JUCS 2 (3) pp. 325–333 Intellect Limited 2015 Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Volume 2 Number 3 © 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jucs.2.3.325_1 Marc JaMes Léger Independent Scholar Homeless Projection: Place des Arts: an Interview with Krzysztof wodiczko abstract Keywords This 2014 interview with veteran engaged artist Krzysztof Wodiczko addresses work that was made in dialogue with homeless people in Montreal. Drawing on previous experience, Wodiczko emphasizes in the process of collaboration the needs of individual participants and their own performance skills in the presentation of self within conditions of marginality and adversity. The subversive humour of Charlie Chaplin and Bertolt Brecht are identified as key components of Wodiczko’s approach to realism. Krzysztof Wodiczko interview homelessness public art fearless speech fearless listening spectacle diversity Homeless Projection: Place des Arts (2014) is a fourteen-minute digital recording and projection of the narrated stories of some twenty homeless men and women from Montreal onto the different levels of the stepped roof of the Théâtre Maisonneuve, a prominent Montreal theatre that is adjacent to the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, the largest performance hall in the province of Québec, and next to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM). All are across the street from the Complexe Desjardins, a mixed-use office, hotel and shopping complex. These sites are part of the broader Quartier des Spectacles. The concept of a Quartier des Spectacles was devised in 2001 as a means to energize the downtown through cultural means. It is today the site of more 325 Marc James Léger than 40 annual festivals and outdoor events that complement the presentations of the previously mentioned cultural institutions. The Quartier des Spectacles is a prime example of what David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) defined as the tendency of global cities to transform a part of the urban infrastructure into a marketable image and in Rebel Cities (David Harvey, 2012) as the phenomenon of urban development becoming one of the primary means by which global financial surplus is invested. Such spaces of the diffuse spectacle are developed at the expense of historical memory and what Henri Lefebvre defined as the ‘right to the city’ (1968). The Quartier des Spectacles truly came to life during the 2012 student strike and the citizen-led casseroles, when more than 300,000 protesters spontaneously marched through the crowd-filled Quartier during the FrancoFolies festival and attempted to disrupt the mafia-operated GrandPrix auto race shows on Crescent Street. The protesters were met with violent police response and this is the first time I myself was maimed with a stun grenade. Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection is itself a kind of direct action, talking back to the spectacle by directly addressing the problem of social exclusion and impoverishment that is at the heart of capitalist economies worldwide. Meeting with and interviewing people who have stories to tell about the problems that directly affect them, Wodiczko patiently organizes what he calls an ‘inner public’, a group of participants who agree to engage in ‘fearless speech’ and present their complaints to the general public (Foucault, 2001). For this projection work, he collaborated with the St. Michael’s Mission and other Montreal community organizations to create a platform for Montreal’s homeless to present their experience, tell their stories, fears and desires. Those who then engage in ‘fearless listening’, as Wodiczko calls it, become participants themselves and members of the ‘outer public’, ready to bear witness to the stories that are ‘choreographed’ by the artist and projected at night on the theatre’s outer façade. The work, which was co-sponsored by the Quartier des Spectacles, the Centre PHI and the MACM has been integrated into the Museum’s collection. Homeless Projection: Place des Arts was presented from 8 October to 23 November 2014, in the context of the inaugural 2014 Biennale de Montréal. I interviewed Wodiczko over breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel, adjacent to the Montreal World Trade Centre, on 23 November 2014. Marc James Léger (MLJ): You decided to title this work Homeless Projection: Place des Arts, directly acknowledging the site of cultural consumption in which the projection is manifested. The site is particularly interesting to me since the commercial downtown at night tends to be a particularly vacuous and aseptic space, with its banal light projections and mass market tourism. Homeless Projection: Place des Arts brings the space to life in an avant-garde way, as though this was a Surrealist film. The players seem to be quite comfortable with the camera and this surreptitious occupation of the site creates an estrangement that brings to mind what Dick Hebdige found to be the unheimlich, uncanny and even dystopian aspects of your work. The experience is completely contradictory without being scandalous. In a sense it should create a controversy, but homelessness has become such a daily feature of life in downtown Montreal that this small drama actually seems like a cultural entertainment, distorting the everyday experience by taking it, literally, to a ‘higher’ level, if I could put it that way. It’s Brechtian in the best sense by producing exactly what the cultural economy excels at: new experiences, strange content, something completely different. 