October 3, 2005
"Where is home?"
“Actually, all visitors and all newcomers are tourists. So are many who have lived in a place for years” (Lippard 4). I find this statement to be painstakingly accurate. When often asked, “where is home?”, I give the standard response of “well, I was born in South Carolina.” However, I feel as if I am and will always be a tourist, because I feel somewhat disconnected to the United States. As a African-American female navigating through the unique experience of being both of African ancestry and engulfed in the American experience, I find that neither place is home for me. Aware of my past, I feel that my American experience is adaptive. The imminent presence of “othering” resides with me, indelibly embedded on the surface of my brain. Some might say that the United States is my home, because I was born and raised here, however, I often wonder what it would have been like if my ancestors had not been involuntarily displaced, if I had been allowed to be raised in Africa. This deepens my internal conflict more so, for I do not feel entirely connected with Africa as “home” either. It seems as if my plight is one in which I remain suspended in the proverbial liminal space, neither here nor there. This is not entirely melancholic or a complete loss, because it opens a realm of possibilities.
In light of the fact that I do not identify with a “home” here in this earthly realm, I find hope in a heavenly paradise. This spiritual concept does not seem to neatly fit in the theories within tourist studies. Upon death and the afterlife, I seek to reach Heaven, Paradise. “Paradise is a place where all your needs are met effortlessly. Paradise is a place where you are not allowed to feel pain” (Drexler in Lippard, 6). This is what I imagine Heaven to be like. When here, I will have crossed over through the realm of liminality and entered a real and eternal home. I will not feel as if I am a tourist, and will know that this is where I belong.
Posted by Michelle Brown at 2:54 PM
October 2, 2005
Leah responds to Lippard
In her introduction to the book On the Beaten track: Tourism, Art and Place, Lucy Lippard comments that “every place is both local and foreign.” (p. 2) This dichotomy, and its tensions, are particularly evident in the phenomenon of domestic travel, the focus of this book. In her final chapter, Lippard notes that “History, created and recreated, is the mother-lode of tourism. (The other extreme – recreation, with its emphasis on immediate gratification – is its greatest, and perhaps generational, rival.) (p. 154) The “history” of a given tourist site and/or the experience it offers serve to attract tourists but also change the locale itself, which is reconfigured around the desire to attract tourists and provide them with the resources that enable such tourism. Much of this activity is economic in nature – local economies shift in order to serve the visitors. But the history presented is also packaged and produced for tourists, leaving locals with a version of their home that is also transformed, perhaps even foreign. Likewise the contemporary experience of a place may be altered. One can imagine the residents of Santa Fe and Maine, noted by Lippard, grumbling to themselves that “It wasn’t always like this.”
Tourism changes both the tourist and the location (p.5), transforming both. Art has the same capacity for transformation, but artistic works, rather than showcasing a commercial representation of a particular place, often seek to interpret or comment on the experience itself, even subverting or upending the conventional understanding of how a particular tourist experience “works.” Artists may be freed from the expectation of providing for tourists and allowed to subvert the “truth” presented. One of the most powerful examples of this upending is the exhibition “Mining the Museum” in which Fred Wilson worked within the tropes of museology to highlight the untold narrative which underscores the conventional history of the objects displayed, in particular as regards the reality of slavery which was a critical element of the American “way of life” on display at the Maryland Historical Society. The work by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” similarly plays with proscribed notions of exhibition. Tourists, however, may be turned off by encountering unexpectedly such subversive takes, particularly at a site that itself is regarded as “historical” rather than “institutional” in nature. (Lippard herself plays with tropes in a similar way, reading thrift stores and similar settings as “informal museums” that are different in feeling due to being liberated from the formality of the institution.)
To some extent artists provide a critical perspective, one that tourists may not want to engage in or that may be unsettling, even objectionable to local forces that wish to maintain the tourist structures as they are, for economic or other reasons. How and when do the two manage to consonantly co-exist and when they do, what seems to account for it? The example of Jane Greengold’s “Scenic Overlook,” (pp. 140 – 141) which both mock and promote the sites depicted, is notable for peaking (pun intended) the interest of the Prospect Parks Alliance. The criticality that Lippard’s artistic examples manage to inculcate reminds me of the philosophical stance (or educational purpose) often taken by educators who advocate for media education that teaches students to be critical viewers of everyday mass media. In a similar vein, the message here might be “do not simply believe what you see.” This may be easier to accomplish in regards to sites that have already attained a quality of “kitsch,” (relic Hollywood film sets, Disneyworld and Mount Rushmore come to mind) but more difficult with sites such as the ones profiled in the essay “Tragic Tourism.”
The examples given here are generally more sober in their relationship to the events that occurred at the site. I imagine that the form of critique that might be allowed would relate more to the social ills attributed to causes of the tragic events rather than a questioning of the events themselves. To add another layer to this discussion, the “Ground Zero” that is the World Trade Center site would have been an interesting example to include, given the debates that have raged not only over the actual usage of the site but also over what artistic institutions would be considered “good citizen tenants” of the site.
Janet Cardiff’s piece, “Her Long Black Hair,” invites participants on an audio tour of Central Park. While the piece utilizes the park extensively, in many ways it is the experience itself which is sculpted and the site itself which is subsidiary. Cardiff’s recorded narration includes memories, conversations, serendipitous events, instructive “exercises,” historical information, associations and allusions. I began the experience feeling somewhat unsettled that the recording prevented me from attending to the actual sounds in the environment – something that I as a native New Yorker do more vigilantly than I often consciously realize. Instead my walk was shaped by the sounds, authentic to the environment, organized and placed by the artist. I soon realized that I was so attuned to her comments that I had few or no thoughts of my own. As I reflected on this wrinkle in the experience I came to see that that seemed to be precisely the point – to experience a recreation of her experience: to walk in her footsteps, listen to her thoughts, follow her quest, and ultimately breathe her breath. The piece ultimately reflects the internal world of a human being experiencing the physical world at any given moment: with a jumble of thoughts, knowledge, activities and goals; her narration is peppered with “digressions” that are inspired by sights, sounds, interactions and memories.
The seemingly personal nature of the Cardiff is reminiscent of Lippard’s work as well; the sites that Lippard writes about reflect her experiences and predilections both as a local and as a tourist. Some of her passages are associative in a way similar to Cardiff’s work. Both mix personal reflection with artistic construction, individual impressions with serious observation and historical information. And both therefore end up reflecting the potential experience of either the “host” or “guest” in any given tourist interaction. Perhaps the blurring of these roles is part of the possibility of a “progressive tourism” in which the commonality of experience in the moment, rather than the inequality of participants’ varying roles, serves as the basis for more “authentic” exchange. Lippard’s informal tours of Santa Fe might be one example, albeit a relatively “unproduced” one. Programs such as Big Apple Greeters, in which “natives” serve as official but not professional “hosts,” might also point in this direction, especially in unscripted or unexpected moments. I wonder how one can create “tours” that allow for more interaction and exchange along these lines.
Note: I chose the term “participant” because “viewer” and “listener” seemed wholly inadequate, while “visitor” seemed too constructed.
Posted by BKG at 8:10 PM
Transcendental Experiences
Lucy Lippard was not the first person to notice the similarities of tourism and art. In “Surprise Packages,” Lippard writes “[n]othing is more Surrealist than tourism” (34).
James Clifford noted that early French ethnography was equal parts art-collecting and tourism. The aim of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission (1932), the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, led by Marcel Griaule accompanied by artists and writers, was to collect primitive art the for the Musée de l'Homme. The rituals of modernist travel and modernist art spectatorship both require the viewer to share a conventional bourgeoisie gaze. In both, a disinterested contemplation of the “Other,” to produce a transcendent aesthetic experience meant to access mystical realms of value and a deeper understanding of the hidden nature of the self.
Lippard also compares the disorienting juxtapositions produced by people seeking experiences outside their ordinary life to the practice of Dadaists well as contemporary artists who make interventions into dominant ways of looking through performative art that is intended to criticize and defamiliarize the unfamiliar. Ironically, tourism itself, which is intended to produce a temporary self-critical alienation, is criticized in the praxis of artists whose intention is to do the same. “Seduction and Hyperbole,” for example, focuses on artists who make feminist critiques of tourism. “Exhibitionism” and “Crossroads Everywhere: Cultural Tourism” are articles that deconstruct Museum exhibitions and Cultural tourism that highlight the disparities between the class of people who hold the intended role of viewer, and those who are not welcome on site (in spite of the legitimating ideologies that support these practices –of the democratization of culture and of multi-cultural encounters).
We observe this in both the work of Marcel Proust, as well as the expedition. Janet Cardiff’s tour unites the experience of art, travel, and life using strategies so similar to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, I can only consider it a homage to the modernist masterpiece. The narrator’s experience, memories, and narratives about another man’s experience explore the dialogue between embodied experiences and those constructed in the intellect, which must be combined in the appreciation of art, travel, and love. In the novel, Marcel notes that as a child he did not properly enjoy trips to distant lands until he learned to cultivate an informed anticipation for the site. His musings on art appreciation and love similarly suggest all aesthetic pleasure requires a cultivation of a dramatic transcendental experience through the embodied experience of something outside the Self.
I the tradition of Minimalist sculpture –I guess --Cardiff’s narrative at times forces us into an acknowledgement of the coevalness of ourselves as spectators with the objecthood of the things in our surroundings. Her directions force us to experience the physicality of the sites in a concentrated and deliberate manner. This experience, however is complicated and confounded by her use of narrative to take us at times far away from the existential relationship with the park, and at times deeper into this experience, but deeper in the sense that we are looking at the sties that have been newly invested with alien meanings.
Cardiff weaves a number of what at times seem banal narratives into the walking experience whose leitmotifs develop similar themes of how we have aesthetic experience. We at times enter the story of an unknown woman, are lead to understand the historical significance of a spot, are forced to subject different areas to an extended meditative gaze (and informed that the park was designed with ideals of modern landscape painting in mind, in case we did not properly enjoy a romantic landscape), even to breath at the appropriately leisurely rate. Like Proust, Cardiff forces us to recognize that memory makes a site significant; often the memory is not one’s own. While aesthetic experiences are experienced individually, they are presumably universal experiences (so long as we belong to the class of people cultivated enough to experience universal experiences). The story of Eurydice invokes the themes of memory and disciplined experience. Enjoying sites properly –whether on tour or in the museum, requires us to stay on the beaten path.
Speaking of other people’s stories and the significance of sites, and the relationship of art and tourism, I’ve posted an image of a painting of the spot Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting my art school buddy recently sold to Charles Saatchi (who also bought a painting of the place Hugh Grant was arrested for “lewd conduct” with a prostitute). Would you pay for this photo or to pass by this site on a tour?
Dwayne Moser "Untitled Backdrop" (site of Winona Ryder shoplifting arrest, 12/14/01) 2002
Acrylic on muslin
6' x 11'1"
Posted by Pilar Rau at 7:59 PM | TrackBack
Encounters with Dark Tourism
Having always had an ambivalent and uneasy relationship toward what Lippard calls tragic tourism, I was very interested in her discussion of dark “tourist targets.”(118) Growing up I lived about a three-hour drive from Auschwitz. In a landscape from which the Jewish presence had been almost completely obliterated, there are few markers of a culture that until recently had been an integral part of Poland. I had often wandered around decrepit synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, untouched for years except for the neo-Nazis whose painted swastikas served as raw reminders of anti-Jewish sentiment. These wound-sites, have a strange status, hidden from view yet not completely destroyed. In these forgotten spaces I could wander alone or sit and think in silence, unobstructed. It was in these spaces that I felt rooted, connected to the past that, although talked about in history books and classes, had no material visibility. Auschwitz on the other hand was a different matter. Ethical dilemmas paralyzed my agency to make a decision about whether or not to go. Yet, as it turned out I didn’t have to make a choice.
