At Ground Level:

London Walking in the Works of Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff and

Patrick Keiller

Coline Milliard

MA Curating Contemporary Art, Final Dissertation

14 May 2007

Word length: 10, 241

2

‘C’est à ce carrefour que nous nous somme trouvé, et perdu.’ 

It’s at this crossroads that we are both found and lost.1

Guy Debord

Critique de la Separation, 1961

1 Author’s translation

3

Abstract

This essay investigates walking as an artistic practice and a method of

interaction with a city specifically, London. It is based on the analysis

of three works: Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994), Janet Cardiff’s

audio walk The Missing Voice (Case Study b) (1999) and Francis Alÿs’

Seven Walks, London (2005). These artists develop the theme of urban

walking as a tool to decipher and appropriate territory, to engage with

an immense metropolis and to carve out a place for the human. This

dissertation also considers how walking in these works contributes to

the constitution of the self, provokes and conveys remembrance and

facilitates the excavation of local history and myths, as well as

inscribing new stories in the urban fabric. Walking becomes a way to

reassess the specificities of the city against the standardization of

urban spaces.

4

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my supervisor David Batchelor for his help and advice, to Patrick

Keiller for kindly providing still images from his film London and to Tom

Perchard for his constant support.

5

Contents

Introduction______________________________________________________________6

Patrick Keiller, London, film, 82 mins, 1994______________________________6

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), Audio walk, 1999_____7

Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5________________________________8

‘Walking as a Conscious Cultural Act’________________________________10

Historical Antecedents_____________________________________________________10

A Territory of One’s Own: Reading and Appropriation of the city_______13

Greetings from London________________________________________________16

From a Different Point of View: the Place of the Artist in the City______16

Identifying the City: Uses and Détournements of London Landmarks__17

Walking as Critique________________________________________________________20

Urban Walking as a Quest of Identity________________________________23

Personal Memories_________________________________________________________23

Urban Walking, Sexual Identity and Eroticism___________________________24

Walking to Reinvent the City: History and Urban Myths____________28

Constructing a Past: Cardiff, Keiller______________________________________28

Francis Alÿs, Rumour Whisperer__________________________________________31

Conclusion: The Walkers in a New Urban Space_____________________33

Bibliography_____________________________________________________________35

6

Introduction

‘Upright walking’ writes Rebecca Solnit, ‘is the first hallmark of what became

humanity’.2 It is mostly utilitarian, the human way to move from one point to the

other: walking to go to work, to visit a friend, to go the pub. Walking is moving

through spaces, from A to B, when A and B are the only things that matter. In an

urban context, walking is often obsolete: defeated by the long distances one has

to cover on a daily basis, one walks only to the bus stop, to the car park.

Yet walking can be a very direct way to engage with our environment. According

to Michel de Certeau, it is ‘the elementary form of experience of the city’, a first,

immediate and physical encounter with our surroundings.3 And from the 18th

Century onwards, walking has been invested of a very different purpose than

reaching a destination. In literature and in the visual arts, the aim of the walk

became the journey itself.

This essay will focus on contemporary works which use urban walking as a

device to explore the city specifically, London: Seven Walks, London (2005) by

Francis Alÿs, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) (1999) by Janet Cardiff and

London (1994) by the filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The key questions in this essay

are: how do these artists use London’s striking features to comment on and

critique the city? How, in these works, can walking be read as a personal quest

for identity? How can the walk challenge the traditional understandings of

gender? How walking can define a relationship to history and memory, and what

is the practice’s relevance today?

Many other works could be as relevant when dealing with this topic, London

being a recurring source of inspiration and subject matter for artists. The

purpose of this selection was not to be exhaustive but to focus on a cluster of

works that could touch on a wide range of issues while remaining contained and

coherent as an ensemble. These works cover a time span of 11 years in which

London experienced tremendous transformations in its inner organization as

well as in the image it promoted outside its borders. The three artists had

different levels of knowledge of the city when they started working on their

2 Solnit, R., 2001, p.323 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.93

7

pieces, from the insider to the complete foreigner; this, as well as their different

genders, resulted in diverse approaches the city.

Patrick Keiller, London, film, 82 mins, 1994

Patrick Keiller’s London is a filmic journal following the peregrinations of two

unseen characters, Robinson and the narrator, throughout the year 1992. The

narrator, voiced by Paul Scofield, reports on his return to London after 7 years

working as a photographer on a cruise ship, and on his reunion with his old

friend and ex-lover, Robinson. The film unravels in series of long, static shots of

various locations in the city. Robinson is a part-time teacher ‘in the School of

Fine Art and Architecture at the University of Barking’. He has a complicated

relationship with London, slightly nostalgic for the past, yet looking for

modernity, intrigued by the city’s quick transformations. He has asked his friend

to visit him in order to tell him about his project on ‘the problem of London’.

Robinson believes that the ‘surface of the city’ is readable. In order to decipher

this city ‘language’, the two characters set out on a series of long walks, taking

place between January and December 1992. They become two flâneurs, two

observers of London mundane reality. As they go along, the narrator reports his

conversations with Robinson. This monologue is a mix of anecdotes and

comments delivered in the driest, most sardonic tone, where fictions and facts

are coupled without distinction.

8

Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), Audio walk, 1999

In 1999, Janet Cardiff was invited by Artangel to produce an audio walk for

London. The Missing Voice (Case Study B) takes the listener for a walk in East

London from the Whitechapel Library to Liverpool Street station. In order to

experience the work, one has to go to the Library and ask for a walkman. As the

participant puts on the headphones, Cardiff’s voice slowly but firmly takes

control of their movements. She orders the visitor to go to the crime section and

reads with them a passage of a detective novel, before leading them to the

streets. The participant has to match their pace with Cardiff’s, almost becoming

her shadow for a short while. As the walk develops, four voices intertwine. The

first voice is Cardiff’s, the narrator, who comments on the city, and tells the

story of a missing woman and how she hired a detective to find her. The second

one is another female voice, again the artist’s, now in a different character. She

could be the disappeared woman, losing herself in the city. Two male voices are

also mingled with these two: the detective looking for the woman, and another

man, possibly Cardiff’s lover.

The Missing Voice (Case Study B) constructs a complex narrative which mixes

anodyne observations, personal memories, comments on the past and the future

of the city, and multiple references to film noir and pulp fiction. But this

scenario is unresolved, wilfully confusing. The point of the piece is less to

deliver a readable story than to provide the viewer with the opportunity to

complement it with their own stream of thought.

9

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999

Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5

Francis Alÿs’ Seven Walks, London is another projects commissioned by

Artangel. Both are part of the ‘Inner city’ series which ‘aims to make a part of

the city seem temporarily transformed, re-mapped or revealed in some way’.4

This project took five years to develop and was finally exhibited at 21 Portman

Square and at the National Portrait Gallery in 2005. Seven Walks, London is an

ensemble of seven works, of varied scale, involving video, performance,

photography as well as a large amount of notes and scribbled maps, altogether

documentation, relics and works. It is the reaction to London of an outsider, a

tourist finding ways to tackle the city. Walking is for Alÿs a way to engage with

and observe the city, the opportunity to develop ‘a rich state of consciousness’.5

Each of the seven works of this project (Guards, Shoeshine, Shady / Sunny, The

Commuters, Railings, Ice 4 Milk, The Nightwatch and L’Imprévoyance de la

Nostalgie) is a ‘walk’. Favouring a poetical approach, they engage with London’s

complex and multi-facetted identity, as well as the multiplicity of its codes.

4 cf www.innercity.demon.co.uk 5 Seven Walks, London, 2005, p.48

10

Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2005

11

‘Walking as a Conscious Cultural Act’6

Historical Antecedents

What the historian Solnit calls ‘walking as a conscious cultural act’ is a relatively

new phenomenon.7 Solnit establishes its inception with the French thinker and

philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).8 In his Confessions (1782)

Robinson narrates the first fifty-three years of his life, with an emphasis on the

long walks he did in his youth. From then on, the notion that walking could

contribute to develop intellectual activities started to develop. While walking,

the body and the mind are in concordances and, as Solnit puts it ‘the passage

through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of

thoughts’.9 In an interview with James Lingwood, Alÿs also acknowledges this

creative power of walking: ‘It’s a perfect space to process thoughts. You can

function at multiple levels simultaneously’.10 But Alÿs refers to urban walking.

