WALKING AND WEEPING

I hear that Yayoi Kusama has an exhibition titled Cosmic Nature, in the New York Botanical Garden, a place I won’t be walking in the forseeable future, given the current state of Covid rules, which is a damned shame. Some of it looks like this:

I’ve always thought Kusama’s work was cosmic though not exactly natural, though there are days when I have trouble knowing what either of those words means. The art looks fun and colourful and playful and it has primary colours and polka dots, which is enough for me, and more than that the NYBG website says, ’Her artistic concepts of obliteration, infinity, and eternity are inspired by her intimate engagement with the colors, patterns, and life cycles of plants and flowers.’ So OK, everybody wins.

In general I do think there are few things more fun than walking through a garden and being smacked in the eye with a startling piece of art, like this one in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: ‘Spoonbridge and Cherry’ by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

In 1966 Yayoi Kusama created a performance titled Walking Piece which was recorded in a series of eighteen color slides, which doesn’t seem quite enough. Kusama walked the streets of New York City wearing a kimono and carrying a customized parasol, and from time to time, she wept without reason, though frankly who needs a reason?

The images still look good over 35 years later and might make you question received ideas of otherness and exoticism, although it seems to me these are ideas that have served Kasuma very well over the years.

It might not have meant so much in Tokyo.

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs.

Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already.

Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house:

But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you.

Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case:

And this in Lynell’s case:

In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this:

Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.

WALKING WITH FELIXES

I think you probably know that as well as being a fan of walking, I’m also a fan of “street photography” - a term that admittedly seems to be becoming increasingly dodgy. 

Recently I have also become, very belatedly, and in a mild sort of way, rather fond of cats.  And I think my fondness for cats may have something to do with walking – in that you have to “take” a dog for a walk, whereas cats insist on walking by themselves.  My cat may follow me from one room to another, but the idea of “going for a walk” with her seems inconceivable.  This is her:

One of my favorite photographers, Nobuyoshi Araki, is a great deal more than a street photographer, but he certainly takes photographs in the street, and sometimes he takes photographs of the cats he sees while he’s out walking.  He also took an enormous number of photographs of his own cat Chiro.  Like this one:

Araki, I think we can safely say, has published more books that any photographer ever has – certainly 400 plus - and one of them is titled Living Cats In Tokyo (Tokyo Neko Machi).

In some of the pictures the cat is front and center, sometimes the cat is very small and distant and it becomes a matter of “Where’s Felix?”  But they’re all good.

 I can tell you that it’s all too easy to walk around Tokyo with a camera, snapping away, and thinking you’re a bit of an Araki, and certainly the cats in Tokyo present themselves left and right, in endlessly photogenic configurations.

I can’t speak for the whole of the city, but wherever I was, whenever I stopped to look at a cat – I never got as far as petting one - a Japanese passerby would stop alongside me and say “kawaii” (which is one of the ten words of Japanese I know – meaning cute), as did this woman on her bike.

 This Tokyo experience and Araki’s book made me realize that over the years, without thinking about it very much, I’ve taken quite a few photographs of cats while I’ve been out walking.  I make no great claims for these pictures, all I can say is, “Wanna see some pictures of cats?”  I understand that some people like that kind of thing.

LOST IN THE MISTRANSLATION

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Here’s Beryl Markham writing in West With The Night, 1942, which is a book about her travels in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.  “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’”

         

Safe to say that Beryl Markham never went to Tokyo, but I just did.  I walked a lot while I was there and most of the time I was carrying and frequently consulting a map.  Unlike Ms. Markham I didn’t feel as though I had the earth in the palm of my hand.  Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a rather useless piece of paper.  Sometimes, of course, I was also consulting a rather useless graphic on a cell phone screen.  True, given the dense population of Tokyo, I was rarely alone, but a lot of the time I was lost.

         

To be honest, only rarely was I completely and utterly, irredeemably lost.  Most of the time I had some rough, nebulous idea of where I was, and I’m enough of a psychogeographer to find that experience interesting, even desirable, but getting from where I was to where I wanted to be was (let’s say) challenging, and often confusing and ultimately downright exhausting.

