Defamiliarising the Familiar: everyday tourism as the art of everyday life

My latest body of work, recently shown at Winchester School of Art, explores the relationship between tourism, art and everyday life. The work investigates the ways in which we can learn from our experiences of art and tourism practice to develop beyond habitual ways of seeing and being. In this direction, everyday practice becomes as an attentive ethics of care through which we can separate personal ontological value from symbolic or exchange value within the cultural systems of late capitalism. One of the aims of my multidisciplinary practice, which includes painting, collage, photography, video, installation and artist-led projects, is to explore the relationship between art, leisure and everyday life in order to expose the paradoxes and inadequacies of commercialised leisure in terms of reward and liberation. Moreover, I also seek to produce conditions to make visible the affective labour of everyday production as a capitalist resource. Further to this, I use relational practice and processes of authoring / de-authoring, to highlight the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of object production and exchanges within late capitalist systems. 

 

The practices of art and tourism encompass both immersion and reflexive subjectivities and can be used to develop a duel consciousness of everyday life in an age in which it is rarely possible for the everyday to be fugitive or to exist outside of specialist practices. Within the biopolitical structures of late capitalism all practices are specialist within the 'creative' economy, characterised by the de-differentiation between work and non-work. Subjective practices and everyday escapes become affective capital within globalised neoliberal systems. New knowledge cannot exist outside of this logic unless it is a situated and contingent knowledge, formed in the gap between the immersive and the reflexive, as an ethics of everyday practice. Artistic and touristic practices, then, become ways of envisioning alternative ways of being and seeing – of imagining possible futures and entertaining the idea of flux and change in the ungendered potentiality of the moment. Above all, we can utilise art and tourism subjectivities as a means of seeing difference in de-differentiation, seeing through the eyes of the 'alien' other, in order to see beyond the alienating same.

HOTEL (installation views)

The images above are a series of A1 photographs documenting a an installation of my paintings at Urban Beach Hotel in Bournemouth. The gallery display itself becomes an installation, mirroring the pseudo-domestic environment of the hotel. The project originated when I gave ten of my paintings to the hotel on permanent loan. This was not a simple act of altruism, just as neither are the 'value added' creative acts of the front of house staff at the hotel - such as producing beautiful, hand drawn chalk board designs. Whilst their everyday creativities may be considered to be unconditional creative and their emotional labour altruistic generosity, this is muddied by working conditions, the blurring of work and leisure, and the ambivalence of social relations. My creative act of painting could be considered a tactic of 'making do' or of making everyday life more bearable, if it were not for the fact that the paintings have become actors in a relational artwork. This is not as problematic as it at first seems, however, as the paintings, despite attempts to articulate narratives of coldness, exclusion and alienation, in their eagerness towards the objects of tourism become complicit in the pseudo-liberation of commercialised leisure. Despite their critical content, they clearly become commercial objects and await their roles as objects of commerce and the exchange value that the market assigns them. An uncomfortable flicker of being emerges from the work. The images set up the equipment for exclusion and alienation but refuse to fully use it. Instead, seducing the viewer with the expectations of his / her gaze. Their status is always up for negotiation and their meaning always at risk of negation: a constant cycle of dissolution and retrieval. Larger works would shout out their intention “I’m here, look at me, I’m not what you think I am”. The paintings become ephemeral objects, 'snapshot' paintings representing fleeting moments that are themselves fleeting objects. They sit where they are supposed to sit, offering eternal blue skies and complimentary colours to their fellow hotel décor. Thus, there is the suggestion that by handing the paintings to the hotel – passing them clear of both the aesthetic rhetoric of material production and institutional objectification as art – their status is reduced to that of the ready-made. They neither address, demand anything of, nor solicit the expectations of the viewer – they lack the context of the gallery and simply become décor. The negation of their status allows them to exist among things; among the guitars, surfboards and other 'cool' ephemera, which sit dumbly behind the thin veil of the venue’s aura. As mildly distracting ambience, as mise-en-scene, the paintings become part of the backdrop for the actors of everyday life, which instead of absorbing them (as spectators) in the search for meaning in the paintings (as work), is absorbed by those passing through (perhaps as a poetic images) – as meaning not sought, but carried from this fleeting rendezvous. Moreover, their status reduced to décor, they join the affective objects and emotional workers of the venue - providing an unquantifiable 'value added' at no extra cost to the business.

