Some theoretical notes concerning the exhibition
Desire Lines
Wayfarer, your footprints
are the way, and nothing else;
wayfarer, there is no path,
you make the path by walking.1
Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla, 1912
Exactly one hundred years ago, in one of his most memorable poems,
Antonio Machado exhorted us to become more conscious of our choices, to
assume what is perhaps the most transcendental responsibility of our
existence as individuals: forging our own path in life rather than being
swept along by social pressure, fear or the paralysing shadow of
apathy. In that poem, the path is a metaphor for life, a powerful image
no less apt for being somewhat hackneyed. It is the perfect allegory for
an existential journey, with all of its inherent forks, choices and
decisions.
‘Desire lines’ is the name given to the alternative trails that
emerge in a landscape— chosen itineraries eroded by wayfarers’
footprints, initially in an improvised manner that follows a
transgressive urge, until they are consolidated and widened as a result
of the kind of subversion that surpasses the individual to become
collective. No path is ever made by one individual: it requires a group.
It takes the repeated footsteps of many people to create these
indelible marks.
Image of a desire line
This metaphor, which evokes both real and imaginary paths, is the
starting point for the exhibition, which features the work of eleven
international artists who explore subversive ways of navigating, using
and living the city. The eleven works selected for
Desire Lines
take the urban fabric to be a complex, contradictory realm, brimming
with possibilities. A broad stage with the capacity to both repress our
deepest, destabilising desires and act as a catalyst for atavistic
spirits of resistance that can trigger collective action. In this
scenario the figure of the artist is key, as the embodiment of the
metropolitan denizen. The artist is the city dweller
par excellence,
often roaming like a nomad from one metropolis to another, leading a
type of existence that normally verges on the precarious—one of the many
results of the gentrification process that the urban theorist and
economist Richard Florida has been studying since the beginning of the
21st century
2—and therefore being a privileged witness to the joys and miseries of life in the big city.
If the artist exemplifies the citizen, he is thus the hero of the
urban odyssey that billions of us face every day. The influential essay
The Practice of Everyday Life3
(1984) by the theorist and scholar Michel de Certeau is dedicated to
the “ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in
countless thousands on the streets. […] This anonymous hero is very
ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. […] We witness the
advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city,
administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass,
woven tight like a fabric with no rips nor darned patches, a multitude
of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the
ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and
rationalities that belong to no one.” It is hard to think of a more
eloquent and poignant way to express the loss of identity and agency
that the individual endures within an oppressive urban context. The
artists and works featured in this show attempt to incite resistance to
this situation, to remind us that we can choose our own path; that
sometimes empowerment is found in the most inconsequential and impromptu
decisions and actions.
De Certeau described these activities, imbued with a tremendous
subversive potential, as ‘tactics’, as opposed to ‘strategies’ –the
institutional processes that establish the rules and conventions that
govern societies. Tactics are the creative opportunities that operate
between the gaps and slips of conventional thought and the patterns of
everyday life. Of the contemporary philosophers who have promoted this
type of liberating, playful, non-conformist behaviour, one of the most
instrumental was undoubtedly Guy Debord, leader and founding member of
the Situationist International (IS). This revolutionary group, created
in 1957, reached its peak of influence with the publication of
Society of the Spectacle (1967)
4
and the subsequent May ’68 protests in Paris, a movement that borrowed
both its ideas and most enduring slogans (such as the famous “Ne
travaillez jamais!”). The group’s philosophy was based on the
construction of ‘situations’ or environments in which one or more
individuals were stimulated to critically analyse their everyday lives
so they could identify and pursue their true desires. These ideas,
developed by the artist Constant Nieuwenhuys alongside Debord,
eventually crystallised into a fully fledged plan of action. Constant
dedicated years to this project, entitled
New Babylon, where he
applied the concepts of what he called ‘unitary urbanism’. Because the
Situationist critique of 20th-century urbanism questioned above all the
degree of citizen participation, this “new Babylon” proposed a new form
of urban planning based mostly on the concepts of mobility and play.
Rather than a conventional urban development plan, this model fostered
critical activities designed to promote participation in the city
through a ‘mobile space of play’ and the construction of ‘situations’.
Guy Debord, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris: Discours Sur Les Passions D’Amour, 1957
The idea of play, of understanding the city as a space in which to
act out our most pressing desires, is central to this philosophy and is
put into practice through the exercise of ‘drifting’ (
dérive):
One of the basic Situationist practices is the ‘dérive’, a
technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. ‘Dérives’ involve
playful, constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical
effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of
journey or stroll. 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. 5
Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”
The notion of drifting as productive or constructive play is
particularly relevant in the context of this exhibition: play in the
sense in which Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga
explored it in his controversial essay
Homo Ludens6,
written in 1938, a time of utter political and social turmoil when the
idea of play seemed, at best, a far-fetched irony and, at worst, an
inappropriate and rather sick joke. According to Huizinga, the notion of
play is inherent to the human condition and even predates it, as
evidenced by the fact that it is found in the vast majority of animal
species. Huizinga argued that the intrinsic value of play, besides being
essential to the generation of culture, is that it permeates archetypal
activities of human society such as language, myths and rituals.