Rousseau’s walks, if they emancipated walking from its solely utilitarian

function, were exclusively linked with nature and an idea of harmony with the

elements in an almost ‘pre-civilized’ state.

In the 18th Century, walking in a city meant negotiating a path through dirty

pavements, amongst beggars and prostitutes. This is exemplified in John Gay’s

(1685-1732) Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) where the

art of walking is the art of keeping oneself clean and safe. Yet gradually, this

activity became linked with a subjective knowledge of the city, as well as a

physical experience of its transformations. In Daniel Defoe’s (1660-1731) A

Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the narrator describes London as a

labyrinthine city, devastated by the plague. This account is at once observation

and recollection, the report of a situation and memory of what is no longer

there. The city is reorganised through subjectivity, appropriated through the

narrator’s perambulations. This became a common feature to all the following

pedestrian explorations of the city in literature or elsewhere. Thomas de

Quincey, (1785-1859) in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821),

wanders the streets under the influence of narcotics, using the effects of drugs

to explore the power of imagination and transfigure – in Merlin Coverley words – 6 Solnit, R., 2001, p.147 Ibid8Cf Ibid9 Solnit, R., 2001, p.510 Seven Walks, London, 2005, p.48

12

‘the familiar nature of our surroundings into something strange and

wonderful’.11 Cardiff’s Missing Voice (Case Study b) resonates with this first

attempt to weave imaginary into the mundane, throwing the viewer participant

in the middle of a pulp fiction. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-

1855) chose his city, Copenhagen, to examine human nature, each passer-by

being a specimen to study. Others went down the esoteric route, most famously

Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) who revived at the beginning of the 20th Century the

theory of ley lines supposedly linking London’s Hawksmoor churches.

The 19th Century marks the emergence of huge and complex cities, estranged to

its inhabitants. The anonymous crowd is part of the phenomenon. A short story

by Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd (1840) has proved influential in

framing the motive of the solitary man walking in the city. In the story, the

narrator follows a stranger for 24 hours before finding himself at his point of

departure. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) translated Poe’s writing, and he

developed this theme in his famous essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863)

where he describes the flâneur, the dandyish figure of the man walking in the

city witnessing its transformations into a modern metropolis. The flâneur

embodies a new type, which can only exist in this new context. Walter Benjamin

(1892-1940) pushed further this theme in his Arcades Project (written between

1927 and 1940), a collection of essays and notes posthumously edited and

published. If Benjamin’s version of the flâneur is more linked with the arcades –

the glass-covered pathways in Paris – and their shops, he is quintessentially, like

his Baudelairian counterpart, the observer of the tableau vivant of modernity.

The flâneur is a recurring character in literature, sociology and urban art,

crystallizing an attempt to understand modernity and post-modernity. Patrick

Keiller also used this motif in London, his character strolling in the post-

industrial city as the Parisian flâneur strolled in the boulevards. However, the

flâneur is also a very problematic figure: a symbol of fin-de-siècle decadence.

But maybe more importantly it is a figure that doesn’t exist. As Rob Shields

pointed out, the flâneur is ‘essentially a literary gloss’: ‘flânerie was […] always

as much mythic as it was actual’ Shields continues, ‘[i]t has something of the

quality of oral tradition and urban myths.’ 12 Yet it seems that it is the flâneur

which validated walking as an investigative method.

11 Coverley, M., 2006 p.4212 Shields, R., 1994, p.62

13

The Surrealists also produced texts of significant importance dealing with urban

walking which allowed them to physically experiment free associations, chance

and coincidence, central to the preoccupations of their movement. Louis

Aragon’s (1897-1982) Paris Peasant (Le Paysan de Paris, 1926) and André

Breton’s (1896-1966) Nadja (1928) both investigated the potential of drifting in

the capital. In a process similar to automatic drawing – where the unconscious

was supposedly taking control over the educated, reasonable mind – the

surrealist free-floating exploration of Paris should bring out new mappings of

the urban territory and facilitate a more poetical approach of the everyday. The

three works studied, and more specifically Alÿs’ Seven Walks, are infused with

this sensibility. Surrealist automatic walking provided the blueprint for what

was to become the Situationist dérive.

According to Coverley, this period marked a transformation in the goals of

conscious urban walking. ‘If the urban wanderer was to continue his aimless

strolling’ he writes, ‘then the very act of walking had to become subversive, a

means of reclaiming the streets for the pedestrian.’13 One could argue that

wandering the city was never an apolitical act. The Baudelerian flâneur was as

much an observer as an embodied critique of the transformations of the city. Yet

whatever he represented, the flâneur was willingly detached, separated from the

mundane urban reality. Like the Surrealist automatic walking or indeed the 19th

flâneurism, the dérive and other psychogeographical practices that appeared

first in the Lettrist Group around 1950, and were soon developed and theorized

by Guy Debord, involved urban wonderings, an imaginative reworking of the

city, and prized unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by drifting. But

unlike the earlier artistic tradition of urban walking, the dérive was not

purposeless: it was a revolutionary device to explore the city in order to propose

radical alternative solutions. Psychogeography divided the city in various

emotional zones according to the responses they provoked on the individuals.

These zones could be defined by the urban wandering, or dérive, which then

produced a new mapping of city. Debord’s 1957 Paris map The Naked City

physically represents this subjective organisation of the space, with its areas of

the capital cut up and seemingly randomly reorganised.

13 Coverley, M., 2006 p.77

14

Guy Debord, The Naked City, poster, 1957

In 1957, the Lettrist movement merged with other avant-garde organisations to

create the Situationist International (SI, 1957-1968). The desire of the new-born

movement to be accessible for a wider audience triggered the creation of a

Situationist glossary in which dérive was defined as ‘a mode of experimental

behaviour linked to the condition of urban society: a technique of transient

passage through ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of

continuous drifting’.14 Yet the SI soon focused on another political agenda and

lost interest in psychogeograpy (possibly due to the lack of results of the first

actual derive experiments).15 Psychogeograpy not even evoked in Debord’s

seminal text La Société du Spectacle (1967).

However, the dérive didn’t disappear. From the ‘70s onwards it found a great

critical and intellectual favour, resonating in works such as Lyotard’s Driftworks

(1973) and later in the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as well as in the

popular infatuation for psychogeography. Sinclair, writes David Pinder,

‘positioned himself as a kind of born-again flâneur’, observing the city to gather

evidence against the Tory government and engaging a fierce critique of the

Thatcherite redevelopment of London.16

London, Seven Walks and The Missing Voice (Case Study b) share an ensemble

of preoccupations that has been defined through a long literary tradition of

urban walking: a physical engagement of the artist and /or the participant in a

14 Coverley, M., 2006 p.9315 See Coverley, M., 2006, p.10116 Pinder, D., 2001, p.11;

15

specific context, a comment, a critique, a subjective rethinking of a place.17 Yet

they also differ drastically from their antecedents. The three pieces, if they all

involve urban walking, are all meticulously constructed which contrast with the

free-floating quality of flâneurism or dérive. In the Missing Voice (Case Study b)

each step of the participants has been planned, there is no place for drifting.

Thought the ever-changing nature of London guarantees that each visitor will

have a different experience of the work, they nevertheless are going to see the

very same places. Likewise, Alÿs worked for each ‘walk’ on precise locations:

The video Guards is a highly choreographed performance despite an element of

indeterminacy. The Nightwatch – a CCTV video of a fox in the National Portrait

Gallery – takes place in a contained environment; and in Railings – a video of the

artist playing with a drumstick on the railings of well-appointed West London

houses – each barrier had been carefully selected. Even the ‘psychic

landscaping’ of Keiller’s London, though referring to the flâneur tradition both

in its script and in its method of shooting, is a skilfully edited combination of

images, each contributing to the critical goal of the film.18

Moreover, despite the numerous links between these pieces of urban walking

and their antecedents, walking is about reacting to a very specific context, and

contemporary London has little to do with the 19th or even 20th century Paris of

Baudelaire and the Situationists. It is a cosmopolitan, post-industrial city were

the issues at stake revolve not around the emergency of modernity, but multi-

ethnicity, surveillance and the consequences of major, late capitalist political

decisions taken throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Yet these works share with the

literary tradition of the walker the supposition that a city can be read as a text,

that it is covered in signs that can be picked up and interpreted.

