Sol Le Witt, ‘Map of Amsterdam without the Amstel River’, 1976, Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Mapping the City, a recent exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, approached the subject of urban life from the evolving perspectives of artists over the past forty years. Driven by broad questions such as “How do we experience the street?â€, the exhibition proposes answers in the form of video, installation, photography, and ephemera.
One of the first works that confronts the visitor is Amsterdam without the Amstel River, by Sol Le Witt, which sets a tone for the exhibition in one elegant statement. Maps are evocative documents, and the shapes of places represented on maps become familiar visual cues. Le Witt’s modification of the cartographic face of Amsterdam uses the power of this familiarity to suggest that our images of the city may be common, but each of our singular views are inevitably and fancifully distorted.
Francis Alà¿s, Ambulantes II, edition 2/4, 1992-2003. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Works by Francis Alà¿s dominate the following rooms. Railings is a wonderfully light-hearted video, proposing the city as a musical instrument, as we follow a man using a drumstick to “play†various objects that are in his path through the streets. A large collection of Alà¿s’ ephemera is presented nearby, depicting similarly ludic thoughts on urban environments and the role of citizens within it. One sketch depicts a long line of people standing in the shadow of a utility pole, another a piece of discarded gum that has been stretched to extreme lengths.
On a more political note, Valie Export’s Tap and Touch Cinema aims to radicalize sexuality by putting it out on the street, in the form of a curtain-covered box affixed to the female artist’s bare chest. She then invites people to ‘visit the cinema’, by placing their hands inside. This work highlights that normal sexual expression, especially as instigated by a woman, is suppressed and controlled while street harassment runs high. Export claims that “the intimate sphere of what the state permits is forced open into public space.†Viewing the video documentation, (especially observing one madly-grinning “cinema goerâ€) one wonders if the men on the street missed the artist’s point.
Deeper into the exhibition, American artist Sarah Morris presents urban portraiture as music video, focusing on the simultaneously sexy and seamy faà§ade of Miami. An ambient soundtrack by Liam Gillick provides the heartbeat of what is ultimately a diaristic view of Miami in all its various states. Nearby, Jeff Wall’s Dawn focuses only on the seedy aspect of the city, presenting a dirty and desolate corner of urban reality, which could be the same type of place anywhere.
Bill Owens’ images of suburbia similarly could be Anytown, U.S.A., yet he chooses to personalize each iconic image of seventies suburbia with a quotation from the subjects of the photograph, such as: “I enjoy giving a Tupperware party in my home. It gives me a chance to talk to my friends. But really, Tupperware is a homemaker’s dream, you save time and money because your food keeps longer.†The images on their own are compelling evidence of the mindset created by urban sprawl, but adding the statements cements notions of difference between suburbia and inner-urban life.
Doug Aitken, still from Electric Earth, 1999, Video installation, Stedelijk Museum CS. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij, Amsterdam
Street photography dominates this exhibition, with numerous other examples including Beat Streuli, Lee Friedlander, and Phillip Lorca diCorcia. Video is also prominent, with a large section of the exhibition devoted to the installation of Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth. Aitken’s piece is evocative and visually appealing, appearing on multiple screens in a closed-off area of the gallery. A rapper/dancer moves through contemporary America, defiantly strutting in the face of the same kind of desolation depicted in pieces like Jeff Wall’s Dawn.
Though the exhibition notes reference the flà¢neur at length, and one might expect that an exhibition of this nature would rely heavily on ideas popularized by the Situationists, many of the works have little to do with these concepts. Highly-staged work such as the pieces by Wall, Aitken, and Morris have a very deliberate artistic agenda, which in a sense is the antithesis of dérive. These works provide a methodical counterpoint to the free-wheeling, romantic notion of the dérive, offering a grid beneath a weary flà¢neur‘s feet.
Though the exhibition is balanced in many aspects, the lack of cutting-edge work dealing with the city is a noticeable gaffe. Digital technologies have enabled numerous projects about urban life, none of which were represented in Mapping the City. The exclusion of new media works was profoundly disappointing, especially since there is such a selection of excellent projects in this area to choose from. Instead of presenting several flavours of street photography, the curatorial team at the Stedelijk could have made a real statement by including some of the contemporary projects that push notions of civic participation, cartography, and site-specificity to the next level. Aitken’s video installation is a good piece, but it wasn’t the “dérive for the digital age†that the exhibition pamphlet promised.
Mapping the City offers a kaleidoscopic view on our urban centres, approaching cities from standpoints ranging from speculative, to playful, to documentarian. When leaving the exhibition, viewers will inevitably view their own paths through their familiar urban environments differently, which is a considerable achievement.
Participating artists:
Doug Aitken, Francis Alà¿s, Stanley Brouwn, Matthew Buckingham, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Guy Debord/Asger Jorn, Ed van der Elsken, Valie Export, Lee Friedlander, Dan Graham, Frank Hesse, Douglas Huebler, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Sol LeWitt, Sarah Morris, Bill Owens, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Willem de Ridder en Wim T. Schippers, Beat Streuli, Jeff Wall.
