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Hostly Footsteps Voices Memories and Walks in The City: David Pinder
Hostly Footsteps Voices Memories and Walks in The City: David Pinder
This paper is concerned with urban walking and the work of contemporary artists and
writers who take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and
paths in the city. The focus is on an audio-walk by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff entitled
The missing voice (case study B), which is set in east London. Connections are also drawn with
other recent projects in the same area by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair. The paper
discusses how these artists raise important issues about the cultural geographies of the city
relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Cardiffs audio-walk in particular works
with connections between the self and the city, between the conscious and unconscious, and
between multiple selves and urban footsteps. In so doing, she directs attention to the sig-
nificance of dreams and ghostly matters for thinking about the real and imagined spaces of
the city.
Breton: For myself, I admit such steps are everything. Where do they lead, that is the
real question. . . . Nadja: Lost steps? But theres no such thing!1
Y ou stand at the crime fiction section of the public library. A woman is with
you, her voice soft and intent. I want you to walk with me, there are some things
I need to show you. At her beckoning you pass the librarians at the main desk,
through the turnstile, and up the stairway to the art and music library. There
you wait at a table while she searches for a book to show you, one with a pho-
tograph of the room the way it used to be when old museum cases lined the
walls. It is unavailable so she directs you instead towards a volume on the table
about Ren Magritte that features the painting The menaced assassin. Someone
has apparently left a note between the pages: Someones following you. The tone
changes. Theres less time than I thought. You follow her directions back down the
stairs, more urgent this time, turning out of the library and into the noise of
Londons Whitechapel High Street. Try to follow the sound of my footsteps, she says,
so that we can stay together.
Figure 1 ~ Whitechapel Public Library, east London: the starting point of Janet Cardiffs
audio-walk The missing voice (case study B). Photo courtesy of Artangel.
The voice is that of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff. It reaches you through head-
phones from a CD of her audio walk The missing voice (case study B).2 From its
starting-point at Whitechapel Library it remains your guide for the next 40 min-
utes as you trace paths through east London. The steps that make up this soli-
tary walking tour are simultaneously real and imagined. The voice locates you
within a fictionalized realm with characters and routes that are articulated
through the spaces of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with stories that intersect
with other stories, and that take form through your own experiences, thoughts
and memories as you wander the streets. The artwork literally takes place in the
streets, finding its meaning through its embodied enaction. In effect it is per-
formed or co-created by participants. It is the very condition of the city to be
plural with a multiplicity of stories, an inexhaustability of narratives, peopled
with strangers and difference. Here the stories are elusive and fragmentary;
thoughts and perceptions shift, threads and clues are hinted at, dropped, cir-
cled round and pursued. Your senses are heightened. The atmosphere remains
taut and compelling as the walk unfolds with much that is reminiscent of detec-
tive fiction and film noir. There is indeed a sense of participating in a book or
a film as you are caught up in the narrative, both aware of its fabrication (with
Figure 2 ~ Im standing in the library with you. You can hear the turning of newspaper pages,
people talking softly. From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy of
Artangel.
Figure 3 ~ Janet Cardiff, creator of The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy
of Artangel.
Figure 4 ~ Have you ever had the urge to disappear, to escape from your own life even for just
a little while? From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy of
Artangel.
become a means of moving between stories and exploring multiple selves that
haunt the streets. Early on the narrator states: I started these recordings as a way
to remember, to make life seem more real. I cant explain it but then the voice became some-
one else, a separate person hovering in front of me like a ghost. The narrators voice is
occasionally intercut with those of an anonymous man and also a male detec-
tive who seems to be on the trail of a woman with red hair, who has apparently
disappeared or perhaps been murdered. His interjections of clues and sightings
entangle the plot. Found in her bag two cassette tapes with a receipt and a tape recorder.
