Challenging Capitalistic Spacial Experience
Preface:
Driving through the urban center of Lake Tahoe- one of the greatest natural gems of California- I was disturbed by shiny-ness of everything around me. I was told to BUY BUY BUY here and GO GO GO here and to STOP STOP STOP there. This is the “natural” order and organization of urban spaces, yet it never struck me until it was placed in such stark contrast and juxtaposed with the “un-programmed” and unplanned nature of the Lake.
To me, these commercial streets were a performance and demonstration of what I should be, and what I was not. Beautiful people dressed in the latest trendy outfits draped on their beach bodies strolling to the coolest and most expensive restaurants hand in hand with their significant others. Looking through the glass I couldn’t take my eyes off of this vision of perfection that I could neither touch nor experience for myself.
It had worked. The spacial design, organization, and presentation of these streets had effectively convinced me that this was the way to experience not only this space, but also this entire area of land and body of water and everything it had to offer. This is what every block of every city is aiming to do in a capitalist state.
It is not a requirement to be in nature in order to be able to define spacial experience- we can just as well redefine it.
The work above (which does not have a confirmed artist but is quite possibly a piece by Guy Debord) is a psycho-geographical map of Paris. Psychogeography offers a an alternative way by which is understand, document, interact with and ultimately experience space. It allows us to take places that someone else- an architect, a businessman, a politician, etc has tried to tell us how it must be used- and instead create our own method, or “map” of how to do so. It asks for multiple, personal and intimate contributions of individuals to collect experiental data and recreate what we might have take for granted or accepted as truth. Such methods of experience have been discussed by Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place — The Perspective of Experience which offers new approachs to understanding physical spaces by going beyond the functional, quantifiable, and scientific and mathematical perspectives on them. Thus, Tuan these traditional notions by allowing for the complex, the imperfect, and the psychological qualities of the human perspective to take center stage in understanding space and place.
The work itself is representative of this idea because it literally is the decoupage and collage of a very quantitative, linear, and “objective” tool of spacial documentation and understanding- a map. It offers new paths and relationships between parts of the city with the red arrows drawing the viewer to considered what the places they connect might have in common or in conversation with each other. It rearranges the geography, placing spaces that were previously far from each other, right next to one another to create new neighborhoods, streets, and islands. It feels and looks like the project of a detective drawing a red string from all the pieces of his unsolvable puzzle- it is the mapping of a mind and its inner workings. Tuan describes this as how a child begins to put together all of the pieces of the spaces around them into a “circumambrient space”- a sort of extropolation. This work is an embodiment and a physical manifestation of this process of learning- and the human mind attempting to put together the information it receives from all of its senses.
Debord was a founder of the Situationist International, a group of artists and political theorists firmly against the ideas of functionality and dictated purpose propelled by capitalism. This map is thus also highly political and a challenge to the idea of moving through spaces by inertia and predetermined purpose. It asks us to make a “spectacle” out of strolling through Paris and being aware of and questioning our surroundings — to push us to experience life for pleasure and desire.
