Browsing by Subject "Psychology of place"

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Roni Horn’s Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) and the psychogeography of looking
(2019-06-26) Mitts, Margaret Frazier; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Stuart, David; Carter, Mia; Flaherty, George
“(When you see your reflection in water, do you recognize the water in you?)” So asks a footnote of Roni Horn’s Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), a work comprised of fifteen annotated photographs of the surface of water. The text of the six hundred total footnotes record Horn’s own thoughts and associations that emerged as she looked at the fifteen photographs of the river Thames. In this thesis, I argue that this work suggests a mode of looking that, instead of seeking a singular meaning, is more akin to the generative wandering of psychogeographers. The psychogeographic practice, of walking city streets and recording one’s observations thereof, arose out of an effort to understand the complex intersection of the social, economic, political, and personal that affects a person’s experience of urban space. Consisting of alternating immersion in urban space and withdrawal for personal reflection, psychogeographic wandering can be understood as a way to navigate city space akin to the selective and generative act of reading. To expand on this comparison and more closely triangulate this type of looking, I compare Horn’s work to Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London, which follows the psychogeographic expeditions of Robinson and the narrator through the eponymous city, and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz which, in its interspersing of black and white photographs in the text, reveals the entanglement of history, memory, and place to the reader alongside the titular character. If these three works allow a viewer to participate in a sort of creation alongside their respective creators, what kind of reading are they figuring a viewer to engage in? What assumptions are these works making or refusing to make about the identity of this viewer? And is this type of looking applicable beyond the gallery’s walls or the book’s pages? I investigate these questions, among others, in the friction that results from rubbing these works together and I hope to approach an explanation of the type of looking these works engender, one that emerges through relation