      Roland Barthes had something to say about this.  In Empire of Signs he writes, of Tokyo, “This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”

         

         Not completely sure about that, Roland.  For one thing I would say that by no means every discovery in Tokyo is fragile; many of them are extremely robust, but they’re intense certainly. Still, does Barthes make Tokyo sound like my kind of town.  And it is.

I walked in Tokyo, I walked a lot, in Shinjuku and Akihabara, in Ueno and  Yanesen and Roppongi Hills, and it was very alien in some ways, surprisingly familiar in others.  I mean we’ve all seen those pictures of the big bustling neon lit main streets.  And if we’ve seen the photographs of Araki and Moriyama then we’ve seen the back streets and alleys too. 

These images were accurate enough.  I was rather more enchanted with the alleys than the main streets, and of course we’re always told how safe Tokyo is. I wasn’t taking anything for granted but I was probably less guarded as I walked around the edgelands of Tokyo than I might have been in some other cities.

I took a couple of maps with me, but once I got there I kept picking up dozens of the things.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Some, of course, were just tourist maps whose main reason for existing wasn’t to help travelers go wherever they pleased, so much as direct them to some very specific places, i.e. the businesses that had paid to have advertisements on the back of these maps.  This was a plain enough illustration that maps are always in somebody’s interest, and that these interests may not necessarily be the same as yours, though of course if you’re looking for a sushi restaurant then these interests may coincide.  Here's part of the collection:

There were also a lot of public maps, on street corners, in parks, in stations, even sometimes in the sidewalk.

 And I did find it some consolation that as I walked I saw many locals who seemed as lost as I was.  They too stared at those street corner maps with as much confusion as I did.  I’d also see them staring at maps on their cell phones, sometimes using the cell phone to photograph the street corner map.  It made me feel just slightly less of a buffoon.

There were also these helpful signs directing you to places where you could cross the street.  I’m an observer of these things.  I have photographs taken in Suffolk, in England only a few years back in which the walking man is wearing flared trousers, and here the walking man was wearing a hat:

The parts of Tokyo I was in weren’t absolutely, completely free of graffiti, but by any standard I know they were very limited, and such street art as there was seemed very minor.  I don’t know if this means Tokyo really needs Banksy or whether they’d just throw him in jail. 

But oddly enough those street crossing signs were quite a target for low level doodling and stickering and general abuse.  I haven’t worked out why that is.  Maybe it’s because of the hat.

Tokyo, certainly to a first timer, though I’d imagine to anyone, seems to be a place of strange and complex and often mysterious spaces, some are big and broad and strangely empty, elsewhere there are tiny alleyways and gaps between buildings that are barely wide enough for a human being to walk through, though the cats seems to like those places just fine.

And there are certain spaces, under freeways or bridges or railway lines that do feel strangely different from their western equivalents.   In the west they might be considered non-spaces, but in Tokyo they seem much more part of the fabric of the city.  Maybe that’s because there are so many of them that if you thought of them as non-place then you’d have to think of much of the city as a blank.

I walked reasonably far and reasonably wide, though I could certainly have walked further and wider.  Most of the walking was not quite aimless.  Generally I was trying to get somewhere, say to a gallery or bookshop or bar or restaurant.  More often than not I got there, but not absolutely always.  Still I was well prepared for serendipity, and that I found in spades.

And if nobody was in any doubt that I was a tourist and didn’t belong there, I never sense any hostility, nor frankly much in the way of curiosity about me.  Maybe this was an illusion.  If we accept that the Japanese are a very polite race, maybe they were just too polite to express either their hostility or their curiosity.  Just one old jogger came up to me and me where I was from and how long I’d been in Tokyo, otherwise I was ignored as just another gaijin.  I was prepared to settle for that. 

Since I got back I’ve been reading Barrie Shelton's Learning from the Japanese City.  He writes, “To a Westerner, the Japanese maps may be seen to fragment the landscape. The Japanese maps are rather like a cubist painting where one can see on a single surface, many aspects of a three-dimensional object which could not be seen from a single static viewpoint. Considered another way, they may be seen to integrate the landscape for they show it, as it is commonly experienced by the majority of those who move through it. In other words, it is more a product of experience than the Western map which is more one of intellect.”

I think I know what he means, though of course I also think you could argue that one of the main duties of a map is to offer information for people who don’t have experience of moving through a given landscape.  If you “commonly” move through it then why did you need a map?

