Graduate Thesis

From the introduction:

The roles afforded the walking wanderer in modern life can be contradictory. As a free-roaming viewer the walker is the embodiment of the Enlightened empirical individual, dependent on none, free to look and not be seen. This traditionally male figure is also, however, able to subversively or romantically dissent against modern ways of life. The wanderer has been the place of both bohemian and aesthete, of rogue and dandy, of terrorist and scientist. It facilitates both the objective view of the surveyor and the subjective reflections and desires of the shopper or thief.

If with Marshall Berman we take Marx's manifesto as a model for Modernist art practice , the pursuit of such contradictions may be what attracts the artist to this role in the first place. In Marx's account of the revolutionary cycles of modern capitalism, the artist becomes an ambiguously tragic figure who truthfully carries the ideals of a culture to their bitter end, drunk on the power, the thrill and desire of the act. The artist alone is able to carry out to the fullest modernity's conflicted desires to hold both the new and the old, the material and the immaterial, the sacred and the profane. Such a mission, though seemingly unavoidable, has proved itself destructive to the artist and everyone else time and again. At the end of his wild-eyed car race through the city, Marinetti winds up crashed in a ditch. Recent feminist critiques have revealed how those at the other end of the walker's gaze fare little better.

Artists of the past century have placed themselves in this paradoxical role with all manner of intentions, hopeful or desperate. I will add my proposition to the lot, a proposition explored at this seminal site of modernist art practice, the walker on the street. Unlike the flaneur, I will reveal my presence as an observer, making available an encounter with the observed. Yet this encounter will not attempt a Utopian community of two; it will retain isolation and strangeness. The encounter will rely on the function of the artist as mime of the world, reporting on the marginalia of the streets. Yet my report will be in real time, on the spot, to others who move through the site of observance. This report will be posed informationally, but as information that is heard, not seen, and delivered to the ears of bodies in transit. In the pages to follow, through describing and contextualizing this project I will provide a more detailed account of the discussion into which I wish to enter; and I will also introduce what new I have to offer to the conversation.