Pedestrian roomsheet

PEDESTRIAN To leave without being forced in any way, and to follow your inspiration as if the mere fact of turning right or turning left already constituted an essentially poetic act. Edmond Jaloux1 Before the industrial revolution, everyone was a walker. Accordingly, the ‘pedestrian’ evolved in tandem with the urban metropolis and the pace of modern life. In 1902 Georg Simmel noted the dehumanising effect of city life: ‘With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.’2 Simmel’s account continues to resonate with contemporary life and its emphasis on outcomes, efficiency and productivity. Being a pedestrian is at odds with the logic of late capitalism; the ‘commute’, for example, is never used to describe a walked path, and the walked path indefinitely suspends the commuter’s destination. Given the superabundance of transport solutions, the slowness of walking is deliberately subversive. Surrealists attempted to retrieve those irrational, playful and instinctive traits excluded from modern life by wandering through the streets of Paris, and following the advice of Marx’s son-in-law, many Situationists quit their jobs in the 1960s to practice their ‘Right to be Lazy’ by drifting through the urban environment.3 For the pedestrian time is qualitative. The pace of bipedal movement brings the sensorial world into sharp relief. Walking simultaneously produces a momentum for thought and an awareness of bodily presence. It is the closest intentional act to the unwilled rhythms of the body like breathing, and the beating of the heart. ‘Ideally’, Rebecca Solnit writes, ‘walking is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned.’ 4 Pedestrians are more sensitive to the rhythms and the patterns of the street. The saturation of traffic signs and signals form an undulating tapestry of colour in the walker’s peripheral vision. Lateral, sagittal, transverse or oblique movements all have their analogous compositions. Mondrian’s 1942 Broadway BoogieWoogie, a grid full of restless energy he described as ‘dynamic equilibrium’, corresponds to both the frenetic bustle of the street and a remote aerial perspective of Manhattan’s traffic. Broadway Boogie-Woogie illustrates the imaginative continuum of the visual field in the mind of a pedestrian, for whom above and below, near and far, and macrocosm and microcosm are correlated.5 The poetry of ambulatory experience is unthinkable from a car interior. Pedestrian was once used pejoratively to describe dull literature; now, however, it speaks of attentiveness. Perhaps this is because walking, in contrast to car-travel, is a realm of unrealised potential, chance encounters, small delights, and unexplored panoramas. Jaime Tsai, 2015

Jaloux cited in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Flâneur’, The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 436 2 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Art in Theory, 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 131 3 Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 1880 4 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, a History of Walking (London: Granta, 2001), 5 5 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 169-170 1