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The train pulled into the Windsor station
late in the evening on Thursday, October 20, 2011. It was the end of an eight
hour journey for me. I was traveling from Kingston to Windsor for the two-day
conference entitled Homework:
Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices. Organized by
Windsor’s own collaborative social practice collective, Broken City Lab, the
conference was to begin early the next morning at nine o’ clock, necessitating
my arrival the night before. It was cold and dark as I exited the station into
what felt like a dusty dirt alley behind a factory. It seemed that the alley
served as a parking lot for the train station and it was at this instant rapidly
emptying of the few vehicles there to pick up the expected arrivals. I had
entertained the thought of walking to my hotel from the station because the map
I consulted made it seem possible, but now I was tired and disoriented and
discouraged by my situation: a chill had taken hold of me. I brightened when
the light of an unoccupied taxi cab appeared.
Walking could wait for daylight.
Nevertheless, I was excited about what
lay before me. The conference had an ambitious scope and I hoped to gain a
better appreciation of collaborative social practices through my attendance:
not only through the scheduled panel presentations, but also by being
introduced to the artists who were selected for a residency running concurrently
with the conference. I also wanted to take the advertised opportunity to
contribute to a collectively authored publication that was going to be produced
after the conference. And finally, I wanted to have the opportunity to spend
some time in Windsor and its border city Detroit, to walk around the core of
the two cities and get a feel for them. Also, could it be possible that Duran
Duran was playing at the Windsor casino that weekend? I glimpsed the
announcement on the marquee as the taxi sped along, transporting me to my
hotel.
The next morning I walked a short distance
along sunny streets to get to the Art Gallery of Windsor where the conference
was just getting started. A long day of concentrated discussion passed, with four
intensive panels each featuring a range from three to five speakers, artists’
performances throughout the day and then a presentation by the 20-odd artists
participating in the residency that had begun earlier in the week; all of the
preceding was topped off by not one but three keynote speakers. I overheard
another attendee say, at the end of the day, “Wow. That was like summer school
in one sitting.” Later, as I was decompressing, I began to gather some of the
threads together and I singled out one of the many recurring themes in the
various presentations, which was “Walking as an Artistic Practice.”
On the first panel that morning, focusing
on the artist’s role in education, Stephanie Springgay, (Assistant Professor in the Department of
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto) spoke of the
pedagogical turn in recent contemporary art, and cited projects such as Diane
Borsato’s The Chinatown Foray
(2008-2010), where artists and non-artists produced lateral learning through a
serendipitous expedition in an unconventional locale, and the Mammalian Diving
Reflex’s Night Walks with Teenagers in Inverness, Cape Breton (2011), which took Parkdale kids from urban Toronto
for nocturnal adventures on the East Coast.
Springgay is working with the artists mentioned as part of a research
project entitled “The Institute of Walking.” The study examines the ways artistic practices reflect the inventive
processes at work within everyday life and proposes that walking can enact a
number of interesting inter-personal, social, and pedagogic relationships. By
mindfully walking together, it seems, participants can realize the Beuysian
motto “Everyone is an artist” and minimize the
distinction between artists and non-artists.
The second panel of the day focused on collaboration,
and again walking or hiking was a privileged mode of engaging with the
environment and learning. Laura Mendes and John Loerchner (who work collaboratively
under the name Labspace Studio) spoke about the East-End Expeditions Series
that they ran in 2010. The series featured a number of artist-led projects and research-based
expeditions that undertook the investigation, navigation and re-contextualization
of natural spaces in the east-end of Toronto. For
example, their Hydro Hike led 15 artists from
various disciplines through
a green corridor of trails, tracks and hydro fields that began in Scarborough
and finished 26.5 kilometres later at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. Exhibitions featuring materials gathered during or inspired by
these expeditions were then organized after the event in order to build
meaningful narratives from their experiences and create common bonds between
the participants. According to Loerchner and Mendes, their most successful
exhibitions are built around conversations as opposed to objects. Their main
goal is to create dialogue and share experiences, and these adventures provided
an effective fulcrum for the realization of that goal.
The artist Catherine Campbell spoke most
explicitly about walking as an artistic practice on the fourth panel
presentation that day, the theme of which was “Cities and Space.” For Campbell,
both walking art and storytelling are empowering activities that help one to
find a sense of place and establish a connection to the land where one lives. A
storyteller and artist engaging in walking as an artistic practice herself,
Campbell often includes environmental teaching as a part of the process of her
practice. Campbell is a teacher whose aim is to enable her students to find
their own voices and articulate their own stories. During her presentation, she
quoted Thomas King: “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” Finding stories to tell that are linked to
place, the landscape and walking, Campbell helps her audiences/participants
establish a connection to a place in order to feel fully alive there. People’s physical
connections to a place, as much as their psychological connections, play a
strong part in their sense of engagement, ownership, and citizenship.
