“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself. Chosen as the center of the world, one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”- Guy Debord

For centuries graffiti has claimed visual space throughout cities, impudently besmirching society’s accreted attempts at organizing itself. More recently, artists have produced ephemeral “guerrilla” and “relational” pieces that in some way purport to defy or circumvent the programming of the built environment.

Art dealing publicly with urban spaces that operates in some “underground” capacity probably owes most of its high-art validation to the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists, circa 1950,who took on the capitalist city at the level of unconscious communication.Their politically charged maps, models, and writings provided a great deal of ideological content for the May 1968 street battles in Paris, the fetishization of graffiti as high art in the East Village in the early 1980s, and the contemporary legacy of artwork done in and with direct reference to public spaces, such as Nato Thompson’s recent curatorial efforts,
The Interventionists and Experimental Geography. The socially-engaged stance of Situationism was allied with Marxism, but Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant Nieuwenhuys, and their allies renounced all dialectical reasoning and statist imperatives. Their anti-rationalism drew from Surrealism, but Situationists had no truck with psychoanalysis and its reification of the bourgeois subject. The Situationist legacy is a model of counter-functionalist critique welded to an esoteric poetics of autonomy that, despite inspiring significant high-concept artwork, remained stalwartly negative, elitist, and backward-looking. Nonetheless, the space it created in the art-world consciousness can include unofficial public art with unrepentant interiority and communitarian spirit.

The idea of the “derive,” French for “drift,” was a trademark concept of the Situationist group. Denoting an aimless trip through the city, it recalls the flâneur, a meandering dandy celebrated by Charles Baudelaire as the rootless Parisian observer of the Second Empire cityscape, transcending mass banality to appreciate the tiny quirks and giant irrationality of the collective estate. The flâneur is flexible in his viewpoint, broad in his knowledge, takes pleasure in spontaneous experiences.
He appears as the beatnik who strolls dreamily through the black ghetto in On the Road. He is the educated content-provider vanguard of New Urbanism in The Creative Class, Richard Florida’s celebration of ameliatory gentrification. He appears as Jack the Ripper in the fictionalized in historical graphic novel From Hell, in which he leaves a trail of clues for a character who finds that his path through Victorian London has traced a pentagram – for writer Alan Moore, this is less an invocation of Satan than a motif of “Chaos Magic,” a form of Gnostic fantasy-novel nihilism. Diogenes the Cynic might be the seminal enlightened drifter, roaming the streets of ancient Athens holding a lamp in search of “a human being;” he publicly masturbated in the Agora and reportedly said “if only it was as easy to soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” For all of these capricious wanderers, a weird revolution is allegedly accomplished by this act of spatial-temporal play, a game of some kind is enacted under the noses of the masses, and, slowly, secretly, supposedly, an ignorant world is brought by intuition to the brink of truth, as the city is revealed for what it is: an infinite miasma of erogenous consumption zones.

Following in Baudelaire’s footsteps (and Nietzsche’s tank-tracks), Henri Bergson was an influential philosophical proponent of intuitive mobility and heterogeneous multiplicity. He articulated the modern disintegration of accepted perceptual unity in his book Matter and Memory:

If you abolish my consciousness . . . matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers . . . Reestablish now my consciousness, and with it, the requirements of life: farther and farther, and by crossing over each time enormous periods of the internal history of things, quasi-instantaneous views are going to be taken, views this time pictorial, of which the most vivid colors condense an infinity of repetitions and elementary changes. In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

This running figure is tracing out the shape of Bergson’s ineffable chief deity: “durée,” or “duration.” A temporal analogue to the derive, the duration does not describe time as a measurable dimension, but as an ever-expanding miasma of overlapping and interpenetrating experiences. Evoking a drive on the freeway, Walter Benjamin describes the durée as a suppression of death, with “the miserable endlessness of a scroll.”