 The Consequences (parts 1 & 2) (installation views)

"The Penthouse - cosy seaside BnB"; a high price for emotional labour'; subtle and covert modification; under the representational demands; playing 'tour-guide' for others; navigating the objects, interests and values that made up 'home'; the devolution of our shared life and an opening out to change and flux; oscillation between private and public, ontological meaning and representational meaning; “we love playing host and welcoming guests into our home”; the desire to go backstage, to penetrate the heart of their host’s everyday life; “before long we were feeling very at home”; something was eating away at the 'staycation' dream; a hub of transient sociality; “we hadn't realised that we shared the bathroom with the hosts”; “records, bands and DJs are an important part of our life”; “we spent some quality time with Bev who was kind enough to mix some '80s music for us”; mutability was key to our success; “Bev's paintings are all over the place and give it a very personal feeling”; emotional selling point; the fallout of aesthetic rhetoric; art becomes commerce, place becomes space, home becomes homelessness; staged authenticity concealed the essence of...


Living Under the Tourist Gaze (in collaboration with Stephen Hill)

Living Under the Tourist Gaze - PIRG blog

 Living Under the Tourist Gaze (installation views)

Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012)

Rather than face up to the problem of quantifying my labour value as a reproducer of images, I simply recognised the photographer's gesture in comparing his image with mine and made the choice to paint it for him for free. Was this an act of altruism, dissent or cowardice?

Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012) (installation view)

The end of work vs non-work equates to the end of leisure.

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Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (installation views)

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (SD video)

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (HD on Vimeo)

Gift / Exchange (before and after, installation views)

Art practice is about bringing substantive personal meaning and value to everyday life and not letting life be something that is imagined as happening in other places, times or as being created using materials that are not to hand. We are no longer making art, we are making life!

 Representation III (after Harold Baim) (installation views)

  

Representation III (after Harold Baim) (SD video)

Representation III (after Harold Baim) (HD on Vimeo)

 

Situationist Survival Kit for Arts and Spirituality, Poole

"Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good" - David Salle

In March I co-ran a workshop with artists Jason Miller and Jennifer Newbury at the Lighthouse arts centre, Poole. The idea of the workshop was to look at how everyday creative practices can help us to look away from the unsatisfactory solutions of commercialised leisure and to become more resourceful in finding ways to occupy our own minds, rather than let them be occupied for us. The workshop was used to consider the relationship between spatial practice and spirituality as we looked for ways in which to integrate mundane art practices such as drawing, walking, re-imagining spaces and keeping visual diaries into everyday life.

 
Consumer practices are often a reflection of that which is perceived to be lacking in everyday life. From the annual holiday to the DFS sale, there is a sense in which we put our trust in commercialised leisure to transform mundane reality or as rewards for helping to fuel the wheels of capitalism. As pseudo-individualised creativities have become a commonplace part of everyday life, the social and institutional structures through which these are organised have become more transparent or revealed in full; thus exposing their paradoxes and inadequacies in terms of reward and liberation. Yet, we have the power to transform everyday life ourselves through creative practice; in order to live a liberated and transfigured existence in which the mundane becomes a catalyst for identifying intensify personal creative and spiritual inquiry, through practice. Participants were asked to choose from a series of propositions for Situationist intervention tactics to utilse on our planned walk around Poole commercial centre, quay and waterside park. We then returned to the Lighthouse to discuss the effects of our détournements.

The work I produced for the project began with the instruction to observe everything at eye level and respond to what I saw and experienced. I made a series of image / text pieces using the ephemeral snapshots of Poole that I had taken to document my journey. The images are cropped to reference the image sharing website Instagram and the transient nature of online representation. The font is SymLogiDIN by Walter van Rijn.

Living Under the Tourist Gaze

'a high price for emotional labour';subtle and covert modification; under the representational demands; playing 'tour-guide' for others; navigating the objects, interests and values that made up 'home'; the devolution of our shared life and an opening out to change and flux; oscillation between private and public, ontological meaning and representational meaning; “we love playing host and welcoming guests into our home”; the desire to go backstage, to penetrate the heart of their host’s everyday life; “before long we were feeling very at home”; something was eating away at the 'staycation' dream; a hub of transient sociality; “we hadn't realised that we shared the bathroom with the hosts”; “records, bands and DJs are an important part of our life”; “we spent some quality time with Bev who was kind enough to mix some '80s music for us”; mutability was key to our success; “Bev's paintings are all over the place and give it a very personal feeling”; emotional selling point; the fallout of aesthetic rhetoric; art becomes commerce, place becomes space, home becomes homelessness; staged authenticity concealed the essence of human sadness... 