One night my friend and I were on a train headed for Budapest. As part of our alternative tourism project, one of which axioms was not to spend any money on transportation (this was at once an absolute requirement since we wanted to travel but had no money and a revolt against imposed restrictions on our freedom of movement), we were traveling for free i.e. we hadn’t bought train tickets. Most times we managed to get away with a free train rain, but this night we ran out of luck. The conductor had the train stop and made us get out into a vast and empty countryside in the dead of winter. We wandered around trying to find a road. With no sense of direction we walked, finally coming upon a road which we followed. The road was unlit and unmarked. We were avid hitchhikers but walking for what seemed like hours we did not encounter one car. Finally, we saw a sign ahead of us. Our relief at having found some indication of our whereabouts was dispelled as soon as we were able to make out the words: Oświęcim (Auschwitz).
Years later I did make the conscious choice to visit Auschwitz, but it was much different than this first encounter. That winter night it was so dark we could not make out much of the concentration camp and this made our experience all the more horrific. We did not have the safety of seeing the markers which frame and contain the horror. Also, we did not have the comfort of leaving. We wanted to run but couldn't not knowing if we'd be running to or from. The bitter cold and cloak of darkness, which rendered the place abstract and sinister, forced us to experience and ponder the horror of this site.
One of the things that Lippard touches on which is so crucial but often missing in sites of tragic tourism is a connection to the present. Memorials to the dead, massacre sites are constructed to leave one with a feeling of guilt, powerlessness, and deep pessimism about humanity. Lippard suggests the potential of making connections with current events. Through strategic intervention it is possible to create a connection to the present not only on a local but also global level. People ask about the Holocaust: “How could people let this happen?” Yet there are genocides taking place right now and somehow we still let them happen. Tragic tourism is a site of potential intervention through drawing of lines between historic atrocities and current social and political activism.
Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 4:51 PM
Theme Tours
In On the Beaten Track, Lucy R. Lippard employs a rather post-modernist point of view to read tourism. In “The Tourist at Home,” Lippard remarks that “the local is defined by its unfamiliar counterpart.”(13) Such remark makes us aware of the problematic presumption of the clear distinction between the tourists and the locals, and the separation of them. In fact, the locals, compared with the so-called tourists, are people who are relatively familiar with the area. Therefore, due to their negligence and indifference to the surroundings, the locals, in some cases, might be equally unfamiliar with the area as the tourists. The domestic tourism is a kind of tourism which allows the locals to re-familiarize themselves with the familiar, the things that taken for granted.
In the introductory chapter, Lippard suggests that tourism is ever-changing and can never be settled. By citing David Harvey, she claims that “tourism is about becoming rather than being.” The locals change over time as they interact with the environment as well as with tourists (14).
In her book, Lippard also draws readers’ attention to the impact of tourism, which she describes as a “mixed blessing” (22). Though “economically positive,” the drawbacks of the cultural and economic aspects could be depleting and devastating to the locale. As Lippard contends, tourism could result in “internal colonialism.”
In the chapter on cultural tourism (or “arts and heritage tourism”), Lippard remarks that cultural tourism operates on three fronts, namely, arts tourism, history tourism, and ethnotourism (72). I am interested in what she defines as “special interest” tourism, which is a genre of tourism that directs to the interest of certain group of people. She cites the “theme tours of America” designed by Japanese as an example. These theme tours are “based on their favorite books, such as Anne of Green Gables and Gone with the Wind,” and especially designed for book fans.
I personally read such tours as parallels of Korean Soap Opera Tours for their direct references to fictions. I think these tours demonstrate the constructiveness of tourism and how the consumers indirectly make the travel agencies to offer tours whose itineraries mainly based on the narrative line of the stories and fictional characters. There is (or maybe was) a kind of tours whose theme revolve around a Chinese classic novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and its author, Tsao Xue-Chin. Similar to the soap opera tours, the itinerary of The Dream of the Red Chamber tours are designed to cover the “authentic” sites, on which the significant scenes in the novel took place. However, unlike Korean soap opera, The Dream of the Red Chamber tours put great emphasis on the biographical facts of the author and include important locales of the author’s background and/or of the author’s writing this novel. In this sense, the novel tours have a strong historical and cultural background, of which the soap opera tours are void.
There are definitely other differences between Chinese classical novel tours and Korean soap opera tours. Nevertheless, in this moment I wish to focus on their commonalities. By citing this theme tour that take/took place in China, I want to raise the question of the construction of itineraries. I wonder whether the designs of the tours are meant to stir tourists’ emotions and/or to fulfill tourists’ expectations. Is tourism an art of the manipulation of minds?
Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 4:26 PM
In Paris
I am in Paris and the blog format of our responses compels me to write this as a diary like entry that relates my travel observations to readings past and present. I am here for only two days and I came predominantly to visit a friend, not to see any sites. However, since I don't live in Paris nor have I spent any significant time in Paris, I currently qualify as a tourist.
I spent last night with an American friend who lives in Paris. I arrived serendipitously on a special evening called Nuit Blanche, when the entire city stays open all night so residents can travel in groups from location to location to observe special arts and music installations. The streets were packed. I was in a group that included a mix of Parisian residents: ex pats, Italians and French. “Museum going is for most a “foreign” experience, so the consumer tends to be a tourist whether or not s/he lives elsewhere” (Lippard, 90). Applying this to a sort of outdoor museum, Parisian residents transformed into tourists making pilgrimage throughout the city and just as they turned into tourists, my tourist status was rendered anonymous.
The installations were not phenomenal. One, for example, involved entering a crowded room that turned out to be a religious sanctuary with pews. Viewers sat in these pews in the dark with organ music playing. The point of visual interest was a small crucifix figurine modeled by neon lights and shadows where one would normally find a religious leader. According to Lippard, “even art museums are de-spiritualized when they become tourist destinations rather than inner sanctums of high culture” (Lippard, 64). As a constructed religious space, the tourists in this instance brought the spirituality to the room by performing as participants in a religious setting. Without the tourist viewers, the spiritual space would’ve remained empty and devoid of spiritual energy.
Another installation involved the transformation of a Hotel Particuliers (old homes of aristocrats) into a bonfire space. Organized as a circle with viewers surrounding the site, gigantic bread loaves lit from the inside were suspended over a bonfire of disco balls and charcoal sticks. Interest came more from what was happening around the installation than the installation itself. Some viewers made funny faces, some shared sarcastic comments with me in English, and some started to embrace in dramatic positions while their friends photographed them in front of the disco balls. Lippard writes, “when an emotionally riveting site is visited with a crowd, the surrounding company can be a turn-off or a turn-on” (Lippard, 122). As a group, reactions are contagious. In this instance there appeared to be a viewer consensus that the site was lighthearted and comical. Considering the activities that usually take place around a bonfire, I believe this is consistent with the artist’s goals as well as consistent with the community building process at work within Nuit Blanche at large.
Despite the limitations of the art and despite the fact the artwork was not specifically related to tourism, the space between art and tourism, resident and tourist all converged to reveal interesting correlations between viewer (looking at art), participant (migrating en masse in the dark streets of Paris), and tourist (viewing the participants). What took place last night was a community event, something that brought the city out of their homes and onto the streets participating as a group in the physical act of touring and the visual act of witnessing. Why were tourist practices of migration, view, and documentation (via photography) employed for the purpose of community building for those in the know, when typically this process is reserved for strangers in an unknown environment? Was the tour really about the art or did it take a secondary role to the tourism involved?
When I checked out of my hotel, the desk man offered me an International Tribune put out by the New York Times. While I waited for the train I glanced at the front page and couldn’t help but notice that it was riddled with stories relevant to the issues we grapple with. Next to a small bit about Austrian apprehension towards allowing Turkey into the EU for fear of the already present tourism escalating to mass migration, there was an article about the tourist targeted bombing in Indonesia. Published in 1999, Lippard’s statements on the “dangers of ordinary tourism escalating” (Lippard, 134) seem ominously forecasting of an increasingly violent trend that further elucidates the complex dynamics involved in tourist relationships as well as the power struggles.
Power was a central theme in Lippard’s book. Many of the artist examples given looked at some form of power play taking place whether it related to institutional power, national power, or individual power attempts. Artists highlight power systems and often point out where masses of man have erred. When something becomes as pervasive as tourism there is bound to be some errors and several power systems for artists to articulate. Power, desire, beauty……the recurring use of these words is something I would like to look at further. For my personal focus, I am particularly interested in what Lippard wrote about artists’ use of photography and postcards to comment on the power relationships involved. I would like to incorporate a visual element to my final project and will develop a postcard series based on how Sepharad ’92 would be represented if documented as a postcard.
Posted by Erin Madorsky at 2:51 PM
The art of construction and deconstruction
Lucy R. Lippard introduces tourism as “an emptying out, a void of daily experience and responsibility” (8), which sometimes transforms into a “critical”, thought-provoking experience. It is this transformation that inspires Lippard; she incorporates two new aspects into the analysis of tourism, ‘time’ and ‘art’ in order to explore how certain tourist productions “shakes up our belief and value systems and opens us up” (4).
The author points out that “by definition, tourism is about going “away”; time is as good a destination as space” (159). Indeed, Lippard’s tourists often time travel, revisiting the past they are all part of in one way or another. The main focus of “On the Beaten Track” is domestic tourism (2); and she analyzes tourism “from the perspective of places ‘visited’” (22), places that were established to exhibit and preserve the past, such as museums, antique shops and memorial sites. At the same time, Lippard, as an artist, is interested in finding (and defining) the artist in tourist productions, exploring “the role progressive artists might play in facilitating, even creating a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry” (11). As a result, after studying different sides and topics of tourism, Lippard concludes each chapter by examining artists’ responses and comments on the analyzed tourist phenomenon.
‘Past’ and ‘art’ are the most effective forces in identity-formation; therefore the ultimate subject of Lippard’s analysis is identity-formation by/in tourist productions. The author’s investigation touches upon the general subject of “the quality of life”, “social change” (34) and “identity formation” (128) and how “regional local identity is falsified or diluted” (83). However, Lippard fails to present how artists’ work in the tourist industry can shape contemporary society.
The artists and art works Lippard uses as examples mostly criticize the weaknesses and ignorance of tourist industry. Their primary aim is to ‘deconstruct’. Although Lippard points out that “construction will involve some deconstruction” (32), she rarely incorporates construction into her analysis. Therefore, I was challenged to find art works, in which artistic and social construction was the primal aim instead of commenting on the prevalent tourist industry.
The best example I found was ‘The Gates’ by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which took place this winter in Central Park. Although the construction of ‘The Gates’ involved the concrete deconstructive and constructive features Lippard depicts in the case study on the creation of a tourist site in Maine, this is not what I would like to focus on. My aim is to point out the social significance a tourist attraction may acquire. Under ‘The Gates’ social/racial/political and geographical differences were suspended; we all stood there mesmerized, tourists and locals, black and white, classy businessmen in suit and tie, and the workers of the streets and the subway in their own class-marking uniforms. One could see uptown school classes as well as groups of children from the kindergartens of Harlem all around drawing; attempting to conceive the inconceivable.
Examining memorial sites, Lippard touches upon sites, which remind nations of crimes they committed in the past. The primary focus of her analysis is to reveal local people’s reaction to these “memories of shameful events” (128). I would like to expand Lippard’s idea and point out the artists’ responsibility in the formation of the historical past and national identity.
