1. West 21st Street, between 6th and 7th Avenue
Participants gather on West 21st Street, between 6th and 7th Ave.
The Guide begins by sharing the “Thematic Prelude.”
Next, he gives a briefing about the walk (“Instructions”).
He then shows them a printed copy of Photograph #1. The prompt is then shared. (The prompt, similar to the other instances in which it is shared, requires participants to take a photo during that section of the stroll that evokes the sensorial sensibility of the photograph and/or poem that has been shared.)
Thematic Prelude
“Walking can be imagined as a visual activity,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust (2000), “every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known.”
Keeping this sentiment in mind – and keeping the notion that an urban landscape is as much spatial as mental – we’re about to embark on an exercise in close looking, and we’re going to employ the apparatus of our smartphone cameras.
Amongst its many uses (and misuses), a camera allows us to have a mindful encounter with the given world. As Stephen Shore notes, “A camera doesn’t point at the world but frames it.”
The prompts we’re working with are designed to provide the useful constraint of a frame – perhaps it is the frame of a frame. How can you unite motion with sight in a conscious way?
Our honest task today is to appraise the world’s surface at a degree to which it is slightly less familiar. In that process the signs of life are more opaque than ordinary, and this invitation is both to see anew and aslant. It is in this sense that I hope you consider an affinity between what is known and what is strange, what is glimpsed and recorded, remembered and felt.
It might be helpful to point to two artists whose work in photography and performance might provide the sensorial accompaniment for today’s gestures. In the 2017 edition of Performa, over the course of two nights, Teju Cole presented Black Paper, an immersive experience in which he presented hundreds of photographs, many of them of quotidian moments, within a multimedia installation of audio and video. And, many years earlier, in the 2009 Biennial, Tacita Dean premiered a film she made in homage to Merce Cunningham at Danspace Project. I think of her ruminative style as a fitting lodestar to this walk – while, of course, our movement is from one point to another, the real gist of our effort is in how we choose to meander, to choreograph a performance of attentiveness.
Instructions
– In this walk, there will be five stops in all. Between one stop and the next you are to take a photograph guided by a prompt. The prompt will be read out to you by the Guide. On some occasions, the Guide will share a poem, which may serve as an evocative accompaniment to the prompt.
– Keep in mind that each prompt has been shaped by a photograph that will be shared with you before the prompt is read out. Think of the photograph as a pictorial cousin of the one you’re to take.
– On each stop you will show the photograph you took to the group and describe it in one sentence.
– In describing the photograph, you will focus, mainly, on how its contents connect with a sensation, idea, or an intimate experience.
– When you get to the final stop, you will have some additional time to describe the “album” of images you have taken.
2. Around the School of Visual Arts on 5th Avenue
I have chosen this street because it was typical for me to walk along here en route to Danspace Project, where, while studying at the SVA, I was a writer-in-residence. My eyes typically looked for certain stillnesses as I walked, especially how things were configured in space. You’re looking for two key elements to compose your first photograph: a wall and a bench. It is best if the bench is unoccupied. It is also best if the wall is dappled with sunlight. You should ensure that the photograph shows no human presence. The mood you’re reaching for is the surprising poetry of an unoccupied street corner.
Poem #1 – “5th Avenue Citizen” by Gbenga Adesina
The only citizenship I have was given to me
by the Brooklyn trees. The trees of heaven, now ghost trees;
the trees of Canarsie: little-leaf lindens, silver maples, Norway
maples, and their little ship of seeds like ships on the Atlantic.
Or their paired tinted samaras which have wings and
thus love to spiral and flutter down to the soil in the autumn
gardens where I sometimes sit and try to listen
to the labor of aquifers underground, the groan of seeds.
My sister who died and is now underground must be one of
those seeds. The white seeds, milky and deciduous, grow up to
feed Carolina wrens, Buteo hawks and laughing gulls, these
birds of Brooklyn are my companions when I sleep and dream
that I’m singing in my sister’s voice, or that I’m a bird of
paradise, high and mauve above a mountain,
gliding over a blue marina, and in that dream I have on my
head a crown of fuchsia, and on my feet the bronze
hooves of white horses, the animals of grief.
