the natural cast of players, the inhabitants of the street. By inhabitants I do not mean the people who necessarily live in the houses in the street rather the people who enter willingly into the public spectacle of the street as part of their daily routine. The work would take the form of a document of unanticipated present instants. The gradual materialisation of the performers reflected through the lens of the camera and their subsequent dematerialisation. It is this moment, without a coherent beginning or end, according to Hadot, that possesses the whole of reality.223

Roger Shattuck talks about the ‘absolute’ fragment which ‘remains isolated and cannot find its way into any larger order of things…It’s self-containment…’ failing to, ‘…lead back to the circles of nature and knowledge…,‘ while the ‘implicate’ fragment leads a totally different life. Shattuck refers to the archaeologist building a whole vessel from a tiny fragment. ‘In this perspective,’ he says ‘nothing stands alone, and the tiniest fragment of the universe breathes forth its secret connections to everything else.’224 _{American academic J. Sage Elwell, in} commenting on Roger Shattuck’s larger theory of the fragment expressed in, The Innocent Eye:

On Modern Literature & The Arts (1984) says:

Shattuck writes “that that the ambiguous fragment stands…on the frontier between meaninglessness and deep metaphysical significance.” This is why the ambiguous fragment lies between unity and isolation, identity and difference. As a complete fragment, or whole-part, it expresses an equivalence among all parts inasmuch as each is complete in and of itself – each ambiguous fragment is a “whole” fragment.225

While I cannot see the complete journey undertaken by each performer, they are inescapably connected to a whole. A whole composed of many fragments each fragment deciphered by others at different points of the walk. Are the walkers as keenly observed in other sections of their walk? John Berger has said, the glance that connects with, in this case, the walkers at various points of their walk becomes, ‘information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored...’226 For me the observation of the fragment is more powerful than the whole because in that instant without past or future, as Hadot suggests, ‘…we possess the totality of the universe.’227 I have no real need to know the whole – instead value is placed on the fragment, the transforming moment, isolated from the whole. And as Shattuck suggests, ‘…the real appeal of the fragment…lies in its ambiguity.’228 I do not know where the performers on 223 _{Hadot, P, Davidson, AI (ed.), Chase, M (translation) 1995, Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from}

Socrates to Foucault, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, p. 228.

224 _{Shattuck, R 1984, The innocent eye: on modern literature & the arts, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, p. 37.} 225 _{Elwell, JS 2010, Crisis of transcendence: a theology of digital art and culture, Lexington Books, Lanham,}

pp. 99-100.

226 _{Berger, J 1972, Ways of seeing, Penguin Books and the BBC, London, p. 24.}

227 _{Hadot, P, Davidson, AI (ed.), Chase, M (translation) 1995, Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from}

Socrates to Foucault, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, p. 229.

the stage that is my street come from or where they go. I merely glimpse a moment of life lived in the performance of a walk. An activity the performers enjoy – a public activity, in a public place. Each walk is different and each walker experiences a different state of mind. Rebecca Solnit reminds us that walking is in the main a practical activity:

…the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings.229

There are no secrets shared in this work, no revelations, rather a gathering of rhythms, patterns and the flickering juxtaposition of humans against the painted backdrop of the constructed landscape of a suburb, itself a fragment of the labyrinth of the city. A patchwork of gathered fragments, moments that tantalize.

My suburban street is not distinctive. It is a street that might be mirrored in many Australian suburbs and in other places such as British Columbia, parts of the United States or England. The built form and the general presentation of the street, is neat, cared for, ordinary. Much of the built form originated seventy-five years ago as the walnut groves, poisoned by leachate from the local wood mill, gave way to housing. There are no McMansions here, just a civilized street lined with houses between a main thoroughfare and the river. A place that engenders a feeling of security and peace or as much security and peace as can be felt in contemporary disruptive society. Shattuck talks about the kind of beauty intrinsic to this street and the neighbouring streets. He says the fact that much of what is said, ‘…about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of the unpretentious street…’ He adds that the beauty inherent in ordinary things, ‘these minimal beauties’ as he refers to the ordinary street, ‘… are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our rational decisions, than the great works…They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them.’230

Tasmanian curator and writer Seán Kelly wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Reflections:

Measuring, recording, tracking, naming – these are all methods and systems of the explorer and they combine in a variety of ways in the construction of a layered unfolding of those features which define one place from another – at the same time they seek to familiarize the experience by locating it through objective instruments of record, common to all

229 _{Solnit, R 2001, Wanderlust: a history of walking, Penguin Books, New York, p. 3.}

investigations.231

My method of gathering would be a single CCTV camera operational for a limited time (one month). The camera would be located on private property where it would watch from the corner of its eye for human interventions into public space – its lens a mirror to the world. The camera was installed parallel to a garage door where it looked sympathetically at the roller door concealing a small studio. However, the lens revealed more than a garage door from its shy, elevated position. Because of the curvature of the street a strange cocktail of angles revealed my fence-line, the footpath, and the streetscape across the road. The image slipping from sharp to uncertain as the distance increased. In his paper Photography and Representation, (1981) Roger Scruton captures my approach to setting the camera view. While the actual placement of the CCTV camera limited adjustments, Scruton’s description remains pertinent:

I mark out a certain spot from which a particular view of the street may be obtained. I then place a frame before that spot. I move the frame so that, from the chosen spot, only certain parts of the street are visible, others are cut off. I do this with all the skill available to me, so that what is seen in the frame is as pleasing as it might be: the buildings within the frame seem to harmonize, the ugly tower that dominates the street is cut off from view, the centre of the composition is the little lane between two classical facades which might otherwise have gone unnoticed, and so on.232

