World-Wide-Walks: Peter d'Agostino: Crossing Natural-Cultural-Virtual Frontiers
387
World-Wide-Walks: Peter d'Agostino: Crossing Natural-Cultural-Virtual Frontiers
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783209132 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 387 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.40(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Walking on Edges, Peter d'Agostino 's World-Wide-Walks
Kristine Stiles
I: The Walk Series
Peter d'Agostino realized The Walk Series in San Francisco in the fall of 1973 and early spring of 1974. The series included roof walk, a close exploration of the roof of his Portrero Hill studio; fence walk, an amble along a fence that bordered a freeway overlooking San Francisco; and beach walk, a traversal of a busy highway and a stroll on the beach. He described these walks as "documentation/performances" to emphasize his use of an early handheld video camera to record his actions in real time. Upon first viewing, the three videos appear quite simple. On reflection, they unfold with an ever-increasing density that anticipated the greater local, regional, and global complexity of his later walks, a compendium that evolved over forty years. This essay travels some of the territory from The Walk Series to what he now generically refers to as his World-Wide-Walks.
In all three black-and-white tapes of The Walk Series (roof-fence-beach), d'Agostino included the trace of his presence in the form of a shadow, a small detail of his body, and sometimes, very infrequently, a fleeting view of his full body appears, the sign of the maker in and of the world. The first hint of d'Agostino's presence appears in roof walk (September 1973), which begins with a fixed shot of what appears to be a densely pitted abstract surface, the exact identity of which is impossible to ascertain. But the sound of bird calls, dogs barking, and an urban roar suggest a place of dense habitation. Eventually, the stationary shot traverses the pockmarked pebbled plane upon which the artist walks. The shadow of d'Agostino's legs flickers on the screen such that the sensation of walking transfers to the viewer. Glimpses of his shoes may be seen and one experiences a greater feeling of walking with the artist, a sensation that is enhanced by the handheld video camera that adds to the impression of sharing the artist's visual field. After walking the pebbled ground for some minutes, d'Agostino raises his camera from its microenvironment to scan the macro world around him. Only then does it become possible to see that he has been walking with the viewer on a rooftop, whose edge becomes visible by degrees, along with the surrounding backyards and nearby streets. The ever-widening panorama takes in a small park surrounded by trees in the distance. Next appear the hills and houses of a city that is recognizable as San Francisco. But the telephone wires, movement of cars in the neighborhood, and familiar objects are quickly forgotten as the camera turns toward billowing clouds in the sky.
For fence walk (December 1973), d'Agostino walked along a chain-link fence dividing a grassy hillock from a freeway. A vague flash of cars is visible through the holes in the fence, which serves both to divide the landscape and to become a barrier that arrests floating debris in a necropolis of accumulated trash. D'Agostino's shadow again proceeds on the ground and continues to seem simultaneously to belong to the viewer. The recurring trope of the shadow in his work enhances the impression of walking with him, sharing his line of vision, and being coextensive with his action in the environment. But when he lifts the camera from its focus on the ground to study his surroundings, and a fleeting glance of his body appears, d'Agostino wrests sole control of the image as a construction belonging only to him, the artist. Next, he pans across the speeding traffic before locking onto the sight of an abandoned car on the side of the highway. White and ghostlike, the immobility of the car exaggerates the roar of automobiles whizzing behind him in a rush. Deserted and silent, the lone car feels uncanny in its existential isolation, which the black-and-white video enhances. Fence walk ends with a shot of clouds into which a column of smoke from the city rises against the San Francisco hills, themselves littered with the built environment, itself caught against the backdrop of sky-like rubbish clinging to a chain-link fence.
