An Idiosyncratic Catalogue of Pathways of Body and Mind

An Idiosyncratic Catalogue

of Pathways of Body and Mind

An Idiosyncratic Catalogue of Pathways of Body and Mind

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Intro

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Works

103 108 114 122 128 141

List of works Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City Psychogeography Shorts Texts Addendum

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Bibliography

Intro A road is more than a connection between two places. A road is an experience of physical and psychic nature.

Roads come in all seizes and forms: straight, twisted, curved, double, square, circular; they are natural, man-made or according to some people extraterrestrial; they appear in the wild and in the cities. Roads vary in character.

I love a public road: few sights there are That please me more – such object hath had power O’er my imagination since the dawn of childhood, when its disappearing line seen daily afar off, in one bare steep Beyond the limits which my feet had trod, Was like a guide into eternity, A least to things unknown and without bound.

William Wordsworth, English poet °1770–†1850 Roads can be simply physical. The Inca highway system was build for logistic purpose, a boreen in Ireland is a pathway through the emerald fields, streets and avenues in a metropolis have to channel the pedestrians and traffic.

I won’t come, it doesn’t matter how long you will sing My path guided me to far My heart is sad, tears keep on pouring down my cheeks Each day the eye of my father touched me like burning waves, red with rage like the glow of the setting sun.

Song of the kerei-shaman, Siberut-tribe, Indonesië Roads can relate to the spiritual world. The shaman beats his drum to fall into a state of trance in order to start on a descent to the netherworld. In the case of sickness he has to capture the soul stolen by demons and reintegrate it in the body of the sick person.

And this voyage is complicated and dangerous. Australian aboriginals consult the maps on their sacred tjurunga’s in order to confirm the continuity of both their life on earth and their mythological life. Emergence myths describe pathways by which a serie of worlds are connected. The progenitors have to walk these paths to experience a metamorphoses and reach the present world.

Hundreds of them died when they were forced to clear out the minefields along the Morice-line or they were simply shot.

Algerian War of independence 1962 Alistair Horne, British historian °1925

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Roads resonate with general narratives of elimination, extermination and evasion. Death roads to camps, fragile borders littered with artillery shells are witnesses of the human suffering.

The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature.

Vertical trees and horizontal hills. The character of a walk cannot be predicted. A walk is practical not theoretical [‌] Hamish Fulton, British artist °1946 Roads also function in the art world. Artists who are rejecting the gallery as a frame for their works are drawn to wastelands and uncultivated spaces in nature. Their works vary from plain walks, ephemeral works on the landscape to colossal earthworks.

Roads leave a trace on the surface of the earth and on the surface of the mind

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Works

01 / I

02 / II

03 / I

04 / III

05 / III

06 / III

07 / III

08 / III

09 / IV

10 / V

11 / VI

12 / I

14 / I

13 / I

15 / I

16 / III

17 / VII

18 / III

19 / III

20 / IV

21 / VIII

22 / IX

23 / VI

24 / II

25 / III

26 / III

27 / X

28 / IV

29 / III

30 / XI

31 / XII

32 / III

33 / III

34 / VII

35 / III

36 / III

37 / III

38 / III

39 / III

40 / I

41 / I

42 / IV

43 / IV

44 / IV

45 / V

46 / II

47 / IX

48 / III

49 / I

50 / I

51 / XIII

52 / II

54 / II

53 / II

55 / XIV

56 / XV

57 / XV

58 / XV

59 / XVI

60 / III

61 / IV

63 / IV

62 / XVII

64 / XVIII

65 / X

66 / XIX

67 / XX

68 / IV

69 / XIX

70 / XXI

71 / XXI

72 / XX

73 / XVII

74 / I

75 / I

76 / XXII

77 / XXIII

78 / XXIV

79 / XXV

80 / XXV

81 / XXV

82 / XXV

83 / IV

84 / XXVI

List of works

01 Carl Andre Steel Peneplain 1982 Kassel, Germany cold-rolled steel 300-unit rectangle (3 × 100) 02 Camp Road Dachau, Germany 03 Carl Andre 74 Weathering Way 2001 Antwerp, Belgium hot-rolled steel 74 units (2 × 37) 04 Richard Long Foothpath Line 1999 Isla de Esculturas Pontevedra, Spain 05 Richard Long A Line in Ireland 1974 06 Richard Long Sea Level Waterline 1982 Death Valley California, U.S.A. 07 Richard Long Throwing stones into a Line 1979 A six day walk in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco 08 Richard Long Slate Line 1980 Gent, Belgium 09 Dennis Oppenheim Table Piece 1975 10 Tadashi Kawamata 2000 Middelheim, Belgium Wood

11 Sacbeob (White Ways) Yucatan, Mexico 12 Carl Andre 97 Steel Line for professor Landois 1977 Münster, Germany hot-rolled steel 97-unit line (1 × 97), side by side

21 Holy Kogi Ways Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

33 Richard Long Walking a Line in Peru 1972

22 Inca Road Machu Picchu, Peru

34 Stonerow Dead Valley, U.S.A.

23 Inca Road Machu Picchu, Peru

35 Richard Long Footpath Waterline 1991 A 7 day walk in the Glärnisch Massive, Switzerland

24 Road of death Mathausen Concentration Camp, Germany

13 Carl Andre Quadrill 1979 Queens, New York, U.S.A. douglas fir 197-unit line

25 Richard Long A Line in the Himalayas 1975

14 Carl Andre 17 Timber Line 1969 Vancouver, Canada wood 17-unit line (1 × 17), end to end

26 Richard Long Brushed Path, A Line in Nepal 1983 Along a 21 day walk

15 Carl Andre Joint 1968 Windham College, Putney, Vermont, U.S.A. 16 Richard Long River Avion driftwood line 1977 17 Stonerow Dartmoor National Park, England

38 Richard Long Ash Line 1994 Eight days of walking in Central Queensland, Australia

28 Dennis Oppenheim Negative Board 1968 St Francis, Maine, U.S.A.

39 Richard Long Walking a Line Through Leaves 1993 Along an 8 day mountain walk in Sobaeksan, Korea

30 Intra-peat stone trackway Dromteewakeen, Ireland

19 Richard Long A Line in Scotland 1981 Cul Mór

31 Devil’s Golf Course Dead Valley, U.S.A. 32 Richard Long Walking Without Traveling The Sahara 1988

20 Dennis Oppenheim Diagonal Cuts 1968 Photo documentation

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37 Richard Long A Rolling Stone 2001 Along a 15 day walk in Oregon

27 Christian Philipp Müller Illegal Border Crossing between Austria and the Principality of Liechtenstein 1993 Border between Bangs, Austria and Ruggell, Liechtenstein

29 Richard Long Along the Way 1992 An 11 day walk in Japan

18 Richard Long Snow Stones 2002 A six day walk in the Swiss Alps

36 Richard Long Throwing stones into a Line 1979 A six day walk in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

40 Carl Andre Log Piece 1968 Aspen, Colorado, U.S.A. Line of round timbers, placed one behind the other dimensions unknown 41 Carl Andre Secant 1977 Roslyn, New York, U.S.A. douglas fir 100-unit line (1× 100), end to end

42 Dennis Oppenheim Time Line 1968 U.S.A. & Canada

55 Richard Serra Shift 1970–1972 Kingcity, Ontario, Canada

43 Dennis Oppenheim Time Line 1968 U.S.A. & Canada

56 Desire path Zoetermeer, The Nederlands

44 Dennis Oppenheim Accumulation Cut 1968 New York, U.S.A. 45 Tadashi Kawamata Working Progress (1996–99) Work in situ, Alkmaar, The Netherlands, wood.

46 U.S.A. Mexico Border 47 Inca Road Isla del Sol, Bolivia 48 Richard Long Wet Weather Walking 1993 A Southward Walk across Switzeland 49 Carl Andre Copper Ribbon 1969 Copper 50 Carl Andre Installation view (Runs & Rods) 1971 51 Christo & Jean-Claude Running Fence 1972–1976 Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, U.S.A. 52 U.S.A. Mexico Border 53 U.S.A. Mexico Border 54 U.S.A. Mexico Border

66 Trapezoidal shaped figures Nazca desert, Peru 67 Jan Dibbets A Trace in the Woods in the Form of an Angle of 30° Crossing a Path 1969 Ithaca, New York, U.S.A.

57 Desire path Meibergdreef, The Nederlands

68 Dennis Oppenheim One Hour Run 1968 Maine, U.S.A. Photo documentation

58 Desire path Geldershoofd, Amsterdam, The Nederlands

69 Nazca Lines Nazca desert, Peru

59 Scorton Cursus Lancaster, England

70 Balthazar Burkhard Ville – Threatening and Empty 1998

60 Richard Long Untitled 1968 England 61 Dennis Oppenheim Relocated Burial Ground 1978 El Mirage Dry Lake, California, U.S.A. 62 Walter de Maria Desert Cross (destroyed) 1969 El Mirage Dry Lake, Nevada, U.S.A.

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79 Ice Circle Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.A. 80 Ice Circle Amasa, Michigan, U.S.A.

72 Jan Dibetts 12 Hours Tide Objects with Correction of Perspective 1969 Film for television

82 Ice Circle Lake Baikal, Russia

75 Carl Andre Timbering 1979 New York, U.S.A. douglas fir 181 unit open-ended circle

65 Christian Philipp Müller A Balancing Act 1997 Museum Fridericianum, Documenta X, Kassel, Germany

78 Betty Beaumont Cable Piece 1977 Macomb, Illinois, U.S.A.

81 Ice circle Cranberry Creek, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

74 Carl Andre Angellipse 1979 New York, U.S.A. 199 bales of hay

64 Robert Morris Grand Rapids Project 1974 Belknap Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S.A.

77 Michael Heizer Isolated Mass, Circumflex #9 of Bine Nevada Depressions 1968 Massacre Dry Lake, Nevada, U.S.A.

71 Balthazar Burkhard Ville – Under a Heavy Sky 1998

73 Walter de Maria Las Vegas Piece 1969 Desert Valley, Nevada, U.S.A.

63 Dennis Oppenheim Cancelled Crop 1969 Finisterwolde, The Nederlands

76 Rober Smithson Amarillo Ramp 1973 Tecovan, Texas, U.S.A.

83 Dennis Oppenheim Annual Rings 1968 U.S.A / Canada boundary at Fort Kent 84 Jim Denevan Circles Lake Baikal, Russia

Michel de Certeau defines the place as an environment, which one reads in a similar way as language. The place gets signified when it will be pronounced.

According to de Certeau, when one is walking in the environment, one is constantly out of place; in a process of enunciation, searching for meaning. Walking is similar to talking—but to a singular enunciations: dialect, patois, stuttering, mumbling or any other way of speaking without clear signification.

Kevin Lynch, Memory Map of Boston, 1954–1959

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City (1960) Reviewed by Natalie MacBride Introduction Born in Chicago in 1918, Kevin Lynch’s studious desire for city design commenced in 1935 at Yale University where he studied Architecture. In addition to his studies, he worked at Taliesin (1937–1939) which was the winter home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright and was the place where some of Wright’s much-published designs were conceived including Falling Water in Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Subsequently, Lynch attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1939–1940) and following this, he attained a degree (1947) in City Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is a world leading institute for research.

After completion of his studies, his passion and enthusiasm for urban design was richly rewarded when he was appointed Instructor of Urban Planning at MIT (1948), Assistant Professor (1949), Associate Professor (1955) and Professor (1963).

After thirty years at MIT, he left to form a joint practice with Stephen Carr and it was during this time that he was commissioned to work on various city projects across America and the world over. Some of his more notable work included Boston’s Government Centre, Waterfront Park, art institutions in Dallas plus numerous other urban design projects in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In addition to his practice, he made a huge impact on the industry and made prolific contributions to the field of city planning using experimental research which he compiled over a period of five years. His study involved understanding the perception and control of movement amongst local residents of three American cities, the conclusions of which offered urban designers a new perspective for city design.

