The Imaginative Tourist Trail for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016

The Imaginative Tourist Trail is a social art project I am currently running as part of Everyday Tourist Collective (ETC) with Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones. The project was commissioned for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016 and explores the notion of authentic experience of place when it is seen through someone a fictitious frame. We have produced an edition of 200 Interactive Trail Guides / maps in the hope that visitors will engage with the 2.6 mile trail, beginning at The Fighting Cocks pub at Godshill in the New Forest, to produce alternative narratives of the area. We printed the guides using risograph technology and included a series of prompts indexed to eleven alternative tourist sites on the trail. The prompts have are not drawn from historical facts or official narratives relating to the sites and were designed to trigger the imaginations of participants and to inspire them to see the seemingly mundane through new eyes. We hope that the project will help visitors to re-image mundane rural sites and to generate a rich, multi-layered palimpsest of experiences indicating the complex nature of our engagement with place as mediated through both official narratives and emergent and unfolding understandings of our temporal, spatial and imaginative relations to site. All responses are submitted anonymously and have been used to conduct artist-led misguided tours, which have been taking place every Saturday during the course of the festival.

Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones

Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, the two week project hopes to bring into question the notions of authorship and authenticity in both art and tourism. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices' (Foucault, 1998), we have attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants are able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of ‘truth’. Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through a fictitious frame not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play.

ETC's Tourist Misinformation Station

The Imaginative Tourist Trail 
 

Interactive Trail Guide (edition of 200)

 

Staged Art Encounters and Artists on Pedestals

Art galleries – in particular ones that stage encounters between those who consider themselves to be artists and those who do not – often pose as a cultural laboratories in which the boundaries between 'common-sense' worlds are drawn and challenged. However, gallery art encounters are still culturally and geographically segregated from day-to-day life and as such are a problematic field for political action. For Bourriaud however, the simple act of facilitating such encounters is enough. The gallery becomes a liminal zone in the ‘arena of representational commerce’, which has the capacity to transform both art and the everyday by generating ‘free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 16). But this in itself is not enough. It’s the equivalent of saying that going on holiday once in a year is enough to transform life back home. Whilst, the 'free' experiences we have on tour might influence our perspectives on everyday life, what can two weeks away in the sun really do to transform the structures of everyday life? The answer, for Bourriaud at least, lies in the notion that the ideal of a wholesale transformation of society is illusionary, and that we must therefore deal with a micro-political process of 'tiny revolutions'. However, this too would seem to limit the potential for action in everyday life if we are expected to attend relational art exhibitions and artist’s workshops in order to know how to escape the alienating demands of consumer capitalism! The very idea that the artist knows better than the rest of us is absurd. Can art encounters alone really help us to lift the sheer weight of capitalism's oppression within the structures of everyday life? Indeed, the mythologies that venerate the post-YBA, artist as a kind of guru or touchstone of 'good' living, seem to be a crass perpetuation of the cult of the artist and indeed, the cult of the self. Something Marina Abramović's 512 Hours (2014) is testimony to. The preconception that artists are the only people with the privilege to stop time, or at least view it from afar in a practice akin to mindfulness meditation, suggests that the fundamental rift between work and leisure, has not gone away, and that romantic notion of leisure (and art) as 'time to stand and stare' as expressed by the poet W.H. Davies in 1911, still haunts our worldviews and convinces us that art practice is an activity of the leisure classes. Yet, despite the fact that the 'freedom' leisure is everywhere, the structures of today’s leisure still suggest that liberation is found elsewhere and if we want 'freedom' in everyday life, then we have to be either rich or unemployed, or to earn it through resourcefulness or entrepreneurialism. Thus, the artist is imagined as either aristocratic dilettante or subversive layabout, which perhaps accounts for why artists are rarely paid for their time, and that their work can only be evaluated in terms of productivity and output. Yet conversely, if we are to judge the power of artists to transform the world on basis of their actions rather than products, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Actions, in the case of Situationism, amount to, at best de Certeau’s pin-prick tactics and at worst, distractions akin to fascist propaganda or the very image of spectacle. Likewise, actions do not challenge the productivist logic of neoliberalism – that the pursuit of freedom is the catalyst of immaterial labour and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri, 2011). Rather than considering the art object to be the enemy of social transformation, perhaps it is better to suggest that the root of the problem is the notion that being an artist is a specialised activity, distinct from everyday life, in the same way as being a tourist. Indeed, both have equally negative connotations, depending on one’s perspective!