The glory of the past is often the basis of national identity in Eastern European countries. Those small nations cannot “afford” to have any stigmas, stains or dirt in their idealized idea of the nation – anything that could ruin the perfect ‘picture’. Therefore, it is only the artist who has the power and the tools (often within the realm of tourism) to modify these distorted self-images. The state have to acknowledge the crimes of the past on a political level, but the artists can help the people through their work to ‘digest’ such responsibilities, ensuring that the ‘national identity’ is reconstructed instead of deconstructed.
Lucy R. Lippard touches upon several different themes and tourist/social phenomena; however, she rarely explores them in their full complexity. The rest relies on us. “Every tourist is an involuntary artist (…) and every artist is an involuntary tourist.” (137) Lippard’s implication is that every one of us shares the responsibilities that she contributes to the artists; the facilitation, even creation of “a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry” (11).
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 2:45 PM
Alma Guzman responds
Not afraid to bad-mouth the tourist while still acknowledging her role as a tourist, Lucy Lippard presents the artist to the tourist spectrum. She explores tourist places as art spaces while dissecting what residents might call home and strangers a “cultural paradise”. In the process, she refers to an enticing vision--“progressive tourism,” an industry in which perhaps the “conscious” and “responsible” tourist could exist in pleasurable and unfamiliar travel. Is it possible? A progressive tourism—it incites hope, but does not sound realistic when Lippard states it is a process that “progressive people” are “struggling to imagine” (11).
In that group of “progressive people” exists the “progressive artist” trying to find a role in this vision. Lippard mentions artists like Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena who took up roles as Two Undiscovered Amerindians and were exhibited to wide-eyed and gullible
visitors in museums across the world. She mentions James Luna who challenged people to take a picture with a real Indian—in street clothes. Lippard refers to artists who dedicate their projects solely for the sake tourism. There’s Kathy Vargas who addresses tourism in her hometown from a Chicana/Mestiza point-of-view. There’s Delilah Montoya who designed postcards that critique tourist activities which undermine her cultural heritage. These artists had similar goals— their performances were efforts to reclaim identity and put the ignorant person/tourist on the spot. A little Tourism 101 for the absent minded—I like that.
Yes, tourists are so absent-minded that “they cannot possibly comprehend what it is to live in a place perceived as existing solely for scrutiny” Lippard adds. This is an extremely bold statement coming from an individual who labels herself as a rubbernecking tourist. This frightens me and adds to my already dubious views with regard to progressive tourism. She mentions pueblos in New Mexico in which tourists feel free to invade without permission. A drawing by a 12 year-old boy shows how tourism has permanently moved into the neighborhood. So how to make tourists comprehend? Whose job is it when the tourist wants to see, the local wants them to leave, and the artist wants respect?
What does Lippard have to say in regard to my pessimistic reaction to progressive tourism? “Utopia too is a necessary and authentic goal, the object of a longing that may never be fulfilled but functions positively and authentically for just that reason” (164). Maybe this utopia will exist when enough people start to envision possibility (which many already have) and begin to put greed on the backburner.
Posted by BKG at 1:58 PM
Touring America With Lucy Lippard
In On the Beaten Track, Lucy Lippard takes readers on a fascinating tour of predominantly U.S. tourist sites, taking time out to examine not only the sites themselves, but also how they’re constructed, perpetuated and subverted. Further, she investigates the changing relationships between sites and their residents, as well as between the sites and the tourists that visit them. During this process, Lippard raises a number of fascinating questions with regard to the construction of history, nostalgia, and community, the tourist’s desire for experience, and the shaping of tourists’ perceptions of tourist sites as well as the institutions that maintain the sites.
On page two, Lippard discusses “rubbernecking” and the implication of a willingness to “stretch, literally, past her own experience, to lean forward in anticipation, engagement, amazement, or horror.” However, at numerous other points in her text she cites the growing number of “armchair,” “national geographic “and” virtual” tourists who prefer the comfort of their own homes to venturing outside. In addition, she mentions how often tourists and/or curators will implement their previously held visions (particularly colonial) upon a tourist site. Add to this Ed Bruner's notion of the “pre-tour narrative,” and one wonders whether tourists really wish to stretch their boundaries and conceptions, or only reinforce their previously held convictions. Where does the line lie? Are their particular groups of tourists or particular circumstances in which tourists are more likely to challenge their preconceptions? If so, what are these?
On 87, Lippard relates the story of a young American tourist to Jamaica who “resigned himself to random acts of tourism…[while] Fate’s travel agents had delivered an expectedly pleasant…. and ethnically authentic…. vacation.” Add to this anecdote Lippard’s “head tourist” (114) who travels in her mind or imagination, and her discussion of how those in the group around a tourist will drastically alter her interaction with a site for better or for worse (122). The conflation of these three excerpts from Lippard’s text lead me to seriously question the extent to which authenticity and the exotic exist solely in the mind of the tourist and have little or nothing to do with physically traveling to a new area, or the site itself.
Finally, how do we situate Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair” amongst works like Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum,” Robbins and Becher’s “Dachau,” and Kathy Vargas’ “My Alamo?” (Note: I’m sure there are numerous other works contained in the Lippard’s book that would contribute to this question, but these are the first that leap out at me.) It appears to me that although their media are quite different, each of these projects is addressing a similar issue, that of uncovering alternate interpretations of environments. Though Cardiff’s project is decidedly less political than the others are, it is no less powerful in revealing the extent to which preconceptions and the force of habit dictate our interactions with our environments.
Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 1:04 PM
Layering
Lucy Lippard’s thesis is not clearly compartmentalized in the way that say, Dean MacCannell’s is. Her analyses are not conclusive; rather her sites seem to peel open like an onion, leaving room for other layers of history and experience that have and have not been yet. Tourist sites like her summer home in Maine or the city of Santa Fe host a complex of co-exisiting and sometimes competing narratives - although, unlike Bruner, she does not exactly articulate it that way. Rather, the places, objects and people themselves stand in tension with each other - the land on which the trailer park will be built, the beach, the locals, and the semi-or demi- locals (“summer people”) , and the tourists and campers who are just passing through. A tourist-hostile sign on the highway in Maine (“Next time just send the money”) is as worthy of attention as any number of “tourist friendly” attractions.
This is not the story of the master narrative usurping the ‘minor’ ones - though that is bound to happen, Lippard seems drawn to sites whose social and historical (and artistic) intentions and tensions have not completely overwritten each other, and to art work which teases out these existing tensions. If all tourists have are surfaces, the progressive tourist does not look for an authentic reality beyond the surface itself but attends to the complexity of the surface, the elements that make it up, how it becomes itself. The artist can help to bring things into view. I do not think, however, that Lippard intends to privilege the artist as the only one who is capable of this. The tourist herself, and the producers and performers of of tourist events and sites can blur the boundary between artist, tourist, producer/performer. It is not necessarily a didactic relationship (the artists teaching the tourists how to see tourism).
Janet Cardiff’s audio walking piece, “Her Long Black Hair” is concerned with many of the same questions of layering, history and experience of places as Lippard. She succeeds, I think, in changing our perception of place. While in other thinking and writing on Cardiff I thought of the piece as ‘teaching’ us to see the park, I would say now that looking back on it, it is certainly not a didactic relationship of artist teaching tourist. The soundtrack we hear, while it contains some information, is carefully put together so as to almost unobtrusively sit on top of our experience, and to create an experience where the ‘real world’ is indistinguishable from the piece. The simulaneity of this piece, its full orchestration of experience, is a feat. We are highly controlled, yet I feel only lightly controlled, and not at all constricted. I want to keep up, to follow her footsteps. Ironically, it is through giving up my physical autonomy to the piece am I made aware of myself as a part of this place, Central Park. The subject is the layeredness of experience, memory, and place, the media are place, sound, and me. I feel hermetically sealed off from the rest of the park, yet at the same time I am made aware of how each person is also unwittingly a medium in this piece. Not forgetting that Central Park was constructed by Olmsted as a series of three dimensional picturesque views, a large scale landscape sculpture, “Her Long Black Hair” is in symbiosis with this large scale public art piece. I think Lippard would admire the ingenuity of this symbiosis: it enhances perception without necessarily bringing a heavy critique or assuming to reveal the sordid truth of a place (but it does not close the door to criticism) . It reveals the layering of human experience of place of which we are a part - and it does so with us, not to us.
It is interesting that most of the work that Lippard examines is visual art. I wonder if this belies a bias toward the model of the tourist as a visual being (the “tourist gaze” of Urry we have heard so much about), or if this is simply her art history background, or the weakness of the book format to represent work that is not visual. Considering the multimedia Cardiff piece alongside some of the works in the Lippard book makes me wonder if other media (sound, movement, taste) aren’t equally suited to the exploration of tourism in art, as these are part of the tourist experience as much as the visual and often as highly controlled or more. I found the “direct input” of sound to be evocative in a way that pictures aren’t, and especially appropriate for this kind of “gentle” intervention in perception of place.
Posted by Sarah Klein at 12:46 PM
Yuichiro on Defamiliarization
I wonder what a "progressive tourism" might look like--tourism that is "responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical," a kind of tourism which BKG suggests us to consider in her reading guidelines for this week, and what might the role of artists be in bringing it about?
DEFAMILIARIZATION
Lippard affirms the connection between contemporary critical tourist art and Dada (34). As in Duchampian readymades, both take up a familiar object and place it in an unexpected context. Critical tourist art places the viewers in an unfamiliar position where they are obliged to muse reflexively on familiar, and often exploitative tourist practices. For example, Tseng Kwong Chi’s “East Meet West” project (35-6), which displays self-portraits of the artist in Mao-suit standing in front of great “American” monuments, where such a figure is least expected, displacing tourists’ prior expectations.
I would like to bring your attention to a number of other works that Lippard does not include in her book. One is Duane Hanson’s life-size, and so LIFE=LIKE dummies of “Tourists,” replete with transplanted real human hair, inevitably making the viewers uncomfortable as they look upon their mirror-images. Others include Fiona Templeton’s You the City (documented in TDR about 10 years ago), and Terayama Shuji’s Knock, both of which succeeded in defamilializing the environments in which you lived. In their audience-participatory theatre pieces, audience members were given a direction to visit specific urban locations where they would be a part of the “play.” But as the boundary between fiction and reality became blurred, spectators were no longer sure whether the landscapes and actions they were looking at were real, made up by the artists, or mirages they created themselves in their own imaginary. Sometimes they were not sure whether they were seeing actors enacting scripts or passers-by doing their daily routines. In such pieces, the audience must weave narratives together from the encounters they have with found-objects and real environments. Their audience may be compared to the tourist who, “herself creates an “off the beaten track” to reassert her own autonomy and independence (Lippard, 10)” on the beaten track.
Jenny Holzer is another artist who employs defamilialization, who, according to NYU Events Calendar, will be projecting her “truisms” on Bobst Library, as well as on the city’s other iconic sites such as Rockefeller Center between Monday and Wednesday this week.
Common among the artists mentioned above (and of course we must not forget Christo among them) is that they do not necessarily work with privileged spaces such as museums or monuments that tourist pay visits to. Their work suggests that the city is no longer the locus of the boredom of mundane, everyday life from which tourists wish to escape, but is a wonder-generating apparatus suffused, not only with aesthetic, but even with TOURISTIC discoveries. We live a touristic life even when we are at home.