Traditions that could anchor our impermanence have been replaced by an urban sprawl of vagrant souls, driven to roam eternally by the bottomless desire to consume. But there is a mythic goal in this disruption of awareness and symbolization – the revelation of authentic truth. For Bergson it lies in the individual’s deep memory. This regression via instinct to one’s most unconscious memories can be expressed through a new, dynamic morality that dispenses with divinity and the requirements of society. Instead of a set dogma of gods and rules, the individual discovers essences – the force of creation found
in the “impetus of love” and “the vital impulse.”

This animist mysticism owes a debt to the Renaissance “hylozoism” of Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for heres
in 1600. The one point perspective “oculus mundi” was a key motif for Bruno and all flâneurs before and after. In turn, Bergson’s views inspired a critique that prized tactics of subversion over images of submission – what Guy Debord would characterize as the “society of the spectacle,” and Gilles Deleuze as “deterritorialization.”

A large Islamic Sufi sect known as the Mourides were founded in Senegal in 1883 by the itinerant ascetic teacher Shaykh Amadu Bàmba Mbàkke, known popularly as Amadou Bamba: a pacifist, poet, anti-colonialist, and Q’uranic scholar who advocated labor, prayer, and meditation. Only one photo of him, taken by French colonial police in 1913, has survived to this day, and to Mourides, who regard Bamba as equivalent to a saint, the image is an object of devotional reverence – something of an anomaly among Muslims. Around the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the holy man is pictured on many surfaces, but one group of Bamba portraits stands out. Drawn freehand in black pigment, Pape Diop’s sacred images are not carefully rendered illustrations, but layered clusters of faces. A few simple portraits of Bamba, and sometimes other Mouride luminaries too, function as a large backdrop. Then smaller portraits pile on top, often gaining more detail as they diminish in size. Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts, documented and wrote about Diop’s work, which has been appearing in the city for over five years. They compare the work to the prolific and self-echoing religious ikons of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox faith, on one hand, and, on the other, to the optical experiments of physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though I appreciate those comparisons, my interest is less anthropological.

Little is known about Diop’s training and background, but, if we dispense with the presumptions that make him a “visionary,” “outsider,” or otherwise Other, a comparison to the formal experimentation of modernism is easy. Paul Klee, also known for his translucent visual poetics, writes about the artist seeing reality in a series of layers, saying:

The deeper he looks, the more readily he can extend his view from the present to the past, the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product.

There seems no reason to assume that Diop only sees his drawings as a visual zikr, or mantra. Rather, in addition to the essential religious content of his pieces, he seems to be consciously presenting in the world an expression of a relationship between a believer and a spiritual leader, humbly refuting the mystic materialism of the flâneur.

Bolstering the possibility that Diop might actually think of himself as an artist, in a manner recognizable in the West,
is the fact, not mentioned in the Roberts and Roberts article, that recently Senegal featured a cultural flowering under the socialist and pan-Africanist leadership of poet and president Leopold Sedar Senghor. At one point in his presidency, arts funding reached a staggering one-quarter of the nation’s fiscal budget. Art schools, museums, theaters, workshops, and festivals were founded throughout the 1960s. Senegalese artists Papa Ibra Tall and Iba N’Diaye helped to found the “Ecole de Dakar” movement, which was sometimes praised for its ambitious approach to artistic “Negritude,” sometimes dismissed as derivative of western movements and rife with self-colonizing primitivism.

After the fledgling works of the first generation, however, it seems that any dedicated image-maker in the Senegalese capital is more than capable of an “artistic” agenda, and his HER aims might not be irrelevant to discourse around master narratives of modernity in the U.S. and Europe. Diop’s art acknowledges a fractured and incomplete sense of shared mental space, but God exists in all levels of the OUR macrocosm. In reaching beyond the secular immanence of modern art, Diop takes death on as a subject, with the frantic gestural bravura but without the nauseated detachment of the German Expressionists. The unity in Diop’s work is more than formal – as in the musings of the situationists, his insistent content makes use of the city and its residents as its shifting context, its complicating factor.