After his death in 1984, it is highly probable that his legacy has been etched onto many urban landscapes by planners as a direct and positive result of his most recognised, credible and muchpublicised piece of work The Image of the City. The book was written under the guidance of Professor Gyorgy Kepes at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at MIT and was published in 1960 by the MIT Press.

Three Cities and Imageability The main essence of the book examines the visual quality of the environment which is observed by Lynch as he investigates the ‘mental images’ held by its citizens. He achieves this by focusing on the most focal and central areas within three American Cities; Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles.

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His objective was to expand upon, as well as assess his idea of ‘imageability’ (defined as a ‘character or quality held by a physical object’) to find out what forms trigger lucid images in the observer. To accomplish this, he directed two types of analysis.

The first entailed a field survey of the relevant areas of each city which was produced by an experienced observer who recorded the various elements and their visual impact of image frailty or strength. In parallel to the field survey, he also engaged in long interviews held with a small proportion of citizens to help establish their own personal images of the physical landscape.

Amongst his findings, he revealed that Boston was unique in character compared with other American cities, but on the other hand, there was no sense of direction, which meant it was full of orientation difficulties. It was noted that Jersey City was ‘formless’ and indistinct in character whilst Los Angeles had a youthful arrangement that was expressed in its ‘grid iron layout’.

From his investigations, he proposed formulas that he hoped would begin to help designers visualise the forms that encompass them at an urban scale and offer them some fundamental principles for urban design.

Legibility In addition to the concept of ‘imageability’, another integral and critical aspect of the urban structure is ‘legibility’ of the city. By this he means ‘the ease with which its parts can be recognised’ and assembled into a logical and systematic setup. He suggests that this structured arrangement is one of the requisite components of the city’s landscape, especially in specific cases where environments are of immeasurable scale, not only in terms of area, but also in terms of ‘time and complexity’.

The many ‘cues’ that are already utilised in structuring and identifying the environment comprise of ‘visual sensations of colour, shape, motion, or polarisation of light.’ In addition to these, other senses like smell, sound and touch equally serve as vital aids in helping citizens to become more acquainted to their surroundings.

In addition to these perceptible tools, he describes the employment of other ‘way finding’ mechanisms that also help guide the way; ‘the presence of others’, topographical depictions, symbols and signs. He implies that these tools have essentially helped to counteract the problem of ‘disorientation’ and the usual feelings of panic or distress that occurs with this. However, he doesn’t completely rule out the question of ‘disorientation’ as he links it to the ‘value in mystification’ and the feeling of wonder that this can bring. He uses the example of the House of Mirrors and the allure that may be experienced from this. However, it must be acknowledged that ‘mystification’ can only be an enjoyable experience

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under the circumstances that there must be no possibility of ‘losing basic form’ or sense of direction and a feeling of ‘never coming out’. Essentially, the confusion must occur only in small areas but in a ‘visible whole’.

However, in addition to his account of what guiding mechanisms were available during his research, other technology has evolved and other ‘way finding’ devices now exist. For instance, mobile phones containing mapping applications such as Google Maps and satellite navigation equipment with Global Positioning System software are just a few of many, relatively recent and modern forms of technological instruments that are accessible to the majority of people. Both these technologies have consequently altered the dynamics of how citizens are able to navigate their environment.

Identity, Structure and Meaning Lynch breaks down the ‘environmental image’ into three separate components of ‘identity, structure & meaning’ and verifies that ‘in reality they always appear together’. Firstly, he implies that image identity requires the recognition which can only be conveyed if the object has a clear distinction and difference from the presence of other elements. Secondly, the structure must express a ‘spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and to other objects’ around it. Finally, the structure must have some sentimental value and ‘emotional’ meaning to the viewer.

He also signifies that ‘meaning’ is also a ‘relation’ to the object, however, ‘spatial or pattern relation’ are much different from the ‘relation’ of ‘meaning’. For an example of this, he refers to ‘an image that is useful for making an exit must require the recognition of a door as the distinct entity, of its spatial relation to the observer and its meaning as a hole for getting out’. He suggests that these components are inseparable and that the visual recognition of the door is fused with its meaning as a door.

The City Image and its Elements Lynch also focuses our attention on the effects of ‘physical’ and ‘perceptible objects’ which are fundamental forms in evoking a strong environmental image. His five years of solid research spent on this subject allowed him to acquire sufficient information in order for him to be able to offer urban designers various techniques for optimising and creating the perfect city using these specific forms. His forms are defined as physical attributes and are distinguished as ‘five elements’; ‘paths’, ‘edges’, ‘districts’, ‘nodes’ and ‘landmarks’.

For example, the definition of a path is an element which acts as a channel through which an observer can move and a node is an element which may be a point of concentration where people

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can meet up like Piazza del Popolo or the Trevi in Fountain Rome. These are just a brief description of two of his elements, however, there are many other examples he uses for these and each of the remaining elements.

The definitions he provides for each of these five elements can perhaps be understood as a set of disconnected elementary definitions. However, what they individually and more importantly stand for is possibly disregarded and is due to the fact that citizens normally perceive these elements as interconnected parts that create a whole city form.

Lynch’s clear and apparent rationalisation of each element is explained in such a concise way that perhaps he wanted these elements to represent a set of design-like implements for urban designers to use so that the creation of harmonious environments could be accomplished and be read as legible whole forms by its inhabitants.

According to his study, these individual elements are what help to create a sense of ‘identity and structure’ so that the observer can effortlessly navigate their environment. However, in conclusion to his proposal for creating a lucid and apprehensible environmental image of the city by using these specific elements, he also wants them to be interpreted as forms that depend upon each other; consequently they can then create a unified and complete setup so that a legible environment can be presented to the observer.

Form Qualities With regards to providing an alternative way for understanding the roles, as well as the physical characteristic of these five components, he produced some intuitive and diagrammatic representations of them which were labelled ‘singularity’, ‘form simplicity’, ‘continuity’, ‘dominance’, ‘clarity of joint’, ‘directional differentiation’, ‘visual scope’, ‘motion awareness’, ‘time series’ as well as ‘names and meanings’. These were also considered as a means to visually communicate the definitions that he proposed for creating powerful and visual experiences of the city image.

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Conclusion Although the majority of his study focused on the ‘identity and structure’ of elements and their ‘patterning’, it was perhaps intended that these elements were to be perceived as only a guide to help structure over time the prospective city as a whole pattern so that it can a achieve a visible and all-embracing image.

He also suggests that ‘the spatial organisation of contemporary life, the speed of movement, and the speed and scale of new construction all make it’ necessary and achievable to create ‘large-scale imageable environments’.

The book was an accomplishment at its time of release in the sense that for some urban designers it was a convenient and useful instrument for composing the ideal city. However, some of its content may be left open to some critical scrutiny and concern because he seemingly addressed city design in a rather linear way and placed little emphasis on the complexities that surround the sociological aspects of city life.

The contemplation he does give to the social aspect of design is addressed in a more abstract and subtle manner when he concludes that a vivid image is the stimulus for elevating the experience of a city to an advanced new level for the observer. In addition, he believes the city should not only be ‘organised,’ but ‘it should speak of the individuals and their complex society’. And finally, it must carry some ‘poetic and symbolic’ meaning and be able to retain as much of its historical past.

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Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957

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Psychogeography Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ Another definition is ‘a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities… just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.’

Development Psychogeography was originally developed by the avant-garde movement Lettrist International in the journal Potlach. The originator of what became known as unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the dérive was Ivan Chtcheglov, in his highly influential 1953 essay Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau (Formulary for a New Urbanism). The Lettrists’ reimagining of the city has its precursors in aspects of Dadism and Surrealism. The idea of urban wandering relates to the older concept of the flâneur, theorized by Charles Baudelaire. Following Chtcheglov’s exclusion from the Lettrists in 1954, Guy Debord and others worked to clarify the concept of unitary urbanism, in a bid to demand a revolutionary approach to architecture. At a conference in Coscio de Arroscia, Italy in 1956, the Lettrists joined the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus to set a proper definition for the idea announced by Gil J. Wolman ‘Unitary Urbanism – the synthesis of art and technology that we call for ­­– must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated.’ It demanded the rejection of functional, Euclidean values in architecture, as well as the separation between art and its surroundings. The implication of combining these two negations is that by creating abstraction, one creates art, which, in turn, creates a point of distinction that unitary urbanism insists must be nullified. This confusion is also fundamental to the execution of unitary urbanism as it corrupts one’s ability to identify where ‘function’ ends and ‘play’ (the ‘ludic’) begins, resulting in what the Lettrist International and Situationist International believed to be a utopia where one was constantly exploring, free of determining factors.

In Formulary for a New Urbanism, Chtcheglov had written ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams’. Similarly, the Situationists found contemporary architecture both physically and ideologically restrictive, combining with outside cultural influence, effectively creating an undertow, and forcing oneself into a certain system of interaction with their environ-

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ment: ‘Cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’.

The Situationists’ response was to create designs of new urbanized space, promising better opportunities for experimenting through mundane expression. Their intentions remained completely as abstractions. Guy Debord’s truest intention was to unify two different factors of ‘ambiance’ that, he felt, determined the values of the urban landscape: the soft ambiance – light, sound, time, the association of ideas – with the hard, the actual physical constructions. Debord’s vision was a combination of the two realms of opposing ambiance, where the play of the soft ambiance was actively considered in the rendering of the hard. The new space creates a possibility for activity not formerly determined by one besides the individual.

However, the Situationist International may have been tonguein-cheek about some parts of psychogeography. ‘This apparently serious term ‘psychogeography’, writes Debord biographer Vincent Kaufman, ‘comprises an art of conversation and drunkenness, and everything leads us to believe that Debord excelled at both.’

Eventually, Debord and Asger Jorn resigned themselves to the fate of ‘urban relativity’. Debord readily admits in his film A Critique of Separation (1961), ‘The sectors of a city… are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents’. Despite the ambiguity of the theory, Debord committed himself firmly to its practical basis in reality, even as he later confesses, ‘none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue… with its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.’

Before settling on the impossibility of true psychogeography, Debord made another film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), the title of which suggests its own subject matter. The film’s narrated content concerns itself with the evolution of a generally passive group of unnamed people into a fully aware, anarchistic assemblage, and might be perceived as a biography of the situationists themselves.

Among the rants which construct the film (regarding art, ignorance, consumerism, militarism) is a desperate call for psychogeographic action: When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, ‘ordinary life’ may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more

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striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain.

Moments later, Debord elaborates on the important goals of unitary urbanism in contemporary society: The atmosphere of a few places gave us a few intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games.

Quoting Marx, Debord says: People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty.

While a reading of the texts included in the journal Internationale Situationniste may lead to an understanding of psychogeography as dictated by Guy Debord, a more comprehensive elucidation of the term would come from research into those who have put its techniques into a more developed practise.

While Debord’s influence in bringing Chtchglov’s text to an international audience is undoubted, his ability to practise the ‘praxis’ of unitary urbanism has been placed into question by almost all of the subsequent protagonists of the Formulary’s directives. Debord was indeed a notorious drunk (see his Panegyrique, Gallimard, 1995), and his assertions regarding the veracity of the affects of the psychogeographical process (dérive, constructed situation) must be questioned by this personal weakness. The researches undertaken by WNLA, AAA and the London Psychogeographical Association during the 1990s support the contention of Asger Jorn and the Scandinavian Situationniste (Drakagygett 1962–1998) that the psycho-geographical is a concept only known through practise of its techniques. Without undertaking the programme expounded by Chtchglov, and the resultant submission to the urban unknown, comprehension of the Formulary is not possible. As Debord himself suggested, an understanding of the ‘beautiful language’ of situationist urbanism necessitates its practise. For those who wish to understand both the consequences and outcomes of psychogeographic research, exploration of the outcomes of its protagonists is strongly advised.

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Dérive By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing Theory of the Dérive in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive (‘drift’).

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…

But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.