Important to the composition is a large street tree. It is one of a series planted on the north- western side of the street twenty years ago – the side without the electrical poles. Like so many street trees planted as young biddable saplings it has outgrown its relationship to even the two-storied built form. It was planted with good intent, no matter how misguided, and it has grown, it is healthy and I protect it vigorously despite the fact that the roots are destroying my seventy-five-year-old brick fence and the footpath needs constant repairs. The street tree breathes life into this work. The tree, this Liquidambar (Liquidambar styraciflua), is a sentinel, a barometer of breeze, demonstrating a gentle atmospheric presence or alternatively indicating the presence of the swirling harpy that visits occasional tumultuous blasts like a speeding car at a raceway. And the tree is a marker of place. It extends proudly above the footpath with its toe metaphorically in the ground water, a silent witness to all. This tree and its movement occupies centre stage in the on-screen framing for Walking the Dog, its trunk a constant temptation for the passing beasts.

There is a palpable sadness, a felt absence, in the street when it is not in use. At these times the scars of more than seven decades of habitation appear more obvious. This absence is alleviated 231 _{Kelly, S & Zika, P (curators), Kelly, S (introduction), Malpas, J (essay) 2008, Repetitions, exhibition catalogue,}

5 April-25 April 2008, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, AUS, p. 2.

232 _{Scruton, R 1981, ‘Photography and representation’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 3, University of Chicago Press,} p. 596.

by small happenings like the ever-changing light conditions, typical of Hobart. Occasionally detritus left over from rubbish collection swirled balletically as if orchestrated to break the monotony. Subtle happenings like a bird pecking about the base of the street tree absently looking for something or the neighbour’s cat looking out from between the bars of our gate before deciding it was safe to move onto the footpath. While this world looks static between walkers the street is rarely still. The tree is always heaving – breathing. In the afternoon the tree casts shadow across the footpath and the cast of performers move in and out of the darkened pool. The human performers are relaxed in their routine – the walking, the intent, the rhythm and the embroidering of their patterns, rain or shine. They are never in a hurry (unless they are runners) nor do they dawdle, they set a purposeful pace, a pleasurable pace, as they negotiate their familiar journey. I know nothing of the path they travel all I have ever known is the glimpsed fragment.

The month of January 2013 did not bring the much-anticipated sun. From the beginning of work on this project I was wrong about the activity on the street. I saw walkers and dogs and the occasional solo walker traverse my fence line and I allowed this movement to obscure the reality. On closer inspection there were family groups, bike riders and motorised vehicles conveying people with limited mobility. I saw joggers, runners, lovers, elderly people wellness walking, and vibrant groups of young people. And irritatingly there were lots of cars. Acknowledging the wider world of activity I changed the title to Walking the Dog (and other things).

Gathering of data began on Wednesday 24 January 2013 at 12.52pm. Thereafter on each successive day data was collected from 7.00am to 8.00pm. During the process of gathering I would often sit in my studio, the re-cast garage, watching on a laptop which showed the live view from the camera, the view I could have seen if I stood in the garden allowing my glance to slide across the trees, the brick fence, the houses across the road. Even in the live view the field of vision is constrained by trees to the left and the garages to the right. But the garden view was not the view I desired. As Scruton described, the camera lens tightened focus, excluded the big sky, the ugly tops of power poles and electrical paraphernalia, and showed me a new reality, a world at once familiar and yet unfamiliar. Although I knew all of the physical elements of this scene I did not know this view. It was real and yet unreal. I was made to see this place in a new way because the view on the live screen was reversed due to a compatibility problem with the technology, something that could easily be put right at the edit stage. Malpas, in his catalogue essay for Repetitions, says:

Wherever we are, where we are is always some place, though the place may be one that remains unknown, un-named, uncertain. Whatever the place, no matter how familiar, no matter how close to home, a strangeness, an uncanniness belongs to it…In the encounter with place, and with our own placedness, what is encountered is itself a secret, something

that remains hidden, a mystery, something that resists understanding. One cannot come to a sense of a place without also coming to a sense of one’s own implication in that place…233

These words reflect my visual and visceral response to a reversed image of the streetscape that I think I know but can never really know. And these words relate equally to the walkers who pass in and out of place as they perambulate along the street, ‘…familiarity may appear as unfamiliar and disorienting…’ Malpas contends.234 No doubt the uncanny qualities of the reversed image would apply even if the image were not reversed because the camera changes the view as decisions are made about framing. As the patterns of feet move through space, the performers create rhythms that rise and fall, the aftershock hanging in the air like the anticipation of the next event. I sat at the laptop watching and listening to the footsteps of the walkers, their voices, the sniffing of the dogs, and the light beat of the runners as they passed on the other side of the roller door. I thought of Hermoine Lee’s book, Virginia Woolf (1996). Lee says Woolf demonstrated in her work Mrs Dalloway (1925) her ‘…unerring ability to articulate the walker’s vision of the street.‘235 She also recognized the sounds of the walker environment, the tone and music, often calling ‘…the noise of the street a kind of language.’236 As I sat at the computer I was sensing this language as Woolf had done.

In the intervals between events I watched the street.Not all of the walkers returned by the same path. Where did they go if they did not return? Were the performers aware of the way in which they embroidered the street? Do they seek to copy their last trajectory or change it? I have noticed that some change their pattern depending on the time of day and which side of the road is in shadow. Most walk on the footpath on each side of the road and on occasion individuals create their own disruptions to the pattern by crossing the road or walking on the road. In conversation with Jeff Malpas he referred to the layering of each journey as a ‘palimpsest.’ He likened the surface of the footpath to a manuscript page from which the text