Once, in the slice of the dark, returning
from the day’s labor, with rose apples in my knapsack, and
suddenly remembering something funny my sister had once
said, I laughed in the dark and blessed myself. Then flush with
images of how we used to climb trees together as children, and
knowing that I’m invisible in this city of gilded harbors
anyway, I thought, though I did not do it, I thought I might
climb the bark and silk of this maple tree
I saw and jostle with black ants and vine dust, and go higher
and higher, as in my childhood until I reached the dome of the
tree. And from that high up, look toward the ports and islands
and tidal estuaries of the city and see them as silver
constellations held together by a finger of darkness;
Or toward the leafy cloud of the Botanical Garden
where goldenrods, asters and canna lilies sleep in midnight sap
and await resurrection by light. Perhaps, my sister is only
asleep. Or toward the bay of the Hudson, near the Little Red
Lighthouse, where the Atlantic meets the shore, and see my
ancestors rise as mist from the ocean.
I thought I might look from my tree and see the mossy acres of
Hart Island, that burial ground of strangers and citizens,
where all those we’ve lost are under the white dwarf stars of
headstones. The spectral multitude. As if while we slept, the
graves, on their own, began to spread
from plot to plot, multiplying all over the face of the earth.
It is not true that I praise the dead. I merely ask them to teach
me their song.
3. Blocked off area on Broadway
This is a quiet area on Broadway Avenue – a quietness relative to other parts of the street. Now, look for the largest tree you can find in this phase of your walk. You’re interested in how it towers above everything else. You’re also interested in what is happening in the background when you compose the photograph – it might be a large building, a wall, a cluster of passers-by. But you want to ensure that the tree is pictured in an intimate manner, as though you are making a portrait of an object dear to you.
4. Union Square
We’re now standing in Union Square, a site of an unlimited range of interactions; you only have to look at the entrance to the subway. For the next photograph, take care to find a group of people (even two or three is okay) in identical poses. It might help if they’re all involved in the same activity, say watching an event unfold on a screen, or hunched over a phone. In essence, you’re looking for “onlookers.” When you decide on those to picture, ensure that you picture them from the back, so that no face is visible.
Poem #2 – “Union Square City Without Smoke” by Edwin Denby
Over Manhattan island when gales subside
Inhuman colors of ocean afternoons
Luminously livid, tear the sky so wide
The exposed city looks like deserted dunes.
Peering out to the street New Yorkers in saloons
Identify the smokeless moment outside
Like a subway stop where one no longer stirs. Soon
This oceanic gracefulness will have died.
For to city people the smudgy film of smoke
Is reassuring like an office, it’s sociable
Like money, it gives the sky a furnished look
That makes disaster domestic, negotiable.
Nothing to help society in the sky’s grace
Except that each looks at it with his mortal face.
5. Stuyvesant Square Park, East 15th Street and 2nd Avenue
There are at least three entrances to Stuyvesant Square Park. The next task is relatively simple: find the most captivating entry point and picture it. Perhaps you are drawn to it by its pillars or by its arches, or by its age. Keep your inner eye trained on beauty: imagine a passageway or walkway that, were you to enter it daily, would never cease to gladden your heart.
6. St Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street
We’re now at St Marks Church, our final stop. This church is New York’s oldest site of continuous religious practice, and the second-oldest church building in Manhattan. We’ve directed you here because it is home to some major art organizations, including Danspace Project and Poetry Project. Conscious of this, your final photograph requires you to seek out people who are at play. You’re interested in how their bodies are composed in the middle of an energetic activity. It’s as if you’re watching a performance and attempting to frame its most precious moment.
Poem #3 – “St Mark’s Church Attention as a Form of Ethics” [excerpt] by Asiya Wadud
I thought we were an archipelago
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing
let’s make an assumption
let’s make an assumption that the lake has a bottom
let’s make an assumption that everyone will mourn
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks
for the sake of acknowledging they mean something
what does it mean to have worth?
who would dream to drain a lake?
I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic
it’s because I am also a body of water
it’s not that onerous
I’ve built a muscle memory
it’s not that heavy
let’s talk about erasure I mean
that’s easy
start with a word that you don’t like
start with a people you didn’t know
start with a neighborhood, rank
start with any miasma dispersed
let’s talk about burden
let’s talk about burden for the weight
it lends us
let’s talk about supplication
about my palms – uplift, patience
let’s celebrate our substance
subsistence in
amber rivulets of stilllife
constellations how you molded me
country how we became it
the longitude is a contested border
my longest muscle I named familiar
