Past and present artists of the randomly motivated walk
EDGE OF THE ORISON. In the traces of John Clare's "Journey out of Essex" 288pp.
Hamish Hamilton. By Iain Sinclair. Pounds 16.99 - 0 241 14218 0
Psychogeography: a beginner's guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets: the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.
There are alternative methods. Part of the game is inventing your own randomizer.
Plot a route between two places on a street plan of Berlin, trace the shape and transpose it onto a London street plan; walk the London version. Trace the Turin Shroud onto a street map and walk Jesus' face. Walk between halal butchers, or Catholic churches, or hairdressers. Follow isobars. Footstep a historical walker.
Or change the paradigm entirely. Go out into the city, hungry for signs and portents, and see what happens. Open your mind, let the guiding metaphors of the walk find you.
The psychogeography patent is usually assigned to Guy Debord, prominent member of the Situationist International, an avant-garde group active between 1957 and 1972.
Debord and the Situationists were looking for ways to explode the herd-think of the urban masses, and to disrupt their choreographed obedience to the sign making habits of capitalism. To these ends, they developed the idea of the "derive" or "drift": the randomly motivated walk, which -in Debord's well-known definition - was "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances". The deriveur was thus a radical update of the nineteenth-century figure of the flaneur: the pedestrian who wandered, idled and watched, and who -as Walter Benjamin pointed out -had been co-opted and degraded by capitalism into the figure of the shopper, aimlessly dot-to-dotting points of purchase.