A Territory of One’s Own: Reading and Appropriation of the city

17 David Toop in the Seven Walks, London catalogue also details musicians and composers who have taken their audience for a walk in the city. In Philip Corner’s I Can Walk Through the World (1965), the composer asked the spectators at New York’s Town Hall to accompany him around Times Square. Drifting along the same lines, Walk, composed by Michael Parsons in 1969, was to be performed by ‘any number of people walking in a large open space’. Randomly selected numbers determined the speed and the length of the walks to be executed. Despite their focus on sonic rather than visual perceptions, these musical pieces aim – like the three works under study here – to provoke fresh encounters with the urban well-known. Cf Toop, D., 2005, pp.63-69s18 Because of the improvised nature of the shooting method, Sinclair positioned the film against the documentary as ‘the justification of a script-approved argument’.Sinclair, I., 1994, p.13

16

‘Walking the city makes the invisible legible’.19

The desire to comprehend the territory one occupies is urgent when faced the

immensity of London. In his essay ‘Walking in the City’ Certeau theorized two

possible attitudes.20 One can decide to be a voyeur, who looks at the city from

the top of a building and perceives it as an architectural model. The voyeur

simplifies the complex urban reality to a network of easily recognizable signs,

fooling himself in the illusion that she or he can comprehend the urban fabric in

its totality. Certeau’s alternative attitude is to be a walker experiencing the city

at ground level and constructing a fragmented image of the metropolis. The

‘walker’ or the walkers: Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller’s characters choose to explore

the cityscape through the subjective. Like Rachel Lichtenstein and Richard

Wentworth’s works discussed alongside Cardiff’s in Joe Kerr’s essay ‘Mapping

with Latitude’, their walks ‘complicate their representations of the city, rather

than abstracting them’. Following the steps of Certeau’s ‘walker’, they

understand and recreate the city bit by bit, step by step.21

One could argue that Certeau’s dual system only takes into consideration a

small fraction of the possible attitudes when dealing with a city. The Certeauian

walker, because he doesn’t reduce the territory to a map of clearly identifiable

signs, seems to be denied the capacity to read the urban landscape. Yet, if Alÿs,

Cardiff and Keiller’s character’s walks don’t operate by simplification, they are

also a form of reading. As in the flânerie or the dérive, contemporary urban

walking allows its practitioners to decode the city. ‘When you walk’, says, Alÿs

‘you are aware or awake to everything that happens in you peripheral vision, the

little incidents, smell, images, sounds’.22 Everything becomes a sign to be

deciphered. In the ‘walk’ Ice 4 Milk, Alÿs juxtaposes photographs of milk bottled

delivered at Londoner’s doorsteps with images of ice blocks used by street

sellers in Mexico City. Both are barely noticeable events in the daily reality of

city dwellers and yet they reveal the unwritten tradition of tiny industries,

almost obsolete but persisting in the megalopolises. This series unveils the

poetic of the mundane and focuses on the fragility, the ephemeral in the

concrete landscape.23

19 Baker, B., 200320 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.91-11021 Kerr, J., 200222 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.48

17

Francis Alÿs, Ice 4 Milk, 160 colour slides on 2 slide projectors, 2004-5

In Keiller’s London, the narrator says that Robinson ‘believed that if he looked

at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the

molecular basis of historical events; and in this way, he hoped to look into the

future’.24 Robinson sets out on his walks to pick up and interpret the city signs

and make assumptions about the capital’s fate. Passing by a Portuguese-run

driving school, Robinson evokes the expansion of the Portuguese community in

South Lambeth after Portugal joined the EU in 1987. Seeing a ship on The

Atlantic pub sign just out of Brixton market, he reminds his companion of the

history of the Jamaican immigration after WW2, and how the newcomers were

housed in air raid shelters in Clapham Common. Drifting around London,

Robinson decodes for the viewers the innumerable signs to be found in the

Londonscape and deciphers for them a city that one tends to take for granted.

This decoding reaches another level of complexity in Cardiff’s The Missing Voice

(Case Study b). Her audio-walk combines her personal observations of the East

End – the buildings, the sounds in Brick Lane – with the story of a detective

following a woman through the city. He is looking for clues, finding and losing

her trace. In his aforementioned essay, Shields reminds us that the imagery and

theme of flânerie or urban walking is closely linked to the emergence of the

genre of detective novel.25 The figure of the detective represents an attempt to

dig out secrets, to make sense of the unintelligible, it evokes the need and

difficulties to master and comprehend the city. Hence in The Missing Voice the

detective figure is not only a character, and an evocation of a certain type of

cinema or literature, but also a mirror of the position of the artist, gathering and

making sense of traces scattered around the city.

23 Richard Wentworth also draws on the poetical power of minor urban incidents. His ongoing photographic series Making Do and Getting By reports banal events: a pea tin open abandoned on a doorstep, a lost glove on a low wall. They construct together a coherent narrative, a documentation of the artist’s emotional understanding of the city. 24 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199425 Shields, R., p.63

18

To read is an attempt to understand, and to understand is to appropriate. If

walking is reading, it is perhaps an attempt to make an unknown territory one’s

own. According to Certeau, this appropriative quality is common to walking and

speech. ‘The act of walking is to the urban system what speech is to language’

he writes.26 For Certeau, walking would be the appropriation of a system, its

transformation from the abstraction of a map, to the personal experience of

moving through spaces. London, Seven Walks and The Missing Voice are three

subjective readings of London’s territory, a selection and an investigation of a

small part of the city, and in that sense can be read as an appropriation of the

territory. Yet if these works are an attempt to comprehend the city, none of

them leave a permanent mark. The artists refuse to assertively inscribe their

presence in the urban fabric: perhaps their works should be understood more as

a reaction than as an appropriation. Each proposes a personal interpretation of

London, ‘speaks’ the city, but all refuse to write on it, favouring an ephemeral

response to what they consider striking features of the capital.

26 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.97

19

Greetings from London

From a Different Point of View: the Place of the Artist in the City

Despite the great variety of reactions to London in this three works, one thing

seems to be recurring: at different levels they are reactions of outsiders,

whether actual foreigners (in Alÿs’ and Cardiff’s case), or just slightly eccentric

like Keiller’s characters. Being a walker is in itself an estranged position, Solnit

writes: ‘in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveller

rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group’.27 The

stranger is, according to Georg Simmel, a positive position.28 He is part of the

group, but he hasn’t mastered the codes of this group; he therefore is in a

privileged position of observation.

Cardiff didn’t know London when she started to work on The Missing Voice

(Case Study b) and was acutely aware of her alien-ness.29 This was doubled by

her position as a woman in the city who is more likely to feel endangered. If

Keiller’s Robinson is a Londoner, a local, then he has very few social contacts,

and he is gay.30 Mike Hodges reminds us that ‘[i]t’s worth remembering that

queers of Robinson’s age know what it’s like to be pariahs – outsiders –

subversives’.31 Being a stranger then can be understood in its broader sense as

being outside a common conception of the social norm. To a certain extent

Robinson is a stranger in his own city. In this, he is quite close to the traditional

figure of the flâneur, with which he identifies, part of the crowd and yet

alienated from it as in Stephen Morawski’s definition: ‘a kind of tourist at home,

a native who feels partly homeless’.32 The narrator is also, a stranger: he has

been away for long enough to have a ‘fresh eye’ on the city, and is constantly

amazed by the difference between the reality of London and his memory of it. ‘I

was shocked by the increase in the number of people sleeping out in the seven

27 Solnit, R., 2001, p.2128 Cf Simmel, G., 195029 ‘For me The Missing Voice was partly a response to living in a large city like London for a while, reading about its history in quiet libraries, seeing newspaper headlines as I walked by the news stands, overhearing gossip, a being a lone person getting almost lost in the masses… the London experience enhanced a paranoia that I think is quite common to a lot of people, especially women, as they adjust to a strange city.’Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice, (case study b),1999, p.66 30 But one could ask: What is a Londoner, a born and breed Londoner, after 30 years of residence, 10 years, 5 years, is a Londoner someone who has no other home? Or is it enough to feel part of the city?31 Hodges, M, 1997, p.332 Morawski, S., 1994, p.185

20

years I had been away’, says the narrator, ‘but Robinson seemed quite

accustomed to it’.33 Robinson and the narrator have a different relation to the

city which enriches London with different perspectives. Their distance to the

world they are witnessing enables them to be critical. Keiller needed this

alienation of his characters to serve his own politicized discourse.

