The International Journal of Arts Theory and History

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Literary Meanderings: A Quantum Leap in Space Travel


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1 New York University, United States
     

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Walter Benjamin thought of Baudelaire's literary flaneur as an object of scopic transaction in a sightplay - to see and be seen, voyeur and exhibitionist, the city as stage. Guy Debord took the practice a step further: to walk without aim was now an artistic practice to be labeled Situationism and mapped according to "psychogeographical" coordinates. If we take a further leap, we find ourselves on a bus with Robert Smithson, on a September morning in 1967, destination: El Passaic, New Jersey. After Smithson's scrutiny, that industrial landscape, converted into a great display of monuments, would never be the same again. Finally, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, 2011, Spain, visually and literally recreates Smithson's steps in his narrative El Hacedor (de Borges), Remake, where he incorporates geospatial technologies. In this paper, I trace the artistic practices that revolve around the praxis of derive throughout these differentiated cultural paradigms. We will see how walking aimlessly, having begun as a metaphor for the journey of the political gaze, has finally transcended man's gravitational state in order to become the panopticon eye that Google Earth has created with the magic wand of a click.

Keywords

Flaneurism, Situationism, Derive, Psychogeography, Internet, Google Earth, Rhyzome.
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  • Baudelaire Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. New York: Da Capo Press, 1964.

  • Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-2003.

  • Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London, NLB: 1973.

  • Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999.

  • Fernandez Mallo, Agustin. El hacedor (de Borges), Remake. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011.

  • Kingsbury, Paul. "Walter Benjamin's Dionysian adventures in Google Earth." Geoforum 40(2009): 502-513.

  • Knnab, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995.

  • Kuppers, Petra. "Moving in the Cityscape: Performance and the Embodied Experience of the Flaneur." In Performance and the City. Edited by Nicolas Whybrow. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

  • Smithson, Robert. "The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic Replaced Rome as the Eternal City?" Artforum, v.6, no. 4 (December 1967): 48-51.

  • Solnit Rebecca. Wanderlust. A History of Walking. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001.


Abstract Views: 367

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  • Literary Meanderings: A Quantum Leap in Space Travel

Abstract Views: 367  |  PDF Views: 8

Authors

Marta del Pozo Ortea
New York University, United States

Abstract


Walter Benjamin thought of Baudelaire's literary flaneur as an object of scopic transaction in a sightplay - to see and be seen, voyeur and exhibitionist, the city as stage. Guy Debord took the practice a step further: to walk without aim was now an artistic practice to be labeled Situationism and mapped according to "psychogeographical" coordinates. If we take a further leap, we find ourselves on a bus with Robert Smithson, on a September morning in 1967, destination: El Passaic, New Jersey. After Smithson's scrutiny, that industrial landscape, converted into a great display of monuments, would never be the same again. Finally, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, 2011, Spain, visually and literally recreates Smithson's steps in his narrative El Hacedor (de Borges), Remake, where he incorporates geospatial technologies. In this paper, I trace the artistic practices that revolve around the praxis of derive throughout these differentiated cultural paradigms. We will see how walking aimlessly, having begun as a metaphor for the journey of the political gaze, has finally transcended man's gravitational state in order to become the panopticon eye that Google Earth has created with the magic wand of a click.

Keywords


Flaneurism, Situationism, Derive, Psychogeography, Internet, Google Earth, Rhyzome.

References