A citizen’s physical engagement with place
through walking as a potentially artistic practice was connected, implicitly if
not explicitly, to another recurring thread at the conference: the Occupy
Movement, which came up several times during discussions as an example of
direct democracy revealing the collaborative nature of politics and
consensus-building. Sarah Margolis-Pineo’s presentation on the third panel,
themed “Artist-Run Infrastructures,” pointed out the echoes and the continued
resonance of artistic practices of the ’60s and ’70s in today’s art, and cited
as one example a parallel between the “Occupy Museums” movement and the Art
Worker’s Coalition. The first keynote speaker,
Gregory Sholette, embodied the continuum by speaking about his own experience
working with the artists’collective PAD/D
(or Political Art Documentation and Distribution) throughout the ’80s. As
an aside, he related that he had taken a walk earlier through Windsor and noted
that, though it was looking pretty empty, it still wasn’t as bad as the Lower
East Side in New York in the ‘70s. One of the crucial points he made about his experience
with PAD/D was that, generally, one must articulate one’s own position and be
vigilant about it so that it is not lost to history. He also spoke for those
not as articulate as he: “Not having a discourse doesn’t mean you should be
excluded.” Of course, one of the main criticisms of the Occupy Movement has
been that it did not have a clear agenda or message to communicate. Conference-goers,
clearly sympathetic with the Occupy Movement’s being if not aims, were able to reflect
on issues related to collaboration and the socially engaged practices that were
highlighted by the conference, and during the next day’s work groups led by the
keynote speakers, they were given the opportunity to articulate a future
strategy for moving forward.
After two days of serious debate and
discussion, the hundred or so people who had attended the conference had earned
a well deserved pint, and so at around five o’ clock on Saturday October 22, a
large number of them retired to the Phog lounge to have one. While there, cogitating on the remnants of
the day and mustering up the courage to talk to Salem Collo-Julin of Temporary Services (another one of the keynote speakers), I noticed the bartender turn,
and putting down his telephone, call out to his patrons, “Does anyone want two
tickets to see Duran Duran tonight?” I lost my train of thought and took him up
on it.
That night on the way to the concert, I
kept noticing chalk outlines of bodies on the sidewalks of downtown Windsor,
and the message was getting clearer each time I passed one, when, just as I was
realizing that it had something to do with women’s victimization by male
violence, a small parade of another hundred or so people rounded the corner, taking
back the night and chanting “Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! The Patriarchy has got to go!” Later,
when the approximately 5,000 Duran Duran fans were let loose from the casino, I
returned to my hotel, passing a tiny encampment I dimly perceived in a dark and
quiet corner of Senator David Croll Park.
“Could that be Occupy Windsor?” I wondered, before venturing into the
drunken melee of Ouellette Avenue, where a strip filled with nightclubs is
closed for pedestrians on weekends.
The next day I caught a bus and headed over
to Detroit to walk around for the afternoon.
I had visited Windsor and Detroit on a school trip many years before,
but I had been shuttled around from art institution to art institution so I
didn’t get the sense of place or scale of the place or orientation in it that I
get from walking in a city. The first
thing I encountered when I arrived in Detroit was the much larger Occupy
encampment, which took up a whole quadrant of Grand Circus Park. Occupy Detroit was probably outflanked, however,
by the throngs of other people animating the downtown: A Lion’s game had just
ended at Comerica Park and there were numerous tail gate parties happening in
parking lots throughout the core; A performance of “Carmina Burana” had also
taken place at the Detroit Opera House that afternoon, and a wave of
fancy-outfitted people had just hit the streets. I made my way over to the
Detroit Institute of Arts, where a painting by Philip Guston was on view in a
temporary exhibition featuring works donated by a Detroit collector. In Driver (1975),
a lone motorist with a meaty hand on the wheel steers a vehicle on a barren
roadway into a bloodstained horizon.
After a weekend of walking in Windsor and Detroit, thinking and talking
about social practices and artistic engagement, I felt that this painting
summed up my experience. All the diverse
groups I encountered seemed to be pursuing their goals in an autonomous and unconnected
manner.
Leaving Windsor, I did walk back to the
train station. It took longer than I
thought it would, but on the way I did discover that, yes, there was indeed an
Occupy Windsor encampment in Senator David Croll Park. Passing a teach-in session there, I overheard
a man saying, “The odds are 99:1! Let’s Occupy the Streets!” My feeling is that
the odds are going to have to get better than that. Maybe one to one is more like it. The last memorable thing I saw in Windsor was
a dedication on a park bench overlooking the Detroit River: “Best Friends, Norm
+ Bev Marshall.” I thought of how, one day during the Homework residency, the participating
artists stitched together a number of umbrellas to create an ambulatory canopy
for them all to use to walk around Windsor together while it rained. Their
canopy is a hopeful rejoinder to the grim outlook of Guston’s Driver. From walking in Windsor and
Detroit, I took with me the following lesson: If you want to increase your
numbers, and your chances, you’ll have to collaborate.
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