politics of psychogeography

as i have been jotting down notes for my biennale article for a publication (and a travel grant application to go back to venice), i have been thinking a good deal about politics of navigating space, perhaps better put as a foucaultian/neo-marxist approach to psychogeography, a term i learned last year at the conflux festival. urban dictionary.com defines "psychogeography" as:

1. the practice of exploring the urban environment while being led by curiosity and a paused sense of time and place. While it is important to let your senses absorb the spaces around you, it is equally, if not more important to find yourself in new spaces, spaces stumbled upon by chance; paying attention to the smaller details, the lost objects, the signage, the fragments that make walking a reward in itself, with a slower pace and an increased opportunity to revel in the simple pleasures of things. A sense of wander/wonder is essential to find the simplicity in urban living.

2. the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual.

now, my assertion is that there is no such thing as "pure chance." while we navigate a city or any given space, we make subconscious decisions to turn here or go there, determined by 1. our conditions (upbringing, culture, lifestyle, etc.) and 2. layout of the physical space.

over the past decade or so, i have noticed certain patterns in the difficulty and ease of getting to certain places. i have also noticed that money unfortunately plays a great role.

for example, i used to commute everyday to my high school via the 1 train. i took the train from the 86th street stop all the way to the very last, 242nd street. from chambers street to 96th street (central manhattan areas with a lot of people traffic) the 1, 2, and 3 trains follow the same route, but 2 and 3 are express, the 1 local. above 96th street, they all branch off to different routes and make "local" stops (a stop every 7 blocks or so).

at least, they are supposed to.

particularly during morning commute times, it is relatively difficult to see the 1 train make all the stops above 125th street, the last "major" traffic point. sometimes, the train is basically "express," only making about three to four stops (usually unpredictable) before the last one.

this was generally ok with me, especially when i was running late. but sometimes, when it was cold out, i preferred to get off at 231st street instead to take a bus that stopped right by the school. at 242nd street, i would have to walk up a big hill. so taking the 1 train was always a gamble. will it stop at 231st today? should i walk?

for people who commute to areas between 125th and 242nd, this means extreme inconvenience. they may have to spend an extra 20 minutes of their time to get off at a stop, then take a downtown train back (given that the downtown, too, doesn't skip that stop). 

i understand that "manhattan" is generally considered more of a "central" commuting location, but i also can't help but notice that there probably aren't that many wealthy people commuting there who would complain about their stops being skipped on work days. mta does suck in general, and the trains skip important stops on weekends for construction, but as far as i know, the 1 train skips on weekdays when many people work, and not because of construction. (sometimes they cite the reason as the "train is running behind schedule." as if the mta stuck to any schedule at all).

my impression was that inconveniencing the people frequenting harlem and bronx were of little importance than those moving around manhattan, which certainly has higher rent and real estate costs.

i also perceive and FEEL this relationship between power/money and accessibility/location when viewing art as well.

the museum is very straight forward: you pay a fee to enter a space in which you understand you are supposed to look at things. (the question of whether you can afford to pay $24 to look at indecipherable objects, or worse, sit in an empty room listening to incomprehensible "sound art" is a related but kind of separate issue).

the gallery experience differs by neighborhood. viewing art in galleries is "free." but some places come with a price of "insider" knowledge, a bit more than others.

for example, the chelsea gallery layout is more like an open-air museum--you make your way to the general area, then walk through each street between 10th and 11th/12th avenues. other than being stared at (not always) by guards at certain mega galleries (like gagosian), it is pretty close to a museum experience where no one really bothers you so you can just enter, look, and leave.

the upper east side, i feel, is more of an insider, upscale boutique kind of deal. either some have signs and storefronts like jewelry stores (matisse, picasso, renoirs!) or little indication of their existence at all, so that you really have to know where they are. the finding the townhouse and buzzing the door to be let in can be intimidating. as if by pressing that buzzer, you are really letting them know, "I AM ENTERING NOW," and also bothering them, since they have to individually respond to every buzz to open the door. this could just be me, but i feel more like i am accessing something more exclusive, and potentially having to make up my presence there by being a collector or "serious" art person.

the lower east side is generally more overtly commercial (i have seen more price tags next to work than other neighborhoods) but a little more down to earth than the upper east. they feel kind of like stores, too, but less exclusive. there are many galleries hiding in odd floors inside random office buildings next to chinatown markets, but it feels "cool" to know they're there, rather than let's say, taking the sleek elevator up to the gagosian galleries on the upper east. it still feels very insider, though, like only "art people" are allowed. 

as a rule, the more established the neighborhood is as a "gallery" area, the easier it is to find the galleries. pretty obvious observation, but i feel as though when it gets to more contemporary, cool, "less known" art galleries (i.e. not chelsea) you really have to know where things are, and in places like brooklyn, they are fairly scattered so you can't really get a "gallery tour" done in a fairly short amount of time in comparison to other neighborhoods. if you're short on time, sometimes this means visiting only a few galleries or not bothering to commit to a trip at all. you get "more bang for your buck (time)" when you go to the expensive areas. (or more expensive in comparison to….)