326 Homeless Projection Figure 1: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Projection: Place des Arts, October 5, 2014. Photo: Kes Tagney. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. Krzysztof Wodiczko (KW): The word ‘art’ here, of course, operates in so many different contexts, with the performance art centre, theatre, opera, a museum of contemporary art, and that’s Place des Arts. But there is another art here, which is the art of performance of people who use art in order to survive – like homeless people. My intuition was that the people who would choose to contribute to this project would prove to be experienced artists because many of them by necessity have developed special ‘professional’ skills and understanding of how to operate and act in front of the public, in public space, and playfully use it as a stage for their lived performance. Although that public doesn’t know that it is functioning as a public. That public is also not aware that they are looking at artists, but in fact there would probably be something profoundly missing in this city if suddenly all the homeless people went on strike and stopped performing their ‘homelessness’. So the homeless do perform, as in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, while the non-homeless, without knowing it, are their public and, unaware, become an integral part of that play. When homeless people use props in order to pretend that they are handicapped, they are ‘professionally’ acting for the public. So, for example, in New York City, in the 1980s, in Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square (1986), I projected onto the equestrian Washington Monument an image of a man in a wheelchair who is holding a can of window cleaner and a cloth. This referred directly to someone who was approaching in his wheelchair the cars who were stopped at red lights at the intersection of Canal Street and Houston, and who would get out of his wheelchair, jump up and clean their windshield, and then get back into the chair. To heighten his performance he had one leg wrapped in a white bandage as if he was wounded, which was of course fake. And so humour was part of his technique and because it’s all fake people would be more compelled to let him clean the windshield, even if it did not need cleaning, and give him some money. Clearly, it was a performance of homelessness by someone who was actually homeless. He’s both a character and an actor, but also the scriptwriter, because it was his script. He 327 Marc James Léger is doing Brechtian theatre as a way to shame the next car to arrive at the street light, where he would do the same number. (Laughs) So that ‘quotable gesture’ seems right out of Brecht and perhaps may have some relation to his short essay on the traffic accident, where he gives an example of Epic Theatre emerging from a real-life situation. That projection was on a statue of George Washington on horseback at Union Square because, as it happens, this homeless performer’s name was also Washington, incidentally, and he was wash-ing windshields! So the present Homeless Projection (2014) has some references to this work that I made years ago with the same name, but this time capitalizing on many projects developed in between, such as Homeless Vehicle (1988) and Poliscar (1991), through which I have learned more of the ways in which homeless people live and operate. The homeless of Place des Arts obviously didn’t act the way Washington did on Houston Street. Instead, one of them, at the start of the project was saying: ‘How do you know I’m homeless right now? You don’t know, right? Unless I tell you’. In that sense he and the others who choose to be part of the project were perfectly fit, as actors, to sit in the studio, surrounded by an enormous amount of media equipment, naturally and eloquently speaking and acting in articulate ways in front of the camera. In that way, the idea of this project, to appear as actors and characters at Place des Arts, to be projected onto the roof of a performance art centre building and be seen as if they were sitting on it, was somehow immediately understood by the homeless. I showed them some sketches of what I had in mind and they laughed with understanding, and they went through with it. They also knew what to say, in a way, because each of them had an idea of what they would speak or sing about before recording. They had been asked beforehand to talk about what they want to say and they developed their own scripts. They dressed-up for the occasion. What was interesting is that they did not play the role of the homeless. When they came to the studio they were dressed the way they look the best as themselves and not as ‘homeless’. MJL: Did you make any suggestions to them? KW: No, my intuition was that I should not make any suggestions. I invited them to speak and to figure out what they felt was important for them to say. Those conversations actually lasted almost an entire year. Obviously there was something happening behind the scenes because of Marie Legagneur, who was always there with microphones and a notepad, listening to them about what they might say or do. She’s a sensitive and thoughtful film-maker, and a very open, tactful person. She was perceived by the homeless as part of a team of social workers. She is in some ways herself a stranger but she seemed to become less of a stranger here as she was embraced by a quite large number of people who are after all strangers themselves as well. As she makes documentaries and works