In the SI’s 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem writes in a manifesto of unitary urbanism, ‘All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry’. Dérive, as a previously conceptualized tactic in the French military, was ‘a calculated action determined by the absence of a greater locus’, and ‘a maneuver within the enemy’s field of vision’.

To the SI, whose interest was inhabiting space, the dérive brought appeal in this sense of taking the ‘fight’ to the streets and truly indulging in a determined operation. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city.

Ralph Rumney, Psychogeographic map of Venice, 1957

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Contemporary psychogeography Since the 1990s, as situationist theory became popular in artistic and academic circles, avant-garde, neoist and revolutionary groups emerged, developing psychogeographical praxis in various ways. Influenced primarily through the re-emergence of the London Psychogeographical Association and the foundation of The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture, these groups have assisted in the development of a contemporary psychogeography.

Between 1992 and 1996 The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture undertook an extensive programme of practical research into classic (situationist) psychogeography in both Glasgow and London. The discoveries made during this period, documented in the group’s journal Viscosity, expanded the terrain of the psychogeographic into that of urban design and architectural performance.

The journal Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration (which appears to have ceased publication sometime in 2000) collated and developed a number of post-avant-garde revolutionary psychogeographical themes. The journal also contributed to the use and development of psychogeographical maps which have, since 2000 been used in political actions, drifts and projections, distributed as flyers. Since 2003 in the United States, separate events known as Provflux and Psy-Geo-conflux have been dedicated to action-based participatory experiments, under the academic umbrella of psychogeography.

Psychogeography also become a device used in performance art and literature. In Britain in particular, psychogeography has become a recognised descriptive term used in discussion of successful writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and the documentaries of filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The popularity of Sinclair drew the term into greater public use in the United Kingdom. Though Sinclair makes infrequent use of the jargon associated with the Situationists, he has certainly popularized the term by producing a large body of work based on pedestrian exploration of the urban and suburban landscape. Sinclair and similar thinkers draw on a longstanding British literary tradition of the exploration of urban landscapes, predating the Situationists, found in the work of writers like William Blake, Arthur Machen, and Thomas de Quincey. The nature and history of London were a central focus of these writers, utilising romantic, gothic, and occult ideas to describe and transform the city.

Sinclair drew on this tradition combined with his own explorations as a way of criticising modern developments of urban space in such key texts as Lights Out for the Territory. Peter Ackroyd’s bestselling London: A Biography was partially based on similar sources. Merlin Coverley gives equal prominence to this literary tradition alongside Situationism in his book Psychogeography

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(2006), not only recognising that the situationist origins of psychogeography are sometimes forgotten, but that via certain writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe and Charles Baudelaire they had a shared tradition. Psychogeography, as a term and a concept, now reaches more British eyes than ever before, as novelist Will Self had a column of that name which started out in the British Airways Inflight magazine and then appeared weekly in the Saturday magazine of The Independent newspaper until October 2008.

The concepts and themes seen in popular comics writers such as Alan Moore in works like From Hell are also now seen as significant works of psychogeography. Other key figures in this version of the idea are Walter Benjamin, J. G. Ballard, and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Part of this development saw increasing use of ideas and terminology by some psychogeographers from Fortean and occult areas like earth mysteries, ley lines, and chaos magic, a course pioneered by Sinclair. A core element in virtually all these developments remains a dissatisfaction with the nature and design of the modern environment and a desire to make the everyday world more interesting.

After a few years of practicing, the psychogeography group that gravitates around the Urban Squares Initiative and Aleksandar Janicijevic, the initiator of, and main figure in organizing and leading this group, came up with the working definition of this procedure as: ‘The subjective analysis-mental reaction, to neighbourhood behaviours related to geographic location. A chronological process based on the order of appearance of observed topics, with the time delayed inclusion of other relevant instances’. Bill Humber (Executive Director, Revitalization Institute, Toronto, Canada), a participant in a few of our walks, described our intentions in his article about psychogeography like this: ‘In discovering a small world we discover the whole world.’

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The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, 1920

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Dan Graham, March 31, 1966

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Art as a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.

Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking.

Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers.

My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.

Walking also enabled me to extend the boundaries of sculpture, which now had the potential to be de-constructed in the space and time of walking long distances. Sculpture could now be about place as well as material and form.

I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making ‘monuments’ or, conversely, of ‘leaving only footprints’, Over the years these sculptures have explored some of the variables of transience, permanence, visibility or recognition. A sculpture may be moved, dispersed, carried. Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture. On a mountain walk a sculpture could be made above the clouds, perhaps in a remote region, bringing an imaginative freedom about how, or where, art can be made in the world, Richard Long, The press release for an exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 2000.

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I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Saint Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer’, a Saunterer, a HolyLander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

Some, however, would derive the word from ‘sans terre’, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. Forth is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never­ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Henry David Thoreau. Walking, The Portable Thoreau. ed. Carl Bode, Viking, NewYork, 1980, pp. 592–93.

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I see the earth as sculpture… flying over the earth is like viewing existing painted areas or pictorial surfaces. While on the ground it is more volumetric. It’s like walking through sculpture. It’s less graphic, more subterranean. Any addition to the ground – any scratch or anything you add – becomes a relational addition to what is there – it ties into it, extends it towards another meaning.

My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road. That is, a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point. Roads appear and disappear. We either have to travel on them or beside them. But we don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it. Most of my works – certainly the successful ones – have been ones that are in a way causeways – they cause you to make your way along them or around them or move to the spectator over them.

They’re like roads, but certainly not fixed point vistas. I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view. There should be no one place, nor even a group of places where you should be.

From a symposium on Earth Art held at Cornell University, February 6, 1969; published in Earth Art, Cornell University.

Carl Andre. ‘Artist’s Statement’, Extraneous Roots, Frankfurt Museums für Moderne Kunst. 1991. p. 52. Originally published in Artforum, NewYork, June 1970. pp. 55–61.

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I wasn’t very excited about objects that protrude from the ground. I felt this implied an embellishment of external space. To me a piece of sculpture inside a room is a disruption of interior space. It’s a protrusion, an unnecessary addition to what could be a sufficient space in itself. My transition to earth materials took place in Oakland a few summers ago (1967), when I cut a wedge from the side of a mountain. I was more concerned with the negative process of excavating that shape from the mountainside than making an earthwork as such. It was just a coincidence that I made this with earth.

Dennis Oppenheim. In Discussion with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson. 1970.

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I Carl Andre °1935 Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.A. American sculptor, living in New York. He studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover from 1951 to 1953, and over the next decade took up a variety of jobs (e.g. at the Boston GearWorks, Quincy; in the US army; as an editorial assistant at a New York publishers; and as a brake operator on the Pennsylvania Railroad. New Jersey). After meeting Frank Stella (introduced by poet Hollis Frampton) he began working in Stella’s studio on large wooden blocks into which he made deep incisions (Last Ladder, 1959). His early sculptures included Timber Piece in 28 parts (destroyed in 1964 and reconstructed in 1970); he also produced paintings and collages. The use of similar ready-made parts as components of a unified whole became the basis of his work at this time.

In 1964 he participated in the 8 Young Americans exhibition at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, and in 1965 held his first one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy Callery in New York. He subsequently developed the ElementSeries, which included pieces such as 64 Steel Squares (1967) – a flat sculpture of 64 square metal plates which aims to make space ‘perceptible’ and to express Andre’s artistic maxim, ‘From form to structure – from structure to place.’ A leading figure of Minimal art, Andre has participated in important international exhibitions, e.g. Minimal Art (Hague Gemeentemuseum, 1968), and When Attitudes Become Form (Berne, Krefeld, London. 1969). In 1982 he participated in Documenta 7, and in 1984 he was awarded a scholarship by the DAAD artistic program in Berlin.

II War and conflict Wars and conflicts have various causes. They are associated with acquiring power, control, authority, wealth, territories, raw materials and ethnocentricity. Wars and conflicts have also their consequences in the sphere of infrastructure. One has to build roads for transport of troops, munition, provisions and prisoners. They include also the construction of devising lines, boundary walls, barbed-wire fencing. The result is a development of emotionally charged roads such as death roads to extermination camps, maximum security roads along boarders, roads thickly studded with mines.

III Richard Long °1945 Bristol, England British Installation and Land artist, photographer, and painter, living in Bristol. From 1962 to 1965 he studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, and from 1966 to 1968 at St Martin’s School of Art, London. Even during his studentship, Long strove for a renewal of art through a turn towards nature and the landscape. In one of his earliest works, A Line Made by Walking of 1967, he photographed a straight line made in grass by walking repeatedly to and fro. Since then he has made walking, and thus his personal experience of nature, the basis of his art. Long’s hikes across England, Ireland, the Himalayas, the deserts of West Africa and Australia take days or even weeks, and brought him international fame in the 1970s. He documents such treks photographically, in texts and also in sculptures and installations which he makes from materials collected from the environment (depending on the kind of ground he has been hiking over, e.g. slate, flint, peat, driftwood, or pine needles). Two basic forms – circle and line – are laid out in ground sculptures, and since 1981, Long has painted pictures using the collected materials.

Long’s art is not representational but the result of real activity and his personal experience of time and space. In contrast to the American Land artists, e.g. Heizer and De Maria, Long does not interfere with nature, but tries to establish a reticent, personal dialogue with the environment by carrying his own experience of nature in the remotest areas of the earth into civilization, thus directly confronting the viewer, who is usually alienated from the landscape, with various forms from the natural world.

IV Dennis Oppenheim In 1964, he earned his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and an MFA from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1965.

He moved to New York in 1966 where he first taught nursery school and then high school art while working toward his first one-person exhibition in New York, held in 1968 when he was 30 years old. He lived and worked in New York City until his death from liver cancer on January 21, 2011, aged 72.

Coming out of the conceptual art movement, Oppenheim’s early work was associated both with performance / body art and the early earthworks /

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Land art movement. From 1966–68, Oppenheim’s ephemeral earthworks included shapes cut in ice/ snow—such as Annual Rings (1968), a series of rings carved in the snow on the U.S.A. / Canada border, and Gallery Transplant (1969), in which he cut the outline of a gallery in the snow, patterns cut in wheat fields with combine harvesters, and giant overlapping fingerprints representing the artist and his son Eric sprawled across several acres of a spoils field in Lewiston, NY. He was included with Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris in the important 1968 Earthworks show at the Dwan Gallery in New York.

Also in 1968, Oppenheim became friends with Vito Acconci and he began producing body art, such as Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), for which he lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest. In the early 1970s, he was in the vanguard of artists using film and video in relation to performance.

In the early 1980s, he began his ‘machine pieces’, complex, space-filling devices, and after the mid-1980s, he worked on the ‘transformation of everyday objects in art.’ From the mid-1990s, he created a number of large-scale public art pieces in major cities around the world, some of which proved controversial.

He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was included in both the Venice Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. In 2007, he was recognized for Lifetime Achievement at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.

V Tadashi Kawamata Tadashi Kawamata has quickly gained on the Japanese and international art scene. At age 28, a graduate of the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo, he was already invited to the Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 1982. Therefore, he intervenes in the world to produce monumental projects always in agreement with the site invested.

Tadashi Kawamata’s work reflects on the social context and relationships that define it. When installing shelters made of materials (wood, cardboard) recovery on the edge of the cities of Montreal, New York or Tokyo, it refers to the slums and the homeless. At Alkmaar, these are people with social problems that are associated with a proposed bridge linking the rehabilitation center with the city. In any project, the artist is surrounded by students, residents, groups involved in editing and producing the work.

A careful discovery, physical and mental

health, history, landscape, architecture and lifestyles they bring him gradually to determine the nature of its projects. At the root of his work, Tadashi Kawamata interested in planning issues, construction sites or demolition, the intermediate areas that remain in urban areas are reinvested by the artist who uses the building for its same materials of the site, the ‘recycling’ (chairs, boats, scaffolding). For example, in Kassel, is a church in ruins, destroyed by World War II and neglected during the reconstruction of the city. Tadashi Kawamata restores the church on the occasion of Documenta VIII in 1987. Time as an indicator of greatness or decline of a monument or site, is a key element of his work.