What is leisure?

Q.
Are the situationists at the vanguard of leisure society?

A.
Leisure society is an appearance that veils a particular type of production/consumption of social space-time. If the time of productive work in the strict sense is reduced, the reserve army of industrial life works in consumption. Everyone is successively worker and raw material in the industry of vacations, of leisure, of spectacles. Present work is the alpha and omega of present life. The organization of consumption plus the organization of leisure must exactly counterbalance the organization of work. “Free time” is a most ironic quantity in the context of the flow of a prefabricated time. Alienated work can only produce alienated leisure, for the idle (increasingly, in fact, merely semi-idle) elite as well as for the masses who are obtaining access to brief periods of leisure. No lead shielding can insulate either a fragment of time or the entire time of a fragment of society from the radiation of alienated labor, because that labor shapes the totality of products and of social life in its own image.

(Situationist International)

Taken from “Le Questionnaire”, which originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #9 (Paris, August 1964). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006).

Ownership, Appropriation, Dwelling

Ownership

For Crouch, the embodied act of walking is a really important part of developing substantive relations with a place and of developing a sense of ownership of it. Walking is an opportunity to embody spaces and become immersed in the multi-sensory world that surrounds us. Indeed, Crouch argues that it is only through ‘embodiment’ that we can begin to enact the ‘primal social practices of shared space, that [can] be imbued with mythologies and images of ownership’ (Crouch, 1998: 168). In other words, by walking and playing in spaces we generate our own mythologies through visual and experiential memories of place; and this, in turn, produces representational spaces as we revisit spaces and rejuvenate them with discursive practices and psychogeographic narratives. Here I’m suggesting that everyday spatial practices produce subjective freedom, rooted in an ontological authenticity of place. As an anecdotal example of this, I have chosen to use my personal relationship with Bournemouth Pier.

For many years I avoided Bournemouth Pier as it seemed to be the central focus for day trippers who would park their cars close by and cram into the areas of beach either side, where they would have easy access to nearby services – fast food restaurants and amusement arcades. It seemed apparent that the pier was a product of class zoning, with all of these kinds of services pushed into a small area. However, in recent years Bournemouth Pier has become a hub for the resort’s annual arts festival. Indeed, the space has been used for a series of performance art parades in which I have participated, and a number of high profile art films have been shown in the pier theatre including a full screening of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle. As a result of these things, I have felt able to occupy the space and gain a sense of ownership of it, which has not subsided since.

This idea of ownership is very important in art. It is strongly related to the concept of appropriation or borrowing. Borrowing is often how we make sense of the world around us. When we buy an item of clothing, for example, we are not simply owning it but borrowing its meaning for use as part of an assemblage of images or what Baudrillard would term ‘bricolage’. Likewise, places can equally be borrowed. We objectify and consume places and place images through images that reproduce the tourist gaze. In turn our own photographs, reproduce the reproductions in an attempt to overwrite the object of our tourist gaze with personal narratives and stamps of ownership.

Appropriation

Appropriation as a means of ownership is also a pivotal idea in field of ‘psychogeography’. Psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Debord, 1955). Situationist International founder Guy Debord argues that the geographic environment dictates our movements and affects our emotions and behaviours. Likewise, geographic environments are designed to be used in certain ways and by particular kinds of people. Spaces can exclude as many people as they include, for example, the young, the old, and those with physical or mental disabilities. Lefebvre refers to the maps, plans and strategies of urban planners and social engineers as ‘representations of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Representations of space are ways of controlling the way spaces are used and the people who use them. Likewise, the seafront environment, which, on the surface seems to represent communality, inclusively and freedom, is a highly orchestrated and controlled space. From CCTV cameras to “beach patrol”, the beach is infiltrated by what the French philosopher Michel Foucault terms ‘the apparatus of power’ (Foucault, 1975).