with people. She was educated by her practice: how to listen rather than doing an interview. That was our rule: don’t interview anybody. A little bit like in psychotherapy – you just inspire people to speak, to figure out what they want to say. Some people were quite taken by the fact that someone would want to listen to them. They don’t talk much and do not listen to each other. Most people who go to St. Michael’s Mission mostly keep to themselves. There is the exception of a group of people who came from up North – Inuit people, who form some kind of a community here. They are strangers among strangers. They have their own culture to hold on to, and 328 Homeless Projection also their own cultural techniques of survival, which is making stone sculptures. The others come from so many different backgrounds, some from even well-to-do backgrounds, that there is little for them to share. This project then became something they could share. It became something communal. Maryse was always there, weekly, so that was one continuity. They all knew something was going on that is going to happen and some of them got to know each other for the first time through this project, as co-actors and co-characters, sharing the stage, which was set up especially in a studio space at PHI Centre. MJL: Somehow I doubt that any of these people would have gone to PHI otherwise. KW: No, but they would know their way around the area and Centre PHI. The Inuit sell their carvings around there to tourists. On occasion they can sell their work to the galleries in Old Montreal. One of them sells on the street, directly on the sidewalk, which is rare because otherwise people might think that he stole the sculptures from these same galleries, which sell a lot of this kind of ‘exotica’ to tourists. By showing that he is actually making the sculptures he becomes legitimate. But those who were doing the carving didn’t take part in this filming – or not much. Perhaps they did not need this since they already have their own project. In any case, there were a few of the homeless Inuit in the work. In some cases there are a multiplicity of identities that are being performed. There was one person who is gay, who has an additional performative layer that adds complexity to the understanding of playing and acting. There was one person who has a double gender, who played these two roles, combing her hair, and who was proud that nobody knew if he was a man or a woman. There was in fact so much theatre going on and Brecht is the one who said that theatre is the most human form of art because it’s happening every day and starts at the beginning of one’s life. The fact of being human means to be an actor, or to create some kind of theatrical situation. MJL: This made me think of the countless strata of representational strategies the work incorporates, in particular what we could refer to as the genealogy of the picturesque, from say, Pieter Bruegel to Honoré Daumier and Ben Shahn. The convention of the picturesque of course codifies a gaze that implies that the subject of the representation is more disenfranchised than the viewer or the artist. It’s typically an uneven relationship and yet it’s at the origins of individualism and even the politics of recognition. The formal inequality between people becomes the basis of the ideology of individualism, which is a formal means to reconcile the contradiction with the idea that everyone is in principle equal. KW: I can’t explain fully why I love Ben Shahn, Daumier and Rembrandt and a few other artists who show in some way the absurdity and visual difference between the bodies of different people from different classes and their reactions to the situations in which they end up – the kind of impossible situations. Daumier moved into the poorest part of Paris to be in the middle of poverty, as did the Expressionists in Dresden. It’s not the same today. We cannot rely on the science of physiognomy, obviously, and even class differences are no longer so evident. However, at the same time, within those tight frameworks, they could expose small differences and show that not all poor people are the same. Charlie Chaplin is also very important because he performed the cliché of the tramp and the immigrant precisely at the time when immigrants were coming through Ellis Island to New York. In City 329 Marc James Léger Lights (Chaplin, 1931), exactly at the very moment of his arrival to the promised land of America, the little tramp is kicking the ass of the policeman. The scene received a tremendous amount of criticism – the ungrateful immigrant (Chaplin, himself), showing an ungrateful immigrant character! The scene shows the force of immigrants’ singular decision-making energy, inner freedom and will to be themselves, despite the fact that they are pushed together in cramped housing conditions and class situation, which comprises a whole set of clichés. And from the beginning they have the right to complete doubt about those who help them and all of the promises made to them. They also see oppression in everything, even when something is a gift. Critical consciousness is a natural thing in human beings even if others would like to subdue this impulse though authority. This anarchic Chaplinesque aspect can be in the kinds of artworks to which this projection belongs. This is the line of realism that I like. It’s no accident that there are many references to Chaplin in the writings of Brecht. But I agree, the contradiction is there in the realization that these people belong to a certain class in