The City Beside Itself

Mapping

Johanna Burton, in her New York, Beside Itself, explores the ideas of time and space in relation to artists and their "movements". Through multiple artists, their works, and philosopher's and writer's ideas, Burton shapes a model of how this living organism, this city, is created (its metaphorical inner framework and structure) and how this seemingly constant changing is really just a rotation of the past and present intertwining.

Perhaps one of the best explanations of how this layering and mapping works, comes through Jonathan Flatley's Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. In this "affective mapping", we are made to view our actions and social relations as both compulsory and divergent. This mapping "also traces the paths, resting places, dead ends, and detours we might share with those who came before us." A prime example of this "sharing what came before us" would be in Emily Roysdon's David Wojnarowicz Project, mimicking Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York. To keep the essence of the idea of being in a place at a certain time (and the timelessness of the photographs made of that moment), and what it meant to be in that certain place at that time (in relation to Wojnarowicz's and Roysdon's comment on homosexuality), Roysdon does essentially the same thing that Wojnarowicz did, but with a Wojnarowicz mask instead of a Rimbaud one.

Emily Roysdon, Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)

Emily Roysdon, Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)

Flatley states that because of these circumstances (stated above...this mapping), we cannot view ourselves as independent or our actions as original or unique. Everything we do and think is based off of something that has already happened, whether that be an action, an event, art, or just an idea. This "affective mapping" gives us a visualization of a tangled city, where time is no longer a dimension and everything is weaving through everything else. The paths that one chooses to take today blends into the paths of those taken twenty years ago, creating endless loops of overlap and layers.

Because of this overlap, the history of what happened at certain locations can drastically change how one is to view a new action in the same location. That is to say, if I were to do some sort of political performance art in Grant Park, there would definitely be a different sense of understanding and interpretation there compared to the same performance piece done on, say, Navy Pier. Though the riots in Grant Park happened over forty years ago, time, as I said earlier, is a lost dimension in this layering and these events resurface themselves as present day markers of meaning and interpretation.

An artist who uses these layers of history to her benefit, would be Sharon Hayes. Hayes, in 2005, created a performance piece called In the Near Future, based in New York City. Over nine days, she went to nine locations in New York City, holding a single sign in each place that had some almost ambiguous statement written upon it (each phrase having been a borrowed or invented phrase from some past demonstration). The locations which she chose to enact these performances were locations "that were themselves highly coded, such as Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the site of a famous 1989 ACT UP protest." Through these performances, she brought into question our interpretation of them. Do we understand them as "demonstrations"? And if so, how? Do we relate the locations and phrases to previous demonstrations we have either studied or seen? Or do we just get a feeling that these performances are supposed to represent the basic structure of what a demonstration is? Hayes herself refers to In the Near Future as quasi work, not quite living up to what a demonstration is, but still sharing some of the same qualities of a real one. John Searle addresses this "knowing but not quite knowing that this is a demonstration" as a borderline case, stating that "we could not recognize borderline cases...as borderline cases if we did not grasp the concept to begin with", and that we grasp this concept through its deviation from ordinary behavior. Here this deviation would be her lack of specificity in this "protest", the fact that she is the only one "protesting", and that there doesn't seem to be any match up between her location choice and the reason for what is written on her sign.

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Hayes, in a recent discussion with Burton, brings up something she has been considering in her work: this idea of common being versus being-in-common. This distinction between the two, spoken about by Jean-Luc Nancy, is a subtle yet important one. "Common being...is based on a desire for a community that shares a common body: an organized whole or entity." In other words, this common being believes in the commonality on almost all, if not all, levels of their being. Its existence, though basically impossible, allows for an opposing existence: being-in-common. This being-in-common is the absence of the common being, believing "that our commonality is experienced in the essential truth that we have nothing in common except our uncommonness." This distance in the being-in-common is defined by Hayse as with. Being-with, according to Hayes would be ultimately the same as being-in-common, but uses the word "with" to allude to distance and space. This space (with) is a representation of the impossibility to possess the dimension of time and space, that no  matter what we choose to relate ourselves to or what we find in common with others (the intertwining in the city), there is still an emptiness between us (time?) that we cannot possess. Another word used in the understanding of this relational space, would be beside. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick attempts to define "beside" as the "mapping between bodies, between sites, through time...[comprising] a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations." In using "beside" instead of "with", the idea of a relationality between beings is still held, albeit loosely, and not completely disregarded. The space is not so open and unrelated.

With all of the overlying, intertwining, looping, endless mapping of relations in the city, there are certainly spaces in between where the past and present, and maybe even the future, lay beside one another, forming what we experience as the living, changing city.