Perhaps one of the reasons why I was not so impressed by Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair as others seem to have been, is because her work was so finely and closely knit, to the extent that it reminded me of T.S. Eliot and his “mythical method” in The Waste Land, as the layers of narratives from the Greek mythology (Orpheus), history (a fleeing slave), personal narrative (the anecdote of the vibrating bed), surreal imagination (scavenging pigs being shot in the park) and others cohered to generate an well-ordered experience in me. I felt that the text woven out of the interaction between the soundscape created by the artist and the real landscape of the park was hers and not mine. I wished I had more time and place that I could play with.
ARTISTS LOOK BACK
Lippard argues, by citing Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place, now a canonical tract in post-colonial studies, and much discussed performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit. . .by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena (sorry I could not put accent marks) among others, that “much of the significant art about travel and tourism is by members of those cultural groups that are stereotypically stared at (38).” The issue of who has the right to look (or the right to take pictures), that has been brought up a number of times during the class, it seems to me, should be given a chance for a fuller, more extended discussion.
However, as I am running out of time on this, another beautiful Sunday morning, please allow me to finish my response with just another example.
Manila’s garbage dumps (called smoky mountains because smoke of burning tyres never ceases to arise out of ground), where the Philippines’ poorest live by scavenging food, clothes and any recyclable, sellable items, has been a destination of environmental tourism for more than a decade. I have heard that local NGOs who are arranging visits are now getting weary of the influx of ever-increasing number of group tours organized by the NGOs from the First World. Participants, I am sure, are well-meaning people with an agenda to end the Third World poverty. Yet they must GO, SEE, and TAKE PICTURES of the smoky-mountain inhabitants before they can start their action plans. Call it curiosity, paternalism, or voyeurism. They should know better that the knowledge of the place, and not an actual visit will suffice to initiate an action. We have enough to see already to believe.
Posted by Yuichiro Takahashi at 12:39 PM
Shifting the Gaze
Lippard in On the Beaten Track highlights how the tourists experience is itself a type of artwork, a kind of framing. Art about tourism has the potential to either strengthen existing metanarratives or to challenge our ways of seeing. Lippard writes: “Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are” and “The tourist experience is a kind of art form if it is, as Alexander Wilson says, its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it.” (13)
Indeed, the self-consciousness of the tourist experience is what links tourism to art. (36) Just as the artist is always questioning ways of seeing, the tourist is trying to make sense of the unfamiliar she is experiencing. The tourist experience is surreal and therefore art about tourism must reflect that disjuncture: “Art about tourism must of necessity be based on the modern and postmodern montage of fragmentation, disjunction and alienation.” (37)
While tourists and artists are linked in sharing a self-consciousness that is born out of “making sense” of the unfamiliar, most tourist productions are not interested in creating new ways of seeing. Producers are interested in guiding tourists to “see” in ways congruent with pre-set narratives. Traditional tourism is built on maintaining the status quo, or locking down on interpretation to allow the tourist to feel that she is getting an authentic experience. The artist’s prerogative is the inverse; she questions these normalized interpretation of place and history and suggests other ways of seeing.
Both tourism and art deal with issues of the gaze and representation. Who has the power to look at another? In addition, who decides how that other is represented? Both tourists and artists gaze, but what they gaze at or choose to represent differs greatly. By redirecting one’s gaze, artists have a unique role in reframing what is gazed upon in the tourist experience. Zig Jackson’s Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian (41), is an example of this redirected gaze. Not only is the gaze redirected, but it is returned to those who are traditionally stared at.
A “progressive tourism” recognizes the many levels of the touristic experience; it is highly reflexive. One acknowledges one’s own motivations for going to a particular place¾ the baggage one is taking along¾ so that one experiences the place for what it is and not what one wants it to be. As Lippard writes, her progressive tourist is one who will “be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places . . . I prefer David Harvey’s contention that tourism is about becoming rather than being.” (11) By emphasizing being, there is an acknowledgement that as a tourist, I do not go to a place as “me” and interact with “them,” but rather there is a constant negotiation with changing and overlapping identities.
David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco’s “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.” (48), is an example of art bringing about this progressive tourism. Posters where put on buses highlighting the illegal immigrant labor vital to tourism in San Diego. By viewing these posters, tourists become more responsible and critical, because they are more aware of what is going on where they are visiting. The barrier between controlled tourist discourse and the large factors at play is broken down. Tourists have more of an understanding of the struggles the population they are visiting and consequently less of a feeling that they can go to a place with no regard for their effect on it. With this acknowledgement of current contemporary struggles, it is harder to regard culture in a timeless sense.
In general, tourists must acknowledge their needs and desires and examine how those desires might contribute to seeing “the other,” in a particular and not necessarily accurate light. In progressive tourism, tourists are no longer trying to stranglehold “natives” into timeless culture so that tourists can feel they have had an authentic experience.
Kathy Vargas’s “My Alamo” (1995), (16), is an example of using art as “a mode of inquiry” or “research method” to look at personal relationship to place and how that relationship relates to dominant narratives. This piece highlights individual responses to place; places are not composed of one metanarrative but rather many, and in many cases very different, individual narratives. This art piece is a different research method for gaining information about personal narratives that a more traditional ethnographic interview. It provides a more multifaceted response than a simply verbal narrative. Zig Jackson’s work with the redirected gaze in Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian (41), is an example of performed theory. The notion of the gaze as a key feature of the touristic experience and the gazes’ relationship to power, is animated through his highly reflexive photograph.
The emphasis on the individual experience of a place and of examining ways of seeing could be very helpful in my work. I would like to explore shifting the gaze in a way to empower those who are often gazed at. Perhaps I will go to neighborhood of Mexican immigrants and have a resident guide me through her neighborhood. Perhaps I could take a series of photographs of Mexican workers outside of the restaurants in which they work ¾ as if they are the owners ¾ questioning power relationships and visibility. I could even have fake “Zagat” reviews that highlight Mexican labor or describe how wonderful the restaurant was by how well run the kitchen is. More simply, I could have a Mexican restaurant worker narrate his day working in the restaurant, serving as a visible catalog of what is not cataloged, an examination of the front and back stage.
Cardiff’s walk of Central Park emphasized the personal. It was an exercise in different ways of seeing– looking, sensing, hearing etc . . . We were asked to follow her directions, in order to free up space for us to have an embodied experience. There was a real egalitarian aspect to the tour – it was free, it was low tech. Moreover, it was self-propelled in that the mode of transportation was walking; Cardiff was leading me, but I was walking on my own two feet.
The gaze was radically shifted. On the one hand, Cardiff was directing my gaze to things that I might not look at – a particular tree, a lamppost. On the other hand, she was very honest that the gaze is not simply what one sees looking at in one’s surroundings, but what one is searching for internally, an internal gaze. There were many different levels of gazing and looking; it was a multi-sensorial searching.
The Cardiff walk was for me about performed theory. It was an exercise in ways of experiencing place, of allowing the place to speak to you, of having a dialogue with the place. Throughout the narration, Cardiff was constantly asking questions, questions that were not necessarily answered, however she was opening up different areas of inquiry. The experiments allowed a sensorial awareness. For example, putting the saliva on my cheek made in aware of its wetness and the air on my face – in general, the multifaceted nature of my relationship with the environment.
Change and staying the same were key themes. When Cardiff said “See the Asian couple getting married,” and I saw the Asian couple, I realized how the park is used in a similar way each day. However, looking at the picture of the pond in winter, I realized how the park is also constantly changing. The park, like me, is in a living and breathing dialogue with time.
Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 12:21 PM
The Artistic Lens . . . No, Wait, The Touristic Lens . . . Er, the Artouristc Lens?
To begin this response, I want to cheat a little bit – I have already read the post entitled “Art and Tourism, Tourism and Art,” and Scott’s post (which found a central thesis lacking in Lippard’s book) and I would like to quickly respond to them. Although I agree that Lippard’s rhetorical style involves quite a bit of jumping around, form personal history, to theoretical analysis, to art criticism, and even to ethnographic interviewing, I fervently believe that this was highly intentional on Lippard’s part.
As a “writer, activist, and curator,” according to the short bio on the back of the book, she is no stranger to the world of art and artists (which the text itself clearly proves), and, I believe, has something of the artist’s soul in herself. Like many artists, she knows that she cannot possibly escape her individual experience, her own personal lens on the world, and so instead of allowing that to be a weakness in the exploration of the universal, she utilizes this “limitation” to her advantage, creating a long response to tourism and art that reflect her own unique perspective and nobody else’s, using that “local” in the hopes of expanding to a “universal” (in the same way that the famous envelope address in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town goes from the extremely specific to the extremely expansive and general – “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God” – to symbolize how Grover’s Corners itself is meant to be a stand-in for “the Mind of God”).
Indeed, Lippard is highly aware of the individualization of the essays that are in On the Beaten Track, for on the very first page she explains:
These essays began with a chapter that fell out of my last book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, and, as such, they remain primarily focused on the United States. [ . . . ] I also remain more or less within my own experience, so extreme adventure and hedonistic temptations are omitted. (My own touristic preferences run to history, ruins, conversation, funky culture, and heading out into new landscapes by car or on foot)” (2).
Thus, I responded to On the Beaten Track as something of a personalized, artistic piece, rather than a well-laid-out critical thesis, in the way that MacCannell and Bruner structured their books, and as such received an immense amount of pleasure and intellectual stimulation from it.
Now then, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, while reading On the Beaten Track I could get out of my head a long quote from in Anne Bogart’s A Director Prepares, which I want to reproduce here:
To be awake on the stage, to distort something – a movement, a gesuture, a word, a sentence – requires an act of necessary violence: the violence of undefining. Undefining means removing the comfortable assumptions about an object, a person, words, sentences, or narrative by putting it all back in question. What is instantly definable is often instantly forgettable.Victor Schklovsky, the Russian Formalist who undoubtedly influenced Bertolt Brecht with his Four Essays on Formalism written in the 1920s, developed significant theories on the function of art. Everything around us, he wrote, is asleep. The function of art is to awaken what is asleep. How do you awaken what is asleep? According to Shklovsky, you turn it slightly until it awakens. [ . . . ]
An example of this Schklovsky-ian notion of distortion or ‘turning’ can be found in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion. In one sequence, a husband (Cary Grant) climbs a staircase carrying a glass of milk on a tray to his wife (Ingrid Bergman) who lies ill in bed in a room at the top of the stairs. At this particular moment, the suspense lies in wondering whether or not the husband has poisoned the milk. Is he a loving husband or a villain and an assassin? What is not obvious but certainly affects the way we experience the scene, is the quality of the milk. Hitchcock placed a tiny light bulb, invisible to the audience, into the glass of milk so that it would glow just a little. Although the audience is not sure why, the milk seems somehow alive, awake, undismissable and in a state of dangerous potential (54).
What Bogart/Schklovsky/Brecht/Hitchcock are all hitting upon, of course, is a basic artistic tenet – through art, taking something that the viewer/audience/reader thought he or she understood and “turning it,” making it different, presenting it through a lens so that it must be reexamined and each individual must renegotiate his/her relation to it. The central motif of On the Beaten Track, it seems to me, is that this “turning” is something which tourism and art share on a deep level, creating the link between the tourist experience and the many artistic works enumerated here by Lippard: “John Urry suggests that the ‘tourist gaze’ uses ‘difference to interrogate the normal,’ whatever that is. This is of course what artists do as a matter of course. Artists have always traveled and provided a lens through which the rest of us look around” (4). To return to where I began, then, I feel like Lippard herself is “providing a lens,” but one with which to look at tourism and at the tourist experience.