His operations recreate bridges between past and present, revealing the emotional, invisible things, but also their material reality. Work sharing and reflection on community life that animates and builds each of his projects promote the awakening of this memory. At the Saint-Louis de la Salpetriere in 1997 the passage of the chairs forms an elevation of chairs and pews that spirals towards the dome of the chapel. In Barcelona in 1996, is a bridge that connects the contemporary art museum with the old neighborhood. In Evreux in 2000, pedestrians are asked to move on instead of City Hall by an elevated walkway that allows to change the point of view. All examples and situations where the work calls for a shift to a path. At St. Thélo in the Côtes-d’Armor, Tadashi Kawamata has invested three summers (2004–2006) during the old weaver’s houses doomed to destruction.

Professor at the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo from 1999 to 2005, he currently teaches at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2005 he was appointed artistic director of the Second Triennial of Yokohama, Japan. Recent projects have taken him to France to participate in the artistic journey The estuary between Nantes and Saint-Nazaire and Japan in a solo retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

VI Sacbe Sacbe, plural Sacbeob, (Yucatec Maya: singular sakbej, plural sakbejo’ob) or ‘white ways’ are raised paved roads built by the Maya civilization of preColumbian Mesoamerica. Most connect temples, plazas, and groups of structures within ceremonial centers or cities, but some longer roads between cities are also known. The term ‘sacbe’ is Yucatec Maya for ‘white road’; white because they were originally coated with limestone stucco, which was over stone and rubble fill. Many sacbeob can

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be seen by modern visitors to Maya sites; perhaps the most familiar is the one in Chichen Itza running from the main group around El Castillo to the Sacred Cenote, which is traveled on by thousands of tourists daily. Few of the longer roads still exist in their entirety. A well known sacbe connects Uxmal with Kabah, which is marked by corbel arches at either end. The 62 mile (100 km) long road connecting the ancient cities of Coba and Yaxuna was for decades the longest known to archaeologists.

The remains of an even longer route have recently received the attention of archaeologists. This long sacbe apparently ran from the site of Ti’ho (modern Mérida, Yucatán), through such sites as Ake and Izamal, to the Caribbean Sea near modern Puerto Morelos, a total distance of some 300 km.

While the longer roads could be used for trade and communication, all sacbeob apparently had ritual or religious significance as well. Travel writer and early Mayanist John Lloyd Stephens reported that some local Maya people in Yucatán still said a short ritual prayer when crossing a sacbe in the early 1840s, even though they had been overgrown with jungle for centuries at the time.

While the sacbeob in the Yucatán are the best known, they are documented throughout the Maya area. Some appear to have been built as early in Maya history as the Pre-Classic; a number have been found around El Mirador.

In modern times, some of the ancient sacbeob have been used as bases or incorporated into modern highways and railway lines.

the sequence, to provide a gradated appearance, though it is not known whether this was done deliberately. Stone rows were erected by the later Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples in the British Isles, parts of Scandinavia and northern France.

VII Stone row A stone row (or stone alignment), is a linear arrangement of upright, parallel megalithic standing stones set at intervals along a common axis or series of axes, usually dating from the later Neolithic or Bronze Age. Rows may be individual or grouped, and three or more stones aligned can constitute a stone row. Alignement, a French word, has been used to identify standing stones rows of long ‘processional’ avenue.

The Kogi claim to be descendants of the Tairona culture, which flourished before the time of the Spanish conquest. The Tairona were forced to move into the highlands when the Caribs invaded around 1000 CE, according to the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress which allowed them to evade the worst effects of the Spanish colonization. Like so many ancient myths concerning holy mountains at the ‘centre of the world’, their mythology teaches that they are ‘Elder Brothers’ of humanity, living in the ‘Heart of the World’ (the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta). Those not living in the Heart of the World are called ‘Younger Brothers.’

Their mythology suggests that these Younger Brothers were sent away from the heart of the world long ago, seemingly in reference to these same Carib people who are said to have originated from South America.

Stone rows differ from a prehistoric avenue, in that the stones are always in a broadly straight line rather than following a more curving route. Stone rows can be few metres or several kilometres in length and made from stones that can be as tall as 2 m, although 1 m high stones are more common.

The terminals of many rows have the largest stones and other megalithic features are sometimes sited at the ends, especially burial cairns. The stones are placed at intervals and may vary in height along

The most famous example is the Carnac stones, a complex of stone rows around Carnac in Brittany.

There are a number of example on Dartmoor including the row at Stall Down and three rows at Drizzlecombe and the Hill O Many Stanes in Caithness. In Britain they are exclusively found in isolated moorland areas. The term alignment is sometimes taken to imply that the rows were placed purposely in relation to other factors such as other monuments or topographical or astronomical features. Archaeologists treat stone rows as discrete features however and alignment refers to the stones being lined up with one another rather than anything else. Their purpose is thought to be religious or ceremonial perhaps marking a processual route.

Another theory is that each generation would erect a new stone to contribute to a sequence that demonstrated a people’s continual presence.

VIII KOGI The Kogi or Cogui or Kágaba, translated ‘jaguar’ in the Kogi language are a Native American ethnic group that lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Their civilization has continued since the Pre-Columbian era.

The Kogi base their lifestyles on their belief in ‘The Great Mother’, their creator figure, whom they believe is the force behind nature, providing

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guidance. The Kogi understand the Earth to be a living being, and see the colonizers’ mining, building, pollution and other activities damaging the Great Mother.

From birth the Kogi attune their priests, called Mamas, to the mystic world called Aluna. It is in this ‘spirit-realm’ that the Mamas operate to help the Great Mother sustain the Earth. Through deep meditation and symbolic offerings, the Mamas believe they support the balance of harmony and creativity in the world. It is also in this realm that the essence of agriculture is nurtured: seeds are blessed in Aluna before being planted, to ensure they grow successfully.

IX Inca road system The Inca road system was the most extensive and advanced transportation system in pre-Columbian South America. The network was based on two north-south roads with numerous branches. The best known portion of the road system is the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Part of the road network was built by cultures that precede the Inca Empire notably the Wari culture.

The eastern route ran high in the puna grasslands and mountain valleys from Quito, Ecuador to Mendoza, Argentina. The western route followed the coastal plain except in coastal deserts where it hugged the foothills. More than twenty routes ran over the western mountains, while others traversed the eastern cordillera in the mountains and lowlands. Some of these roads reach heights of over 5,000 metres (16,000 ft) above sea level. The trails connected the regions of the Inca empire from the northern provincial capital in Quito, Ecuador past the modern city of Santiago, Chile in the south.

The Inca road system linked together about 40,000 kilometres (25,000 mi) of roadway and provided access to over 3,000,000 square kilometres (1,200,000 sq mi) of territory.

Situated between 500 to 800 metres (1,600 to 2,600 ft) above sea level, this monumental road, which could reach 20 metres (66 ft) in width, connected populated areas, administrative centres, agricultural and mining zones as well as ceremonial centres and sacred spaces.

These roads provided easy, reliable and quick routes for the Empire’s civilian and military communications, personnel movement, and logistical support. The prime users were imperial soldiers, porters and llama caravans, along with the nobility and individuals on official duty. Permission was required before others could walk along the roads,

and tolls were charged at some bridges.

Although the Inca roads varied greatly in scale, construction, and appearance, for the most part they varied between about 1 to 4 metres (3.3 to 13 ft) in width.

Much of the system was the result of the Incas claiming exclusive right over numerous traditional routes, some of which had been built centuries earlier mostly by the Wari Empire. Many new sections were built or upgraded substantially: through Chile’s Atacama desert, and along the western margin of Lake Titicaca, serve as two examples.

The Incas developed techniques to overcome the difficult territory of the Andes. On steep slopes they built stone steps resembling giant flights of stairs.

In desert areas near the coast they built low walls to keep the sand from drifting over the road.

The Qhapaq Ñan (Great Inca Road, or Main Andean Road, and meaning ‘the beautiful road’) constituted the principal north-south highway of the Inca Empire traveling 6,000 kilometres (3,700 mi) along the spine of the Andes.

The Qhapaq Ñan unified this immense and heterogeneous empire through a well-organized political system of power. It allowed the Inca to control his Empire and to send troops as needed from the capital, Cusco.

The most important Inca road was the Camino Real (Royal Road), as it is known in Spanish, with a length of 5,200 kilometres (3,200 mi). It began in Quito, Ecuador, passed through Cusco, and ended in what is now Tucumán, Argentina. The Camino Real traversed the mountain ranges of the Andes, with peak altitudes of more than 5,000 m (16,000 ft).

El Camino de la Costa, the coastal trail, with a length of 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi), ran parallel to the sea and was linked with the Camino Real by many smaller routes.

X Christian Philipp Müller Müller’s critical practice is preoccupied with mapping the institutional and geopolitical parameters of the vernacular. His work is a mise en scène of various disciplines of knowledge, conducted by an artist in multiple roles of an archivist, researcher, communicator and performer. The issues of national identity and the construction of borders remain in the center of Müller’s investigations of the economies of site and the politics of belonging. For his Green Border installation, the artist, dressed as a hiker, crossed Austria’s green borders eight times illegally. During his first site visit in March 2008 at Rovereto’s former Manifattura Tabacchi Müller by chance found

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a package of ApolloSojuz still wrapped in cellophane, produced in Russia for Philip Morris.

Intrigued by the image of the copulating space ships he started to research its history as well as its relation to the Manifattura Tabacchi. He discovered that in 1936 Futurist Fortunato Depero conceived a float (carro allegorico) for the factory that resembled a cross of a tank with folkloristic allegories. In direct analogy to this late regional adaptation of a utopian art movement Müller takes the 1975 space rendez-vous as a model for his Manifesta float. The opening parade starts at the train station and then physically connects the historical center of Rovereto with the venues of the show. Müller’s Carro Largo will be populated by people in traditional costumes for the 1936 festa dell’uva by Depero.

XI Pre-Bog Field Systems Blanket bog is widespread in those parts of Ireland where annual rainfall is in excess of 1250 mm and where the evaporation rate is low. Thus, except for steep slopes, much of the west of Ireland is covered in great stretches of blanket bog which run down to sea-level and even below it. Elsewhere it is generally confined to hill-tops and upper slopes. Blanket bog had already begun to form throughout the country by the late third millennium BC, and what had been relatively well-drained mineral soil with woodland cover ultimately became degraded and buried beneath thick layers of peat. It is thought that a combination of factors was responsible for the onset of peat formation. The land had in many areas been cleared of trees for pasture and cultivation by the early farmers and this may have led to soil degradation which, combined with deteriorating climatic conditions, enabled peaty podzols, and then peat, to start to form. The peat expanded and gradually large tracts of the landscape, including field systems and associated sites, became buried beneath a layer of peat which covered them like a blanket.

The pre-bog sites range from single stretches of walls, which may be parts of large systems, to extensive field systems and short lengths of stone trackways.

XII Devil’s Golf Course The Devil’s Golf Course is a large salt pan on the floor of Death Valley, located in the Mojave Desert within Death Valley National Park. The park is in eastern California.

It was named after a line in the 1934 National

Park Service guide book to Death Valley National Monument, which stated that ‘Only the devil could play golf’ on its surface, due to a rough texture from the large halite salt crystal formations.

Lake Manly once covered the valley to a depth of 30 feet (9.1 m). The salt in the Devil’s Golf Course consists of the minerals that were dissolved in the lake’s water and left behind in the Badwater Basin as the lake evaporated. With an elevation several feet above the valley floor at Badwater, the Devil’s Golf Course remains dry, allowing weathering processes to sculpt the salt there into complicated forms.

Through exploratory holes drilled by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, prior to Death Valley becoming a national monument in 1934, it was discovered that the salt and gravel beds of the Devil’s Golf Course extend to a depth of more than 1,000 feet (300 m). Later studies suggest that in places the depth ranges up to 9,000 feet (2,700 m).