In the third and last tape, beach walk (March 1974), the walk begins in a place not unlike where fence walk took place: a freeway with cars rapidly passing. The camera suggests that d'Agostino is standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic to subside. Someone pushes a baby stroller along the sidewalk at the edge of a retaining wall, beyond which the ocean crashes against the shore. D'Agostino is then seen from behind, hurrying across the street and down a flight of stairs to the beach. The camera during this sequence is situated on a tripod, recording his movements from behind before he picks the camera back up to walk on the beach. Once on the sand, the artist's cast shadow overlaps with and becomes the viewer's own, and one walks again with d'Agostino, watching surf and foam flush over shells and sand. D'Agostino rescues the scene from its inherent romanticism by videotaping cigarette butts tumbling in the waves and littering the beach. The walk ends with the camera again stationary as he departs the beach. Briefly glimpsed in a frontal image with the sea behind him, the artist becomes a body moving quickly to ascend the stairs from the beach, to cross the street, and to disappear.
D'Agostino's appearance in his own productions reminds viewers that seeing is an artifice of the producer, similar to how Dziga Vertov, Alfred Hitchcock, and later dozens of filmmakers appeared in their own work. In this practice, d'Agostino has never lost sight of the fact that the artifact of his making is the residue of real events in which his viewers have the sensation of participation. He accomplishes this act of sharing through the function of the shadow, which enables viewers literally to become his doppelganger, German for "double walker." While the shadow and the doppleglanger have negative connotations in western history dating from Plato's Republic, in d'Agostino's work the "double walker" could be taken to mean that one has the positive sensation of being in and a part of the activity of exploring and seeing, an illusion made possible through the prosthetics of the camera's apparatus. By uniting viewers with his shadow, d'Agostino metonymically bridges the distance between subjects and objects, sharing a form of embodiment in the articulation of the signification of things that bring objects closer to subjects. The variable sensation of being both in and outside of the site of walking has been continuous in d'Agostino's art, from its inception to his use of video and virtual reality and to his present complex multiscreen digital works.
Three years after The Walk Series, with his then future wife Deirdre Dowdakin, d'Agostino created Coming and Going: Angel Island (1977). The couple travelled by ferry to Angel Island, an island in the San Francisco Bay, and walked to its highest peak, Mt. Livermore at 788 feet. They then filmed their return walk in reverse order and short-bursts all the way back to the boat and its final docking in San Francisco. Next d'Agostino cut the film into 50 segments and invited 50 guests to retrace his and Dowdakin's walk, this time beginning at the San Francisco ferry, traveling back to Angel Island by boat, and walking back up to the top of Mt. Livermore. Each participant was given a strip of the film in a small film canister and instructed to find the place where the images in his or her segment were taken. Once these directions were carried out, participants returned the section of film to d'Agostino, who spliced the section back in the order that the film clips were received. The public and the artists, both having come and gone, watched the reconstructed film together, a new work created through their collective experience.
After the Angel Island walk, d'Agostino produced new work in the series Coming and Going, this time titled Coming and Going: NEW YORK (Subway), PARIS (Metro), San Francisco (BART), Washington (METRO) (1977-79). In this tetralogy, he surveyed the infrastructure of urban mass transit systems in the various named cities, commented on the linguistic parallels of visual images and structures of communication in closed-circuit surveillance cameras, and produced participatory public works. In each city and its subway system, d'Agostino objectified the movement of people on public transportation, deconstructed the spatial and temporal sequences, and situated public acts of walking and riding in a way that revivified banal sites of transport and movement usually taken for granted. As I noted at the time:
Three phenomena are basic to d'Agostino's art: origins, transformations, and reception (in the sense of receiving, taking possession or getting, harboring and reacting through response). Selecting aspects of observable reality (manifest in events), he creates works that signify passages and relationships among these three points. In effect, he continually produces art that objectifies the transitive, visualizing movement through structures that incorporate spatial elements in sequence, quantity, and number, through language as symbol and through the juxtaposition of real and illusory perceptions. His metaphors stay movement between approach and recession, that synaptic juncture where meaning resides and connects to recognition, which produces knowledge.