And later: I believe shes still in this area. The last line is followed by the narrators
own confession, accompanied by atmospheric music from a movie connoting
mystery and suspense: I sent him the photograph and the audio tapes. I hired him to
find her. The figure of the detective has long been associated with the complexity
of modern urban life. It rests on the idea of confronting the citys apparent
unknowability in its infinite spread and diversity, and of following clues to tame
and make intelligible its secrets and scrambled paths. It embodies a realist epis-
temological claim about the potential of knowing the city and of mastering a
labyrinthine urban reality.7 At the same time, here and in certain other writings
and films, the detectives presence comes to speak of the difficulties of reading
and knowing the city, where the citys legibility and representability have been
thrown into doubt and become a focus of anxiety, or in more extreme cases
where they have become the subject of paranoiac webs of connection, as in the
self-reflexive, metaphysical detective fiction of Paul Auster.8
Questions about representation are indeed central to The missing voice as the
voices on the soundtrack shift between spaces and locations. The perspective of
Figure 5 ~ Fashion Street in Spitalfields, with the spire of Christ Church above the
rooftops. Photo courtesy of Artangel.
Figure 6 ~ Were underneath a construction awning, pieces of old wood above us. I wonder
whats behind here? . . . From Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo of Bishopsgate courtesy of
Artangel.
herself reflecting on the urge to disappear. She also recalls the incomprehen-
sion as a child that someone could just vanish as well as the agonies that result.
Ghostly presences are also felt in the way that space and time in the sound-
track shift, making you aware of connections not only with other places but also
other times, as geographies and histories collide. This happens most dramati-
cally when, as you pass down a side street in view of the spire of Christ Church,
built by Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century, a new scene is suddenly described
in front of you. Graffiti, barbed wire, men with guns and uniforms appear, and
there are fires all around. The sound of machine-gun fire breaks out, a heli-
copter beats low overhead. An air raid siren is followed by the wails of emer-
gency services and the noise of a car alarm. The narrator speaks of people having
visions of coffins in the air, and of heaps of dead bodies lying unburied. The
previously calm setting is shattered and a dark pall cast over the area. The dis-
placement may be to a war zone or perhaps the scene of a terrorist attack.16
Later, while standing at Liverpool Street Railway Station, the scene again shifts
unexpectedly and it appears as empty, blackness and rubble everywhere, holes in the
glass roof.
Connecting threads
Turning back to Janet Cardiffs The missing voice, where do its footsteps lead?
What happens to its narrative threads? What does their resolution or lack of it
say about the works engagement with the city? Towards the middle of the walk
the male detective states with reference to the woman he is tracking: As far as
I can tell shes mapping different paths through the city. I cant seem to find a reason for
the things she notices and records. The components of the mysterious plot help to
create an atmosphere of foreboding. The clues remain elusive and feature frag-
mentary reports: a bag found containing cassette tapes and a tape recorder; the
identification of a womans body; a picture from a newspaper of the woman with
long red hair; a package sent to the unidentified man. Her letter made no sense to
me, something about seeing a newspaper picture. Theyre similarities but theyre obviously
not the same person. It is a common enough strategy in modern fiction to stress
the opacity of the city, the difficulties of reading and piecing together its frag-
mented elements. The detectives inability to make sense of the events in The
missing voice brings to mind the struggles and failures to map the city by
detective figures in other texts. A striking case is Paul Austers The New York tril-
Figure 7 ~ I like watching the people from here, all these lives heading in different directions. From
Cardiff, The missing voice. Photo of Liverpool Street station by Stephen White, courtesy
of Artangel.
rupting tale-tellers. Lives that fade into other lives.36 When Cardiffs audio-walk
comes to an end, it is like awakening from a dream. All around are the struc-
tures of corporate and financial power in the City of London and its Broadgate
development. Yet, while still in their shadows, thoughts turn to other map-mak-
ers and tale-tellers with their own stories to relate, with their own narratives and
interventions that insinuate different meanings into, or directly contest, domi-
nant scriptings of urban space. Unlike overtly political and interventionist ver-
sions of psychogeography and the urban walk, The missing voice is individual,
solitary and detached from many aspects of the social geographies through
which it passes. Its dreamlike qualities remain, for me, its most resonant feature.