XIII Christo Christo (born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, June 13, 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (born JeanneClaude Denat de Guillebon, June 13, 1935 – November 18, 2009) were a married couple who created environmental works of art. Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile (39 km)-long artwork called Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties in California, and The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same date. They first met in Paris in October 1958. Their works were credited to just ‘Christo’ until 1994 when the outdoor works and large indoor installations were retroactively credited to ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude’. They flew in separate planes: in case one crashed, the other could continue their work. Jeanne-Claude died, aged 74, on November 18, 2009, from complications of a brain aneurysm.

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic impact. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo’s wrappings as a ‘revelation through concealment’. To his critics Christo replies, ‘I am an artist, and I have to have courage […] Do you know that I don’t have

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any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.’

XV Desire Path A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand.

Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g., as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tread a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail ‘of least resistance’ for followers.

The lines may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface.

The paths take on an organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest routes between two points, and may later be surfaced. Many streets in older cities began as desire paths, which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

In Finland, planners are known to visit their parks immediately after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are not visible. People naturally choose desire lines, which are then clearly indicated by their footprints and can be used to guide the routing of paths. Social trails often cut through sensitive habitats and off-limit areas, threatening wildlife and park security. However, social trails also provide to park management an indicator of activity concentration. The National Park Service unit at the Yosemite National Park uses this indicator to help establish its General Management Plan.

The path of Interstate 95 between the cities of Boston and Providence in the U.S.A. is said to have originated as a desire line in the form of a trail followed by 17th century Native Americans, which subsequently became a primitive turnpike and eventually a superhighway.

More casual trails can be found in parking lots and lawns. Sometimes, vegetation barriers are planted along the pavement to deter off-trail traffic.

However, many social trails still penetrate these barriers.

XIV Richard Serra American sculptor living in New York. His studies included 1957–61 in Berkeley and Santa Barbara; and 1961–64 at Yale University. In 1965–66 he resided in Italy, where he began his experiments in the direction of Arte Povera. From 1968 he produced characteristic works in steel, where the material always determined the form. In 1967 he composed the Verb List; 85 concepts referring to the treatment of materials. These terms are ‘visualized’ in a number of different works with materials such as rubber, solid and liquid lead (Splash series), and steel. In the series Prop Pieces, for example, he explores the principle of supporting and leaning through numerous variations.

Geometrical shapes in lead or steel are placed in such a way that they support one another, the corners or walls thereby becoming involved.

He works without the help of welding, rivets or screws, simply stacking steel plates on top of one another, as in the Skullcracker series (1968), where the laws of gravity alone determine load and position. Balance becomes the work’s central topic. Apart from a conceptually determined formal simplification it is the dialectical reference of the work to its environment that is of fundamental significance, just as space determines the sculptures so they in turn define space. This is true also for works in the open landscape (Open Field Vertical Horizontal Elevations, 1979–80) as well as in urban space. The spectator can experience the works realized in this context (Terminal, 1977; Tilted Arc, 1981; Berlin Junction, 1986–87; Intersection, 1992), which are architectonic and not simply visual in character involving the whole physical body. They are articulations of spatial experiences, which evoke sensations of insecurity. Balance and one’s sense of orientation are disturbed and undermined through the monumental, seemingly unstable forms and through an inability to seize these foreshortened views in their entirety. The sculptural system of coordinates contradicts that of the spectator. Apart from his sculptures, since 1971 Serra has produced mainly black, large-scale drawings, which he calls two-dimensional sculptures.

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XVI Cursus Cursus was a name given by early British archaeologists such as William Stukeley to the large parallel lengths of banks with external ditches which they thought were early Roman athletic courses, hence the Latin name cursus, meaning ‘course’. Cursus monuments are now understood to be Neolithic structures and represent some of the oldest prehistoric monumental structures of the British Isles; cursus may have been of ceremonial function.

They range in length from 50 metres to almost 10 kilometres and the distance between the parallel earthworks can be up to 100 metres. Banks at the terminal ends enclose the cursus.

Contemporary internal features are rare and it has been traditionally thought that the cursuses were used as processional routes. They are often aligned on and respect the position of pre-existing long barrows and bank barrows and appear to ignore difficulties in terrain. The Dorset Cursus, the longest known example, crosses a river and three valleys along its course across Cranborne Chase and is close to the henge monuments at Knowlton.

It has been conjectured that they were used in rituals connected with ancestor worship, that they follow astronomical alignments or that they served as buffer zones between ceremonial and occupation landscapes. More recent studies have reassessed the original interpretation and argued that they were in fact used for ceremonial competitions.

Finds of arrowheads at the terminal ends suggest archery and hunting were important to the builders and that the length of the cursus may have reflected its use as a proving ground for young men involving a journey to adulthood. Anthropological parallels exist for this interpretation.

XVII Walter De Maria Walter De Maria is an American sculptor and composer. He lives and works in New York.

De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Although trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media. De Maria and his friend, the avant-garde composer La Monte Young, participated in Happenings and theatrical productions in the San Francisco area. From his exposure to the work of La Monte Young and dancer Simone Forti, among others, De Maria developed an interest in taskoriented, gamelike projects that resulted in viewer-interactive sculptures. For example, his Boxes

for Meaningless Work (1961) is inscribed with the instructions, ‘Transfer things from one box to the next box back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless’.

In 1960, De Maria moved to New York. His early sculptures from the 1960s were influenced by Dada and other modern art movements. This influence led De Maria into using simple geometric shapes and industrially manufactured materials such as stainless steel and aluminum—materials which are also characteristic of Minimal art. With the support of collector Robert C. Scull, De Maria started making pieces in metal in 1965. Also in the mid 1960s, he became involved in various artistic activities. His piece, Cage, for John Cage, was included in the seminal 1966 Primary Structures exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. He appeared at happenings, composed two musical works (Cricket Music, 1964; Ocean Music, 1968), and produced two films (Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert; Hardcore, both 1969).

In 1965 De Maria became the drummer in the New York-based rock group The Primitives and an artist / musician collaborative group called The Druds—the group included Lou Reed and John Cale, i.e., it was a precursor to The Velvet Underground From 1968 De Maria produced Minimalist sculptures and Installations such as the Munich Erdraum of 1968. He realized Land art projects in the deserts of the southwest US, with the aim of creating situations where the landscape and nature, light and weather would become an intense, physical and psychic experience. After De Maria, the notion of the work of art is intended to make the viewer think about the earth and its relationship to the universe. The artistic practice of De Maria is connected with Minimal art, Conceptual art, and Land art.

The Lightning Field (1977) is De Maria’s bestknown work. It consists of 400 stainless steel posts arranged in a calculated grid over an area of 1 mile × 1 km. The time of day and weather change the optical effects. It also lights up during thunder storms. The field is commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

In the 1960s and 1970s De Maria created enduring urban works. As complementary pieces, Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), and The Broken Kilometer (1979), address the idea of unseen or abstracted distance. Vertical Earth Kilometer is a one-kilometer long brass rod, two inches in diameter, drilled into Friedrichsplatz Park in central Kassel, Germany. The rod’s circular top,

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Morris studied art at the University of Kansas and at Kansas City Art Institute and philosophy at Reed College. Initially a painter, Morris’ work of the 1950s was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock. While living in California, Morris also came into contact with the work of La Monte Young and John Cage.

The idea that art making was a record of a performance by the artist (drawn from Hans Namuth’s photos of Pollock at work) in the studio led to an interest in dance and choreography. Morris moved to New York in 1960 where he staged a performance based on the exploration of bodies in space in which an upright square column after a few minutes on stage falls over. Morris developed the same idea into his first Minimal Sculptures Two Columns shown in 1961, and L Beams (1965).

flush to the earth’s surface, is framed by a twometer square plate of red sandstone. In 1979, De Maria meticulously arranged five hundred brass rods for The Broken Kilometer, a permanent installation at 393 West Broadway in New York.

In contrast to the hard metal of both Kilometer pieces, the third of these urban works, The New York Earth Room (1977), is a 3,600-square-foot room filled to a depth of 22 inches with 250 cubic yards of earth (the New York work is a permanent iteration of Munich Earth Room, 1968, a temporary installation in Munich). Also in 1977, the artist recreated the work at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in New York, which was then permanently reinstalled in 1980 at 141 Wooster Street, New York. Similarly to the Lightning Field, The Broken Kilometer and New York Earth Room installations remain on continuous view, maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

The Broken Kilometer is also part of De Maria’s series of monumental sculptures using a horizontal format, which feature groupings of elements ordered according to precise calculations. This series includes 360° / I-Ching (1981), A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World / 3-12 Polygon (1984), 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows (1985), Apollo’s Ecstasy (1990), and The 2000 Sculpture (1992).

In 1989 De Maria completed a sphere of polished granite for the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, followed in 2000 and 2004 by works for two museums on Naoshima Island in Japan, the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum and the Chichu Art Museum. A comparable, 25-ton sculpture entitled Large Red Sphere (2002) was installed in the Türkentor, Munich, in 2010.

One Sun / 34 Moons (2002), conceived by the artist in collaboration with architect Steven Holl, was opened 2007 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. In 2010, The 2000 Sculpture (1992) was the first work of art to inaugurate the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Bronze Gate (2005) is a cor-ten steel work by Robert Morris. It is set in the garden of the dialysis pavilion in the hospital of Pistoia, Italy.

In New York, Morris began to explore the work of Marcel Duchamp making pieces that directly responded to Duchamp’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), Fountain (1963). In 1963 he had an exhibition of Minimal sculptures at the Green Gallery in New York that was written about by Donald Judd. In 1964 Morris devised and performed two celebrated performance artworks 21.3 in which he lip syncs to a reading of an essay by Erwin Panofsky and Site with Carolee Schneemann. Morris enrolled at Hunter College in New York (his masters thesis was on the work of Brancusi) and in 1966 published a series of influential essays Notes on Sculpture in Artforum.

He exhibited two L Beams in the seminal 1966 exhibit, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York.

In 1967 Morris created Steam, an early piece of Land art. By the late 1960s Morris was being featured in museum shows in America but his work and writings drew criticism from Clement Greenberg. His work became larger scale taking up the majority of the gallery space with series of modular units or piles of earth and felt. In 1971 Morris designed an exhibition for the Tate Gallery that took up the whole central sculpture gallery with ramps and cubes. He published a photo of himself dressed in S&M gear in an advertisement in Artforum, similar to one by Lynda Benglis, with whom Morris had collaborated on several videos.

He created the Robert Morris Observatory in the Netherlands, a ‘modern Stonehenge’, which identifies the solstices and the equinoxes. It is at coordinates 52°32'58"N 5°33'57"E.

XVIII Robert Morris Robert Morris (born 9 February 1931, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, Land art, the Process Art movement and installation art.

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During the later 1970s Morris switched to figurative work, a move that surprised many of his supporters. Themes of the work were often fear of nuclear war. During the 1990s returned to his early work supervising reconstructions and installations of lost pieces. Morris currently lives and works in New York.

XIX Lines and Geoglyphs of Nazca and Pampas de Jumana Located in the arid Peruvian coastal plain, some 400 km south of Lima, the geoglyphs of Nazca and the pampas of Jumana cover about 450 km². These lines, which were scratched on the surface of the ground between 500 BC and AD 500, are among archaeology’s greatest enigmas because of their quantity, nature, size and continuity. The geoglyphs depict living creatures, stylized plants and imaginary beings, as well as geometric figures several kilometres long. They are believed to have had ritual astronomical functions.

The Nazca lines and geoglyphs form a unique and magnificent artistic achievement that is unrivalled in its dimensions and diversity anywhere in the prehistoric world. This unique form of land use bears exceptional witness to the culture and beliefs of this region of pre-Hispanic South America.

The Nazca geoglyphs are located in the arid Peruvian coastal plain 400 km south of Lima, and cover 450 km², both in the desert and in the low Andean foothills. These are covered with ferruginous sand and gravel which has acquired a dark patina from weathering. Removal of the gravel reveals the underlying lighter coloured strata, which contrasts strongly with the darker gravels.

