Leisure travel is inspired by the promise of personal understanding and connection offered by proximity to a different environment and people, which can then be brought back to our own culture of origin. It is often a performance of commonality. If unity cannot be found in history, culture, religion, or commerce at home, then we devote our independent time to the exploration of elsewhere. We go looking for this elusive fellowship abroad. We look for recognizably human traits in everyone, but often this sought-after authenticity is an illusion, an amalgam of impressions and transactions altogether unlike the heightened moment of life awareness it is made out to be. Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil is a response to this imperative, the chronicle of a man who travels the earth looking for signs of unity within difference. The film, as an examination of cross-cultural relationships, relates to a number of the artworks in Downtime: Constructing Leisure.
Travel, for Marker's alter ego, Sandor Krasna, is a project one has to work at, mining specific details of unfamiliar cultures in order to gain insight into a more universal picture of human nature. He can collect facts, but any authentic connections to the history and inhabitants of a different society that might become apparent from these details are reduced by the act of recording to a series of images, setting up a problematized idealism of the artist as alternative traveler. Unable to represent truth in film, he finds a tempting semblance of authenticity in the ritual practices of foreign religions. He simultaneously attempts to document genuine human collectivity and discounts that possibility, engaging a politics that confounds the attempt to faithfully represent distance and difference. Rather than represent a narrative of reality, the film presents a stream of consciousness filtered through personal observations about history and time.
In his 1976 book The Tourist, a sociological analysis of modern leisure, Dean MacCannell explains the importance of ritual to the contemporary traveler. As increased compartmentalization of workplace roles leaves us disconnected from one another, we use our free time to seek out and reconnect with a community. Leisure and the attendant travel industry have a role to play in society—that of regreasing the cog, or persuading the worker to return to work another day. Leisure is a ritual; a simplified performance of interconnectedness that is replacing established social bonds. It is a means of letting out energy that might otherwise be focused on revolution. The sense of transcending divisions of class, race, and culture to reach a utopian state of human togetherness is powerful. Leisure as a response to this potential for permeable social boundaries takes two opposing forms. One is a quest for connectedness, in which one attempts to make contact across class and culture lines. The other is a retreat into exclusivity, hunkering down with those in your own social category and putting up walls to keep difference out. Both can be artificial experiences organized around the market values of commercial tourism. MacCannell argues that "modern mass leisure contains this transcendence in itself, but there is as yet no parallel revolutionary consciousness that operates independently and for itself."i
What might this revolutionary consciousness look like? Sandor Krasna is a man driven to make peace with the arbitrariness and violence of human history. He is portrayed only through letters read by Florence Delay, a woman with roots in a geography he no longer recognizes as his own. Krasna's letters fluctuate between descriptions of local cultures encountered throughout his travels and reminiscences on the very brutal and very recent histories that predispose the apparent calm in the scenes he films. He is not a leisure traveler, but he is attempting to transcend difference and find a sign of universal human character in unfamiliar landscapes. He tries to connect in Japan through a shared appreciation for technology. In Guinea-Bissau, a country in western Africa ravaged by war and poverty, he looks at centers of commerce such as the marketplace and the docks. He looks for marks from the war in both places and turns to their rituals to try to understand how they cope with the violence. Disconnected from any concept of home, he is always on the lookout for authenticity in the "neighborhood celebrations" of elsewhere. When he thinks he's found it, he writes a letter and shoots a picture, hoping to share that fleeting glimpse with someone else.
Krasna is struck by the presence of what he calls "mediating animals" in Japanese culture, as in the statue of a heroic dog that attracts devotees and offerings, or in the cemetery for cats where pet owners go to pray for their animals' safe passage to the afterlife. He sees this trend as a characteristic markedly absent from the West. In his film Fundamentals of Pachyderm Architecture (2001), Pedro Reyes looks for animistic potential in the United States and finds it has been deflected from religious practice towards popular iconography and architecture. The film records a journey the artist made in search of Lucy the Elephant, a brightly colored former hotel located on the coast near Atlantic City, New Jersey. Reyes and a friend investigate the structure as a living embodiment of a time now long past. Dressed as elephants, they attempt to understand Lucy through mimesis and draw out this energy of shared belief. They explore the building's appeal to tourists and aficionados of roadside architecture, based in the anticipation of engaging with the collective energy directed at this animal form.