Starting when he settled in Mexico, Alÿs was to make the fragility and the

advantages of this position the bulk of his practice. For the performance Tourist

(1994) he sat outside the cathedral in Mexico City amongst the workers

advertising their skills on little signs – plumber, electrician – Alÿs’ sign said

‘tourist’. This piece comments on the precariousness his situation and

affirmation of his artistic role as a professional observer. This became a strategy

to interact with specific contexts, an approach he also favoured for the London

project. Alÿs says that he was overwhelmed by the vastness of the capital, and

by his inability to ‘build [up] a mental image of the city’34. Seven Walks is

infused with this sense of alien-ness. When for The Nightwatch Alÿs puts a fox in

the National Portrait Gallery, or when for Guards he releases Coldstream guards

one by one into the City of London, he injects interlopers, outsiders, mirroring

his own position in the city.

Alÿs’ other strategy to engage with London was to find points of entry. They

were always ‘a detail, an aspect of architecture, or some social mechanism, a tic,

some kind of phenomena that recurs throughout the city’.35 When dealing with

one of the first tourist destinations in the world, the clichés images are waiting

to be seized. Alÿs recalls his first trips to London were he would gather all the

postcards presenting the ‘must-sees’, the sleek image the city has of itself and

want to promote abroad.36 Then gradually, he started to twist these archetypes.

33 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199434 Buck, L., 200535 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.1636 Ibid

21

Identifying the City: Uses and Détournements of London Landmarks

Francis Alÿs(in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), Guards, video, 28’, 2004-5

Seven Walks, London and The Missing Voice reinterpret London’s symbolic

lexicon; landmarks and striking features are used in a détournement strategy, a

Situationist approach designed to subvert an ideology by appropriating and

transforming its messages. The video Guards (2004-5) best exemplifies this

appropriation of London symbols.37 It features a Coldstream regiment and

evokes the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, possibly the

quintessential ‘London’ experience in popular imagination. The guards bring to

mind the folklore of the British monarchy. The city in which the Queen’s

presence in the palace is announced with a flag on a mast is also the city with

the most developed CCTV system in the world; out-of-date traditions and ultra-

modern technologies cohabitate and Guards responds to both. The video was

first to be only recorded on CCTV and edited, but it turned out that despite the

legal theoretically rights allowing anyone to get hold of the videos on which he

or she appears, the crew would not have been able to get access to it. The video

had to be shot in the CCTV ‘style’.38

The video shows Coldstream guards in the City of London. At first they walk

alone, then, locating each other by the sound of their steps, they congregate and

start their military march. The guards gather until the full formation of 64 is

completed. Then they walk together towards the river and break, returning to a

37 Guards, like Railings and numerous others of Alÿs’ projects, was realized in collaboration with Rafael Ortega. 38 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.30

22

passer-by state. At the beginning of the work, the guards seem lost, out of place,

strolling around the streets or sitting smoking on public benches. For the first

time, and because they are remote from their normal setting, they become

normal men again, not the interchangeable dummies guarding the gates of the

Queen’s residence. But they also seem threatened by this fall into the civilians’

world. As they gather in formation, they retrieve their power as a military unit,

as well as their anonymity. Under the electronic eyes of the cameras, the guards

seem to be invading the City, evoking a metropolis on the verge of collapsing,

devouring itself.39

The 5-track video Railings (2004) deals with another well-known image of the

capital: the railings surrounding houses in affluent areas of London. They are

reminiscent of an archaic idea of Britishness, linked with imperial power and

wealth coming from overseas, but they also evoke a contemporary situation,

London’s social inequalities and class division. Alÿs relates: ‘Richard Wentworth

suggested to me that the railings are an echo of the moat around a castle. They

play a role of protection, they filter’.40 Railings is an immediate, physical

connection between the artist and the architecture of the city, and by extension,

its socio-economic stratification. On each track, Alÿs runs a stick against

railings, playing on the noise provoked by this simple gesture, reminiscent of a

kid’s game. At first very simple, the sound becomes more a more complex, drum-

like rhythm. The video points at the protectionist attitude of London upper-

middle class and makes a melody-mockery of it.

Francis Alÿs, Railings,

39 Guards is a video but it is also the documentation of an event. Alÿs’ piece ironically came full circle when he decided to publicise the performance in pubs and tourist booths, side by side with London sightseeing coaches. He also made a postcard available for free on a rack at the entrance of the exhibition space, at 21 Portman Square.40 Ibid, p.20

23

five-track video projections, 2004

Alÿs tests the validity of London’s symbols and operates on the complex of

associations that accompany them. Even the venue hosting his Seven Walks,

London exhibition, an 18th Century building at 21 Portman Square, is a symbolic

space, a throwback to the issues dealt with in the work and as well as a

comment on the position of the artist, commissioned by the bien-pensant

intelligentsia.

Keiller also uses well-known images that can function as a metonymy for the

city. London starts with a static shot of Tower Bridge, immediately establishing

the geographical area under scrutiny, as well as the issues at stake in the film:

‘the problem of London’.41 Contrasting with this glorious figure of the capital,

the narrator offers a sardonic portrait of the country:

‘Dirty old Blighty. Undereducated, economically backward,

bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries. With its fake traditions,

its Irish war, its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges. Its

hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food. Its sexual

repression. Its hypocrisy and racism. And its indolence. It's so

exotic. So home-made.’42

This discrepancy between what is said and what is shown sets the tone for the

film. Likewise, when watching the Trooping of Colour for the birthday of the

Queen, the narrators reflect on the stark contrast between the grandeur of the

parade and ‘the squalor of the surrounding city and its suburbs’.43 London is a

provocation; it undermines the sleek, official version of the city’s identity and

points at its failures. The narrator relates that Robinson prepared his own

series of postcards, for which he asked homeless people to pose for him.

London underlines the superficiality of the city public image, alienated from its

social reality.

Even if it’s less obvious, Cardiff also plays with elements belonging to London

mythology. The structure of the audio walk in Whitechapel could in itself be a

reference to the famous ‘walks’ proposed to tourists, investigating local history

41 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199442 Ibid43 Ibid

24

or famous inhabitants (the most famous in the area being the Jack the Ripper

walk). Yet she focuses on mundane events: street furniture, cars, passers-by,

and rubbish, always avoiding the ‘spectacular’, at odds with tourist attractions

always seeking ‘sensational’. The Missing Voice (Case Study b), like Alÿs’

Guards, reacts to the omnipresence of surveillance cameras. ‘I watch your

movements on the, a small dot walking through the streets’ whispers an

unidentified man’s voice.44 In Cardiff’s work, the panoptical system has

developed as in a sci-fi story, where Big Brother can interact with anyone,

anywhere and at anytime. The participants are made aware that in London, they

are a dot on a screen, constantly being scrutinized. The ‘readers’ become

written into the fabric they attempt to interpret. They become, by being

observed and recorded, readable objects themselves.

Cardiff and Alÿs recognize the aesthetic of surveillance as part of the London

lexicon, alongside the Coldstream guards or Jack the Ripper. Their walks use the

CCTVs as an artistic tool, appropriating its visual identity or using its possibility

to multiply perspectives, hence undermining the principle of secret surveillance.

Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller all have an ambiguous relationship to London well-

established iconography, all at once admitting their identification to it and

perverting its messages. Walking allows them to engage with the striking of the

city, but also to comment on it. From observers, they become critics.

Walking as Critique

Social history has often been written in the streets. Rallies and marches are one

of, if not the oldest manifestations of protest, one of the first degrees of active

citizenship. Criticism is embedded in the tradition of urban walking: from what

Coverley calls the ‘spirit of dissent that animated both Defoe and Blake’ to the

political radicalism of the Situationists, which contributed to the social

movement culminating in May 68.45 Cardiff’s work seems primarily concerned

with the subject, but perhaps, Keiller and Alÿs’ works could be understood as

subversive and critical of London’s political situation.