It centres not so much on a moment of awakening as on the drift of the dream-
walk itself and on exploring the connections between self and city, between the
conscious and unconscious, and between multiple selves and steps through the
streets. Who am I? asked Andr Breton at the opening of his book Nadja. If
this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount
to knowing whom I haunt.37 But as Bretons writings themselves suggest,
addressing how subjectivities and urban spaces intersect, and attending to
dreams and the ghostly matters of the urban, can be a vital means of thinking
about the possibilities of other cities that exist inside the city.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine Nash for her encouragement with this essay,
and Steve Pile and Philip Crang for their helpful comments. I am also grateful
to Artangel for permission to reproduce the photographs. The missing voice (case
Notes
1
Quotations from Andr Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Grove
Weidenfeld, 1960), pp. 69, 72 (emphasis original). The book was originally published
in France in 1928.
2
The lines in italics above and subsequently are taken from Janet Cardiffs The missing
voice (case study B). This has also been released as a compact disc with accompanying
photographs, video images and texts under the same title (London, Artangel, 1999).
3
Carol Peaker, The voice of a friend, Weekend post arts (3 July 1999), p. 7.
4
Some of Cardiffs projects are jointly credited to her collaborator and partner, George
Bures Miller. For a discussion of her earlier installations and audio walks, see Kitty
Scott, I want you to walk with me, in Cardiff, The missing voice, pp. 4-16.
5
Many of these events have been followed by afterlives in the form of videos, CDs or
books. Artangels projects have also included original film, television and radio works;
for further information, see the organizations website at www.artangel.org.uk
6
The distinction is from Michel de Certeaus influential essay Walking in the city, in
his The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1984), pp. 91114 (p. 97). The book was originally published in France in 1974.
7
Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the nineteenth century (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p.
2. See also Ralph Willett, The naked city: urban crime fiction in the USA (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1996); and Philip Howell, Crime and the city solution:
crime fiction, urban knowledge, and radical geography, Antipode 30 (1998), pp.
35778, who discusses the significance of geographical description in these episte-
mological claims.
8
See Steven Marcus, Reading the illegible: some modern representations of urban
experience, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, eds, Visions of the modern city:
essays in history, art and literature (New York, Columbia University, 1983), pp. 228-43;
and Jonathan Crary, J.G. Ballard and the promiscuity of forms, Zone 1/2 (1986).
9
De Certeau, Walking in the city, p. 93.
10
Janet Cardiff, cited in Ralph Rugoff, A walk on the wild side, Financial times (1920
June 1999), p. vi.
11
Iain Chambers, The aural walk, in his Migrancy, culture, identity (London, Routledge,
1994), pp. 49-53 (p. 52).
12
Scott, I want you to walk with me, p. 17, nn. 8, 9.
13
Chambers, The aural walk, p. 50.
14
From Artangels Inner City website at www.innercity.demon.co.uk
15
Cardiff, untitled text dated Sept. 1999, in The missing voice, p. 66.
16
Cardiff deliberately leaves the scene open to different interpretations, as the mix of
sounds suggests. The imagery is nevertheless especially disturbing in the wake of the
racist nail-bombing that took place nearby in Brick Lane in April 1999, injuring 13
people. Cardiff remarks on how she passed the bomb in Brick Lane herself just five
minutes before it went off, while she was visiting the area and researching the art pro-
ject. But she stresses the multiple allusions of the sounds and states: People respond
by projecting whatever images and stories come to mind; cited in Rugoff, A walk on
the wild side, p. vi. The vision of coffins and dead bodies may refer to air raids dur-
ing the Second World War, and to memories of the aftermath of a bomb that landed
on a nearby Jewish burial ground. Among other resonances surrounding Christ