The ‘Nazca Lines’, as they are commonly known, are the most outstanding group of geoglyphs anywhere in the world. They are also one of the most impenetrable enigmas of archaeology by virtue of their quantity, nature and size, as well as their continuity. The concentration and juxtaposition of the lines, as well as their cultural continuity, demonstrate that this was an important and long-lasting activity.

Intensive study of the geoglyphs and comparison with other manifestations of contemporary art forms suggests that they can be divided into three chronological phases. The first dates from the Chavín period (500–300 BC) and is characterized by the technique of forming figures by piling stones.

This was an important time of cultural developments in the Andean region, with strong influence exerted in the Inca region from the north by the

Formative Middle Late Culture. The local development known as Paracas represents the second phase (400–200 BC), again strongly influenced from the north. The town of Paracas adapted its culture skilfully to its severe location and achieved a high level of artistic development.

The third phase, which represents the great majority of the geoglyphs, is the Nazca phase proper (200 BC–AD 500). The Nazca culture derived directly from that of Paracas. The Andean towns developed a powerful religious system which produced, along with Moche on the northern coast of Peru, an outstanding culture represented by its handicrafts (notably pottery) and textiles. Most of the geoglyphs of this period are located close to villages of this culture, such as La Quebrada del Frayle, Cahuachi, Palpa and Ingenio, concentrated in Pampa de Jumana.

Two techniques were used to define the geoglyphs. In the earlier Chavín period they were defined in outline, the gravel being removed and piled inwards, so as to leave the figures in slight relief. For the most part, however, the technique used was the removal of the gravel from the figure, providing a solid figure that contrasts with its surroundings.

In general terms the geoglyphs fall into two categories: the first group (of which about 70 have been identified) are representational, depicting in schematic form a variety of natural forms. Many of these are animals, birds, insects, and other living creatures: examples include the spider, the monkey, the guanay or guano bird, the lizard, the hummingbird, the killer whales, and the largest of all, the pelican (285 m). Stylistically they can be linked closely with motifs on other representational art of the period, such as pottery and textiles. Other figures represent flowers, plants, and trees, deformed or fantastic figures (strange creature with two human hands, one with only four fingers), and objects of everyday life, such as looms and tupus (ornamental clasps).

There are very few anthropomorphic figures, for the most part paralleled by the petroglyphs to be found in the more rocky parts of the region and are considered to be early in date.

The second group comprises the lines proper.

These generally straight lines criss-cross certain parts of the pampas of the region in all directions.

Some are several kilometres in length and form designs of many different geometrical figures — triangles, spirals, rectangles, wavy lines, etc. Others radiate from a central promontory or encircle it, as in the cases of the quipus. Yet another group consists of so-called ‘tracks’, which appear to have been laid out to accommodate large numbers of people.

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XX Jan Dibbets °1941 Weert, The Nederlands Dutch photographer and conceptual artist living in Amsterdam and San Cascianodi Bagni. He studied at the Academy in Tilburg from 1959 to 1963, and at St Martin’s School of Art in London (from 1967). In 1967 he set up the International Institute for the Re-education of Artists. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972. and in 1984 was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf in 1984.

Influenced by Mondrian, as well as by Vermeer and Saenredam, Dibbets initially produced monochrome, minimalist paintings, but in 1967 turned to his preferred medium: photography.

Following encounters with Richard Long and Land art he produced a number of photographs centered on a dialog between nature and geometric shape. In his Perspective Corrections, (1967– 69), for example, he works on the phenomenon of perception (a trapezium appears to be square).

In the 1970s he created picture sequences of material surfaces and structures (Waterstudy of Structures, 1975). More recently he has used film and video to foreground architectural details such as windows and interiors (Octagon I, 1982), while continuing to emphasize the isolated representation of individual elements and the structure of objects.

XXI Balthasar Burkhard Balthasar Burkhard’s now legendary city photographs were first shown in 1999 at both the 48th Venice Biennale and the Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie in Basle. The curator of the Biennale exhibition was Harald Szeemann, with whom Burkhard had been linked by professional collaboration and close personal friendship since the 1960s. When Szeemann was the director of the Kunsthalle Bern from 1961 to 1969, Burkhard assisted him as a photographer in producing advertisements and catalogues and in documenting exhibitions. From 1969 to 1970, Burkhard collaborated with Markus Raetz. Together they devised a series of photocanvases, which established Burkhard’s reputation as a pioneer of monumental black-and-white photography. In 1970, the works were shown for the first time in a museum exhibition, the Visualisierte Denkprozesse show at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, curated by Jean Christophe Amman.

In 1977, Burkhard presented his work at a solo exhibition for the first time at the Zolla

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Liebermann Gallery in Chicago, where he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois from 1976 to 1978. After his return to Switzerland, this was followed by his first solo exhibitions in museums, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (1980) and the Kunsthalle Basel (1983).

There Burkhard sensationally showed two female nudes, each extending over more than 13 metres.

Not only human bodies, but also plants were a recurring theme in Burkhard’s work in the 80s.

When he was teaching at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Nîmes between 1990 and 1992, the artist discovered a man-made bamboo grove in Anduze, which inspired him to take the photographs shown at the Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie. In the 90s a series of animal photographs followed; in these the motif of the falcon’s wing, a subject with a nuanced structure virtually predestined for black-and-white photography, held an ongoing fascination for Burkhard.

A few years later, Burkhard took the photographs of cities and deserts presented in this exhibition. They show the opposites of nature and civilisation in their most extreme polarity: the wide landscape of dunes, softly formed by the forces of nature, and the man-made urban landscape divided into small plots. In black-andwhite technique and by means of aerial perspective, pictures of exceptional clarity and distance are produced, their forms taking on abstract characteristics. Burkhard is not concerned in his work with making a portrait of a particular town or a specific place, but with the natural or civilizatory phenomenon in itself. In the process, he approaches his subject without judging, without political or philosophical implications, with an open, yet matter-of-fact gaze.

For decades, Burkhard’s photographs have exerted an extraordinary fascination over those viewing them. This is based on the one hand on the classical beauty of the pictures and their technical perfection, and on the other on a certain feeling of being overwhelmed which the person viewing the works experiences. The large-format pictures, especially the shots of the desert, provide viewers with few aids to orientation, nothing to catch the eye that could serve as an introduction or finale to the viewing of the photograph.

The eye roams around and is overwhelmed by the monumentality of both the picture itself and the subject it portrays. This makes us shudder with a mixture of admiration and awe which distinguishes Burkhard as a photographer of the sublime.

XXII Robert Smithson °1938 Passaic, New Jersey, †1973 Amarillo, Texas From 1953 to 1956 he attended the Art Students League of New York and Brooklyn Museum School. In 1963 he married Nancy Holt. He began writing on art theoretical issues in the 1960s.

His early paintings were in the style of American Expressionism, such as collages created from gathered plants. In 1964–67 he made a series of sculptures using iron, glass, and plastic in clear, geometrical shapes and uniform color. In these pieces related to Minimal art, he investigated questions of proportion and perspective. From 1968 he made excursions into post-industrial regions, which led to his Earth and Land art projects. His 1967 series Monuments of Passaic (24 photos), showing the monuments of an industrial town, clarified the memorial and abstract status of Smithson’s approach in what is an extension of the objet trouvé. After 1968 he developed the dialectical principle of Sites (outdoor space)and Non-sites (situations created in the gallery or museum, where geometrical containers are filled with unworked natural materials, supplemented by maps). Smithson thus aesthetisizes geology and expands sculpture following geographical documents. In Mirror Displacements of 1969, a piece of landscape art, he used mirrors to enlarge space. In 1970–73 he produced his monumental landscape works, often helical earth deposits.

Spiral Jetty (1970), the helical accumulation of rocks and boulders on the bank of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, has become an icon of Land art—its spiral symbolizing rebirth, growth, and infinity.

In Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) a wooden cottage, filled with earth, is left to the ravages of the luxuriant surrounding vegetation. Smithson regarded the effects of civilization on landscape as an organic part of nature, and the devastation caused by natural disasters as basic aesthetic occurrences. The idea of entropy – the idea of irreversible change in a closed system which ends in collapse – is crucial. Numerous of Smithson’s projects concern elementary processes in nature, such as decomposition.

XXIII Michael Heizer Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist specializing primarily in large-scale sculptures and earth art (or Land art).

Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944; and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute.

Traveling to New York City in 1966, he began his

career producing more conventional, small-scale paintings and sculptures. In the late 1960s, however, Heizer left New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he began to produce larger-scale works that could not fit into a museum setting, except perhaps in photographs.

This culminated in the production of Double Negative, a 1500-ft trench Heizer cut into the side of a mesa in the Nevada desert.

Since then, Heizer has continued his exploration of earthworks, with his efforts directed primarily toward City, an enormous complex in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada. He has also produced a number of abstract paintings, and his large-scale sculptures, often inspired by Native American forms, can be found in museums and public spaces worldwide.

Since the late 1990s, Heizer’s work has focused primarily on City, and his work continues to this day, supported by the Dia Art Foundation through a grant from the Lannan Foundation. City is not yet available to the public.

XXIV Betty Beaumont Since 1969 Betty Beaumont’s works have helped define Ecological Art—a model of interdisciplinary problem solving. She is internationally recognized for her environmental and conceptual art marked by deep-seated social and ecological concerns, ranging widely from experimental landscape projects, photo-based art, image / text / object works, information art, and interactive combined-media installations.

After receiving her Master’s degree from the College of Environmental Design in the School of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, she began showing widely in the United States and Europe in the early 1970s. Since then she has produced a body of research-based psycho / bio / social projects that are unique works of visual art. She has had over 125 solo and group exhibitions that include the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, PS 1 Museum, The Hudson River Museum, The Queens Museum and The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and in Kyoto.

An artist and educator, she has served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SUNY, Purchase (where she was awarded the 1989 Professor of the Year Award), Hunter College, and is currently at New York University. Among the awards and fellowships she has been honored to receive are five National Endowment for the Arts grants, three New York State Council for the

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Arts grants, two Pollock-Krasner grants, and the German Unwelt Stiftung Award. She has served as a member of the Board of Advisors for the Art & Technology Program at the New York Hall of Science as well as on the Board of Directors of Women Make Movies.

XXV Ice circles Ice circles are a rare phenomenon. Some say they are the work of alien artists who want to communicate with earth. Traditional science holds that they are caused by currents beneath the ice, but it is amazing how such a perfect circle just may appear.

XXVI JIM DENEVAN Jim Denevan (born 1961) is an American chef and artist who creates temporary Land art. He works with natural materials to create massive scale drawings in sand, ice, and soil. His sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather, the landscape is the means of their creation. Often aerial photography or video is needed to comprehend the final work.

He is also the founder of Outstanding in the Field, a traveling farm dinner series.

March 2010, Denevan was commissioned by The Anthropologist to create a large scale drawing on Lake Baikal. The drawing is the world’s largest single artwork. A documentary of the journey and artwork called Art Hard was released in 2011.

The short version of the film premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival and was also accepted at the Carmel Art and Film Festival, DocNYC Film Festival, Milwaukee Short Film Festival and ION International Film Festival.

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ADDENDUM Labyrinth In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth (Greek: labyrinthos, place of the double-axe, i.e. the building complex at Knossos) was an elaborate structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its function was to hold the Minotaur, a mythical creature that was half man and half bull and was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus.

Daedalus had made the Labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it. Theseus was aided by Ariadne, who provided him with a skein of thread, literally the ‘clew’, or ‘clue’, so he could find his way out again.

In colloquial English, labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze, but many contemporary scholars observe a distinction between the two: maze refers to a complex branching (multicursal) puzzle with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single, non-branching path, which leads to the center. A labyrinth in this sense has an unambiguous route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.

