Derive and Psychogeography

Guy Debord and the Situationists were writers, artists and political activists that helped pioneer new ideas in avant-garde artistic practice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Through their interests in mapping, they introduced the concept of derive - an experiential encounter with the landscape based on a kind of real-time response.  The walk you take, for instance, could determine how you respond to it creatively.  Simon Sadler, author of The Situationist City, writes that:

"Maps had traditionally been made by those wishing to impose order upon the city... In their maps, by stark contrast, Debord and Jorn attempted to put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lay beneath its surface... the situationist maps described an urban navigational system that operated independently of Paris's dominant patterns of circulation."

It was common for the Situationists to advocate walking through one city using the map of another (similar in some ways to Surrealist games and devices used to reveal unconscious motivations).  The Wikipedia page on derive provides some good background:

Wikipedia - Derive

It's interesting to consider this in the context of Mappr or Wayfaring - how can a map promote an active condition that changes the way we use a space (and doesn't just reflect it?)  Is this something that must happen in the studio, for instance, and not in the real-time mapping process itself?

(Thanks to, and credit for, putting the site comparisons together and for pulling that quote from Simon Sadler must go to the Systeme D blog).

Guillermo Kuitca

Guillermo Kuitca is a contemporary artist whose work directly addresses both formal and poetic responses to the map as a dynamic force.  He is currently represented by the Sperone Westwater Gallery, which we will tour during our stay in New York.  The following is from Katherine Harmon's book The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography:

"The relationship between presence and absence is a major theme of Guillermo Kuitca's work.  People are visibly absent from his paintings and drawings - or are the invisibly present?  While human figures are never represented, the maps, diagrams, and objects in Kuitca's works suggest human activity, as if time has been momentarily suspended until someone arrives to impart meaning to these spaces.  Although Kuitca's artworks are often described as desolate or empty, the places and things that they depict - beds, theaters, prisons, hospitals, cities, intersecting roadways - suggest human use and social activity.  Kuitca removes the narrative of human presence to offer outlines and abstractions that are static, melancholy and also, often, beautiful."

New York Activities in the Summertime

You'll have lots of options if you're interested in exploring New York's non-art destinations; here are a few things to check out that are best experienced in the summertime:

1. Brooklyn Flea Markets
There are more locations than are listed here - a great place to scout for just about anything.

2. Shakespeare In The Park
Totally free, these productions often include very good casts.

3. Rooftop Films
An outdoor repertory cinema!

4. Coney Island
An NYC staple (be warned that it can get insanely crowded on weekends, but if you're amusement park-inclined, this is one of the best.  For a theoretical discussion on its significance, you can reference the first chapters of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York.)

5. Marlow and Sons
One of the best places to eat in Brooklyn, (for after the flea markets).  If you eat meat, you can also pick up some amazing cuts at their partner butcher shop, Marlow and Daughters.  Not just a summertime restaurant, but like Cafe Habana, worth visiting if you have the chance.

The Brooklyn Rail

Since we'll be spending a lot of our time in Brooklyn, it would be good to get acquainted with The Brooklyn Rail, an independent publication that covers contemporary art among other topics.  It's a good, free resource for non-Manhattan events, openings, etc.  Here's a link to an article that was written on David Humphrey, another artist that we're going to visit with at his studio:

David Humphrey - The Brooklyn Rail

Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne is one of the artists we will visit in New York.  A link to an interview with her that was published in The Huffington Post is here.

The emphasis on geography and its relationship to history in their conversation is particularly apt considering our emphasis on different ways of mapping/annotating an experience.

Her website is here.

Cafe Habana

Cafe Habana offers some of the best Cuban food in New York City - including their specialty, Mexican grilled corn with cotija cheese.  That's not necessarily a Cuban dish (though they have amazing Cubano sandwiches and fish tacos as well).  This is a small,  busy place and you should expect to wait 20 minutes or more to get a table, but it's a place you should eat at before you die.

At the corner of Prince St. and Elizabeth St. in NoLita:

Cafe Habana

Christopher Wool's East Broadway Breakdown

Christopher Wool has made work that crosses several mediums and disciplines.  His project East Broadway Breakdown was released in book form and collected black and white photographs that he took in New York along Broadway.  From the amazon blurb on the book and project:

"Between 1994 and 1995, Christopher Wool shot a series of photographs in downtown New York City that he calls East Broadway Breakdown, after a street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lives and works. Taken at night using a 35 mm camera, the pictures feature the city's signature streets with their dilapidated storefronts and ramshackle staircases leading up to anonymous spaces. The high contrast images are often hard to read, producing, rather than coherent images, seemingly random forms that emerge from skewed camera angles. Like his paintings, Wool's photographs hover between abstraction and representation, forcing viewers to confront their desire for visual coherence while offering an alternative construct for picture-making today."

As a model, the work presents an interesting take on how the photograph can be just as useful a notational tool as directly drawing from the landscape, not to mention how choosing one section of the city you engage with every day allows the body of work to tell a larger story by maintaining a site-specific constant.

Mark Bradford

The artist Mark Bradford's work provides an interesting point of reference for how collage, found materials and painting and drawing techniques can be combined.  Like Anselm Kiefer, the mapped element of the work emerges not just from the way imagery is constructed (such as using forced perspectives and huge sizes), but also from the intensely sculptural relief of the surface.  Here's an interesting write-up on his practice, courtesy of Art 21:

Mark Bradford on Art 21

Our Collaboration with Moleskine

Moleskine makes some pretty amazing notebooks.  They also publish specially-designed city guides, with each guide notebook containing maps, tabs for notes, important details tailored specifically to an experience in that city.  The folks at Moleskine have generously agreed to donate a New York city guide to each of you since the concept of our class dovetails so closely with their mission!  In exchange, they've asked us to document the guides in the beginning, middle and end of the class so they can post the images on their site blog - an awesome opportunity for you all to get exposure for your drawings, sculptural interventions and other work you do in the notebooks themselves.  These will be given to you when you arrive in the city, but you can already start thinking about how you might do some site-specific work in the books themselves.  How could your itinerary and studio work connect?

Bill Cunningham and New York Fashion

Bill Cunningham - the fashion photographer for The New York Times - is a fashion legend in NYC.  He travels around on his bike and records new trends and patterns in high / low fashions in the city, but also splices his finds together and narrates his thoughts on what they mean.

This is a link to his most recent post in the Times: 

Bill Cunningham Mars Struck

Note his adorable excitement that we've arrived at a fashion of the future (and also hi-tops with wings).  This is a good way to get a sense of the every day rhythm in and around NYC.

The Perfect Subway Network

This image is courtesy of Wired magazine.  In a recent article, author Brandon Keim explored the relationships between the use of a subway system and its physical structure / urban planning.  What would the ideal shape of movement be?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/subway-convergence/

In a related article linked to this one, slime molds were also held up as an example of how the actual network shape of a national road system might be determined by how mold grows over a surface.  In this case, the shape of the surface is the country itself:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/slime-mold-iberia/

Dawn Clements

In addition to David Humphrey and Angela Dufresne, two of the artists we will meet in New York, I will be posting links to other artists as we get closer to July - New York based and otherwise - who approach the idea of mapping in different ways.  The artist Dawn Clements bridges the idea of drawing from observation into an installation/site-specific context.  Her work provides a strong example that not all responses to a mapped space have to use a primarily symbolic language to convey their ideas.

Here is a link to her page on the Whitney Museum's 2010 Biennial website:

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/DawnClements