II. Walking on Edges
The Walk Series and the Comings and Goings series launched d'Agostino as an artist who walks on the edge, beginning with the terrain and rim of the several story building in roof walk, the perimeter of a dividing structure in fence walk, and the precipice of the continent at the Pacific Ocean in beach walk, and extending to the urban systems of transportations in major metropolitan cities. While constructing a visual discourse of places and sites on the edge, d'Agostino also worked on the borders of experimental art of the period, from conceptual, body, land, and installation art, to slide projection and video. He equally drew upon the spare aesthetics of minimalism to create his own unique hybrid of the late 1960s and early 1970s flourishing forms of avant-garde practices. His consciousness of edges reflects as much his view that the concept of "the dematerialization of the art object [was] key to a lot of this [work]," providing him "the freedom" to imagine "the world [as a] canvas of sorts" that one "can just walk." During the following four decades, d'Agostino walked and recorded over a thousand journeys and exhibited a number of new walking series, each of which built on former insights to create what is now an intertwined corpus of sites, sounds, environments, themes, and histories from throughout the world. Being alert to edges, d'Agostino's walks cumulatively display the unique capacity of art to inhabit and operate at borders and to bridge otherwise apparently divided spheres. His walks inherently contest the conventional wisdom that fields of knowledge are independent, especially those of the humanities and the sciences, which English physical chemist and novelist C. P. Snow so famously identified in 1959 as the "two cultures." Rather than separate and distinct, d'Agostino's walks provide an exceptional forum for staging the natural entanglement of the rhizomatic condition of culture, society, and politics.
Significantly, a sustaining support enabling the artist to walk edges, while uniting putatively isolated spheres of experience, has been his study and application of semiotics, the sign systems that operate in the overlap and limits of visual and textual information and at the intersections of objects, language, behavior, and society. His many series of walks have brought into rigorous interplay d'Agostinos innate sensitivity to how the processes and production of meaning depend upon the juxtaposition of signs, and he has continuously identified points of connection and communication between social and political phenomena through language and image. He has drawn on visual aspects of the natural and cultural worlds, as well as on poetry, literature, and philosophy; and his oeuvre is a veritable compendium of quotations that link art to literary meanings.
When asked if his study of semiotics included such thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Pierce, Umberto Eco, Christian Metz, and Roland Barthes, d'Agostino responded:
Sure, the obvious suspects. BUT the first refs I made to LANGUAGE were most important [to] the inspiration for the work. "The science of signs" was & still is suspect, there's always pre and post to these ideas. Art should not depend on any of it, after all (Art) is news that stays news, I replace E. Pound's (Literature). Of course, WCW provides another source for the WALKS.
He also included in his email fragments from William Carlos Williams' epic poem Paterson (1946-58), a reminder that these fragments of the poem stood in for d'Agostino himself: a city man, born in East Harlem, raised in the Bronx, educated in New York, but aware of the "outside" Locating "the elemental character of place in the particular to discover the universal" as much as Williams before him, d'Agostino perceives the interpenetration of the edges of things:
The city, the man, an identity – it can't be otherwise –
An interpenetration, both ways ...
That a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving,
and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody –
Outside / outside myself / there is a world ...
which I approach / concretely
The elemental character of place ...
In the particular to discover the universal.
The breadth, depth, and substance of d'Agostino's walks testify to the nearly twenty early years of his life when he studied art, beginning at the High School of Art and Design in New York (1959–63), followed by the Art Students League in New York (1963–64), the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, Italy (1965–66), and the School of Visual Arts in New York (1964-65 and 1966-68), where he received his BFA in painting and sculpture. He then moved to San Francisco in 1968 and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, later earning his MA in "Film, Creative Arts Interdisciplinary" at San Francisco State University (1974–75). D'Agostino was already a practicing artist at a very young age, shooting home movies as a boy. He has worked in all traditional artistic mediums, from drawing, painting, and printmaking to sculpture and photography. Throughout the 1970s, he was a pioneer in slide projection installations, while also working in film and multichannel video installations. He investigated issues of commercial television, explored the possibility of electronic two-way communication, and examined how the technological apparatus of television and other media encodes, transmits, and constructs ideology and produces knowledge. His artistic research has been at the forefront of rapid advances in technology, from his use of video and interactive videodiscs (beginning in 1981) and CD-ROMs (1989) to virtual reality (1993), works that he called "critical virtual reality" He especially explored the interactive capacity for two-way interface in a variety of media. But while enthusiastic about the possibility for the use of new technologies, d'Agostino has been far from an uncritical advocate. On the contrary, early on, he drew attention to the vulnerability of the abuse of the powers of the media in his Proposal for QUBE (1978), a video installation in which he commented on the dangers of surveillance of the public, the manipulation inherent in television, and the issue of "unchecked mass communication" Years later, when using GPS, he remained acutely aware of the hegemonic applications of digital mapping.