Although early Cretan coins occasionally exhibit multicursal patterns, the unicursal seven-course ‘Classical’ design became associated with the Labyrinth on coins as early as 430 BC, and became widely used to represent the Labyrinth—even though both logic and literary descriptions make it clear that the Minotaur was trapped in a complex branching maze. Even as the designs became more elaborate, visual depictions of the Labyrinth from Roman times until the Renaissance are almost invariably unicursal. Branching mazes were reintroduced only when garden mazes became popular in the Renaissance.

Labyrinths appeared as designs on pottery or basketry, as body art, and etched on walls of caves or churches.

The Romans built many primarily decorative labyrinth designs on walls and floors in tile or mosaic. Many labyrinths set in floors or on the ground are large enough that the path to the center and back can be walked. They have historically been used both in group ritual and for private meditation.

Ancient labyrinths Pliny’s Natural History mentions four ancient labyrinths: the Cretan labyrinth,

an Egyptian labyrinth, a Lemnian labyrinth and an Italian labyrinth.

Labyrinth is a word of pre-Greek (Minoan) origin absorbed by Classical Greek and is perhaps related to the Lydian labrys (‘double-edged axe’, a symbol of royal power, which fits with the theory that the labyrinth was originally the royal Minoan palace on Crete and meant ‘palace of the doubleaxe’), with -inthos meaning ‘place’ (as in Corinth). A lot of these symbols were found in the Minoan palace and they usually accompanied female goddesses. It was probably the symbol of the arche (Mater-arche: matriarchy).

This theory is confirmed by the worship of Zeus Labraundos in Caria of Anatolia, where also existed a sacred site named Labraunda. Zeus is depicted holding a double-edged axe. In classical Greece the priests at Delphi were called Labryades—the men of the double axe.

The complex palace of Knossos in Crete is usually implicated, though the actual dancing-ground, depicted in frescoed patterns at Knossos, has not been found.

Something was being shown to visitors as a labyrinth at Knossos in the 1st century AD (Philostratos, De vita Apollonii Tyanei iv.34). A palace of similar complicated structure was discovered at Beycesultan in Anatolia, on the headwaters of Meander river.

The word labyrinthos (Mycenaean daburinthos) may possibly show the same equivocation between initial d- and l- as is found in the variation of the early Hittite royal name Tabarna / Labarna (where written t- may represent phonetic d-). If so, the equivocation would be similar to the Vedic sandhi representation of intervocalic retroflex as. It is possible that daburinthos may be cognate with the name of Mt. Tabôr, but this is not generally accepted.

Greek mythology did not recall, however, that in Crete there was a Lady or mistress who presided over the Labyrinth, although the goddess of mysteries of Arcadian cults was called Despoine (miss). A tablet inscribed in Linear B found at Knossos records a gift ‘to all the gods honey; to the mistress of the labyrinth honey.’ All the gods together receive as much honey as the Mistress of the Labyrinth alone.

The Mycenean Greek word is potnia.

‘She must have been a Great Goddess’, Kerényi observes. It is possible that the Cretan labyrinth and the Lady were connected with a cult which was transmitted later to the Eleusinian mysteries.

The labyrinth is the referent in the familiar Greek patterns of the endlessly running meander, to give the ‘Greek

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Thésée et le Minotaure / La légende crétoise Maître des Cassoni Campana

key’ its common modern name. In the 3rd century BC, coins from Knossos were still struck with the labyrinth symbol. The predominant labyrinth form during this period is the simple seven-circuit style known as the classical labyrinth.

The term labyrinth came to be applied to any unicursal maze, whether of a particular circular shape (illustration) or rendered as square. At the center, a decisive turn brought one out again.

In the Socratic dialogue that Plato produced as Euthydemus, Socrates describes the labyrinthine line of a logical argument: ‘Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth: we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking at first.’ Thus the present-day notion of a labyrinth as a place where one can lose (his) way must be set aside.

It is a confusing path, hard to follow without a thread, but, provided (the traverser) is not devoured at the midpoint, it leads surely, despite twists and turns, back to the beginning.’

Cretan labyrinth The most popular potential site for the Labyrinth in the myth of the Minotaur is a Bronze Age site at Knossos. When Knossos was excavated by explorer Arthur Evans, he found various bull motifs, including an image of a man leaping over the horns of a bull, as well

The labyrinth retains its connection with death and a triumphant return: at Hadrumentum in North Africa (now Sousse), a Roman family tomb has a fourfold labyrinth mosaic floor with a dying minotaur in the center and a mosaic inscription: HICINCLUSUS. VITAMPERDIT ‘Enclosed here, he loses life’ (Kerenyi).

Prehistoric petroglyph in The Rocky Valley, Tintagel, Cornwall, England

as depictions of a labrys carved into the walls. The palace is thought to have been the site of a dancing-ground made for Ariadne by the craftsman Daedalus, where young men and women, of the age of those sent to Crete as prey for the Minotaur, would dance together. By extension, in popular legend it is associated with the myth of the Minotaur.

In the 2000s, archaeologists explored other potential sites of the labyrinth.

Oxford University geographer Nicholas Howarth believes that ‘Evans’s hypothesis that the palace of Knossos is also the Labyrinth must be treated skeptically’. Howarth and his team conducted a search of an underground complex known as the Skotino cave but concluded that it was formed naturally.

Another contender is a series of underground tunnels at Gortyn, accessed by a narrow crack but expanding into interlinking caverns. Unlike the Skotino cave, these caverns have smooth walls and columns, and appear to have been at least partially man-made. This site corresponds to an unusual labyrinth symbol on a 16th century map of Crete contained in a book of maps in the library of Christ Church, Oxford. A map of the caves themselves was produced by the French in 1821. The site was also used by German soldiers to store ammunition during the Second World War. Labyrinth as pattern In antiquity, the less complicated labyrinth pattern familiar from medieval examples was already developed. In Roman floor mosaics, the simple classical labyrinth is framed in the meander border pattern, squared off as the medium requires, but still recognisable. Often an image of the Minotaur appears in the centre of these mosaic labyrinths. Roman meander patterns gradually developed in complexity towards the fourfold shape that is now familiarly known as the medieval form.

Medieval labyrinths and turf mazes When the early humanist Benzo d’Alessandria visited Verona before 1310, he noted the ‘Laberinthum which is now called the Arena’; perhaps he was seeing the cubiculi beneath the arena’s missing floor.

The full flowering of the medieval labyrinth came about from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries with the grand pavement labyrinths of the gothic cathedrals, notably Chartres, Reims and Amiens in northern France.

These labyrinths may have originated as symbolic allusion to the Holy City; and some modern thinkers have theorized that prayers and devotions may have accompanied the perambulation of their intricate paths. Although some books (in particular guidebooks) suggest that the mazes on cathedral floors served as substitutes for pilgrimage paths, the earliest attested use of the phrase ‘chemin de Jerusalem’ (path to Jerusalem) dates to the late 18th century when it was used to describe mazes at Reims and Saint-Omer. The accompanying ritual, supposedly involving pilgrims following the maze on their knees while praying, may have been practiced at Chartres during the 17th century. However, no contemporary evidence supports the idea that labyrinths had such a purpose for early Christians. The cathedral labyrinths are thought to be the inspiration for the many turf mazes in the UK, such as survive at Wing, Hilton, Alkborough, and Saffron Walden.

Over the same general period, some 500 or more non-ecclesiastical labyrinths were constructed in Scandinavia. These labyrinths, generally in coastal areas, are marked out with stones, most often in the simple 7- or 11-course classical forms. They often have names which translate as ‘Troy Town’. They are thought to have been constructed by fishing communities: trapping malevolent trolls or winds in the labyrinth’s coils might ensure a safe fishing expedition. There are also stone labyrinths on the Isles of Scilly, although none is known to date from before the nineteenth century.

There are examples of labyrinths in many disparate cultures. The symbol

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has appeared in various forms and media (petroglyphs, classic-form, medieval-form, pavement, turf, and basketry) at some time throughout most parts of the world, from Native North and South America to Australia, Java, India, and Nepal.

Modern Labyrinths In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the labyrinth symbol, which has inspired a revival in labyrinth building.

—— Countless video games depict mazes and labyrinths.

—— On bobsled, luge, and skeleton tracks, a labyrinth is where there are three to four curves in succession without a straight line in between any of the turns.

—— In modern imagery, the labyrinth of Daedalus is often represented by a multicursal maze, in which one may become lost.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was entranced with the idea of the labyrinth, and used it extensively in his short stories (such as The House of Asterion in The Aleph). His use of it has inspired other authors’ works (e.g.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves).

Additionally, Roger Zelazny’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Amber, features a labyrinth, called ‘the Pattern’, which grants those who walk it the power to move between parallel worlds. The avant-garde multi-screen film, In The Labyrinth, presents a search for meaning in a symbolic modern labyrinth.

Labyrinth of Hadrumeutum Sousse, Tunesia

Labyrinth pattern in Saint-Omer Cathedral, France

In Rick Riordan’s series Percy Jackson & the Olympians, the events of the fourth novel The Battle of the Labyrinth predominantly take place within the labyrinth of Daedalus, which has followed the heart of the West to settle beneath the United States. Australian author Sara Douglass incorporated some labyrinthine ideas in her series The Troy Game, in which the Labyrinth on Crete is one of several in the ancient world, created with the cities as a source of magical power. Lawrence Durrell’s The Dark Labyrinth depicts travelers trapped underground in Crete.

The labyrinth is also treated in contemporary fine arts. Examples include Piet Mondrian’s Dam and Ocean (1915), Joan Miró’s Labyrinth (1923), Pablo Picasso’s Minotauromachia (1935), M. C. Escher’s Relativity (1953), Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Labyrinth (1957), Jean Dubuffet’s Logological Cabinet (1970), Richard Long’s Connemara sculpture (1971), Joe Tilson’s Earth Maze (1975), Richard Fleischner’s Chain Link Maze (1978), István Orosz’s Atlantis Anamorphosis (2000), Dmitry Rakov’s Labyrinth (2003), and Labyrinthine projection

by contemporary American artist Mo Morales (2000).

The Italian painter Davide Tonato has dedicated many of his artistic works to the labyrinth theme. The art historian Giordano Berti has defined him as ‘the Prince of Labyrinths’ due to his ability to create using the refined Trompe-l’œil technique, a considerable number of absolutely innovative, almost modelled structures. The art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, however, has compared Tonato’s worked to those of Maurits Cornelis Escher.

Cultural meanings Prehistoric labyrinths are believed to have served as traps for malevolent spirits or as defined paths for ritual dances.

In medieval times, the labyrinth symbolized a hard path to God with a clearly defined center (God) and one entrance (birth). In their cross-cultural study of signs and symbols, Patterns that Connect, Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter present various forms of the labyrinth and suggest various possible meanings, including not only a sacred path to the home of a sacred ancestor, but also, perhaps, a representation of

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the ancestor him / herself: ‘many (New World) Indians who make the labyrinth regard it as a sacred symbol, a beneficial ancestor, a deity. In this they may be preserving its original meaning: the ultimate ancestor, here evoked by two continuous lines joining its twelve primary joints.’

Labyrinths can be thought of as symbolic forms of pilgrimage; people can walk the path, ascending toward salvation or enlightenment. Many people could not afford to travel to holy sites and lands, so labyrinths and prayer substituted for such travel. Later, the religious significance of labyrinths faded, and they served primarily for entertainment, though recently their spiritual aspect has seen a resurgence.

Many newly made labyrinths exist today, in churches and parks.

Labyrinths are used by modern mystics to help achieve a contemplative state.

Walking among the turnings, one loses track of direction and of the outside world, and thus quiets the mind. The Labyrinth Society provides a locator for modern labyrinths all over the world.

Shamanism Shamanism is a religious phenomenon centered on the shaman, an ecstatic figure believed to have power to heal the sick and to communicate with the world beyond. The term applies primarily to the religious systems and phenomena of the northern Asian, Ural-Altaic (e.g., Mansi, Khanty, Samoyed, Tungus), and Paleo-Asian (e.g., Yukaghir, Chukchi, Koryak) peoples.