The situationist Guy Debord claimed that the function of spectacle "is to make history forgotten within culture."ii Disillusioned by the spectacle of the West, Krasna searches for the memory of history in the cultures of non-Western societies. He is given to some romanticism as well, such as when he credits the Japanese with preserving a beneficial awareness of death in life, and later cuts to a bar full of lifelong alcoholics. The correspondence format and the absence of the "I" viewpoint in the narrative underscores the elusiveness of the journalist’s coveted insider perspective, making the film a kind of pseudodocumentary that offers only anecdotes and snapshots. In a marketplace in Guinea-Bissau, the filmmaker attempts to catch the direct gaze of a local woman, but she never lets her guard down. He can depict faces, but he cannot relay another society's reality.
Marker connects rituals to the hidden machinations of power. His observations are informed by the French revolutionary philosophy of Debord and others. Bureau d'études' project of mapping influence in its many manifestations draws on this lineage as well. In a commission for Downtime, they investigate a secretive ceremony of power billed as a leisure gathering. It is conducted annually at Bohemian Grove, north of San Francisco. Participants engage in a spectacle of mock sacrifice, orchestrated like a tradition but divorced from any concrete historical or spiritual reference. Representative of 100 years of economic and political dominance, the grove is a luxury bunker for the upper classes, with local residents kept at a distance. It is a spectacle accessible only to those who have attained a controlling level of status, wealth, and influence in the world. This is again a kind of leisure that one has to work at, and pay for, sustained by certain collective goals. The decisions made by the people assembled there, including presidents and captains of international industry and banking, have ramifications felt worldwide.
The conviction that the actions and machinations of men can affect or even control nature, also linked to a notion of elsewhere, is evident in Bubble House (1999), a photograph by Tacita Dean (related to Dean's 16-millimeter film of the same name). Like the denizens of Bohemian Grove, the builder of the Bubble House sought transcendence in isolation from rather than immersion in difference. The house on the island of Cayman Brac was intended to shield its owner from natural as well as personal calamities. It was abandoned prior to completion and now decays in its unresolved state. Dean is an artist intrigued by obsessive journeys involving the sea. She depicts this iconoclastic structure as a monument to one man's failed dreams; pummeled by storms, it stands as a temple to human ingenuity and hubris.
In one of his letters, Sandor Krasna describes how he remembers "that month of January in Tokyo. Or rather, I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory—they are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape." The traveler cannot preserve the experience even for himself, for he is reliant on documentation and dim recollection. The amateur films collected by Melinda Stone are also records of this kind. Like souvenirs, made on leisure time rather than professional time, these films freeze images of personal interactions and private histories tied to specific sites and preserve human interactions that would otherwise be ephemeral. Some of the films function like diaries, and many document the influence of geography on people's lives.
Perhaps it is in memory that transcendence is finally achieved, when messy experience recedes into comfortable nostalgia. In reality, the pursuit of collective experience and shared history that many seek in travel is compromised under the best of circumstances. If it is overtaken by a commercial agenda with a vested interest in fueling the economy of leisure and rejuvenation that the citizens of capitalist societies demand, any conviviality that transpires does so in the service of that enterprise. It falls to artists to present an alternate picture of interaction across culture and class by representing the few and fleeting moments of genuine camaraderie between people. These artists must also continually question whether the investigative visual languages they develop do justice to complexities and misconceptions that deny superficial connections. The kinds of links that can be made between such elusive indicators may be insufficient to describe a fundamental human character that defies culture.
—Anuradha Vikram
Notes
i. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 12.
ii. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), chapter 8, section 192. See library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/25.