D'Agostino has always worked at the cutting edge ofadvanced digital technologies, and today in his walks deploys Google Earth, GPS, SMS (geochat systems), and EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), among others. Invoking GPS, he sometimes refers to the digital versions of his walks in media installations as "mobile/locative" a concept that Jason Farman describes in another context as "less about the [digital] devices and more about an activity" Keenly attuned to and adapting technologies, d'Agostino's walks emphasize the activity of corporeal seeing, imagining, and remembering, and he is mindful of the contradictions in media. For, while their instrumentality can have the impact of stripping experience from a direct encounter with the world, it may also enable sharing insights gained in their application. D'Agostino celebrates such technological contradictions for how they expose the convoluted edges of reality, much as he studies how sign systems reveal the incongruities of signification.
Indeed, over the last four decades, d'Agostino has joined semiotics to various technologies in order to de- and reconstruct the intersection of images, language, and experience in all that may be discovered in a walk. He adapts advanced technologies to record and exhibit his walks, making use of the capacity of virtual, two-way media to provide a more immediate sense of "being there in the walks" as well as to enable the viewer to halt an image to examine it. D'Agostino's sensitivity to the semiotic concurrence between movement and stasis was already in place in the early 1970s when he considered the relationship between the filmic apparatus and the still. Mining films for stills in his trilogy ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG (1976–77), d'Agostino put into play in his book on the work how a still, removed from the temporality of filmic movement, as Roland Barthes wrote, is "at once instantaneous and vertical" "flouts logical time" and also "teaches us to disassociate technological constraints (the film's projection) from the authentically filmic, which is the 'indescribable' meaning" Continuing his interest in the interplay between movement and stasis, today d'Agostino encourages interaction with the technological apparatus so as to enable viewers to still a meaning-laden moment in an otherwise ephemeral walking journey and to study its import and significations.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface, vii,
PART I: INTRODUCTION, 1,
Chapter 1: Walking on Edges, Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks Kristine Stiles, 3,
PART II: COMMENTARIES, 33,
Chapter 2: Peter d'Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise, and silence) Gabriel Villota Toyos, 35,
Chapter 3: World-Wide-Walks: body-apparatus David I. Tafler, 49,
PART III: PROJECTS, 75,
Chapter 4: World-Wide-Walks: selected works (1973–2018) Peter d'Agostino, 77,
Chapter 5:FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping Peter d'Agostino, 109,
Chapter 6: WALKING ... in a changing climate Peter d'Agostino, 121,
PART IV: DOCUMENTS, 151,
Chapter 7: COLD / HOT: Walks, Wars & Climate Change David I. Tafler, Kristine Stiles, and Christiane Paul, 153,
Chapter 8: World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal Peter d'Agostino, Deirdre Dowdakin, and David I. Tafler, 177,
Chapter 9: COME & GO Kristine Stiles, 185,
PART V: APPENDICES, 201,
Chapter 10: WALKING ... maps–territories Peter d'Agostino and David I. Tafler, 203,
Chapter 11: Natural-Cultural Consciousness: in the age of climate change Peter d'Agostino and David I. Tafler, 221,
Chapter 12: Techno-Cultural Visions: photography-cinema-digital media David I. Tafler, 241,
Chapter 13: Peter d'Agostino's Interfacing Strategies:camera obscura to World Wide Web David I. Tafler, 269,
Chapter 14: Re-Visioning Virtual Realities (1990s/2010s) Peter d'Agostino, 309,
Chapter 15: footNOTES: selected 1970s notebooks Peter d'Agostino, 327,
Acknowledgments, 353,
Biographies, 359,
Index, 361,