 

Shelton also refers to an early eighteenth century map showing the whole of Japan, a map that was 7 inches high and 28 feet long.  I haven’t seen this map and it doesn’t sound as though Shalton has either, but it sounds a wonderful thing.  I wonder if Ed Ruscha knew about this map when he did his Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Then and Now).  In any case, in honor of this concept I did buy the map you see below, by no means as long and thin as the 18^th century map, but long and thin enough.  Suitable for framing no doubt, but quite a challenge for the framer.

DIORAMIC WALKS

Do you know this guy’s work: Sohei Nishino?  I didn’t till recently.  He walks around cities taking photographs.  Well, many do, of course, but after he’s walked his chosen city for a few weeks and shot literally thousands of photographs, he assembles the results into a kind of collage, something he calls a Diorama Map.  So far the cities he’s covered include Rio, New York, Berlin, and London. Thus:

The works are huge, this one is 2300 by 1283 mm.  He says he had a particularly hard time walking in London because of the cold, and says the original idea came about when he went on “Ohenro”, a walking pilgrimage that involved him visiting 88 temples, though he says he walked not so much for spiritual enlightenment as for the sake of the journey, which in itself is a spiritual proposition, of course.  He took photographs as he went, as a way of recording the route.  Then he started taking pictures of cities.

“I try not to think about, or research a city before visiting,” he said in an interview with the website The New Wolf. “I want to capture an impression of each city only when I’m there. What I don’t want is to be prejudiced towards it beforehand, to be forced into thinking from someone else’s point of view.
 Normally, when I get to a city I begin by walking around it, spending time familiarising myself with its size. The way I walk depends on where I am, it’s as if I’m absorbing the energy of each individual city.”

He also says in an interview with Foam, “My passions are walking, meeting people, and discovering myself through the act of walking.”  Naturally he’s also walked and mapped some Japanese cities, including Tokyo, thus:

Tokyo is one of those places I’ve always said I want to visit, and it's true, but I’m daunted by it.  I’ve bought a few maps and guides, including this one, which despite the title is actually a book, an architectural guide to the city. 

Of course I didn’t expect to be able to understand the language but I wondered whether I’d even be able to make any sense of the maps.  The answer, as you see, yes and no:

I’ve thought that one way to tackle Tokyo would be simply to book into some hotel, then in the morning get up and start walking, more or less randomly for a good few hours, and do that every day, and sooner or later I’d start to feel at home.  Or perhaps I wouldn’t.

Obviously I have no idea what the experience would actually be like, but one of my points of reference is the cityscape photography of Nobuyoshi Araki.  Along with his many photographs of women in bondage, his wife, his cat, his toy dinosaurs, he also photographs streets scenes.  I love those chaotic images, all that clutter and unmatching buildings, the alleyways, the hanging cables ...

Clearly he must have done some walking in order to take those pictures, and I just discovered a book of his titled Tokyo Aruki (since his bibliography runs to several hundred volumes it’s easy to miss one), which translates as Tokyo Walks.  I assume there’s some pun in there on Aruki and Araki, but I don’t know if Japanese puns operate the way English ones do.

I just ordered a copy of the book and I’m told it’s on its way, but for now most of what I know about it comes from a website titled japanexposures on which John Sypal writes about it, and reveals that in the back there are maps showing the routes Araki took when photographing, thereby allowing the reader to follow in his footsteps, and take your own version of his pictures if you like.  I can’t decide whether this a fun idea or just very reductive, I suppose it depends on the spirit in which it’s done.

No doubt you could do something similar with Sohei Nishino’s work, though I suppose in his case the map would have to be as big as the dioramas he makes.  Ultimately of course, in the style of Borges and Lewis Carroll, you might have to make a map that was as big as the city itself.

And incidentally I did just find this quotation from Araki: "Photographing a city that is now my own is bothersome.  To be honest, I don't have any interest in any city besides Tokyo."

Here are the websites referred to above:

Foam:  http://foam-magazine.tumblr.com/post/75893218659/sohei-nishino-featured-in-our-latest-talent

The New Wolf:  http://www.thenewwolf.co.uk/2013/02/nishino/

Japanexposures:  http://www.japanexposures.com/2009/07/20/nobuyoshi-araki-tokyo-aruki-tokyo-walks/