society. You could call this class ‘homeless people’, because it’s an economic condition that they share. At the same time there is no real representation of these people, there are only stereotypes and clichés attached to this class. So people have a preconceived image of how that class ‘looks’. Before they have any connection with these people they already project such images onto them. If someone doesn’t fit the stereotype they do not even notice that person. If it fits the cliché, they see a ‘homeless’ person instead of a real person. What this project is showing is that each of those people are very singular human beings who have their own, individual conditions, doubled up inside that other condition of being homeless. Often this means that they have cut their community ties and have no connections with other people, which leads to anomie. The fact that they don’t have a roof over their heads is secondary to having broken such connections. You can be homeless in your own apartment or in some ways anonymous vis-à-vis people you might see in an elevator in a large apartment building. That is the case of some homeless people who have received apartments. MJL: If, as a matter of survival, one has to play at being homeless, it’s interesting that for this work they decided to not play that role. KW: Exactly. We could have had a repertoire of crutches, like in Threepenny Opera, but that didn’t happen. (Laughs) They did, however, bring their bags, and on occasion some of them would show, performatively demonstrate and explain the vital function of some of the things they carry with them in their bags. These are invisible things that people would not normally know about. You see inside of these bags, also, something that doesn’t fit the cliché, for example, beauty products and objects that are about taking care of oneself, like medication. This is typical for people who live on the street. As most of us do, they are very concerned about their appearances and staying clean, and more so, because it is very dangerous to have even a small infection or something which, in those conditions, can develop into a health problem. MJL: I can see how you would have emphasized theatricality and maybe the building itself, with its steps, but also its function suggested something. If you’re working in the context of modern or contemporary literature you might be trying to reduce narrative and character. Cinema, on the other hand, creates movement by showing 330 Homeless Projection things, like the objects that are in the bags. You could easily have projected close-ups of these objects to create a more filmic kind of representation. KW: Yes, in this projection the people have to say what they have in their bag. Sure, I like them to speak, because this projection is very much about sound, in contrast to a mostly visual project. The images on the building make no sense if you don’t hear what these people are saying or singing. Because of this we decided to set up the speakers on the spot that gives you the best vantage point from which to see the whole projection. In other words, the projection is a vehicle for the public to listen. Listening is related to seeing. You have to focus on their appearance in order to better hear what they are saying and you need to hear in order to focus on who is speaking and who appears during any given sequence of the projection. The gestures become a very important supplement to speech, especially on this architectural setting, with its stepped setbacks. You need the architecture and the site for the work to be fully understood. MJL: Walter Benn Michaels argues in his book, The Trouble with Diversity (2006), that the obsession with diversity in the United States is directly connected with the avoidance of issues concerning economic class equality. According to Michaels, the fact that we love diversity and hate class has delivered to the right a ‘neo-liberal left’ that fears to engage in radical class analysis. One of the points that Michaels makes is that in a world that is dedicated to diversity, poverty and even homelessness are no longer seen as conditions to be eradicated, but have become conditions that are to be conceived and managed as matters of diversity, sensitivity and recognition. One ‘recognizes’ the homeless as people with agency and who have made the choice to be homeless, rather than as people whose condition is structurally conditioned, typically by poverty, by the experience of domestic and social violence, by mental illness or addiction, or by broader socio-economic conditions. His point is that we should be working to eliminate homelessness and not create more homeless people. KW: Yes, I need to think about this, because this projection could be interpreted by conservative members of the public to be something that is endorsing some notion of diversity. They may take the elements of this projection and put them back together in their heads as proof that ‘all’ homeless people want to be homeless. So then this argument serves the political right insofar as homelessness is an identity that people created by and for themselves – that they are homeless by virtue of their free will. There is a danger of that, I agree. One good thing is that the projection challenges the clichés about homelessness, that this condition somehow eliminates diversity and reduces people to a particular kind of sameness, and instead respects their right to not conform to some kind of prison of collective identity. On the other hand, some of those people seem to be saying that they don’t