Attempts Devised Part2

This notion of self awareness inspired by making the audience aware of their 'looking' in my version of "Attempts" invited the old idea of the "flâneur". Introduced by the likes of Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin who said that 

"Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes" 

Though Benjamin himself lamented that the role of the flâneur or wanderer was hindered due to the modernity of the city. Those darn motorcars! This exploration and almost dreamlike spectatorship coupled with your awareness of your own role as one of the crowd. This tour of the city guided my excerpts of "Attempts" is a modern, guided look at the role of the flâneur. 

Early film recorded this feeling of the flâneur and showed the city as a modern spectacle and gave it tactile and poetic quality.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPD2C0K38jY The film "Regen" or "Rain" by Joris Ivens 1929

The Movie Camera

“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising of bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. 

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate and and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

-Dziga Vertov, 1923 p.10 

As opposed to a painting in which the spectator was the unique centre of the world the camera demonstrate that there was no centre.

Going off of this idea of the modern flâneur, the next installment of the play is sent as directions in an email. You are asked to go to a street corner and as you pass the trash can you hear voices of those who have gossiped about Anne during their smoking break. An art installation and a ghost of the past. 

-"Attempts on Her Life" by Martin Crimp Act 4 The Occupier excerpt 

voices: Harriet Wilcox, Acer Su    2011

Thoughtful Billboards

This is from the work of the artist and poet Robert Montgomery, he says he works in a  "POETIC AND MELANCHOLIC POST-SITUATIONIST TRADITION"  leaving his art on what would otherwise be an overlooked part of the city. In the everyday world we are assaulted by images. Due to mass media there is no getting away from the image as it determines our reality and how we live and behave. The image becomes more real than reality. There is only surface without depth. As Berger stated, 

" We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact... we accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate.. we are theoretically the active agent- we can look away, turn down the sound, make some coffee. Yet despite this, one has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic." 

Yet Robert Montgomery, through his use of billboards, bus stops, challenges our perception of the everyday. Taking something that would normally be used for publicity images and instead uses them to challenge and interact with the passerby. The text forcing us to stop, read, interpret. In a way that an image no longer does, as we skim over the many images we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Added to that his choice of words and their direct correlation to an event, (image 2, Oscar Night) challenges us to contemplate his words as we go about our daily lives, waiting for the bus. So every so often, stop, and really look.

view more of his work at http://www.robertmontgomery.org/robertmontgomery.org/ROBERT_MONTGOMERY.html

quote: Ways of Seeing, by John Berger