Debord’s focus on walking as an everyday “tactic” through which we contest and disrupt the established symbolic order of spaces, is adopted by Michel de Certeau (1988). De Certeau proposed that maps and other such totalising spatial discourse or representations of space have the effect of rendering the act of walking invisible, by joining up points to draw a line which fixes the act within their technocratic structures. Thus, such representations ‘constitute procedures for forgetting’… by transforming …‘action into legibility, but in doing so… [causing] a way of being in the world to be forgotten’ (de Certeau, 1988: 97). However, he then introduces the concept of walking as ‘enunciation’ – an act of speech; suggesting that ‘the topographical system’ is appropriated in the same way as ‘the speaker appropriates and takes on the language’ (Ibid, 1988: 97-98). These speech acts are not simply affirmative descriptions of space like a series of ‘yes’ responses to the calls of the town planners who cry: Is the space the same shape as its supposed to be? Do you flow as you are supposed to flow? They are not simply the acts of drawing lines on maps. They are ways of using the language provided in new ways and to new ends. De Certeau extends the analogy to the acts of writing and painting, suggesting that the relationship is like that of ‘the act of writing and the written text’ or ‘the “hand” (the touch and tale of the paintbrush…) and the finished painting’.

For de Certeau (1984) we are not simply the passive “readers” of urban space. By using spaces – walking, playing, stopping, looking – we are in fact “writing” them; personalizing, adapting, amending and even modifying their meanings. He argues that walking ‘manipulates spatial organizations’ or ‘creates shadows and ambiguities within them’ (de Certeau, 1984: 101). An example of this is in the use of a wall designed to prevent the walker from going further. If the walker then uses the wall as a make-shift seat to rest and view their surroundings, then they are re-inscribing this object with a new and personal meaning that flies under the raider of spatial control. The ambiguity of surveillance is a further example. The seafront and in particular the promenade embodies the flâneuristic sensibility of being private in public;the carnivalesque pleasure of anonymity; of seeing and being seen, safely hidden within the crowd. As Hebdige (1988) suggests appropriation is disarming and that subcultural performance ‘forms up the space between surveillance and the invasion of surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is hiding in the light’ (Hebdige, 1988: 35).

Dwelling

It would also be useful at this point to begin to clarify the relationship between appropriation and dwelling. Dwelling is the idea of an ontological authenticity rooted in the process of taking up and occupying spaces and objects (Pons, 2003); and key to this is the notion of appropriation. For Larsen (2008), the vacation provides opportunities to deconstruct the primal practices of dwelling through play. He refers specifically to the symbolic materiality of tourist practices like the domestication of ‘vacation stages by building sandcastles and decorating the rented house with the collected shells and stones’. In Bournemouth this can be seen in the routine occupation of beach huts and the mundane practices such as reading and tea drinking, which come into play in and around these spaces. Likewise, campfires and barbeques provide a centre-point for dwelling practices. Further to this, Larsen suggests that these kinds of practices highlight ‘how tourists enact corporally and multi-sensually, routinely and creatively with landscapes’ (Larsen, 2008: 28). In my own art practice, I recently orchestrated a project for SIX Project Space in Bournemouth, which focused on the concept of dwelling through appropriation. Indeed, I will utilise the FROUTE project, within this study, as empirical evidence of such practices.

The notion of dwelling as authenticity is fundamental to the concept of everyday tourism because of the way that it is perceived by modern societies to be lacking from everyday life and present in tourism. MacCannell views tourism as a manifestation of the need of modern societies to look for authenticity ‘in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles’ (MacCannell, 1976: 3). Moreover, the holiday can provide opportunities to ‘act out’ traditional forms of living and ‘perform’ simpler, idealised versions of our selves (Edensor, 2001; Larsen, 2008). For Dovey, the search for authenticity is symptomatic ‘of a deep crisis in modern person-environment relationships’ (Dovey, 2000: 33). In Marxist terms the discourse represents a need to return to a state where we are not separated from the means of production and ‘where the processes of environmental change are integrated with everyday life’ (Ibid, 2000: 43). She further argues that authenticity is ‘rooted in indigenous process [and is] found and generated in the dwelling practices of everyday life’ (Ibid, 2000: 44). This proffers two oversights, both of which oppose the notion of everyday tourism. Firstly, that one can only ever dwell at home, and secondly, that it is always possible to be an “insider” at home. However, Dovey approaches the notion of ‘indigenous authenticity’ with caution, emphasising inherent paradoxes with her need to add an ontological reading of the discourse ‘in the modern world - not as a condition of things or places, but rather as a condition of connectedness between people and their world’ (Ibid, 2000: 46).