want to have apartments, to be forced to live ‘normal’ lives in accord with the social norm of ‘decent’ living. The automatic philosophical interpretation of each person’s own life history and present living conditions, their singularity and uniqueness, are quite evident or implied through their speech and performance. This does not confirm ‘liberal’ politics but goes beyond that. It comes across I hope as a radical democratic perspective with anarchistic overtones. For example, some of the people in this project came from a women’s shelter and one of them commented that in the end being part of the projection was for her excellent psychotherapy. This means that there is a need and 331 Marc James Léger that meeting such a need cannot be done by simply coming up with what is normal and standard, but by actually listening to them and creating projects through which people can learn more about themselves and communicate with others and insert themselves into society the way that they wish. This allows them to defend their right to be the way they are or should become, because they might even have forgotten what they would like to be, because the conditions under which they live force them to develop meta-languages, superstructures and fantasies to help them move on. Various cultural projects could help them. It’s clear that the City of Montreal has neglected to provide homeless people here with psychological help, post-traumatic therapy, art therapy and other services. If some artists in collaboration with therapists and social workers were conscious and educated enough to accept to take responsibility to work with the homeless on projects I think it would be very helpful, especially by connecting with various publics or through teams of people from different backgrounds and in different situations. This would give people a chance to connect with others. The isolation they live is reinforced by the character of some of the existing social programmes. Even within those circles there are patterns of exclusion and alienation. One of the persons in the projection has spoken about it. In such a rich country as Canada this seems a pity. For example, something must be wrong if some of the people have no teeth. They have no dental care. You cannot perform for others without front teeth and you are also in trouble in terms of health, because you cannot eat properly. It affects your health also if you have bad teeth. There is no proper health insurance in Canada for dental care. And also, if you want to get a job, when you don’t have teeth you’re out. You need an address also. People often have telephones but not an address. There are mailboxes for homeless people but others, who want to exploit cheap labour, go there to find them. So not everyone wants one of those mailboxes. MJL: Yes, no one should have one of those mailboxes. Thank you Krzysztof for this interview. references Chaplin, Charles (1931), City Lights, Los Angeles: Charles Chaplin Productions. Foucault, Michel (2001), Fearless Speech, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, London: Blackwell. —— (2012), Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri (1968), Le droit à la ville, Paris: Anthropos. Michaels, Walter Benn (2006), The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, New York: Metropolitan Books. suggested cItatIon Léger, M. J. (2015), ‘Homeless Projection: Place des Arts: An Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2: 3, pp. 325–333, doi: 10.1386/jucs.2.3.325_1 332 Homeless Projection artIst bIo Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor of Art, Design and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has had many retrospectives and has exhibited at Documenta and the Paris, Sydney, Lyon, Venice, Whitney and Kyoto Biennales. His work has been the subject of numerous publications, including Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (1999), Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests (2009), City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial (2010), Krzysztof Wodiczko (2011) and Abolition of War (2011). contrIbutor detaILs Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He has published essays in critical cultural theory in such places as Afterimage, Art Journal, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Left Curve, Parachute, RACAR and Third Text. He is editor of Culture and Contestation in the New Century (2011), The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today (2014), and is author of Brave New Avant Garde (2012), The Neoliberal Undead (2013) and Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics (2015). E-mail: leger.mj@gmail.com Marc James Léger has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 333 intellect www.intellectbooks.com Punk & Post-Punk ISSN 2044-1983 | Online 2044-3706 3 issues per volume | Volume 2, 2013 Aims and Scope Punk & Post-Punk is a journal for academics, artists, journalists and the wider cultural industries. Placing punk and its progeny at the heart of interdisciplinary investigation, it is the first forum of its kind to explore this rich and influential topic in both historical and critical theoretical terms. Call for Papers In keeping with its cross-industry scope and appeal, Punk & Post-Punk invites contributions from key performative, journalistic and industry figures, as well as the more usual academic contingent. This publication fills a conspicuous void by providing a ‘home’ for a burgeoning and multifaceted community. 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