The flâneur... Melbourne... Project A

I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to identify the sites for Place and Space assignment, Project "A".

The project description is I Know What I Like: Select 2 spaces for analysis; one that you like and one that you don't. Formally document the features of these sites recording dimensions, light, usages, surfaces etc and develop a work that could be located in either of these spaces. This will be combined with a an examination of an artist work or a relevant critical theory.

I still haven't decided on either of my locations, especially as many of the sites I have actively disliked for years pro-active local councils have already fixed before I could get to them for my project.

For the moment I am considering the task within the framework of critical theory. Last week I read a great deal about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and the flâneur.



French poet Charles Charles Baudelaire developed a meaning of flâneur that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it".

Walter Benjamin took the concept of the flâneur as part of that of the urban observer and product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution. For the flâneur to exist, he requires the presence of the crowd and arcades with which to stroll, both of which are metropolitan phenomena.

"Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes."

Hence, when considering a site with which to examine through a relevant critical theory I am drawn to the concept of determining the conditions and behaviours of the contemporary flâneur in Melbourne.

My immediate thought is to examine Chapel Street, South Yarra and the "flâneurs" I used to observe on a Saturday nights. However I'm sure I can think of something more sophisticated, in every sense of the word, than that.




References:
Gilloch, G.(1997). Myth and Metropolis - Walter Benjamin and the City, Polity Press