The major divergence between a touristic lens and an artistic lens, though, according to Lippard, is that the artistic lens is, in her opinion, presented as unflinchingly positive (or, at least, she never presents any artistic pieces that she is critical of) whereas the touristic lens is one that must constantly be analyzed and examined for its motivations, impact, social factors, etc. She rises to the defense of Zig Jackson, who took a picture of a “white ‘trader’” who did not wish his photograph taken (and who is cast by Jackson and Lippard as a one-dimensional, unrepentant villain, more Iago or Snidely Whiplash than complex human being) as a part of Jackson’s project Indian Photographing Tourist Photographinc Indian (it is perhaps important to point out that the “trader” was taking a picture of a “stuffed buffalo head,” not of another human being, of an “Indian”), but she doesn’t stop to consider that an observer of Fusco/Gomez-Pena’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West might be viscerally disturbed by such an image, creating a deep, traumatic psychological impact/upset that goes beyond being a mere “guillible onlooker.” To Lippard, it would seem, art can only provide a positively fresh view of the world, and not have any sort of negative, harmful impact in the way that tourism can (this is, as I’m sure is obvious from the preceding examples, not a belief that I personally share).
Now, of course, with this concept of a “negotiated view” in mind, it is impossible not to think of Janet Cardiff’s Central Park walk, which was based entirely on the notion of utilizing the embodied experience of a walk, complete with ongoing audio and periodic visual elements, to renegotiate the way in which its participants view this Park which is, presumably, so much a part of the heart of every New Yorker’s experience of the city. Here is where, to my mind, Cardiff fails (I provide the caveat that I absolutely LOVED Her Long Black Hair and found it to be one of the most powerful artistic experiences that I have had the pleasure to participate in – but it would be too easy and long-winded for me to go on and on about what is great about the piece, and much more of an interesting challenge to throw a bit of criticism at it): the walk assumes a prior relationship to Central Park for a great deal of its artistic strength. In the constant references to past experiences, of both Cardiff (or the unnamed narrator, whomever she may be) and of the woman in the mysterious photographs, the participant seems meant to reflect upon his or her own past encounters with Central Park, particularly in the long moments of narrative silence filled with either music, simple footsteps and breathing, or pre-recording binaural audio meant to contrast and be juxtaposed with the “real-life” binaural being experienced at the precise moment of the individual’s walk. However, what this does is to create a piece that speaks more to New Yorkers than it does to tourists.
Although I can’t argue that Cardiff does create a lens through which to view Central Park, I feel like it is an artistic lens meant for a particular, local audience, rather than a touristic lens meant for any out-of-town participant who has no emotional attachment to the Park. I am, of course, drawing a line here that I am not quite yet able to theoretically back up, but the best I can do is compare Her Long Back Hair to Christo’s The Gates from last year, which, to me at least, did a slightly better job of recreating a lens with which to view the park, bringing together everybody, foreign, native, and/or local, who joined together for a stroll underneath the bright neon gates, joining in a shared artistic experience that truly engendered a sense of community. In that Christo thus brought a disparate group of individuals together into a community, for both local and tourist, using both an artistic and touristic lens, whereas Cardiff’s walk is very importantly experienced alone, I have to admit that I ultimately found Christo’s piece a bit more powerful, in that I didn’t have the same notice of the line between artistic and touristic that I noticed with Cardiff.
Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 12:21 PM
Familiarity/Unfamiliarity
Lucy Lippard’s On the Beaten Track is concerned primarily with domestic tourism, with Lippard’s interest in rubbernecking (“looking like a tourist wherever I go, even at home, because I’m always rubbernecking.” (7)). Lippard, with a long history of investigation into contemporary art, makes several linkages between tourism and art. She suggests that Urry’s “tourist gaze” is a bit like what artists do all the time (4), she quotes Albert Camus (5) and Alexander Wilson (13), both of who’s comments could apply to either tourism or art: travel is “a grander and deeper process of learning which leads us back finally to ourselves,” and “we tour the disparate surfaces of everyday life as a way of reintegrating a fragmented world,” respectively. She asserts that the very self-consciousness of being a tourist, allies it to art. (36)
Lippard is advocating a sort of progressive tourism (“responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical” (11)) and importantly, she often returns to the idea of tourism, specifically domestic tourism, being a metaphor for multicenterdness (2). She asks on page 11, “will the consciously multicentered person-artist eventually be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places?” and on page 37, “Art about tourism must of necessity be based on the modern and postmodern montage of fragmentation, disjunction, and alienation.” She examines art that provides a political commentary on tourism (ch.3), cultural tourism in its art, history, and ethno sub-divisions (“must cultural tourism be a downer?” (87)), and the role of tourism in looking at the political culture surrounding arts funding (75) and land management (76), among others.
Most interesting to me, is Lippard’s chapter on the popular museum, where re/dis/organisation of objects, the experience more of a junk shop, replaces the clinical museum. Here is where the participation of the body, embodied memory, personal navigation, and associations that make the experience more potent come into play. I am thinking of the infamous Gould’s Bookshop on King’s Road near the University of Sydney – infamous because it is a second-hand bookstore with absolutely no cataloguing system, books are just stacked, sometimes several layers deep, on shelves in a large cavern, making finding a specific tome impossible but aimless browsing and the juxtaposition of titles incredibly interesting.
“Familiarity and unfamiliarity are at play, in comfortable proximity.” (110)
“…a sense of relaxation into delight, a disorientation opening up into discovery.” (115)
Lippard points out that “every place is both local and foreign” (2): she says this in relationship to domestic tourism, that while the place of tourism is inhabited by both (Bruner’s “borderzone”) mostly the view of the visitor, not the visited, is recorded (a notable exception from international tourism being Balinese paintings incorporating tourists in sunglasses, as cited by Bruner). The interest in this comment for me, however, lies in the potential for a place to feel both familiar and foreign; for us to feel like tourists in a place where we are also locals.
This is something that struck me as extremely clever in Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair – her ability to disconcert and to transport, through time and history, excavating personal memories and associations and allying them with other, foreign stories. Making me see the paths I often walk along, the memories I have, differently. Making me a tourist in my own backyard. I have been on Cardiff’s Central Park audio tour twice; the first time I came home and wrote:
With Cardiff’s calm, seductive voice in my ear and her feet stepping along with my feet, I am invited to see and experience the city of New York, specifically, its Central Park, differently.
There is a sense of secret or guilty delight – I am doing things outside of expected normal urban behaviour. I lick my finger and touch it to my cheek; I stop in the middle of this busy footpath, turn, and begin to walk backwards; I walk with eyes closed (something I would not normally do alone in the city but which seems ok since Janet is with me). There is a sense of heightened existence even. Either I look odd, or perhaps I am invisible. I vacillate between the two.
I wonder whether I can put this together with experiences like, say, evening walks in my neighbourhood where a large part of the exercise is to stare into other people’s windows and lives, putting pressure on theories of home/away and front/back. There is something about the curatorial style of Lippard’s popular museum, the work of someone like Cardiff, and my evening walks that seems to come together in the familiar/unfamiliar, in the specificity of body in place, and in the agency of personal associations that arise.
Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 12:02 PM
Lisa Reinke responds (fairy tale included)
Lucy R. Lippard points out that “women in ads are often seen not only on islands but also as islands—lonely, alluring curvilinear skylines waiting for invasion” (54). The feminization of landscape goes far beyond the island, however. In numerous religions, the deity representing the earth and/or harvest is a woman (Maori: Raumoko, Papa; Greek: Gaia, Demeter; Aztec: Coatlicue; Incan: Pachamama). Also, consider the feminization of nations by such phrases as the motherland, or Lady Liberty. As Lippard discusses, colonization continued the feminization of landscape. Property was described as having virgin soil, which could be explored and conquered. This motif of representation, of course, continues in tourism, nursed along with other fantasies of colonization.
Lippard recounts, from the poet Eliot Weinberger, that, “Iceland has few notable buildings, museums or monuments. What it has are hills and rivers and rocks, and each has a story the book recalls” (19). One may attribute the same to Northern Scotland. At the western end of Glen Shiel lie five linked hills, known as the Five Sisters of Kintail. Legend has it that, at one time, there were seven daughters of a local chief, two of whom were taken as brides by two Irish brothers. On departing Kintail, they promised to return with the other five brothers of the Irishmen. These brothers would then marry the remaining sisters. The years passed with no sign of the Irishmen returning, so, to preserve their beauty while they waited, the witch from Kintail turned the sisters into the hills seen today.
This tale provides a very direct link to the representation of mountains as women. Several websites refer to these hills as “graceful” and “shapely.” Conversely, women are often presented as mountains, particularly in breast metaphors. Also, in the adventurous spirit, one must always mount a mountain. Like colonialism, this story not only represents the conquest of the foreign Other, as two Irishmen seduce and take away two Scottish women; it also represents subsequent betrayal, as the promise to come back is never kept. Granted, most colonizers do not run away, per se, but the discourse contains a false promise of a better life for the colonized people. While colonizers do not run away, tourists regularly do so. Tourists are expected to spend their money and get out. What a poignant metaphor the legend becomes, once the Irish tourists come to Glen Shiel. They have a good time and take their souvenirs away with them. The Scottish women, with the promise of more tourism in sight, go to irreversible extremes to ensure the place has what the tourists want. The tourists do not come, or perhaps they peter out, leaving the Scottish in a worse position than they were in when they started. Suddenly the fairy tale becomes much more believable, especially in consideration of Lippard’s warning. She writes, “Those of us at home in towns, counties, and states soon to be converted for display value are unprepared for these changes. We wake up only when it’s too late to channel or control them” (23). Maybe old cautionary fairy tales really do give the best advice for those who are facing tourism, such as the people of Georgetown, Maine. Yet, not even mountains can stop the forces of globalization. One day, will these ghosts of tourism past consume and loom over the landscape, as mountains eat into glens? Or will tourism begin to recycle itself, as tours of failed tourism spring up?
Posted by Lisa Reinke at 11:59 AM
Memory on Feet
Is Lucy Lippard really addressing the relationship between art and tourism? Her book wants to address so many issues, from eco-tourism to performance art to personal experience to patronizing comments about tourism, to tragic sites, that we quickly lose track of her thinking thread (if there ever was any). Her strong opinions are not developed, her sources scarce and she touches on too many ideas without offering a solid argument for each theme. If I just take her “tragic tourism” section, since I am most familiar with it, I was quite disappointed to see that she doesn’t try to answer the questions she raises (why are people visiting sites of murder? How is memory influencing tourism and vice-versa? Why is James Young her only scholarly source? Her choice in favor of “as-is” sites rather “manicured lawns with monuments” deserves deeper development, as well as the tension between “Holocaust memory fatigue” and mass tourism around Holocaust-related sites. I guess this book remains to be written.
Lippard offers some interesting thoughts on the relationship between visitors and visited, especially the “gaze returned”. The symbol of the mirror is worth keeping in mind, along with the gaze into the mirror as a second layer. After our discussion with Ed Bruner last week, I found fascinating the idea faux-indigenous art created in order “hijack” the tourist gaze and redirect to the tourists themselves. Rather than offering a representation of the “other”, such artistic practices provoke a self-reflection, a distorted representation blending the foreign (Indonesian art) and the familiar (Western porn). The problem raised by self-reflection has then to do with reception: how many tourists are actually aware of the mirror presented to themselves, how many tourists will engage in self-reflection and change some habits in order to experience a more authentic or responsible experience? I think that Lippard offers provocative examples of performance art addressing issues of tourism (colonial discourse, racism, sexism, etc.) but that the discussion remains confined within elite circles such as academia and contemporary art. It loses touch with the reality it claims to denounce and is often uprooted from tourist sites in order to be shown in galleries. In order words, the critique never meets the object of critique, they move on parallel tracks, one eyeing on the other, but never intersect.