Rejecting the notion of play as something that is “not serious”,
Huizinga explained that play creates a transitory order (or a set of
rules), a community of players and a feeling of tension or instability,
thus generating collective situations and social exchanges that
constitute the first step towards the creation of ‘cultures’.
Anna Halprin, City Dance, 1976-1977. Performance on the streets of San Francisco
For example,
Looking Up (2001) by Francis Alÿs, a work present
in this exhibition, is a video documentation of an action in which the
artist walks into the middle of Mexico City’s busy Plaza del Zócalo and,
standing impassively on the same spot, starts looking up at the sky. A
group of passers-by, surprised and curious, gradually gather behind the
artist, trying to see for themselves the elusive sight he is so keenly
observing.
Looking Up is, in many ways, a practical joke turned
into an artwork, but it is a joke that unveils some distinctive human
traits: for instance, the fact that groups tend to follow a leader like a
herd of animals, often without the slightest guarantee of a worthwhile
outcome. More positively,
Looking Up examines curiosity and play as agents that mobilise groups, reassuring us of our capacity to respond to events collectively.
The need to overcome that passive ‘herd’ mentality was also staunchly
advocated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal
philosophical treatise
Anti-Oedipus7 (1972), which
denounced and challenged the human urge to repress oneself by means of
‘territories’ such as work, family, political parties or education: in
short, any social construct born out of the exercise of power relations.
To combat this drive and achieve what they called
‘deterritorialisation’, thereby triggering a chain reaction leading to
change, it is necessary to forge ‘lines of flight’: brand-new paths in
which one can break away from the material of the past.
That such ‘lines of flight’ seem to recall the concept of desire
lines is no mere coincidence. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire (never in
its strictly sexual sense) is the real force that can mobilise our
freer and inevitably more transgressive impulses. This is why the
aforementioned ‘territories’, from the workplace to the city, are such
excellent machines for repressing our desires, making us docile and
obedient as a result of the eternal battle between the social machines
and us, the desiring-machines. As Deleuze and Guattari argue so
eloquently throughout
Anti-Oedipus, desire is socially repressed
because any sign of uncontrolled behaviour has the capacity to
destabilise the prescribed symbolic order. The lines that stem from
desire can sabotage hegemony.
Desire lines—the real and imaginary ones—are an unmistakable symptom
of the transgressive capacity of an individual desire that becomes a
collective impulse. They symbolise the small acts of urban resistance
that emerge from a strong impulse to deviate from the paths created and
imposed by others. Regardless of the form these disruptions might take
within the symbolic order—games, poetic acts, jokes, minor sabotages or a
revolutionary and violent explosion—such transgressions can and should
be extrapolated onto the field of human existential behaviour. They
should be valued for what they are worth and used as tools for reviving
the sensation, buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and social norms,
that every life, every fate, is unique and worth fighting for, from the
smallest routine struggle to the most pyrrhic battle. When disobedience
leaves such a tangible mark, one must acknowledge it and take notice,
rather than turning a blind eye, as evidenced by the protests that have
shaken the world over these last two years, 2011 and 2012, from the 15
May Movement to the worldwide demonstrations of Occupy.
The works featured in
Desire Lines represent different spirits
of insurgence as well as tactics for appropriating and celebrating the
city’s latent creative potential. We are honoured that artists as
inspiring as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mark Aerial Waller, Francis Alÿs,
Francisca Benítez, Mircea Cantor, Filipa César, Cyprien Gaillard, Regina
de Miguel, Laura Oldfield Ford, Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman,
and John Smith have accepted our invitation to participate in this
project and allowed us to exhibit their stimulating works, lending
consistency to a set of enthusiastic ideas. It’s the turn of the
audience now. We hope this journey is as enriching for them as it has
been for the two curators.
-
This essay is part of the catalogue of the exhibition
Desire Lines, curated by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso & Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.
The exhibition
will open on the 21st of November 2012 at the Espai Cultural Caja Madrid in Barcelona and will run until the 13t of January 2012.
Catalogue design by David G. Uzquiza.
-
Bibliography
1. This poem belongs to the anthology
Campos de Castilla which Antonio Machado first published in 1912.
Campos de Castilla, Madrid,Cátedra, 1992
. Translation by the author of the essay.
2. Richard Florida
, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York, Basic Books, 2002.
3. Michel de Certeau,
L’invention du quotidien, tome 1: Arts de faire, Paris, Gallimard, 1990. (Published in English as
The Practice of Everyday Life.)
4. Guy Debord,
La sociéte du spectacle, Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1967. (Published in English as
The Society of the Spectacle.)
5.
Théorie de la dérive was originally published in
Internationale Situationniste no. 2 (Paris, December 1958). A slightly different version had appeared in 1956 in the Belgian Surrealist magazine
Les Lèvres Nues no. 9. (Published in English as “Theory of the Dérive”.)
6. Johan Huizinga
, Homo Ludens, Boston, Beacon Press, 1955
.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L’anti-Œdipe, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972. (Published in English as
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.)
