Cathy Turner

Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility

Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial.

Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space

Dodds continues by suggesting that for others, the ‘essential elusiveness’ of architecture’s boundaries offers ‘hope for its future actions and the body politic of which it is part’. The notion of dramaturgy, at its most ‘inclusive and broad-based’, seems to exclude as little as the word ‘performance’, or, indeed, ‘architecture’. Just as Dodds observes in relation to architecture, an anxiety to define the limits of dramaturgy and the profession of the dramaturg has been evident at recent European conferences and symposia, especially in contexts where neither are well established. However, while this was true of discussions in Warsaw’s Instytut Teatralny (Theatre Institute) in 2009, the ‘essential elusiveness’ of dramaturgy was also welcomed by some, this flexibility enabling dramaturgs to be responsive to the changing needs of performance practices.

Situation: (Un)building the Hacienda

‘You’ll never see the Hacienda. It doesn’t exist,’ wrote Ivan Chtcheglov in 1953, concluding, ‘The Hacienda must be built’ (Chtcheglov 2006 [1953]: 387). Nevertheless, Chtcheglov and his friends in the Letterist International were to become as interested in dismantling the Haciendas of late capitalism as in building their own.

Gestalt: From the Bauhaus to Robert Wilson

There are innumerable historical connections between the artists of the previous two chapters and those of the German Bauhaus.1 We have also seen that Lefebvre links the Russian constructivists and the Bauhaus together, though he places particular significance on the work of the Bauhaus in the reconceptualisation of a modern space. He characterises this as one that posits a link: between industrialization and urbanization, between workplaces and dwelling-places. No sooner had this link been incorporated into theoretical thought than it turned into a project, even into a programme. The curious thing is that this ‘programmatic’ stance was looked upon at the time as both rational and revolutionary, although in reality it was tailor-made for the state — whether of the state capitalist or the state-socialist variety. (Lefebvre 1991: 124) This ‘worldwide, homogenous and monotonous architecture of the state’ (Lefebvre 1991: 126) implied a focus, not on individual objects, but on the interrelationship of objects in the spirit of the German Werkbund, whose concerns ranged ‘From the sofa cushion to city planning’ (Muthesius in Schwartz 1996: 22).

Architecture and Deep Map: Cliff McLucas’s Placeevents

The Letterist and Situationist Internationals came into being in recognition of rapid changes taking place politically and culturally, and not only in France, although for various reasons Paris felt these shifts acutely. These changes are those Jameson identifies when hypothesising the ‘break’ that determines postmodernism, while acknowledging the potential pitfalls in periodisation: The economic preparation of postmodernism or late capitalism began in the 1950s … On the other hand, the psychic habitus of the new age demands the absolute break, strengthened by a generational rupture, achieved more properly in the 1960s. (Jameson 1991: xx) The situationist movement emerged in response to the ‘economic preparation’ Jameson identifies in the 1950s and early 1960s. In another essay, Jameson proposes that this period came to an end between 1972 and 1974, due to the onset of a world economic crisis (1973–74) and related philosophical, cultural and political changes, and following a preparatory shift between 1967 and 1968, again connected to economic crises in Germany and the US (Jameson 1984: 205). The 1968 events in Paris and the 1972 dissolution of the SI are not coincidentally linked to this general outline, which, in Jameson’s analysis, is one of the recuperation and proletarianisation of energies released in the 1960s.

Building: Ibsen, Jugendstil and the Playwright as ‘Master Builder’

In my introduction, I referred to Hans- Thies Lehmann’s characterisation of the dramatic form as ‘a certain architecture’ (Lehmann 1997: 56). In The Secret Life of Plays, playwright Steve Waters develops a similar characterisation of the dramatic text as architecture: It’s no accident that when Ibsen in The Master Builder or David Greig in The Architect or Howard Barker in The Castle wished to dramatise the ethical dilemmas of the playwright, they used architects for their surrogates … A play, like a building, is made out of disarticulated elements; like a building, it needs to have carrying capacity and it needs to work; like a building, it will be put to uses by its inhabitants. (Waters 2010: 194)

Construction: The Convergence of City and Stage in Russian Constructivism

In an essay entitled ‘A Free Port’, Viktor Shklovsky writes of a makeshift structure that masked St Petersburg’s statue of Tsar Alexander III on the occasion of the first anniversary of the October Revolution, in 1918. This Bolshevik structure, characteristically covered with text, as if arguing itself into existence, paradoxically draws attention to the statue that it conceals. Shklovsky recollects the street urchins who would run from the police to hide beneath this ‘Monument’. Having reached its safety, ‘they would lie low in that strange place — in the void beneath the planks that separate Tsar Alexander III from the revolution’ (Shklovsky 2005 [1923]: 126–7).

Chronotope and Rhythmic Production: Garden Cities, Narratives of Order and Spaces of Hope

In George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 play, John Bull’s Other Island, the Irishman Peter Keegan reminds us, ‘Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time’ (Shaw 1952 [1904]: 452). Perhaps in the same spirit, a reviewer of the 1910 Garden City Pantomime at Letchworth writes: ‘I refuse to take Garden City seriously, because, like all important things, it began as a joke. An official in the House of Lords wrote a little book about the cities of Tomorrow. A number of influential men took him at his word and floated a company to build castles in the air’ (Buckley 1910: n.p.).

Learning to Write Spaces

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Contemporary Theatre Review, volume 23, issue 2, 2013, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10486801.2013.777054

Site-Specific Performance

the politics of Whybrow’s style might be credited as purposefully cumulative rather than singularly pointed; for example, Chapter Three, on walking, addresses people’s relationships to a wide range of important things, including technology, space (policed zones), the everyday (a shoe propping open a window [p. 56]), histories (Tate Britain’s location on the site of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison experiment [p. 57]), disorder, dissensus, disenfranchisement, communities, narrative, suggestion, choice, and more. Similarly, Whybrow does not make explicit cases, but perhaps cumulative ones, for focusing on walking, play, and memorials in Part Two. To be more thoroughly persuaded that this cumulative style enacts a pervasive politicised practice, however, I would have liked to see a more thoroughgoing argument for the ‘relational writing’ Whybrow claims to practise. Finally, though I would prefer an approach to the topics of art, performance, the city, and politics that is more explicit about its arguments and therefore about the value of contemporary urban art practices, I very much welcome this book for the important work it does constellating these topics, vividly and movingly illustrating them, and instigating crucial analysis across a great range of their many, urgent political implications.