A web of movement around a stable, subtle, single point is a fundamental tension in art, which functions in a different way in an indoor gallery, even an installation, versus an outdoor piece. Outdoor artwork makes me think of the poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” by Wallace Stevens, a Bergson devotee. The first stanza reads: “I placed a jar in Tennessee/ And round it was, upon a hill./ It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill.” Two famous and superficially similar artists associated with the non-built environment illustrate how and how not to think of the world as a frame. Andy Goldsworthy makes clever cutesy little balls out of icicles, clever little haloes out of fall leaves, clever little designs out of similar pebbles, and takes photos for his gallery exhibitions and accompanying coffee-table books. The wilderness is irrelevant, except as a trove of decorative notions. These pieces glorify industrious mediocrity, with no ghosts beyond or beneath. But the best environmental art expands the environment, not the artist. In “Siluetas,” probably her best-known work, Ana Mendieta dug holes in the earth in the shape of a human body (her own), in sizes from small to enormous, sometimes filling the shapes with flowers or tinted bonfires. As out of fashion as these pieces were for quite a time, perceived as ethnic or feminist essentialism, they are exactly about that empty space denoted by Wallace Stevens’ jar, and the fullness around that ritualized absence. They reveal a layer of reality within and outside the world of forms.

Chicago artist Michael Bancroft also seems to see his environment as a symphony of places and beings rather than an empty swirl of impersonal trajectories. Bancroft is locally best known for the Cooperative Image Group, the non-profit media educational organization he has led since 2003. He works primarily in the Humboldt Park neighborhood; his ongoing projects include cultivating and beautifying community gardens, from which young people harvest vegetables and herbs they tape themselves turning into hot sauce for Chi-Town Chefs, a public-access television show that they produce. The hot sauce is then sold as a fundraiser. Bancroft also works with students designing fused-glass art objects and creating silkscreen designs for t-shirts, part of a business run by the teenagers who make the shirts. He creates many stand-alone projects that become public interventions, projecting light and/or sound into public spaces, leading painting projects on boarded-up houses, or perhaps depositing sculptures made by his young collaborators. The work he makes is meant to relate to circumstances, concerns, and tastes of area residents. On his own Bancroft has planted circuit-bent tape recorders in libraries and elevators, projected video from within public trains, blown up ridiculous giant inflatable public sculptures, and created ballpoint-pen drawings that, like Pape Diop’s, show the world in an undulating mass of superimposed patterns.

Both the theory that evil has a positive existence, balancing forces for good in the universe. And the archetype of the Gnostic wanderer archetype comes from the Zoroastrian dualism of the Manicheans, who had a profound effect on Jews during the Babyonian exile in the sixth century BC. Whether fictional in whole or in part, the astronomer Magi of the Book of Matthew are almost certainly based on these Persian seekers after mystical knowledge, who were indeed drifters. In John Carpenter’s film They Live, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s character, a train-hopping drifter, finds sunglasses that give him access to a vision of evil:
the city covered with authoritarian decrees, propaganda of a cabal of mind-controlling alien zombies. Magazines and billboards commanded, ‘ “Watch TV,” “Marry and Reproduce,” and – perhaps the inspiration for Shepard Fairey’s once-ubiquitous street art mantra – “Obey.” After some large-caliber slaughter, Piper liberates humanity through destruction of the
mind-control apparatus.

What seems crucial in these stories is that the blind, fallen world can be redeemed by sight. Diop’s pieces contain elements of Bergson’s sublime humanism, and Bancroft’s take on the urban environment in a celebration of unreason that might cause a Situationist to crack a smile. But, in the end, they’re warm and hopeful. They allow a place its presence and history, while they allow art placed therein to be neither pedagogically impotent nor frivolously solipsistic. As the Situationists held, tactical awareness allows understanding of the constructed environment that shapes us. But, following Bergson, the fragmented quality of our perception is not a window on the void, but a new way of apprehending continuity, which art can depict as human and divine – simultaneously but separately.

by Bert Stabler