psychogeography

Why I have never come across anything on psychogeography before is beyond me. It seems like something that might have come up in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (a book by David Abram on phenomonology--how our experiences are linked to our surroundings). Perhaps I wasn't quite ready to put it all together, but this definitely helps me do just that. For the longest time I've been interested in time and place and memory and our circuitous experiences, the webs of time and space that slide together and apart in each of us at every moment, inextricably linking our inner worlds to our surroundings. And landscape painting seemed the most natural place for me to start expressing my experiences, but it honestly never felt quite true enough because it was not wide enough in scope. My landscape paintings do not in and of themselves call up the links that go off in my mind--memories, intellectual knowledge--though they can communicate emotion and a sense of place. This is what I want to start communicating--these links, the webs that I am pulling together.

What floors me is that all of this is based on urban rather than rural explorations. I have a tendency to wander, but almost always in a rural place, and this brings up a fundamentally different experience. While a flaneur is able to claim anonymity, (and therefore a lack of responsibility for his actions) because of the mass of people within a city, wandering about the countryside is a very different experience. When in the woods or walking by fields, I am often the only one there, and therefore a degree of self-awareness is involved. There is nowhere to hide, and I become responsible for my actions. My actions have meaning for my surroundings whether I want them to or not. In terms of modernism//post-modernism this is an ironic division. The concept of the wandering flaneur who claimed anonymity became a popular thing to explore in a time when the avant garde was very important--when individuals were meant to make a difference and be overthrowing the norm. In my rural wanderings, I am exposed and aware of the effects of my actions--I cannot help but affect my surroundings--and this is in a time when anyone can say anything in art (and elsewhere, such as here on the internet), and so we have nearly lost our capacity to create meaning and affect anyone as a result.


Here are a few key quotes that resonated with me from Wikipedia's entry, "Psychogeography":

"The sectors of a city…are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents". -Guy Debord, A Critique of Separation (1961)

Perhaps I'm interested in starting to document some of this web of experience in order to share the truths of what I have lived and am living.



"People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty." -Marx, quoted by Guy Debord

A truth--that we can only experience life from within ourselves, and yet we are made up of everything that is outside of us. Time and space are singing us as much as we are singing them.



“In discovering a small world we discover the whole world.” -Bill Humber

macrocosm//microcosm
universal laws//personal narratives