As an example of an interesting combination of art and memory, here is an image of the Parque de la Memoria Parque de la Memoria
The image shows Dennis Oppenheim's Monumento al Escape.
What I find very interesting is the fact that the official brochure published by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires about the park, says that “the project … will make possible the use, by the inhabitants of the city and by its visitors, of a public area with testimonial, artistic, cultural and touristic value” (p. 61). It is the first time I see no shame in mentioning tourist activity on a memorial site, and the combination of the artistic, the touristic, the memorial and the political is an intricate relationship worth exploring.
Another question Lippard raises has to do with the transformation of an ordinary place into a tourism destination (and, one should add, the potential return to an ordinary place deserted by tourists). This is the moment to ask what elements contribute to the making of a tourist destination: it is not the site itself, but the context of the site: what happened then and what happens now, its accessibility, and the audience potentially interested in visiting the place.
This is what Janet Cardiff does with her Soundwalk of Central Park: making the unseen visible, guiding the audio-tourist to details that are overlooked, offering angles off the beaten track, and making us act differently in a place that is usually packed with tourists, marked with repeated behavior (sit by the fountain, look at the seal) and stops at expected places. For the first time in years, I noticed that the angel sculpture didn’t smile, that the polar bear could be seen from afar, among other things. I also appreciated the embodied experience (blurred sounds, imposed walking pace, breathing), though I thought that it could be better exploited and include other senses, such as smell, temperature, touch, color). But the paths explored by Cardiff and the physical impressions that her audiotour left with me are inspiring for my research on embodied memory.
Posted by Brigitte Sion at 11:19 AM
Scott's Response
In On The Beaten Track, Lippard takes a decidedly post-colonial, cultural critical approach towards tourism, emphasizing not only issues of power and social, economic, and environmental impact but also the power of the tourism to strengthen racist views and deteriorate the integrity and autonomy of ethnic communities. In comparison to those authors we have previously read, she appears to mostly side with MacCallen, claiming “all voluntary travel is characterized by longing for some elusive element that lies out of reach in daily life.” (5) She also states that tourism is driven by the desire for authenticity. Finally, she subscribes to the idea that there is, indeed, an authentic backstage of culture for which tourists strive.
I appreciated Lippard’s case studies regarding various facets of tourism. Something new that Lippard introduces to our reading list to date is the artistic response of individuals in conceptualizing and commenting on tourist productions. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of the “tourist gaze returned” by various performance artists, as this moves into a postmodern understanding of tourist sites also discussed by Bruner. I also found relevant her critical approach to various negative consequences of tourism.
However, I was hoping for the author to present a central thesis, and I found this lacking in the text. The collection of essays were overall less theoretical and more simply reflective with various general statements that occasionally were not supported in theory nor examples. This was most salient in her essay on ethnic tourism. For example, she states “ethnic tourism…usually turn out to be another facet of the racism it claims to overturn by paying homage to or idealizing a group of people.” (84) I have difficulty finding this to be categorically true. Is paying homage to someone inherently racist? She also contradicts herself at times. In one instant, Lippard claims “when the tourists arrive at the roots, at the more or less original context, the uprooted nation itself becomes a museum. The detrimental effects of tourism on internal community engender competition and fragmentation of place.”(86) In the next moment she indicates that such authenticity is possible to experience in a beneficial, reciprocal manner, pointing to the accidental Jamaican tourism experience by the 20 year old white musician who “gave up” on planning his tour and paid a young Jamaican man for the opportunity to simply “hang out with him in his life.” She reports that the tourist “lived poor”, ate “good home-cooked food, swam under a beautiful waterfall and smoked a lot of dope.”
Lippard embraces this tourist experience as “ethnically authentic,” as if these activities best represent true Jamaican culture and living. In doing so, Lippard reveals her own stereotype-based fantasy of the epitome of Jamaican culture: relaxed, task-free living (hanging out, smoking marijuana, living poor but experiencing what really matters in life: family and healthy home-cooked food), and swimming under beautiful waterfalls in paradise while taking time to help harvest the “good herb” that romantically epitomizes the easy-going, “no worries” Jamaican. Perhaps she is not aware that the majority of Jamaicans do not smoke ganja (nor that it is, in fact, illegal), that the few swimmable waterfalls on the island are not readily accessible to the vast majority of 2.5 million Jamaicans, more than half of whom live in concrete, tree-less cities or polluted environments without access to rivers or clean water at all, that people generally work very hard for long hours and do not live a relaxed lifestyle where hanging out and eating good home-cooked food with the family is the average daily experience, or where “living poor” is a positive aspect of life to be relished. She is also apparently unaware that there is a strong informal tourist economy in Jamaica where locals provide tourists with personally accompanied vacation experiences (often including sexual services and/or drugs) where the tourist receives the same tourist package as all-inclusive hotel vacationers, only at a different socio-economic level. In embracing the musician’s experience as more “authentic” Lippard seems to endorse the idea that the young Jamaican man is not an tour guide, nor lodging operator, but simply opening his family’s door and life to the tourist for social reasons--simply because the “friendly, care-free native” welcomes the foreigner into his life in paradise. In reality, the youth who “befriended” the tourist is certainly regarded by his neighbors as an informal tourist operator whose business is picking up tourists and socializing with them for money. Such activity by a local school teacher, construction worker, store clerk, factory worker, or business woman would seem as out of place as the average American picking up a German tourist, bringing him home, and guiding him around the city for a week. Perhaps, Lippard was fooled into thinking that the musician tourist experienced something more “authentic” than other tourists because there were no official tourist markers in his experience (aside from the exchange of money.)
In such a manner, Lippard highlights the pitfalls of attempting to work within a structured model of “authenticity” regarding tourist productions. She is quick to value authenticity in the exotic “Other” and decries exploitation by those who cannibalistically destroy such culture, but she unable to offer an alternative solution or even scenario. Furthermore, by framing “the Other” as a fragile, tourist stage to be destroyed by the tourist gaze, she perpetuates a colonial and paternalistic view of that culture, a view that is steeped in her own First World fantasies of the “primitive” to be cherished and yearned for, but who’s identity is unable to withstand the touristic embrace.
The rest of the essays presented various examples of types of tourism with appropriate examples. I found her overall tone somewhat pessimistic without being constructively so, leaving me with a sense of unsupported snobbery or intellectual superiority. Perhaps I found this markedly so in contrast to last week’s Bruner who humbly qualified his view through his personal experience. Lippard seems to place herself firmly in the camp of traveler as opposed to tourist without clearly defining the practical difference.
It is interesting for me to think upon Cardiff’s piece through a “tourist studies” lens, for I did not do so the two times I experienced the walk (first on my own, and then the second time for a “Performance in New York”class.) I had experienced walking in Central Park before, but having recently moved to NYC, it was the first true walking tour through part of the park. Since there is no clear economic transaction involved, the Walk seems to be partly removed from the normal tourist experience. Secondly, there are no tourist markers involved in the production. I did not feel I was labeling myself as a “tourist” by taking the Walk. True, I was wearing headphones attached to a shoulder bag. Perhaps I felt I was more of an art consumer. There was, however, definitely a sense of the tourist gaze in that as I walked along I was instructed to view the sunbathers, the “typical” food cart vendors, the Manhattan Zoo. I was also instructed to perform the role of someone who is walking through the park, copying the narrative of another past walker (Cardiff.)
What is interesting is how the Walk truly resides in Bruner’s “Border Zone” in that is a New York experience constructed specifically for the tourist (although the tourist can easily be a native New Yorker.) One may apply the concept of Front Stage and Back Stage regarding “authenticity” to the piece. We are led to believe that we are re-experiencing an authentic walk by Cardiff in space and time in the park as if she just serendipitously had a tape recorder with her on one single walk, when in reality we are experiencing an artistic construction of a fictional walk with sound edited in from different time periods, scripted conversation performed solely for recording, and photographs of dubious authenticity (e.g. are they really “old” photographs? If so, how come all of the copies are made to look equally “old”? Are we made to believe that we are holding the actual old photographs found in the flea market? Werer the original photographs even found in a flea market? Cardiff also imposes an imagined narrative on the photographs. If they were found, how do we know that a lover took them?) We are led through a choreographed score that allows us to be totally in the moment, which affords a pleasurable sense of immediacy. There is also room for improvisation and chance reality by the environment within the framework. These facets lead to experience an aura of authenticity, for in one sense each performance is unique and personal. However, the entire experience is sculpted and very different than if the tourist were to take his or her own walk through the park.
On a personal note, the first time I took the walk, I happily suspended disbelief and thoroughly enjoyed jumping back and forth through time past and present, allowing myself to slow down and gaze upon things that I normally would have passed by. I experienced the walk as a four dimensional sculpture piece with a guided tour in the most intimate manner, much like guided imagery meditation, only up on my feet and moving. In this sense, it felt like environmental theater where the audience got to perform most of the acting of a script co-written by all involved.
Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:50 AM
Leah responds to Bruner
Edward Bruner’s ethnographic work on tourism, as represented by these two readings, focuses on the role of stories or narratives in the tourist experience.
I wonder about how a narrative, or projected narrative, can be understood as being in some way “mapped onto” a place and how that relates to conceptions of “narrative” and “performance.” This question came to mind because of my interest in educational institutions and settings and the relationships that alumni of these institutions have with the sites of their educational experiences. In much of my thinking about alumni relationships I have focused on the importance of the educational experience in terms of content, sequence and purposes. The study of tourism has pushed me to think more about how alumni relate to the sites of their educational experiences, especially since they are often invited to revisit those sites (concurrently with their cohort members) for reunions. When alumni do attend reunions they do not simply visit the site of their previous experiences; they also in some way revisit the experiences themselves and their memories. The location can serve as a “landscape of memory” that brings to mind stories from their prior sojourning there. In two of the cases in Bruner’s book he makes reference to other books that deal with the concept of alumni status and its relationship to setting. These two examples, and the sense of narrative that is implied in each, are striking to me in different ways.
In the first example, Bruner studies the reconstructed town of New Salem, Illinois, home to the young Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s. In each of the two chapters about this site (“4: Lincoln’s New Salem as a Contested Site” and “5: Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism”) Bruner cites the description of New Salem given by Carl Sandburg in his 1954 biography, entitled Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. According to Bruner, Sandburg calls New Salem both Lincoln’s “Alma Mater” and “nourishing mother.” The two terms are the same; “Alma Mater” is a traditional appellation for a school or educational institution that one has graduated from.
In Chapter Four Bruner quotes one of Sandburg’s passages: “The hilltop village, now fading to become a ghost town, had been to him a nourishing mother… a friendly place with a peculiar equality between man and man… Here newspapers, books, mathematics, law, the ways of people and life, had taken on new and subtle meanings for him.” (p. 131) As Bruner continues in his own voice, “New Salem is presented as the site where it all happened, the scene of a rural Midwest version of the familiar American rags-to-riches success story, a master narrative in American culture.” (ibid.) I hear something else is Sandburg’s description: he seems to say that New Salem was a place where Lincoln’s education was finessed, where he learned new ways of understanding the concepts that he had previously learned. Bruner seems to reject this notion, commenting later on the same page that Lincoln “had spent his truly formative adolescent years elsewhere.”
In his mention Sandburg’s use of this term in Chapter Five Bruner reports that “Implicit in Sandburg’s story is the frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner: he suggests that just as the United States was formed by its overcoming of the obstacles of the wilderness, so too Lincoln was formed by his overcoming of the hardships of frontier life.” (p. 147) He states further “New Salem, then, is a national shrine of America’s civil religion because it is the locality of the transformation that gave birth to the adult Lincoln. Lincoln’s story is the story of America, the rags-to-riches, log cabin-to-White House American narrative.” (ibid.)