i have made some hasty jumps from navigation/access to money, but i know the connection is there. just have to develop a better argument linking the two.

back from dreams to nyc

i just returned from a ten-day dream trip from italy. it took me more than a month of laborious planning. i went through three cities: rome, florence, and venice. with approximately three days in each, i had to set up the most perfect itinerary to take advantage of my brief stay. venice, however, i did not plan as thoroughly as the other cities. i imagined i will probably bust my ass trying to see as much biennial related art as possible.

which is what happened. during the full days i had, i arrived earlier than the 10am opening time to wait in line at the arsenale and giardini. i spent the whole day there until closing time at 6pm, only occasionally leaving for food, gelato, a sit near the canal, or a visit to a satellite event close by. after the main venues closed, i hurried to see other events that stayed open for a little bit longer. i spent the other two half days getting lost and searching for national pavilions and satellite events not included at the central biennale locations. thankfully, some were clustered around the same areas, but others were more difficult to find. this difficulty heightened my annoyance when i finally found them and i did not like what i took the trouble to see. 

i truly felt the politics of spatial distribution in venice. to get my money's worth on the hefty entrance fee to the arsenale and giardini, i visited every pavilion there. but the pavilions around other parts of town did not require a ticket, nor were they conveniently located at single, easy accessible destinations as the main exhibits. given these difficulties and time restraints, i could not see as many national pavilions or collateral events as i would have liked. if this happened despite the immense effort i made to squeeze in as much as possible, i imagine it may have been even more so for those who were not there to write about it. seeking out the pavilions of iraq or thailand become very conscious choices, whereas one can do quick glances at spain or japan since they are right inside the arsenale or giardini.

this must be the case every year--how can one include "everything" and "everyone" "equally"?--but it appears sillier in relation to this year's theme: the shamelessly utopian dream of marino auriti's encyclopedic palace. its curator, massimiliano gioni, admits to the absurdity of such an idea--the existence of a space containing all human knowledge. the exhibit seems more of a meta-approach to investigate and complicate the reasons why and what we collect, classify, keep tabs on. but the central pavilion at the giardini location especially suggests the existence of a universal, collective knowledge--a jungian shared unconscious existing across borders and times. a good portion of the show there arranges the work formally: the gaping ellipses of anonymous tantric paintings in one room echo forms created by the circling gestures of the blind painters in artur zmijewski's film, blindly (2010) and even the globe and mandalas in camille henrot's video installation, grosse fatigue (2013) at the arsenale venue. but seeing the same recurring forms and subjects under the same curatorial argument of the archival, encyclopedic tendencies of our "human condition" can be exhausting. what of the show's including the "severely autistic" sawada shinichi's sculptures, for example, as evocative of "the arts of tribal societies in africa"? or lynette yiadom-boakye's imaginary portraits of dark skinned people?

extremely exhausted from my journey from florence and getting lost, i trudged back toward my hotel on the first day of my arrival in venice. it had begun to rain, and as i approached the san marco piazza i decided to duck into an exhibit, this is not a taiwan pavilion, which happened to be there at the right time. it was like taking a long gulp from a cold pint of dark ale after an entire afternoon of flowery tea. the show was directly concerned with relative nature of subjectivity, notions of "national representation" and identity, more explicit consideration of who the audience was. also by chance, i was on time for the last of four performances, a live bianshi narration of artist bernd behr's film, chronotopia by huang ying-hsuing. bianshi narrators are silent film narrators from back in the day--a perpetual reminder that one is seeing a film, and that the images are being interpreted by one as well as the person speaking for (with?) it. the guy spoke entirely in taiwanese without subtitles during the 16:38-minute projection which already had an english narration. most people present did not seem to speak taiwanese and appeared bored after the first few minutes. i, too, found myself straining at first to hear the muted english from the film and looking for subtitles. failing at both, i became fascinated by the whole act: for those 16 plus minutes, english was NOT the assumed language of the audience. huang's enthusiastic speech was not only lost on most of the audience members, but also became a noisy obstruction for those trying to hear a language they understood. when the performance ended and the projection resumed its english narration, i listened, wondering what the correlations were between huang's words and the english narration of the film. i will never know, but after standing near the speakers for a while, i realized that the center speakers also had been playing a taiwanese narration in a very low volume the entire time, barely audible under the booming english.

relevant to this show is also the history of the "taiwan" pavilion at the biennale. sort of there at some point, then gone in 2001, not granted an official "national" pavilion but listed as a collateral event. i know very little about international political drama, and i may be reading what i would like (from an ignorant american perspective) from behr's film as well as the work of other artists, hsu chia-wei and katerina seda + batezo mikilu. the show at least appeared to be adding a different and important perspective to the one(s?) given by the main biennale show, which, overall, i thought relatively safe and too neat.

i will probably write more about the main exhibit and some other shows. i saw a lot and it's been difficult to sort through and process all of them. 

more to come.