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Main | Artists | Images | Curatorial Statement
From A to BCurated by Donna Conwell
March 6 - May 3, 2008
SOME NOTES ON FROM A TO B
by Donna Conwell
The average Angeleno spends 368 hours per year, or the equivalent of fifteen 24-hour days, commuting to and from work.
-Jared Diamond
Places, landscapes, territories, and all the objects of material culture have a reassuring solidity about them...Mobility, however, has no such presence. It is absent the moment we reflect on it. It has passed us by. It is true that there are places and landscapes of mobility—airports, roads, passages—but this is not the same as mobility itself. Maybe, on the other hand, our ways of knowing are just not mobile enough and we are stuck in a sedentarist metaphysics—a way of knowing that valorizes the apparent certainties of boundedness and rootedness over the slippery invisibility of flux and flow.
-Tim Cresswell
It takes me 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to work in the morning and about 55 minutes to get home; nearly 11 hours a week_more than a full working day. What happens in that mobile capsule of space and time? Barring unforeseen accidents, the route is almost entirely predictable. It has become as familiar to me as the layout of my apartment. I know where the merging lanes of freeway traffic at poorly planned intersections will create bottlenecks. I know where congestion will thin out and I can pick up speed. Sometimes, I arrive home entirely unable to recall how I got there or what I did en route. On other occasions, I will mull over a taxing problem. Then, there are functional activities such as eating breakfast and calling family and friends. Most common are the moments of absence when I seem to slip away entirely_disappearing and then re-appearing again at points along my trajectory.
From A to B is an artistic exploration of the commute. Getting from A to B is a basic signifier of mobility. In classical migration theory, the choice of whether or not to move would be the result of so-called push and pull factors in A and B respectively, but, as Tim Cresswell in his book On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World suggests, the content of the line between A and B tends to remain unexplored. The commute is a repeat trip from A to B; it is performed over and over again by millions of people in various contexts through out the globe. It is a communal condition of urban life and one of the primary modes by which we interface with the city and one another. It is at once a signifier of mobility and immobility_both fixity and flow.
Marc Auge, in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places." Non-places are sites marked by the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral. They include freeways, airports, and supermarkets; sites where particular histories and traditions are not allegedly relevant_uprooted places marked by mobility and travel. If point A (home) and point B (work) are places, is the space between them a non-place?
Technologies of transportation have enabled us to live further and further away from our places of work. High housing costs have led to extensive migration to the suburbs and beyond, and as congestion worsens we spend longer and longer periods of time in the ill defined in-between space of the commute. Extreme commuters_ commuter nomads who spend several hours a day en route from home to work_are the fastest growing segment of commuters in the US. What does the itinerant site of the commute become for them?
Automobile manufacturers now tailor their car designs to accommodate the needs of the long distance commuter. I-pod enablers, navigation systems, cup holders, and even refrigerated glove compartments and passenger seats that fold down into tables, are often fitted as standard. Functionally designed for the heightened comfort of its driver, the car has become the commuter’s augmented body. It serves as a prosthetic limb, enabling the motorist to cover vast distances of geographical separation and move through a world that is no longer human scale.
The places of home and work seep into the space of the commute. The multitasking commuter is found fielding calls from home and the office, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, reading the paper, contemplating the work tasks of the day, planning and arranging family activities, and zoning out in Zen-like meditative repose. Is the space of the commute a threshold between two points of mooring, a space of passage through which the social body traverses as it transitions from the private self—associated with the home—to the public self—associated with the world of work? Or is it rather a mobile place employed by the commuter in order to fulfill a series of tasks and activities that the pressures of everyday life have rendered impossible to complete elsewhere?
Seeking to engage in a process of inquiry that would interrogate this site on the move, I invited six Los Angeles based artists_Bulbo, Bia Gayotto, Elana Mann, Vincent Ramos, Linda Samuel and Jane Tsong_to map and intervene in the space of the commute, disrupting our familiar readings of this interstitial space and opening up its imaginative possibilities. Whereas in my initial statement I framed this process in quite interventionist terms, the invited artists went beyond the limits of this strategy to mine the discursive and artistic potential of the ‘commute.’ This inquiry evolved into a species of action research_where artistic practice became a vehicle for producing and presenting new ways of understanding the commute.
How do the diverse interrogations by this varied group of artists suggest new ways of thinking about the commute? What new fluid conceptual frameworks do they pose?
The commute as a site of simultaneity
Rather than a line between A and B, the commute is perhaps better conceptualized as a site of simultaneity; a mobile capsule of contradictory resonances, where relations and positions intersect and overlap_the global and the local; the public and the private.