Without worrying about answering Bruner’s question “Is it “true”?” (p. 131) I am interested in thinking further about the implied message: that Lincoln’s experiences in New Salem were edifying in a way that helped to shape the beliefs or values that he became associated with in later years. Presenting a reconstructed New Salem might then suggest that a tourist visiting the site will somehow experience or come to understand some of what inspired Lincoln himself. As an educator I wonder about how this message might be presented or communicated. As a researcher I wonder about how this understanding of educational experience shapes tourists’ experience of this site and its narrative as “authentic” or “true.” It relates as well to how they might connect the “story” of New Salem to their pre-existing understandings of American history and of Abraham Lincoln.
The second case where the concept of alumni surfaces is in Chapter Nine, “Reincorporations,” in which Bruner reflects on his return to Sumatra, the site of fieldwork that he engaged in at the start of his career. He explains that his focus is not on the changes in the villagers or himself but rather in the field of anthropology and the ways in which he thinks about ethnographic work in a “transnational global world.” One of the concepts that he references in order to do is the idea of “postcommunity,” a term from anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s study of her own high school graduating class (1958) in Newark, New Jersey. Bruner notes that “she writes about doing fieldwork in the postcommunity, her term for a one-time local community that has been radically delocalized.” (p. 231) Towards the end of the chapter Bruner returns to this example, noting that the “high school class was together in one locality, engaged in face-to-face relation, only during the school years, for after graduation the members of the class dispersed. There was 100 percent geographic mobility, and class members and their spouses came together most prominently in reunions.” (p. 251) He then notes that a number of residents of the Batak village that was the site of his fieldwork have migrated “while maintaing an identification with their place of origin.” (ibid.) Bruner describes the Batak as a “postlocal community, one that is radically delocalized, but the culture of the Toba Batak continues to emerge in many diverse transnational spaces and there is continuous interaction among geographically dispersed ethnic and kin group members” (p. 252) This description is useful, but I wonder how to further describe the interplay between the locality and the collective experiences shared there. Further I wonder how to describe the new ways that “postlocal” communities can remain connected given the existence of new modes of communication.
In “The Role of Narrative in Tourism” Bruner describes the stages of the “life cycle of the touristic engagement” (p.1) and the role of stories in the pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour stages. It seems to me that this typology remains useful but is made more complicated by the examples discussed above, where personal stories are about sites are blended with other stories that relate to one’s own individual or national history. I wonder how the typology can be extended to consider previous visits, related history, and the communal relationships that connect and might yet reconnect to particular localities.
Posted by BKG at 10:42 AM
Tourism and Artists
Lippard identified On the Beaten Track as a book mainly based on domestic travel. As a student traveled afar from the other country, I have the problem of setting my personal points on seeing these analysis as domestic travel, however, this problem also led me to think about the definition of locality. How to define the borderline of being local and being non-local?
As Lippard quoted Jamaica Kinkaid, that natives always envy the tourists and their ability to turn the banality of the natives into the source of pleasure (22). Exoticism certainly played the part in tourism production and served as a highlight in all kinds of marketing strategy when it comes down to sell the travel product. But what is exoticism when you can easily tell the difference of each area on Manhattan and feel like a tourist in a few blocks away from the place you are familiar with. You can go to a remodeled bar which you have visited thousand times before its remodeling and feel like a totally new world. Or, maybe I should ask, what is banality?
It was a beautiful experience to join Janet Cardiff’s walking tour in the central park and dig into my own memory. There is no memory about Central Park in my memory, yet the journey in Central Park perfectly matched the image of Central Park in an artistic way. Or say, I do have memory about Central Park in the big illusionary image of New York City that created by superpower media in United States. Therefore, while I was creating my own memory with Cardiff’s voice in Central Park, I was also examining my imaginary memory of Central Park. Cardiff introduced us Central Park by asking us to follow the trace of the lady with long black hair in her red coat, with her enchanting narration, and the empowerment of the audio set, the audience can be more sensitive about all the sounds and scenes in routine life. By setting the path in Central Park, which is one of the symbolic icons of New York City yet follow the trace of an insignificant lady, Cardiff’s walking tour coincidentally echoed with Lippard’s book and questioned about banality and tourism.
In Lippard’s book, she mentioned Tseng Kwong Chi’s artistic project, which used photographs as media to discuss about tourism. Since this book is published in 1999, the time before the digital camera substitute the traditional camera and become the major product of producing pictures. The new gizmo changed the way people making image records of their daily life and their travel life as well. I believe the travel pictures reflect a certain sense about the way people see tourism. It is fascinating for me to see the mis-en-scene is actually going to the opposite way as Tseng’s picture.
For my project, I am planning to finish an idea, which inspired by Janet Cardiff’s tour. Personally, I felt like that I was walking in a space that contains different layers of time at the same time, I can almost see the lady with red coat walking a few steps ahead, the man with cell phone who was not there, yet so vividly exist in my imagination. I cannot help myself of not thinking the piece as a poetic ghost story. Therefore, I am very interested about make a tourist list about the best places in New York to find the ghosts. By doing the list, I think it can be very exciting to peek into the change of narration in these urban legends, re-interpret several iconic landscape and also some insignificant locations.
Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 9:58 AM
Sandra responds: Art and Tourism, Tourism and Art
Lucy Lippard presents a multilayered understanding of the relationship between art and tourism. In On the Beaten Track, she weaves so many different threads together that it is difficult to compartmentalize her analysis. She combines elements of her own experience (memories, experiences, stories) with art criticism in order to comment on tourism as an art form in itself, the arts that have emerged from/for the tourism industry, how different artists have worked with the subject of tourism, how art has influenced tourism and the way place is experienced, as well as how talking about the relationship between art and tourism provides a locus where alterative forms of “progressive” travel can be found.
Art and tourism seem first and foremost to be intertwined because they share a common nature capable of shifting, fragmenting, juxtaposing and superimposing elements from reality and fiction. In Lippard’s understanding, both art and tourism share a surreal power of curating/editing the world in particular ways and shaping experience, culture, landscape (13). The idea of power is certainly highlighted by Lippard. Art, like tourism, does, it creates, produces, transforms (5). Art and tourism are very much “about becoming rather than being” (11).
Both are often motivated by the desire to change, to improve, to learn or to see the world in a different light. The parallels between tourism and a performance piece provide an interesting way of understanding this relationship: when one travels, one can reinvent oneself, act out a part that shapes our interaction with people in a different way than when one is at home (5); when one travels, places are transformed into stage sets, citizens become actors, guides take on the role of directors, and the tourist production begins (34).
For Lippard, art is also tied to tourism, or anti-tourism rather, as it provides a means of empowerment for the “toured” to speak up against the adverse effects of tourism (cultural, economic, ecological) in their communities. Indeed, many of the artists that have taken tourism seriously as a subject in their work are members of the cultural groups that are objects of tourism (38). Their work has been instrumental in debunking the stereotypes created by the tourist industry (Zig Jackson’s work), working as a powerful tool of self-representation (James Luna). Art has also provided a means for political activism, often denouncing the “dark side” of tourism while using the importance of tourism as an income generating industry as a way to exercise pressure on government, corporations, etc. The Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation campaign by Avalos, Hock and Sisco is a great example of this, especially since the artists used a form created for the tourism industry, the advertisement of place, to turn tourism on its head and expose its hypocritical use of migrant labor in the face of anti-immigrant policies (48). On yet another level, tourism and art seem to coproduce each other, namely through the use of photography and video. The importance of the camera in tourism has made everybody into a potential artist , as well as transformed artists into potential tourists (137).
For Lippard, tourism and art are also related as spaces of memory-work. Her discussion on monuments is especially illustrative of how art an travel have been linked in how memory, as well as forgetting, is made concrete through an object or a landscape. Here, tourism and art collaborate in inducing memory-work since tourism is the “visiting mechanism” through which monuments function (129). A monument needs a visitor in order to work. Museums are also identified by Lippard as places where art and tourism collaborate. Museums are tourist sites as they provide the same sense of self-improvement as travel (90), but they are also works of art in themselves that emerge from tourism (the Biblao Guggenheim is a perfect example of this) (92). Museums are also interesting as examples of the way tourism has influenced art. Certainly Fred Wilson, Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco, Mark Dion, Thomas Struth, David Wilson et al. have used art as a way to “mine” the museum and expose its constructed and political nature as a type of tourist production. Lippard provides an interesting framework to look at the different ways artists have dislocated the museum from the tourism/cultural industry and transformed it into a subject of art: the museums within the museums approach (or minimuseums) such as that of Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, the anti catalog (Carol Duncan et al.), the mirror box (Thomas Struth), the exhibition as artwork (Group Material), and reflexive and critical exhibits (Fred Wilson). Perhaps the ultimate example of the way tourism (museums) has influenced art is the museum as a work of art and the work of art as a museum embodied by David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology (105). All of these artists have echoed (and sometimes pioneered) much of the critiques that academia has formulated in the new museum studies since the late 80s in a non-verbal and thought-provoking way.
But how effective is art in providing theoretical frameworks to understand/study tourism? Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (39) might be the best example of the unpredictable ways in which critical art can function. As Lippard (and the artists themselves) have recognized, the artists did not anticipate the audience’s taking the piece seriously, rather than perceiving its irony. Lippard critiques the fact that often the “surprise box” approach creates more of a sense of bafflement than a real transformation in the audience. Certainly, art does not have to be democratic, but often, people get frustrated that they don’t “get it” and are either dismissive of the piece, or feel exposed by it, rather than thinking about what the piece is focusing on, they focus on their own misunderstanding of it.
Certainly, this is not always the case. Janet Cardiff’s walking tour of Central Park is also a “surprise box” that uses parody to reflect on tourism and place. However, her work is not using irony in the same way. She parodies the tour guide/book’s role as she instructs/guides the participant in the park, but she does not use the form to critique its origin. Rather, she provides a creative approach to touring. She uses the audience’s prior exposure to having been on tour to create a relationship of trust between the participant and herself. We follow her instructions, turn left, look right, sit down, think about x, partially because we have been exposed to the format beforehand. Cardiff takes the format a step further, guiding the participant almost into her own body, looking to her gaze, stepping to her steps, breathing to her breath. Rather than making the piece critical of the guided tour per se, Cardiff uses the genre to explore it, to re-invent it and make us think about the experience of touring in an embodied way. The piece is not shocking, it does not bank on our stereotypes or ignorance. It very intricately makes us think about how we experience place, a place we walk in and visit in the quotidian, a place we tour. It uses history and memory, personal narratives and a reconstructed story based on photographs (this is where I think the weakness of the piece lies), to sculpt the landscape, to refashion place with her voice, with sounds, with music. Thus, for example, the participant listens to Cardiff’s tales of Central Park’s as the undercity of the 1930s, as a dark place of crime, vagrancy, poverty, but also refuge, while walking in one of the most picturesque wooded areas of the park (and classic background for photography), watching people sunbathe and play. Cardiff’s work is often even eerie because she uses both the constructed prerecorded audio tour, and the park as it is the very second you walk by, to shape experience. While taking the tour, one feels transported to a magical place where one no longer knows what is inside and what is outside the recording. A whining saxophone surprises us as we see it played by a man dancing to his own music on a pathway, and rumbling horse hoofs take us aback when we turn around and cannot find their owner. Cardiff turns the entire park into a theatrical extravaganza, forcing us not only to experience it, but to think about what we are experiencing on tour, as well as in our daily routines. This seems like a more nuanced and multilayered way of “mining” tourism through art that does much more than merely point fingers.
