The Flaneur & the Flirt

Whilst away the subject of the Flaneur came up and I mused about the differences between the act of the flaneur and those of myself. I've tried to ascertain a descriptor for someone who conducts the activities of the flaneur but transposed away from the city and into the paysage. There is of course one substantive difference - the relationship to and interaction with others. By and large rural villages (and I will come to the towns in a moment) are solitary places during daylight hours (and I suspect for much of the night too). One wanders, strolls, undisturbed and the occasional interactions with others are more often than not genuine encounters of substance. I've previously blogged about one or two of these and there are others but they are exceptions to most of my perambulations. The true flaneur walks the city, drifting through the crowds, detached and aloof. In the contemporary world and popularised in the UK especially by Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Nick Papadimitriou there is, of course, the midway phenomena of 'psycho geography' that more often than not concerns itself with the suburbs. Equally detached and more alone, these wanderers are more energetic, setting themselves specific targets of ground to be covered. All of them are however essentially literary commentators. A colleague of mine from my MA studies - Ingrid Newton - transposed the notions of psycho geography (and to an extent earlier photographic practice of the 'flaneur' as best exemplified by Atget) to the photographic realm with considerable success and deserves further recognition for a complex, witty and rewarding body of work. But these are all outside of the realm of the rural. As for this most photographic work seems to be either topographic or documentary.

However this project is less photographic and more painterly, though the photograph is the chosen weapon of record, a way of augmenting memory and punctuating the physical act of painting with something that has, at the least, a simulacra of reality. The ways and means of artists in capturing, by fair means and foul, an aspect of reality that can form part of the act of painting is well documented (not least by Hockney in Secret Knowledge). In a recent introductory talk to an exhibition of Landscape art a former colleague of mine - Professor David Crouch - outlined his thesis on the idea of Flirting With Space. A substantive part of a chapter in the book rehearses ideas around the work of Peter Lanyon with regard to the contingent idea of journeys and interaction with space. I imagine Lanyon would have thoroughly engaged with the idea of Photoshop and its offer of all possibilities with the manner in which places and spaces can be manipulated and distorted. His physical collaged sculptures hint at how this might of developed but also some of his very late 2D collages (made on his last trip to the USA) where manmade material began to find its way into the work (I recall seeing a piece that incorporated a frottage of an american car numberplate into a landscape image).

As I move into the final stages of this project, the above being yet another example of the rough digital collage from which the canvases spring, I'm imagining myself as something of a paysageneur 'flirting' with space in the rural places of North West Leicestershire!