London can be seen as a two person march, an open protest against – in

Keiller’s words – ‘the decline of London under the Tories’.46 The film takes the

44 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199945 Coverley, M., 2006, p.1246 Keiller, P., 2003, p.353

25

form of fictional journal of the year 1992, reminiscent of Defoe’s 1721 Journal of

the Plague Year. Historical considerations and anecdotes about figures such as

Poe, Sterne or Rimbaud lead the pair to reflect on the topicality of London – its

port losing importance, its run-down transport system – and the progressive

degradation of the quality of life in general. 1992 was a pivotal year in British

history. John Major was re-elected Prime Minister, several IRA bombs were set

off in the city and coal mines were being closed, which led to important miners’

demonstrations in the capital. Month by month, Robinson and the narrator

witness and comment on these events, building up a fierce critique of the Tory

government and of the aftermath of Thatcherism. This critique is supported by

the structure of the film and its long static shot, each contributing to the general

purpose of the film. Often the image speaks for itself, as in a shot showing

workers wearing the British Rail uniform while working on the recently

privatized South East train network. Keiller’s critique is also based on a

ferocious if understated humour: When the narrator evokes the costs

implemented to build a tunnel under the Thames between the headquarters of

MI5 and those of MI6 – costs comparable to the costs of the construction of 8

new general hospitals – the camera shows a street sign advertising a Magritte

exhibition at the Hayward Gallery: ‘It seems that everyday we were faced with a

new reminder of the absurdity of our circumstances’ concludes the narrator

(John Wrathall refers to the ‘low-key, very English Surrealism’ of the film).47 The

images are emancipated from the text, developing and complementing what is

being said. London denounces the lack of interest the Tory government had in

social welfare, in the city itself, and critiques the abuses of privatization. The

film also presents a city from which industry has moved away; this observation

led to Patrick Keiller’s second film Robinson in Space (1997), in which the two

characters undertake a tour of provincial English cities and industrial sites.

47 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 1994; Wrathall, J., 1999, p.10

26

Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still

Keiller’s political engagement is at odds with Alÿs’ stategy, which favours a

poetical approach to the city. For Alÿs, only ‘the poetics provoke a sudden loss

of self that allows a distancing from the immediate situation, a different

perspective on things, and might then have the potential to open up a political

thought’.48 Each ‘walk’ functions like parasite in the urban fabric. They point at

a distinctive social phenomenon: protectionism, surveillance, class division, but

leave the viewer to articulate her or his own conclusion. Alÿs’ practice centred

on walking also promotes a ‘counter-productive’ attitude that could be read as a

comment of capitalist society, obsessed with speed and efficiency. Like the

flâneur analysed by Chris Jenks, he is promoting a ‘[r]esistance wrought through

a change of pace, or walking ‘out of step’ with the late modern rhythm of the

city’.49 Alÿs starts with the official routes, the London landmarks, to better

escape them. He re-inscribes the human in a city where pedestrianism runs the

risk of obsolescence, endangered by what Debord called the ‘dictatorship of the

automobile’.50

48 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.5649 Jenks, C., 1995, p.15050 Debord, G., 1994, p.28

27

Urban Walking as a Quest of Identity

Personal Memories

The walker is alone in the crowd. If this alienation allows an acute observation,

one could argue that it also contributes to the creation of a space for

introspection. The walker is looking for himself while looking at the world.51 Like

the pilgrim seeking redemption, the walker is on a quest on something

intangible: the self. This theme of walking as a quest of identity was introduced

by Poe’s The Man of The Crowd. At the end of the story, it is unclear if the

narrator has been following a person or merely his own whims, looking for

himself within the throng of anonymous. Of the three works under study,

Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study b) could best demonstrate this quest of

self. Yet, in her work, the notion of identity is confused from the start by the

multiplicity of perspectives: the narrator-artist / the disappeared woman / the

detective / the lovers. These various points of view build an intricate fiction and

could hint at the artist complex sense of selfhood. How then does this piece,

despite its fictional nature, illustrate how walking can contribute to the

construction of oneself?

The process of remembrance is crucial in the construction of a sense of

selfhood. It provides a ground on which build one’s personality and way to be in

the world. The steady rhythm of walking facilitates reverie, a travel through

time, as one is moving through space. Observations are interwoven with

recollections, temporalities are disjointed and recombined. This constant shift

between past and present is at the core of The Missing Voice, where fragments

of the past are constantly invoked by the narrator. As she goes along, the

narrator stops in a church (and invites her audience to do so as well). Inside she

is transported back to a childhood scene, in another church with her parents

51 Alÿs has long acknowledged the introspective qualities of urban walking. He played them out in the performance piece Doppelgänger (1999):

When arriving in ……. (new city), wander, looking for someone who could be you. If the meeting happens, walk beside you doppelgänger until your pace adjusts to his / hers. If not, repeat the quest in …… (new city).

The artist / performer walks in the city to find himself, or his doppelgänger, his double, as if anyone would have a double in each city, a double that would know the city, and share his or her insider knowledge with the new arrival. Following one’s doppelgänger is finding a point of reference that could be oneself, and abandon to his or her will. Some versions of the myth of the doppelgänger imply that meeting one’s double provokes death which gives to the piece an existentialist turn: looking for oneself, one’s double, one’s death.

28

and siblings: ‘my little brothers next to me [...] the sound of my father’s heavy

breathing, his tan neck rough against the white shirt’.52 This immersion in her

past could suggest that the artist / narrator is looking for the roots of her

identity.

Memories also come back through sensations. The smell of incense and feeling

of the cold wood against her legs surely take Cardiff back to her (or her

character’s) childhood memory, as quickly, if not more so than the sight of the

church, a Proustian mémoire involontaire. Walking allows collecting these

sensations. It stimulates the senses and transforms our understanding of the

present, which becomes, as Mirjam Schaub suggests, ‘the sum of all the

impressions, sensations, thoughts and memories which are active at the same

time’.53 The Missing Voice (Case Study b) draws a complex network of

recollections. Cardiff mingles what could be true memories, those of a woman

who grew up in a farm in Canada, with her character’s memories, hence

blurring the limits between her character’s quests of self with her own.

Moreover, for the listeners, all these memories are part of their present

experience; they are caught between contradicting temporalities, Cardiff’s and

their own. Finally, The Missing Voice piece encompasses the audience’s

memories. In this sense it not only invites the listener to assist at someone else’s

introspective moment, it also begins to create for them a meditative space.

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999

52 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199953 Schaub, M., 2005, p.248

29

‘Have you ever had the urge to disappear, to escape of your own life, even just

for a little while?’54 asks Cardiff of her viewer. She attempts to tease out the

desire to let go, to abandon, to stop being a cog in the well-oiled city-machine, to

vanish. This theme of disappearance is very present in literature dealing with

crowd. The flâneur ‘is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I'’ writes

Baudelaire.55 Cardiff takes on this tradition, playing out her urge to disappear, to

walk the step that separates anonymity and nothingness. In the same way the

search for one’s identity can often be interrupted by the desire to let everything

down, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) complements an active existentialist

search with a desire to lose oneself in the throng.

Urban Walking, Sexual Identity and Eroticism

If the position from which the artists interact with the city – whether insider or

insider – is important in shaping their intellectual perspectives, the role of

gender is also crucial. Chris Jenks suggests that ‘women are not at home in the

city’ and it is evident that from the start, they have been excluded of the

tradition of urban walking.56 In literature, Baudelaire and Benjamin’s flâneur

was a wealthy male, disposing of his time at leisure and not feeling endangered

anywhere in the city. This figure has also been intermingled with the Victorian

bourgeois leaving his quiet area of residence to look for a cheap thrill in

disadvantaged part of town.57 From Baudelaire to the Surrealist, the female

counterpart of the man strolling in the city is the prostitute. In Benjamin, the

woman who shares the territory of the arcade with the flâneur is a shopper.