Shifting features a sculptural listening station embedded with a sound map of recordings from eleven commuters in Los Angeles and Iraq. Elana Mann also reproduced the sound map as an unlimited-edition CD of 29 minutes_the average length of a commute in Los Angeles. The overlapping aural textures of Shifting suggest that the commute is a site of intersection where global and local processes interconnect and come into collision. Although the commute is often experienced as a solitary activity, it is also a relational space where we become implicated in a network of power relations that extends across the globe.
For "During My Commute . . ., Linda Samuels manipulates basic photographic variables to document the subtle changes of the commuter route. Taken using a pinhole camera with its minute aperture, her time-spanning images capture the commute’s duration from A to B and back again. Inviting commuters to self-identify as a public, Samuels produced two sets of postcards and solicited visitors to inscribe their thoughts about the commute and pin them to the gallery wall. Here the commute becomes a site of intersection; it is simultaneously an extension of our private realms as well as the experience of being part of a larger mobile public.
The commute as a mode of excavating the city
The commute can be mobilized as a mode of excavating the city; a means of uncovering the layering affects that take place over time. The commute provides a point of entry for seeing the city as a palimpsest that has been written over, erased and written over again.
With Xing LA, Bia Gayotto documents the route from Altadena to Long Beach by car, train and on foot. The resulting videos recall the style of early travelogues, featuring establishing shots with formal compositions and minimal camera movement. The juxtaposition of documentation of each trip suggests how successive modes of moving from A to B have irreversibly altered our perceptual experience of space.
For the modern middle classes, walking as a form of transport is essentially obsolete. It is the rare individual who commutes to work on foot. Walking is now usually considered a leisure activity. In Xing LA we follow the artist as she traces the LA River_another outmoded mode of transportation_to the sea. The river channel parallels the Ventura, Golden State and Long Beach freeways. Coated with concrete, it resembles a roadway, and, in an effort to ease traffic on local freeways, it has even been suggested as an alternative automobile route.
New modes of mobility were ushered in with the success of railroad technology in the 19th Century, and the accompanying compression of time and space enabled home and work to become functionally separate. Overtime, a new panoramic perception of the world emerged, moving from the view from the train window to the car windshield as the 20th century signaled the beginning of a new age of freeways.
By mobilizing the commute as a way of exploring and mapping the city, Gayotto suggests how evolving modes of transport have shaped Los Angeles and our experience of moving from A to B.
In Vincent Ramos’ work The Commuter, the modern urban flaneur becomes the post modern commuter. By tracing family members’ former commuter routes from the 1960s_mapping and documenting points A and B_the commute becomes a process of wandering or drifting across the cityscape and through time. Many of the places of A and B have long since disappeared or now exist as strange incongruous left over relics to a transforming city. The commute from A to B becomes less about points of departure and arrival than a process of travelling through time and getting lost.
For Everything is Still Alive Jane Tsong traces a pathway from A to B by planting California native poppies along her route from home to work. Traversing Highland Park via Pasadena to San Marino, the route crosses a historically working-class Latino community, a middle-class neighborhood, and an upper-class enclave. Vibrant orange blooms recall the fields of wildflowers described by early settlers before the land was subdivided and developed. As with Xing LA, the poppies, and the walking tours that the artist organized to chart their progress, reference an earlier ambulatory mode of moving through space. As a process of mapping Everything is Still Alive also serves to reveal the socio-economic differences of the distinct neighborhoods the route traverses. Where the poppies survive, orange blossoms reveal the disparate patterns of land management.
The commute as a condition of un-belonging
Adding the prefix com- to the Latin mutare gives us ‘commutare’: "to often change, to change altogether," which is the root of the English ‘commute.’ The commute involves journeying between positions. It is a condition of un-belonging; to be in a process of transformation.
With TJ to LA Bulbo interviewed individuals from Tijuana who have relocated to Los Angeles for employment, education and personal reasons. Some commute back and forth with varying degrees of frequency; some are unable to return. TJ to LA maps the often painful process of dislocation that occurs when one moves from A to B. Here the commute as a site of change or exchange is not a smooth transition from A to B and back; it is the detour; the stop and go, the limbo point between positions; the neither here nor fully there.
Perhaps it is because of its interstitial condition_its slippery quality that evades easy categorization_that the commute gains creative traction. The commute is not simply an itinerant site on the move; it is also a way of thinking about the world, and its imaginative potential is revealed through the diverse interrogations of the From A to B artists.
’Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin, 2001, 192
Please visit the From A to B blog for insight into how the artists and curator generated their projects.