Going back to Lippard, it seems that she uses the relationship between tourism and art as a way of exploring new ways of touring, of being a “progressive tourist” that travels and consumes elements of place without consuming the place itself (11). She proposes several examples, some accidental and some more self-conscious, in which tourism can become responsible as well as critical. The model of tourism as a form of exchange seems to be inevitably accidental. For Lippard, this often happens when the tourist experience goes wrong, when the tourist slips through the cracks and falls into the loopholes. But, it can happen (87). However, there seem to be more “active” or organized ways in which Lippard believes one can be a progressive tourist. Her own writing on her summer home in Maine and the debates around its being a tourist site, a summer home and a home home for different people; as well as on her home in Santa Fe, is proposed as a means of action. Finding one’s own sites based on personal experience and memory, or “invisible monuments” is another. Artists and activists have also taken this into their hands by organizing tours that are centered around political activism (133), as well as environmental activism such as CLUI’s tours (149). However, the book seems open-ended. Lippard does not provide a model, merely sketching options, ways of using the gaps in productive and responsible ways. But I am not sure her project was to create a manual for the progressive tourist, merely to suggest that there are ways in which one can take it upon one’s self to be one.
I want to end this response with some thoughts on the book. I was incredibly frustrated by the book, by Lippard’s way of constantly shifting back and forth between art criticism, tourism insights and her own experience. The book is full of assumptions about audience reactions, artists’ intentions, and tourists’ experiences. However, she does not explain where she gets these assumptions from, what her sources and evidence are, and presents her own voice/opinion as truth. I hate to be an anthropologist about this, but her return every few chapters, and most notably, in the conclusion, to herself and her experience as the only subject she truly knows anything about, makes many of her other insights seem more like personal opinion than scholarship. Surely, different audiences and individuals react differently to tourism, to art, to museums. I just did not find that she took this very much into consideration.
Posted by at 9:29 AM
Keeping it real.
The way I think of art is as something that is powerfully expressive, uplifting, revealing and inspiring. And Lippard’s book examined the way art could and is a way out of the seemingly slow and steady process of a sanitizing and embalming process of a culture and a people, as a way of re-thinking tourism and urging it to be more responsible and thoughtful, a way of stimulating some sensation to a numbing body as it were. So is tourism indeed a process of slow and steady ‘destruction’ of a place and a people? Because the past two weeks I have been trying to focus on the ‘creative’ role of tourism in its potential to create new social relations, transnational communities and indeed new forms of art. The question that now comes to mind is how powerful and expressive are the new forms of art and culture simulated by tourism? How nourishing, enduring and thought-provoked is it? Aren’t all these new forms “contextualized and created by a quintessentially capitalist and colonialist value system”?
I think Lippard did a wonderful job of examining these questions and more – particularly to look at the power in play in tourism, representation, and an examination of how meaningful and deep/cheap tourism is/‘nt. The work of the socially conscious artists that she focussed on is thought-provoking to say the least, her book is also very important in bringing attention to the crucial role of artists in the survival and life of a culture, something that is being lost sight of as we are “all complicit in what our culture has become” (77). I felt wanting to read more on that.
There were important questions that came up – for my own research I raise the question of authenticity and legitimacy. Its really misleading to think that authenticity is about the past. It’s about how the present sees and constructs the past and what past it wants. Authenticity itself is never an objective quality inherent in things, but simply a shared set of beliefs about the nature of things we value in the world. These beliefs are subsequently reinforced by the conscious efforts of cultural producers and consumers alike, and is “visibly insistent” in the tourist art, (or audibly insistent in the tourist music). Lippard sums it up for me - “We need to know what art looks like when it no longer represents only the taste of the ruling class” (117).
“Is anyone himself when a tourist”? (37) or to rephrase that – is anyone him/herself before a tourist? Apparently not. How feasible is it to separate tourist culture from ‘real’ embodied culture for the ‘native’ community? The idea to “harness tourism for community needs….to create a separate space, both psychologically and physically, where local communities can nourish their own myths and social lives”(61) sounds ideal, but what will sustain that ideal world when tourism backed by money is constantly pushing the edges for more spaces to control? And just how real can that protected space be – that is indeed museumization – where and how will it find ways to renew, replenish and move forward? It was the artists in Lippard’s book that were trying to bring about a balance and sense of reality in the tourist world, their ‘real’ world. What is ‘real’ as I understand is something that is not illusory but something embodied and grounded in experience. What I’ve been struggling with I think is when the illusory starts becoming the reality - to what magnitudes of detriment? Particularly for the music that becomes a mere exercise – how enduring can that be? Can I really call that the ‘creation’ of a new genre?
Lippard touched on so many interesting issues – nostalgia, sacred and profane, primary and secondary memories and celebrities, feminist perspectives among others – her work represents the immense montage of tourism, tourism not just as a frame or a lens but as an embodied covert art form.
Posted by Senti Toy at 9:29 AM
October 1, 2005
"How can I know what I have seen?"
“How can I know what I have seen?” asks the voice on Cardiff’s recording after describing the aftermath of violence in a room. There are signs everywhere, described by the narrator (blood on the drapes, etc.), yet everything is up for interpretation. How are we know what has actually happened in this room, in this park, in this country we are touring? This question – how can I know what I have seen? – resonates throughout Lippard’s On the Beaten Track. A tourist knows what she has seen because she has been guided – the signs are everywhere, the meaning is made clear. The Ground Zero memorial, for example, will tell a certain story and build a national narrative, but what will remain hidden from view? What violence will remain shielded and what voices repressed? Both Lippard and Cardiff are interested in toying with the boundaries of tourism and sightseeing, revealing suppressed narratives, and creating new, more conscious (and, thereby, more responsible) ways of seeing/knowing the world around us.
“Teaching people how to see,” writes Lippard, “is the artist’s business” (4). Though this statement is certainly arguable, it draws an affinity, a relationship between the artist who expresses a certain worldview through her art and the industry of tourism itself (an industry that is conspicuously in the business of casing landscapes, explaining monuments, and guiding people through new scenery. Both artist and industry frame the world (here, I am thinking of Bruner’s own metaphor of “framing” and MacCannell’s “staging”) and both construct a particular experience for a viewing public.
So, why isn’t there more art about tourism, asks Lippard. Or, if not specifically about tourism, why isn’t there more creative production around and about this social group of mobile, sight-searching, circulating individuals? Here is a class of persons poised to see the world anew, fueled by a “desire to become intimate with the unfamiliar” (51), so why not harness this energy and create what Lippard calls an “alter-industry” to conventional tourism? Tourists are perfectly positioned to collectively experience something new – and collective experience is the base of political mobilization and heightened awareness. The idea here seems to be that tourism is an economically entrenched and growing enterprise that is “here to stay” so we artists, critics, and scholars better start working creatively within this paradigm. Lippard alludes to a variety of public, collective art projects that are doing just this: the Ohio Site-Seeing project which hijacked the form of the tourist brochure (49), and Dean MacCannell’s own “unconventional sites” tour of San Francisco, just to mention a few.
But Lippard also has in mind a particular tourist-as-artist paradigm: “the tourist experience is a kind of art form if it is… its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it.” And it is best practiced locally (13). The Cardiff walk is a perfect example of this. Cardiff herself (or the performing voice on the recording) is acting as a guide, leading the walker through a landscape that has popularized itself in the local, national, and global imaginary: Central Park. While traveling back through the park after finishing the walk, I saw a tour group standing on the promenade leading up to the Bethesda fountain. They were clustered around a guide who was pointing out where a scene of “Kramer vs. Kramer” had been filmed. She is a guide, and Cardiff is a guide: both are engaged in (art)ifice, both are guiding a group of people through a popular public space, pointing to certain things, telling stories, directing the gaze. So, who is the artist? And who are the “real” tourists?
“Her Long Black Hair” (like all good theory) begs these important, binary-busting questions. It is an art form that provides a new experience, one that, in turn, leads to new thoughts about a landscape. It asks us to move differently, to see differently, to become differently. “Put your body here, walk this way, breathe and think,” demands the art. Then it asks of us (as all “good” art asks of us): Now, who do you know yourself to be in the world? It provides a space for a different kind of knowledge acquisition, one that does not separate thinking from feeling, minds from bodies, or observing from participating. Sightseeing becomes place-sensing, and intimacy ensues. Cardiff’s understanding of art is undisciplined, unbounded. There is simply sound, scene, and sensation: the Nick Cave melody, the sunlight through the trees, the sensing of slave music in a dark, hollowed tunnel, the stories of visits to New York. So simple. And yet, we are in awe and completely confounded by how easy it is to know the world around us. It is an exercise in letting the body theorize rather than the mind and though the experience is structured, the outcome is spontaneous; the space between the viewer and the viewed is a borderzone of creativity that hinges on what we bring to it.
I appreciated the opportunity to take part in a mode of inquiry that builds on and fleshes out Lippard’s own desire to merge tourism with art.
Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 11:17 PM
Contradictions
Download file. I really appreciate how much On the Beaten Track compares tourism to theater. I along with Lucy Lippard look at tourism as a kind of performance piece. For my research project I want to look at the “toured” as a performance piece. Specifically, how people put on a certain production as it pertains to their culture, whether it is true or false, for tourists. However, I find it interesting that Lippard said specifically that traveling could be a performance piece and not tourism. I think she is making a distinction between the two, which is not something I have discovered in the other readings.
Though her distinction is different than mine, I believe the two have some common ground. I believe that sometimes people can travel without the intent of being tourists. As she stated many times in the reading, sometimes people go on vacation simply for leisure. To get away from their everyday reality and transform themselves into an unknown world of relaxation and play. Now maybe this world clashes with that of tourism, but I do not believe it always begins with that intent. Like Lippard, I believe that traveling offers more freedom than tourism. This is something I wish Lippard explored more in depth.
I love how she incorporates class and gender into the equation, though I do not feel like she explored the gender aspect as in depth as she did class. It is true that the amount of money one makes determines their length of stay or if they can travel at all. This can sometimes cause envy, anger, or jealousy among those who cannot travel. For example, while in Ghana I was sitting in the lounge area of a hotel with a couple of my classmates. We were approached by one of the employees of the hotel and were engaged in a lengthy conversation about Western travel. The conversation became heated when this young man expressed his disdain for the fact that we (the American students) could travel to another country to do research for our schools when he could not even afford to go to school. At first I was offended. I am cognizant of my blessings as an American student, but money does not come easy for my family either and going to school has been a constant struggle. Of course, he replied by saying that we still had the opportunity to fly to another country, stay for a week in the nicest hotels, and study a culture while this opportunity would never be available to him. I saw his point and was immediately silenced. I think class is a very important factor in determining the financial abilities of many tourists.
Lastly, I saw a major contradiction in her writing. She begins in the introduction by saying that in this book she tries to go against the grain of the usual melancholic texts concerning tourism to show its more positive sides. However, in the very next chapters, particularly one and two, she explores much of the negative. First, she discusses the need for tourists to “look around,” but then she sardonically follows that statement by saying we would know so much more about our own neighborhoods if we spent the same amount of time looking around as tourists do. Maybe she did not mean that in a sarcastic way, but that is the way it sounded to me. Next, she talks about the unbalance in tourism, sometimes being the only option for economic survival, which leads to a labor force becoming a nation of service workers pretending to look tantamount to our ancestors. Then, Georgetown’s economy is mentioned as being “pitifully dependent” on tourism. I am not saying that she does not actually look at tourism in a lighter light as she promised. I was simply looking for that light much sooner, and after her initial statement in the introduction and then reading the next few chapters, her initial statement seemed to be a contradiction.
Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 10:27 PM