Myriam Lefkowitz - Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh), Talbot Rice / Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller - Night Walk for Edinburgh, Fruitmarket
Edinburgh looks
different with your eyes closed. So it goes in Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh), Paris-born
artist Myriam Lefkowitz’s guided tour with a difference that forms part of
Talbot Rice’s wider inquiry into cognition in the gallery’s accompanying
exhibition, The Extended Mind. Senses are shaken in different ways in Night
Walk for Edinburgh, Canadian duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s gothic
noir thriller that leads its prey down some of the city centre’s rarely
explored back alleys, where they become an accessory and willing pawn in
someone else’s game. The fact that these two very different walks are running
concurrently speaks volumes about the power of the imagination to change one’s
inner landscape as much as the outer one that exists just beyond your front
door.
In Walk, Hands, Eyes
(Edinburgh) (****), audience members are taken by the hand and led individually
through a familiar everyday landscape made new by the fact that they have their
eyes shut through the walk’s hour or so duration. Such an act of
self-discipline might have been made easier with a blindfold, but, as with
everything that follows once you go willingly into someone else’s hands, it’s
done on trust.
As you’re led through
the streets, brushing against strangers with no recourse for apology, gingerly
moving up and down stair-wells and effectively being lost and without a
compass, the care bestowed upon you gives you the confidence to turn baby-steps
into strides into the unknown.
At moments, your guide
instructs you to open your eyes, then to close them a nano-second later.
Inbetween, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it view of a door or a panoramic view of
the city through a window, maybe, become mental snapshots or picture postcards
reimagined as somewhere better.
Lefkowitz has introduced
Walk, Hands, Eyes to various cities over the last decade, training up a new set
of guides each time as she goes. Her methodology in part echoes the Situationists
and their notion of the derive, a way of being that saw these serious-minded
urbanists drift through cities to absorb their ever-changing energies in order
to make psycho-geographic maps of the experience. The difference here is that
for the participant, those energies are absorbed as a blind child might do,
with the shifting clash of sounds, silences and smells heightened even as you
wilfully deprive yourself of sight.
There are moments you
think you’re going round in circles, your mind playing tricks that this is all
a set-up, and that you’re being taken for a ride, metaphorically at least, if
not actually. As you go on, however, snatches of conversations drifting in and
out with the traffic noises while wafts of hot food-smell pervade the air, as
you navigate the uneven terrain underfoot in the cold light of day before the
temperature changes once you move indoors, entire new worlds open up.
This is done in tandem
with your guide in a two-way exchange that finds an unspoken empathy, rapport
and even intimacy in the choreography that ensues. As you gradually learn to
move in rhythm, the relationship evolves into an improvised dance of co-dependent
bodies and minds at one in the throbbing heart of the city.
There is a more
calculated narrative thrust in Night Walk for Edinburgh (****), originally
commissioned and presented by the Fruitmarket as part of the 2019 Edinburgh
International Festival, and now revived for winter with the intention of it
becoming an annual event. This new context gives Cardiff and Miller’s hi-tech
mix of sound and vision relayed through a mobile screen and headphones a frosty
air that lends it even more atmosphere.
Beginning at the bottom
of the steps on Cockburn Street, the breathy drawl of Cardiff’s voice acts as
narrator and guide as she leads you around the same corners and down the same
dead ends mirrored in the video you’re watching. The urgency in her voice
sounds possessed with the dramatic deliberation of a spoken-word artist
re-booting Raymond Chandler by way of Robert Louis Stevenson.
From here we’re led
through a disarming back-street maze where something untoward lurks behind
every metal grille, and poetry unfolds where you least expect to find it. Once
you’re in, however solitary, you’re cast as co-conspirator, diving down closes
where the dark underbelly that lurks behind the pretty chocolate box façade of
this arcane and ugly-beautiful Jekyll and Hyde city comes to grudging
after-hours life.
Out of this emerges an impressionistic
detective story that sees Cardiff give chase in a narrative as elusive as the
forever-just-out-of-reach woman in a red-coat who comes in and out of view. Her
barely-there presence recalls scenes in Nicolas Roeg’s similarly eerie and
forensically fragmentary film, Don’t Look Now. Roeg’s Daphne Du Maurier
adaptation was set in Venice, another city loaded with hidden menaces.
Even what’s left of
Edinburgh’s public spaces, it seems, can put the frighteners on you, as their
wide-open desolation is rudely intruded upon by drunken grotesques leaping from
the shadows in packs. Jump-cut glitches in the film seem to foretell a messy
end.
There are musical cameos
from folk legend Dolina MacLennan, who performs a 19th century Gaelic
song, and singer/song-writer Kathryn Joseph, whose other-worldly keening
bridges ancient and modern in striking fashion.
There’s always a chance,
of course, you may stumble on a real life intervention, as I did when the trio
with a dog hunched out of view down a close passed around a crack pipe,
oblivious to anything beyond. As absorbed as they were, they could easily have
been mistaken for extras in Cardiff and Miller’s construction. After almost
thirty years devising audio and video walks, such accidental glimpses into
harsh reality are probably an occupational hazard. But as parts of their film
acknowledge, they are also a sharp reminder of a world beyond the dead-of-night
mythology conjured into view in a city where there really are eight million
stories.
Myriam Lefkowitz - Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh), Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh until 1st February, 2020. Janet Cardiff and
George Bures Miller - Night Walk for Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery,
Edinburgh until 31st January 2020. Advance booking is essential for
both events.
The List, November 2019
Ends
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