Consumable or consumers, women are in both cases incapable of distance with

the urban commerce. Moreover, there is an understanding of the women being

in the streets to be seen, on display. They can’t be active observer, they are

there to be observed, available for the male gaze. Jenks argues it is this

understanding of women ‘performing’ for men that lead to intimidation:

‘[w]omen do not look, they are looked at. Thus in the public arena, the streets of

the city, women are prey to the harassment of male optical gratification. Women

cannot simply walk, they do not stroll, they certainly do not loiter.’58 The flâneur

54 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199955 Baudelaire, C., 1995, p.1056 Jenks, C., 1994, p.15057 Cf Walkowitz, J., 199258 Jenks, C., 1994, p.150

30

has also been criticised by feminist scholars such as Judith R Walkowitz (1992)

and Janet Wolff (1985). Wolff points out that the gendered nature of the flâneur

left literature with a gap in the knowledge of women’s experience of the modern

city. ‘There is no question of inventing the flâneuse’, she writes, ‘the essential

point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of

the nineteenth century’.59

In light of critiques such as these, the flâneur became too problematic to simply

be re-adopted by late-20th Century artists. Even Iain Sinclair, who embraced the

idea of the flâneur in his first novels and poems, repudiated it eventually in his

recent London Orbital (2002), choosing the more ‘gender-politics neutral’ image

of the man walking to escape.60

One could wonder what relevance these kinds of affirmations have in a post-

feminist society, where women are (supposedly) free from these old social

stereotypes. Moreover, it is easy to fall into a caricatured understanding of

gender difference, pretending that all men would feel comfortable anywhere

when women would constantly threatened. Yet misogynic clichés are still

embedded in popular unconscious, even, as Solnit reminds us, in the language:

‘English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women’s

walking. Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the

streets, women on the town, and public women’.61 There is still a belief that if a

woman is abducted, she is somehow herself partly culpable, and young girls are

told to be careful how they dress in order to avoid trouble. Women are made

responsible for their own security in the streets. Still today, they can feel like

prey walking in the streets, they are denied the freedom to go wherever they

feel like.62 Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study b) operates as an affirmation

of the artist’s female position in the city. So how does this piece challenge these

59 Wolff, J., 1985, p.4560 Cf Baker, B., 2003One could also argue that Sinclair abandoned the figure of the flâneur because of its link with a 19th Century understanding of the urban space. In Lights Out For the Territory he replaced the flâneur by the stalker: ‘The concept of ‘strolling’, aimless urban wandering, the flâneur has been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent –sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker as our role-model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing[…] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.’ Sinclair, Lights Out For the Territory, quoted in Coverley, M., 2006, p.12061 Solnit, R., 2001, p. 23462 ‘Two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, according to one poll, and another reported that half of British women were afraid to go out after dark lone and 40 percent were ‘worried’ about being raped.’Solnit, R., 2001, p.240

31

outdated codes of access to urban space, and perhaps of simplistic

understandings of gendered possibility?

First, Cardiff’s presence as an active observer in the streets is in itself a

perversion of the traditionally male flâneur. But she doesn’t achieve it by

mimicking masculine models. On the opposite, she encompasses women’s fears

in cities: walking alone, being followed, going missing. ‘I sometimes follow men

late at night when / I’m coming home from the tube station’, she whispers, ‘I

pick a man that’s going my way and / then stay behind him it makes me feel

safer / going through the dark tunnels to have / someone near me it’s like a

guardian angel’.63 Yet she perverts the idea of the woman-victim: in order to feel

more secure, she becomes a stalker.

Eroticism is for Cardiff a tool to re-affirm her female identity, in ‘a reaction to

art history and to our culture’s obsession with male desire’.64 For the duration of

the audio walk, the listener becomes an active participant in an almost

cinematic experience, one who willingly gives up free will and submits to

Cardiff’s authoritative voice. Almost like an erotic game in which the pleasure is

abandoning oneself to another’s will, Cardiff builds a sensual bond between

herself and her listener. The listener is then caught between the pleasure of

letting go and the panic of going astray, getting lost, hurt. Like a lover, Cardiff

demands absolute trust from her audience.

Cardiff also plays on the noir cliché of the femme fatale, both controlling and

ultra feminine, and invites the listeners into her intimate experience, her train of

thought. Not only do they surrender entirely to her will, but for the duration of

the piece, they accompany Cardiff in her constant shifting of perspective. During

the walk, Cardiff all of sudden describes a scene of abduction: ‘I’m blindfolded /

my hands tied behind me’.65 It is unclear if she is dreading an old nightmare – as

earlier she seemed to recall an actual event – or daydreaming S & M fantasies.

The listeners, like Cardiff, are altogether controlled subject and dominator,

participant and victim.

63 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199964 Christov-Bakargiev, C., 2002, p.2265 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 1999

32

Cardiff indulges in fantasies of victimisation of women, perhaps as to reclaim

her power over them. But this reclaiming of her sexuality isn’t achieved by a

direct confrontation of her body with a male audience, as in several feminist

performances of the ‘60s and ‘70s.66 Cardiff is protected by her absence. Her

body is evoked – ‘I walk naked across the floor’67 – yet it is unavailable,

mysterious, resistant to what Jen Harvie defines as ‘voyeuristic or physical

appropriation’.68 Cardiff defines another relationship between art practice and

femininity, away from its historical tendency to objectify both female subjects

and artists.

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study b), Audio Walk, 1999

Cardiff complicates the often too simplistic critical dialectic ‘woman’ / ‘male

gaze’. She endorses an authoritative voice, submits the viewer to her will, but

also admits the pleasure of being submitted. She claims the right for women to

control and enjoy their sexuality and promotes a sensual encounter with the

world. In the same way her personal / fictional memories are included in the

walk so as to weave the narrative as well as to trigger the audience’s own

recollections, Cardiff’s promotion of sensuality allows her public to reflect on

their own relationships to their bodies. Establishing an erotic tension between

her voice and her listener, she re-defines female identity. She doesn’t confront

male stereotypes but instead appropriates dominating sexual codes.

66 See for example Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) or Valie Export’s Touch Cinema (1969) where the audience was invited to have a direct contact with the artists’ bodies. 67 Ibid68 Harvie, J., 2004, p.202

33

Walking to Reinvent the City: History and Urban Myths

Constructing a Past: Cardiff, Keiller

London, as any city, is a palimpsest, constantly erased and re-written. It’s a

puzzle of historical debris, physical objects, houses, roads, monuments, each

revealing a facet of the area’s history. London is also built of phantom

landmarks: Knightsbridge, Crystal Palace, Temple. These absences continue to

mould the character of the urban. ‘The long gone King’s Cross casts a shadow so

permanent it’s like a stain with an unfixed edge’ writes Richard Wentworth.69

Yet, in the race of everyday life, one could forget these thick layers of history

and see only the latest addition, oblivious of what it’s build on. Cardiff affirms

that walking allows weaving links with the past. ‘How can one just walk over the

footsteps and not remember?’ she asks.70 Yet, what makes walking such an

appropriate way to engage with a place’s past? And, leaving Alÿs’ work aside for

the moment, what kinds of relationships with history do The Missing Voice (Case

Study b) and London offer to their audience?

In The Missing Voice (Case Study b) Cardiff evokes the scaffolding everywhere

present, the impermanence of the urban landscape especially in Spitafields area

and its accelerated gentrification. ‘I wonder if the workers ever think about

themselves as the changers of the city, the men that cover up the old stories,

making room for new ones’, she says.71 Yet, there is no condemnation in her

voice; she is observing the changes of the cities taking place under her eyes.

She counters the transience of the city by excavating the memories of the place.

She tells its legends, these scraps of facts that slowly become mythological. In a

book, Cardiff has found the history of a man living in the street where she’s

walking. He played the violin, waiting for his beloved to come back. As the

listener strolls down the street with her, string notes resonate, the ghosts of

Brick Lane re-emerging from the shadow. As we walk with Cardiff, we overhear

a guide, talking about Whitechapel when it was inhabited by a large Jewish

community. Quickly after, we listen to the Southern Asian music pouring out of

the curry houses. Cardiff combats forgetfulness, and exposes the complex

overlaying of histories. Just as personal memories contribute to the construction

69 Off-limits, 40 Artangel Projects, 2002, p.4870 Cardiff, J., The Missing Voice (Case Study b), screenplay, 199971 Ibid

34

of a sense of selfhood, the city’s memories form the core of its identity. Cardiff

guides us through its meanderings.

In London, history is even more ‘present’. ‘He was searching for the location of

memories’ says the narrator of Robinson.72 He studies emblematic figures of

British history as well as the large number of French writers that came to

London: Rimbaud and Verlaine, Mallarmé, Appolinaire. They are the landmarks

of Robinson’s cognitive mapping of the capital. The pair’s long walks are a way

to connect with its history and free from the yoke of efficient travelling, they

make themselves available to the city’s past. Robinson has a limitless knowledge

of the city and each neighbourhood brings to his mind its famous inhabitants:

Soho evokes Montaigne who used to live in Wardour St, Hammersmith William

Morris, and Strawberry Hill Horace Walpole, who wrote the first Gothic novel

The Castle of Otranto (1764). Clapham North was the theatre of Apollinaire’s

rejected love; the docks were the favourite haunt of the young Rimbaud looking

for the muse of poetry and easily available drugs. These historical figures

surround Robinson and his friend like a crowd of ghosts. Occasionally, they are

only evoked: Robinson declares Twickenham as ‘the site of the first attempt to

transform the world by looking at its landscape’.73 It is unclear if he is talking

about historical precedent or his own exercise of ‘psychic landscaping’. Only the

sign of the pub ‘Pope’s Grotto’ suggests the comment refers to Alexander Pope’s

innovative gardening and his nearby artificial grotto. Robinson seems to identify

with many renowned Londoners, seeing himself as an enlightened gentleman.