Dovey’s model of authenticity in dwelling is particularly useful, as it takes the idea of ontological truths rooted in personal meaning and relates this to postmodern environmental forms. She argues that the quest for authenticity that permeates many postmodern cultural practices increasingly contradicts much that is found in the man-made environment; and yet individuals continue to derive meaning from ‘fake or inauthentic’ places and things. As she also points out, ‘[t]o accuse someone, their possessions or their home of being inauthentic implies a strong moral judgement’ (Dovey, 2000:33). MacCannell (1976) recognises this social stigma in his observation that tourists don’t wish to be identified as such. Likewise, to call someone a “tourist” in everyday life suggests that you are implying that that person has inauthentic relations to world that they inhabit, a permanent outsider who will never know how to experience anything first-hand and / or “for real”. Dovey illustrates the process, which turns something authentic into something inauthentic with the example of window shutters. Moreover, she makes the distinction between two entirely different functionalities that dominate ‘person-environment’ relations. Shutters are an environmental form that was once a response to environmental factors. They were once understood vis-à-vis environmental function as possessing the ‘use-based meaning of “shutting” ’. Today however, they often only possess the ‘image-based meaning of “decorating” ‘ (Dovey, 2000: 36). Over time, shutters have become detached from the ‘processes of environmental change’ leaving them as free-floating signifiers (Ibid, 2000: 43). However, Dovey claims that it is not that this historical process that makes something “fake”, but that inauthenticity paradoxically ‘emerges out of the very attempt to retain or regain authenticity’ (Ibid, 2000: 36). For Dovey, authenticity is not something that can be attained by the sprinkling of fairy dust, as Disneyworld is testimony to, but it is a by-product of the process of functional ‘concerned’ relationship between people and their surroundings. Key to this is appropriation or ‘incorporation of the world into our-selves’ (Ibid, 2000: 37).

The ontological motivations of certain types of tourist practices are also manifest in material practices of everyday production, which centre on the discourses of ownership, appropriation and dwelling. These material manifestations appear as objects of “self-making” or ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988) and also as objects of concern or ‘taking care’ (Heidegger, 1964). However, these practices are not materialist in Bourdieu’s sense of the word. While there are indeed elements of both conspicuous consumption (Verblen, 1899) and the positional acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1979), these practices encompass consumption as an everyday form of production, which is:

• A transformative symbolic act, decoupled from material acts of purchasing
• An ongoing reflexive process in which the self is reformed

These discourses are characterised by everyday creativities, which are active forms of visual and embodied engagement that symbolise an ontological struggle in which substantive inter-personal and intra-personal meaning is produced. Moreover, this draws upon the notion of the post-modern self as a ‘process model’, open to reformation through new experiences and represented via everyday forms of production (Wearing and Wearing, 2001). Miller suggests the importance of the rise of leisure in democratising production. He cites the popularity of hobbies in the Nineteen Seventies and the rise in ‘pursuits in which people buy small scale production facilities (e.g. beer-making equipment)’ as emblematic of this (Miller, 1993). Today this process manifests itself in the production of private leisure spaces such as gardens and terraces. This can be seen as a reflexive act in which we recognise the arbitrary and constructed nature of tourist spaces by contriving similar spaces at home: Patio heaters, barbeques, chimineas, decking, sub-tropical plants and sun-loungers are all semiotic bit players in the production of everyday tourist spaces. This is a description that could easily be misrepresented as illustrative of conspicuous or positional consumption practices. However, taking into account practices of ownership, appropriation and dwelling in the context of notions of subjective freedom and ‘existential authenticy’ (Hughes, 1995; Wang, 1999), it is possible to see how these kinds of texts help to reproduce the kinds of ontological structures of ‘being in the world’, that we employ on holiday, in order for our tourist experiences to become useful. This involves an ontological understanding of the world as emerging - of the appearance and dissolution; the revealing and concealing of things in themselves - from a (their) base ground that Heidegger terms ‘earth’: the objective nature of things, which is unknowable. In turn, ‘earth’ conceals or shelters ‘world’; or that which we think we know, and, paradoxically, is ‘on which and in which man bases his dwelling’ (Heidegger, 1978: 107).