The term shamanism comes from the Manchu-Tungus word saman. The noun is formed from the verb sa-(‘to know’); thus, ‘shaman’ literally means ‘he who knows.’ Various other terms are used by other peoples among whom shamanism exists.

There is no single definition of shamanism that applies to the elements of shamanistic activity found in North and South America, in southeastern India, in Australia, and in small areas allover the world as well as to the phenomena among the northern Asian, Ural-Altaic, and Paleo-Asian peoples. It is generally agreed that shamanism evolved before the development of class society in the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age, that it was practiced among peoples living in the hunting-and-gathering stage, and that it continued to exist, somewhat altered, among peoples who had reached the animal-raising and horticultural stage. According to some scholars, it originated and evolved among the more developed societies that bred cattle for production. Opinions differ as to whether the term shamanism may be applied to all religious systems in which the central personage is believed to have direct intercourse through an ecstatic state with the transcendent world that permits him to act as healer, diviner, and psychopomp (escort of souls of the dead to the other world). Since ecstasy is a psychosomatic phenomenon that may be brought about at any time by persons with the ability to do so, the essence of shamanism lies not in the general phenomenon but in specific notions, actions, and objects connected with the ecstatic state.

World view / The universe.

The classic worldview of shamanism is found among the peoples of northern Asia. In their view the universe is full of heavenly bodies peopled by spiritual beings. Their own world is disk-shapedsaucerlike-with an opening in the middle leading into the Netherworld; the Upper World stands over the Central World, or Earth, this world having a manyfold vault. The Earth, or Central World. stands in water held on the back

of a colossal monster that may be a turtle, a huge fish, a bull, or a mammoth.

The movement of this animal causes earthquakes. The Earth is surrounded by an immense belt. It is connected with the Upper World by the Pillar of the World. The Upper World consists of several strata—3, 7, 9, or 17. On the navel of the Earth stands the Cosmic Tree, which reaches up to the dwelling of the upper gods.

Shamans' drum, skin on wood, Lapland Contemporary version of a shamans' drum. All the symbols of the dreamlike state of the shaman are shown (roads to sun and multiple worlds) in combination with depictions of modern life in the polar regions.

Shamans’ drum, skin on wood, Lapland The diagram on this drum shows a map of his cosmic journey throughout the center of the three worlds. The drums itself reproduces the primal sound, which regulates the cosmos and gives rise to a state of ecstasy in which the trip of one’s dream can consciously be repeated.

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Tjurunga A Tjurunga or as it sometimes spelled, Churinga, is an object of religious significance by Central Australian Indigenous Australian people of the Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) groups. Tjurunga often had a wide and indeterminate native significance, they included: Sacred ceremonies, Stone Objects, Wooden sacred objects, Bullroarers, Sacred ground paintings, Ceremonial poles, Ceremonial headgear, Sacred chants, Sacred earth mounds.

Meaning Generally speaking, tjurunga denote sacred stone or wooden objects possessed by private or group owners together with the legends, chants, and ceremonies associated with them. They were present among the Arunta, the Loritja, the Kaitish, the Unmatjera, and the Illpirra. These items are generally oblong pieces of polished stone or wood.

Some of these items have hair or string strung through it and were named ‘bull roarers’ by Europeans. Upon each tjurunga is a totem of the group to which it belongs. Tjurunga are highly sacred, in fact, they are considered so sacred that only a few were able to see them and likewise it is considered sacrilegious to post a picture of them. Durkheim suggest that the name churinga is normally a noun, but can also be used as an adjective meaning ‘sacred.’

The term Tjurunga was translated by Strehlow to mean something similar to secret and personal. With Tju meaning hidden, secret, and runga meaning that which is personal to me. Kempe argued against this translation and suggested that Tju means great, powerful, or sacred and that runga it did not translate into personal ownership.

Ownership The ownership of sacred tjurunga amongst the Arrernte groups was determined largely by ‘the conception site’ of every individual member of a patrilineal totemic clan. Because these relics are considered so sacred, their availability is limited to a small number of people. During the early 20th century and before, only initiated males were able to see or touch these sacred objects. Women and uninitiated males were not allowed to touch them or see them, except from a far distance. The tjurunga were kept separately from the rest of the clan in a sacred location that was also unavailable to the uninitiated and women.

While some theorists, such as Strehlow, have suggested these relics

are amongst the very few forms of property, which may be owned legitimately by individual persons in Central Australia. Durkheim and Kempe contend that the Tjurunga can not be owned by an individual. For example, Durkheim writes, ‘As concerns the meaning of the word runga, that seems very doubtful. The ceremonies of the Emu belong to all the members of the Emu clan; all can participate in them; they are not the personal property of any member.’ (Durkheim, 119) Religious Aspects In many myths the ancestors themselves are said to have used them and stored them away as their most treasured possessions. Such myths emphasise the life-holding magical properties of these tjurunga. The ancestor regarded his tjurunga as portions of his own being; and is always anxious that strangers might come and rob him of the very essence of his life. Accordingly, the legends abound with stories of theft and robbery, and the very fierce vengeance exacted. Tjurunga were considered to have magical properties. They would be rubbed on the body to confer sacredness onto the subject and to do things such as heal wounds. While tjurunga was useful to the individual, the clan’s collective fate was also considered to be tied up with the items. After all, it was the totemic image that provided representation for the group on the tjurunga.

The acquisition of sufficient knowledge leading to possession of personal tjurunga was long, difficult and sometimes extremely painful.

Practices differed amongst the various groups. Ted Strehlow describes how the men from the Northern, Southern and Western Arrernte groups were put on probation for several years after their last initiations.

Ceremonial significance The tjurunga were visible embodiments of some part of the fertility of the great ancestor of the totem in question. The body of the ancestor merely undergoes a transmutation into something that will weather all the assaults of time, change and decay. Stone tjurunga were thought to have been made by the ancestors themselves. The wooden tjurunga made by the old men are symbolical of the actual tjurunga which ‘cannot be found’. These ‘man-made’ tjurunga were accepted without reservation as sacred objects.

At the time of receiving his tjurungabody a young man may be twenty five years of age. He will often be thirty-five

or forty years of age before the most sacred chants and ceremonies that are linked with it have passed into his possession. As he grows older and continues to demonstrate his worthiness, he receives an ever-increasing share in the tjurunga owned by his own totemic clan. Eventually he may become a member of the assembly of old ceremonial chiefs who are honoured trustees for the ancient traditions of the whole clan.

In 1933, Strehlow noted that after the advent of white men to Central Australia, the young men employed by the foreign intruders were watched very closely by the old men of their group. In many cases, unless the young men were outstandingly generous in their gifts towards their elders, no ceremonies or chants of power and importance were handed on to this unworthy younger generation. With the death of the old men such chants and ceremonies passed into oblivion.

Acquisition of knowledge The old men would carefully note a young man’s conduct. He had to be respectful towards his elders; he had to be attentive to their advice in all things.

He would know the value of silence in ceremonial matters: no account of his past experiences could be spoken with the hearing of women and children. His own marriage had to conform to the laws of the group. Then one day the old men, sitting in a circle, would call him in to sit down in their midst. They began to chant. One man told Strehlow: ‘The old men seized my hand. They all struck up the chant-verse: With fierce eyes, with glowing eyes, they seize the thumb; With fierce eyes, with glowing eyes, they rip off the nail.

An old man produced a sharp kangaroo bone (ntjala). He stabbed my thumb with it, pushed the bone deeply underneath the nail. He drew the point out; the rest kept up the chant. He thrust it under the nail in a different place. He gradually loosened the thumbnail. It was slippery with blood. I almost shrieked with pain; the torment was unbearable.

I have not forgotten it: the pain was not slight; it was exceedingly great.

When the nail had been loosened, he took a sharp opossum tooth, forced it into the living flesh through the base of the thumb-nail, and tore the nail off from behind. Blood spurted over his hand. The man chanted: They rip off the nail, they tear off the nail; Blood flows like a river, rushes along like a river.

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Tjurunga, stone, Central-Australia The denotations of the map on this Tjurunga are described by these words: ‘On a place called Nagapatjimbi (1) a couple of locusts came out of the soil; they flew into the air and landed afterwards back on the ground. There they multiplied and after the following season they reappeared on other places (2). They flew into the air and returned as human beings. These people went to Wantaugara (3), entered a cave and turned into a Tjurunga’.

The parallel lines which connect the circles represent the paths made by the locusts and are formed by crushing grass and leaves. The couple of short lines represent the tracks made in the sand. Nagapatjimbi and Wantaugara are sacred places in the desert about fifty miles north of the Mac Donell mountain ridges in CentralAustralia.

Then they seized my left hand and removed the thumb-nail in like manner.

Nowadays we make a great concession to the young men in our group.

We no longer tear off their fingernails. The price is too high; we give the tjurunga to them at a much lower cost. Besides, the young men of the present generation are no longer hardy enough to endure such pain.’

Relationship to Historical Research These sacred relics were of high interest to early European anthropologists and sociologists, who were studying the nature of totemic religion and the sacred. Scholars such as Spencer, Gillen, Strehlow, Kempe and Durkheim all studied tjurunga. Durkheim discusses the nature of tjurunga throughout his seminal work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim considered the tjurunga to be an archetypes of the sacred item.

Creation Myth A creation myth is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it. They develop in oral traditions and therefore typically have multiple versions; and they are the most common form of myth, found throughout human culture. In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes even in a historical or literal sense. They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths—that is they describe the ordering of the cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness.

Creation myths often share a number of features. They often are considered sacred accounts and can be found in nearly all known religious traditions. They are all stories with a plot and characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals, who often speak and transform easily. They are often set in a dim and nonspecific past, what historian of religion Mircea Eliade termed in illo tempore (‘at that time’).

Also, all creation myths speak to deeply meaningful questions held by the society that shares them, revealing of their central worldview and the framework for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context.

Marta Weigle further developed and refined this typology to highlight nine themes, adding elements such as deus faber, a creation crafted by a deity, creation from the work of two creators working together or against each other, creation from sacrifice and creation from division / conjugation, accretion / conjunction, or secretion.

An alternative system based on six recurring narrative themes was designed by Raymond Van Over: —— A primeval abyss, an infinite expanse of waters or space.

—— An originator deity which is awakened or an eternal entity within the abyss.

—— An originator deity poised above the abyss.

—— A cosmic egg or embryo.

—— An originator deity creating life through sound or word.

—— Life generating from the corpse or dismembered parts of an originator deity.

Mythologists have applied various schemes to classify creation myths found throughout human cultures.

Eliade and his student, Charles H. Long, developed a classification based on some common motifs that reappear in stories the world over. The classification identifies five basic types:

Tjurunga, stone, Central-Australia, Ngalia-tribe The Australian aboriginals consider the Eternal Dreaming as an era in which man and nature where fixed for all time. The Dreaming is nevertheless modern and inextricable joined to the events of the worldly history. Tjurunga’s are secret, divine and occult maps of events that happened during the Dreaming, perceived by the eye’s of the spiritual essence of the individual, that part of the Self that is situated outside time.

—— Creation ex nihilo in which the creation is through the thought, word, dream or bodily secretions of a divine being.

—— Earth diver creation in which a diver, usually a bird or amphibian sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which develops into a terrestrial world.

—— Emergence myths in which progenitors pass through a series of worlds and metamorphoses until reaching the present world.

—— Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being.

—— Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as the cracking of a cosmic egg or a bringing into form from chaos.

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Drawing, Siberia Chuckchi-tribe The Chuckchi acknowledge explicitly the coming and going in both directions between the levels of the Middle-earth, the hellish region and the heavens. This map shows the way and reduces the risks of getting lost. Roads to the worlds of dawn, evening and darkness are running through the North star and the axis of the world, while the sun, moon and stars are shining simultaneously.

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Colophon 2012 Concept & design Kahil Janssens Print Groep Gheysen We have attempted to contact all copyright holders but this has not been possible in all instances. We apologise for any omissions and, if noted, will amend in any future editions.

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