The paths his illustrious predecessors followed guide Keiller’s character through

London, allowing him to make sense of the fragmented metropolis. London

doesn’t favour any period. The characters constantly travel through history, of

which the last deeds of the Tory government would be only the latest

development.

Robinson reinvents London; he makes it in accordance to his fancies.

‘Sometimes I see the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’, he says.74

Monuments play an important role in the constitution of local myths, as they are

the marks of what a city chooses to remember, and in this sense they contribute

to shape history. As Robinson and the narrator walk, they pass by the unveiling

72 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199473 Keiller, P., London, screenplay, 199474 Ibid

35

of a statue of Arthur Harris, Bomber Command’s leader during WW2 and

responsible for the death of thousands of German civilians. This statue was

highly controversial and covered with red paint just a day after its unveiling.

Robinson answers these dubious celebrations by turning whole parts of London

into monuments: he imagines that Leicester Square is a monument to Laurence

Sterne, who came to London after the first success of Tristam Shandy (1759)

and met Hogarth and Reynolds who both lived on the square. BT Tower, close to

the location of house where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived as lovers, becomes for

Robinson a monument erected to their tempestuous relationship. This resonates

with Braco Dimitrijević’s plaques and statues dedicated to anonymous passers-

by, scattered in London by the artist in the early ‘70s. ‘John Foster lived here

from October 1961 to February 1968’ says one of them. Dimitrijević, like

Robinson in Keiller’s London sought to reassess what is usually understood as

important and worth remembering. They both acknowledge that history is above

all a constructed narrative and desire to take part in its rewriting. Yet

monuments also contribute to oblivion, relieving us from our responsibilities and

marking the beginning of a process of forgetfulness. ‘Memorials are a way of

forgetting, reducing generational guilt to a grid of albino chess pieces, bloodless

stalagmites’ writes Sinclair.75 Soon, the memorials become part of the cityscape,

present, yet invisible to the passer-by. Yet, Robinson’s monuments – because

there are only valid for himself – don’t run the risk of becoming mundane or

invisible, hence retaining their role as powerful reminders of the past.

75 Sinclair, I., 1999, p.9

36

Patrick Keiller, London, 1999, Still

Walking lets Robinson read the marks of the past, both physical and fictional.

Indeed, the past is not only communicated to us through official history and

monument, but also legends and myths. London gleefully blurs the limits

between them. Fantastic interventions are never excluded: Robinson describes

the London stone encased in the Overseas Chinese Bank Corporation’s wall in

Cannon St as the air-born vessel of a magician. Fairy-tale-like elements are

freely mingled with precise dates and events, and highlight the constructed

nature of history. According to Certeau, stories, myths and legend offer the

possibility to leave the routine, to get out and are therefore essential to make

the city habitable. ‘[T]heir extermination […] makes the city a “suspended

symbolic order” The habitable city is thereby annulled’.76 For him, history and

legends render human the incomprehensible city; looking for them is escaping

from alienation. One could argue that they could also overwhelm the newcomer.

Yet learning about local history and legends can be a way to feel part of the

place, to appropriate the unknown and in that sense stories transform the

inhospitable environment of the anonymous metropolis into a place of one’s

own. Moreover, local history and urban myths are a silent knowledge, shared

only by people ‘in the know’. They allow inhabiting a space that can’t be

monitored and function like an antidote to the panoptical city.77 Walking is

making oneself available to the marks of the place. In The Missing Voice (Case

Study b) and London it also becomes an act of remembrance.

76 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.10677 ‘There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this invert the schema of the Panopticon. […] This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on “just between you and me”.’Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.108

37

Francis Alÿs, Rumour Whisperer

Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, drawing, 2005

Certeau further argues that walking not only allows engaging with legends, but,

because it also offers a possible escape from the mundane, walking can become

a substitute for them. He writes: ‘Physical moving about has the itinerant

function of yesterday’s or today’s “superstitions” ’.78 In The Missing Voice (Case

Study b) as in London, it appears that the walks are rooted in a quest for these

stories. They don’t replace them, but are used as device to tease out the secrets

of the area. However, Alÿs’ walks seem to resonate more with Certeau’s theory:

perhaps they function as stories in themselves, inserted by the artist within the

urban fabric.

For Alÿs, walking allows the artist to intervene in a territory without modifying

it. This artistic ‘attitude’ started when Alÿs decided to leave the field of

architecture (Keiller also trained as an architect), and ‘not to add to the city, but

more to absorb what was already there, to work with the residues, or the

negative spaces, the holes, the spaces in-between’.79 Alÿs long term residence in

the saturated environment of Mexico City also contributed to this desire to

affect the city without adjoining physical objects. Alÿs refers to Seven Walks,

London as ‘a repertoire of possible scenarios which could develop in their own

way within the envelope of the walk in the city’.80 Each walk, in addition to its

real presence in the city documented by video and photographs, is also

conceived as a possible tale, which could spread around the city. ‘This ‘mythic

dimension” is interesting to me’, says Alÿs.81 His first project for London was to

spread a rumour. This would have been the development of a project instigated

78 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.10679 Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.4480 Ibid81 Ibid

38

in Mexico with the help of three local people. They started to ask about a

‘disappeared man’ and answered questions about his physiognomy. In three

days, the local police issued a poster with a ‘photo-fit portrait’ and Alÿs left

town. Even if Seven Walks, London took a somehow more tangible form, the

‘walks’ can also function as rumours. One could easily imagine that after a

certain amount of ‘word of mouth’ propagation, the works could end up as the

Evening Standard’s headlines: Fox Visits the National Portrait Gallery,

Coldstream Guards Lost in the City. ‘Maybe you don’t even need to see the

work’, suggests Alÿs ‘you just need to hear about it’.82 The work then would only

exist in the imagination of its audience. ‘What is exiled walker produces is very

precisely the legendary… it is a story’ writes Certeau.83 Walking, like talking

unravels in space and time. It can be a form of dissemination. Alÿs’ Seven Walks,

London introduces stories, almost starting points of urban myths that could be

perpetually transmitted and transformed whereas London and the Missing Voice

contribute to excavate the myths lurking in London’s streets, waiting to be

discovered and passed on.

82 Ibid83 Certeau, M. de, 1984, p.106

39

Conclusion: The Walkers in a New Urban Space

Walking is a direct way to interact with one’s surroundings. In the 19 th Century,

it was linked with a desire to observe and comprehend modernity, a way to

ground oneself in the specificity of a place. How can it be relevant in the 21st

Century?

London – like any metropolis in the world – has become gradually standardized.

The phenomenon of suburbanization has increased the distances between places

of work and places of residence. Each space is designed for a unique function: to

eat / to sleep / to work, moving away from the original design of the medieval

cities where all the human occupations were intermingled. New developments

are built up around the principle of security: reduction of public spaces, gated

areas, from which the stroller is excluded. One spends more and more time in

what Augé (1995) calls the ‘non-places’, the places of transit, airport lobbies,

cafeterias, all looking and feeling the same wherever they are on the global

map; and walking is often reduced to the bare minimum.84

21st Century modernity seems not to be characterised by places but by the

traffic between places, in new means of communications, and faster and cheaper

transport. Walking in the streets appears increasingly obsolete, even, in certain

parts of the world, ‘a sign of powerlessness or low status’ as Solnit writes.85

Solnit argues that walking is endangered, and that ‘if the city is a language

spoken by walkers, then a post-pedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks

becoming a dead language’.86 Bauman concludes that for the unfortunate who

cannot afford the security of the car, the ‘street is more a jungle than a

theatre.87 The urban stroller is said, by these theorists, to have lost his place.

