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The Surprise Appeal of Psychogeography The test of great art is that it surprises – you stand in front of it and go ‘wow’. Until the modern era, art could surprise in two ways: through power of imagination and through technique. Then Modernism came along and substituted newness, which worked for a while; but whereas imagination and technique are endlessly renewable, newness is not. Postmodernism, finding that there was nothing new left, adopted a strategy of last resort: pretence. The hope was that if artists acted surprised audiences would follow, or at least be persuaded that the work was somehow surprising even if the wow factor was conspicuously missing. Students today may leave art school with little knowledge of technique or art history, but they graduate with a sound education in astonishment at the obvious. In the absence of special skills or perceptions, it’s this capacity for surprise that sets them apart. Postmodern artists are staggered at things the rest of us take in our stride, like walking, and find a source of wonder in subjects like geography that ordinary people find desperately dull. In fact, by combining geography and walking, they’ve given the world not one but two new art forms: land art and psycho-geography (not to be confused with environ-mental art). We British are world leaders in rural land art, but the urban roots of psychogeography lie in France. It was Guy Debord in 1955 who defined the term as the study of the effects of the geographical environment on individual psychology. As a Situationist he understood that geography’s capacity for surprise did not depend on the discovery of new continents. There was no need for the psychogeographer to discover America; it was enough to explore hidden corners of one’s own city and rediscover the use of one’s legs. What he proposed, in effect, was a sort of anti-geography, without destinations or maps - unless they were the wrong ones. ìLife can never be too disorientatingî was his approving comment on a friend’s attempt to find his way round Germany’s Harz Mountains with a map of London. More than a Baudelairean fl‚neur, Debord’s psychogeographer was a drifter who practised the ìtechnique of locomotion without a goalî. His expeditions were characterised as dÈrives – ‘drifts’, ‘diversions’ - with no end in view, and no end-product. If this sounds a little like a pub-crawl, it probably was. According to Debord’s biographer Vincent Kaufman, ìPsychogeography comprises an art of conversation and drunkenness, and everything leads us to believe that Debord excelled at both.î Ah bon! So we’re talking pyschogeography. No wonder Tracey Emin wants to move to France. Of course, as a Frenchman Debord had to muddy the waters with a lot of intellectual mumbo-jumbo, but one thing about his enterprise was clear: it was absolutely, liberatingly pointless. But that was then and this is now. Since the art of urban drift went mainstream and qualified for funding, even pointlessness must have a point. So the dÈrive-ative new generation of psychogeographers has been diverted up the cul-de-sac of community art, in the hope that the disaffected urban masses will catch their surprising enthusiasm, recover their ‘sense of place’ and stop complaining about all the things that need fixing. In which case the artists will have earned their money several times over, if you factor in the savings on transport and health when fatties rediscover the use of their legs. In my part of London, cheapo Camden Council has tried to achieve a similar effect by hanging banners from the lampposts saying ‘LOVE YOUR LOCAL HIGH STREET’. But artier places like - wait for it! - Bedford have gone down the psychogeographic route. Last summer, with funding from Arts Council England East, Bedford Creative Arts gave the Spanish artist Jordi Lafon a residency aimed at reintroducing walking to the local population. As the publicity for his show Criss Crossing explained, ìthe act of walking is a kind of performance in which many different situations converge, both the unexpected and those that are deliberately sought outî - eg you go down the road to get a paper and you don’t expect to be mugged/run over by an unmarked police car/engaged in a half-hour conversation by the mad old bat at no 38 on your way home. For those who didn’t get the drift, it went on: ìWalking is a way of searching out new experiences, a way in which to observe the internal workings of a town, discovering points of interest, territories and hideaways.î There was no suggestion of the erotic charge experienced by the French pioneers of psychogeography, for whom exploring Paris was like making love to an exotic woman. This was Bedford. The tone was indistinguishable from the health education video advising me to take the long way round to the shops which I had to sit through on my last visit to the dentist because the magazines had been confiscated due to swine flu. And sure enough, the couch potatoes of East Angular were encouraged to join the artist on his Saturday walks: ìAs you pass through Bedford on foot, you will take photographs of the sights that captivate you. Then you will get to work alongside Jordi to trace some of your images onto the gallery walls, for all to see!î There was a photo of a projected image with someone up a stepladder carefully drawing around the top of a tree in pencil, while someone else worked on outlining ripples in the river below and a third person traced the railings of a bridge. Debord will be dÈriving in his grave. Like all good pointless ideas, his has been hijacked by dimwitted do-gooders determined to see points where there are none. These are the numpties who commissioned ìurban explorerî Richard Wentworth in 2002 to declare Kings Cross ìAn Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beautyî and set up a map room, complete with periscope, as a base for a ìwide-ranging interactive programmeî; or who arranged in 2007 for postmodern tour guides Lone Twin to lead a crocodile of cub psychogeographers in ever-decreasing circles around the Barbican. It’s possible that you can teach anyone to draw, you can even teach people to walk again, but you can’t teach them to look, except right and left at crossings. Psychogeography has its uses, if not as art then as protest against urban mallification. In this department, Manchester has the edge on Bedford. A few years ago Paul Melia made a film called Manchester by C following a pedestrian’s progress through the city taking only streets beginning with the letter ‘C’, so as ìto reveal the gaps between the marketed Manchester and the local spaces left behindî. Now the psychogeographical baton has been taken up by the Loiterers Resistance Movement, who describe themselves as ìa Manchester-based collective of artists and activists interested in psychogeography. We can’t agree on what that means but we all like plants growing out of the side of buildings, urban exploration, drinking tea and getting lost. Gentrification, advertising and blandness make us sad. We believe there is magic in the Manchester rain.î In December they baked a DIY cake map of the city and invited people to devour the buildings they disliked. Better still, in 2006 they momentarily dematerialised the Beetham Tower. If you blinked you missed it, but there was an element of surprise. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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