Yet, London, The Missing Voice (Case Study b) and Seven Walks, London all

demonstrate the contemporaneity as well as the emergency of this practice. For

the artists (as for their characters), walking in London is first a way to engage

directly with a city on a physical level, an initial step to appropriate it. Starting

with obvious images, they gradually excavate London’s secret stories, and not

only reveal these myths but complete them with their own, building up a critique

84 Augé, M., 199585 Solnit, R., 2001, p.25386 Solnit, R., 2001, p.21387 Bauman, Z., 1994, p.148

40

and contributing to the constant re-invention of the city. In the pieces discussed,

walking in the capital is also a way to carve out of the unknown territory a space

for introspection, to inscribe a search of selfhood in the specificity of London

and to question the traditional codes of access to urban space.

Alÿs, Cardiff and Keiller’s use of urban walking is an assertion of the place

against the ‘non-place’. Urban strolling in a completely globalized city would

have no point, but the artist’s (or their character’s) walks show that if the

standardization of cities has started, it hasn’t yet taken over London. They

unveil the particularities of the city, its unique if ever-changing London-ness.

Walking creates a ground level image of the city, fragmented, subjective and

incomplete, but inhabited by the spirits, the past, the urban myths of the place.

It quietly opposes the cult of speed and efficiency and transforms an

increasingly alienating surrounding into a new space tailored to human

dimensions.

41

Bibliography

Books and Periodicals

Ackroyd, Peter, London: the biography, Vintage, London, 2001

Arriola, Magali, ‘Beaux Gestes’, Art Review, no. 10 (October, November 2005), p.111-113

Atkins, Marc and Sinclair, Iain, Liquid City, Reaktion Books, London, 1999

Augé, Marc, Non-places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London, 1995

Babin, Sylvette, ‘Artiste et Flâneur’, Dérives, esse arts + opinions, n.54, 2005http://www.esse.ca/fr/editorial_a.php?no=54[Accessed May 6 2007]

Baker, Brian ‘Maps of London Underground: Iain Sinclair and Michel Moorcock’s Psychogeography of the City’ in Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies of the representation of London, 2003 at http://www.literarylondon.org/londonjournal/march2003/baker.html[Accessed May 6 2007]

Baker, Phil ‘Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London’ in Kerr & Gibson (Eds) London, from Punk to Blair, London: Reaktion Books, 2003, p.323-333

Ballard, J.G, Crash, Vintage, London, 1995

Ballard, J.G ‘The Westway’ in Iain Sinclair (Ed.) London, City of Disappearances, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2006, p.497

Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life & Other Essays, Phaidon, London, 1995

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 2000

Bauman, Zygmunt, ‘Desert Spectacular’ in Tester, Keith (Ed.), The Flâneur, Routledge, London, 1994, p.138-157

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999

Biagioli, Monica, ‘Janet Cardiff: The Missing Voice’, Artfocus/68, Spring 2000 at http://www.artfocus.com/JanetCardiff.html[Accessed May 6 2007]

Buck, Louisa ‘Soldiers as social allegory, interview with Francis Alÿs’, The Art Newspaper, no. 162, October 2005, p.36

Cardiff, Janet, Artist Statement, 1999 Artangel archive

Carr-Harris, Ian, ‘Forever engaged in the “there” beyond the “here”’, Canadian Art, Fall 2001, p.68-75

42

Certeau, Michel, de, ‘Walking in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984, p.91-110

Clapp, Susannah, ‘Down these mean streets a playwright must go’, The Observer Review, June 20 1999

Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials, London, 2006

Davila, Thierry, Marcher, Créer, Déplacements, flânerie, dérives dans l’art du XXe siècle, Editions du Regard, Paris, 2002

Debord, Guy, The society of the spectacle, Zone Books, New York, 1994

Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year, Dent, London, 1908

Fowkes, Maja and Reuben ‘Croatian Spring: Art in the Social Sphere’ Paper given at the Tate Modern conference ‘Open System: Art C.1970’, September 2005 www.translocal.org[Accessed May 6 2007]

Fraser, Marie, ‘From Place to Non-Places, From Mobility to Immobility’ in Places and Non-Places of Contemporary Art”, Les Editions Esse, 2005, p.180-185

Hanson, Steve, ‘interview with Patrick Keiller’ in Street Signs, Spring 1994 at http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/pdf/1iss6.pdf[Accessed May 6 2007]

Harvie, Jen, ‘Being her: Presence, Absence and Performance in the Art of Janet Cardiff and Tracey Emin’ in Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Eds) Auto / biography and Identity: Women, Theatre, and Performance, Manchester University Press, 2004, p.194-216

Hodges, Mike, The Secret City, PIX 2, January 1997

Jenks, Chris, ‘Watching Your Step: the History and Practice of the Flâneur’ in Chris Jenks (Ed), Visual Culture, Routledge, London, New York, 1994

Keiller, Patrick, ‘London in the early 1990s’ in Kerr & Gibson (Eds) London, from Punk to Blair, Reaktion Books, London, 2003, p.353-361

Kerr, Joe, ‘Mapping the territory’ in Off-limits, 40 Artangel Projects, Merrell, London, 2002

Lingwood, James, ‘Rumours, A conversation between Francis Alÿs and James Lingwood’, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, 2005, p.10-56

Lyotard, Jean-François Driftworks, Semiotexte, New York, 1984

Morawski, Stephen, ‘The Hopeless Game of flânerie’ in Tester, Keith (Ed.), The Flâneur, Routledge, London, 1994, p.181-197

Musil, Robert, The Man Without Qualities, Secker & Warburg, London, 1955

43

Noord, Gerrie van (Ed.), Off-limits, 40 Artangel Projects, Merrell, London, 2002

Pearman, Hugh, ‘You’ll never walk alone’, The Sunday Times, September 18, 2005

Pinder, David, ‘Ghostly Footsteps: Voices, Memories and Walks in the City’, Ecumene 8:1 (2001), p.1-19

Poe, Edgar Allan ‘The Man of the Crowd’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales, Penguin, London, 2003

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2000

Quincey, Thomas, de, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Penguin, London, 1986

Scanner, ‘Remembering How to Forget: An artist’s Exploration of Sound’ in Leonardo Music Journal, Vol.11, 2001, p.65-69

Schaub, Mirjam, Janet Cardiff, The Walk Book, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, 2005

Shields, Rob, ‘Fancy Footwork, Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie’ in Tester, Keith (Ed.), The Flâneur, Routledge, London, 1994, p.61-79

Sinclair, Iain, Lights Out for the Territory, Granta Books, London, 1999

Sinclair, Iain, ‘London: Necropolis of fretful ghosts’, Sight and Sound, June 1994, p.13-15

Simmel, Georg, ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950

Solnit, Rebecca Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Verso, 2001

Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few, Abacus, London, 2005

Tester, Keith (Ed.), The Flâneur, Routledge, London, 1994

Toop, David, ‘Sound Passing Through Circumstances’, Seven Walks, London, 2005, p.63-69

Verhagen, Marcus, ‘Nomadism’, Art Monthly, no.300, November 2006, p.7-10

Walkowitz, Judith R, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Virago, London, 1992

Watkins, Alfred, The Old Straight Track, Abacus, London, 1970

44

Wolff, Janet, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ in Theory Culture and Society, vol.2 No.3, 1985, p.36-46

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway, Penguin Books, London, 1996

Wrathall, John, ‘Profile: Patrick Keiller’, Blueprint no. 158, February 1999, p. 10-11

Wright, Patrick, ‘A conversation between Patrick Wright and Patrick Keiller’ Robinson in Space Reaktion Books, 1999

Yates, Robert, ‘London’ Sight & Sound, June 1994, p.54-5

Exhibition Catalogues

Braco Dimitrijević, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 1979

Faces in the Crowd, picturing Modern Life from Manet to today, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Torino 2005

Open City, Street Photography since 1950, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 2001

Diez Cuadras Alrededor del Studio / Walking Distance From the Studio, Francis Alÿs, texts by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Interview by Corinne Diserens, published for the exhibition: Everything I saw, heard, found, did or undid, understood or misunderstood, Walking distance of the Studio in the Historical Center of Mexico City / Todo lo que vi, escuché, encontré, hice o deshice, entendí, Diez Cuadras Alrdedor Del Studio en el Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2006

Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, London, 2004-5, Artangel, London, 2005

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice, (case study b), Artangel Afterlives, London, 1999

Janet Cardiff, A Survey of Works Including Collaboration with George Bures Miller, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, 2002

Filmography

Keiller, Patrick, London, BFI, London, 1994

Keiller, Patrick, Robinson in Space, Reaktion Books, London, 1999

45

46