On Procession Prompts

Prompt 1.

This section of Stewart’s On Longing was a bit challenging for me to unpack. In reading this I started to think about ideas of the all American dream and its manifestation in the Macy’s Day Parade. I think that this parade specifically is largely linked to nostalgia and has become strangely convoluted in a union between holiday and consumerist culture. The earliest evidence of the idea of Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving suggests that the term dates back to 1961, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the streets of Philadelphia the day after Thanksgiving. More than twenty years later, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".

These readings also made me think of David Armstrong’s piece The Dark Parade. This series goes beyond evoking nostalgia, recreating the experience of the authors previous home. The pieces are exhibited in a gallery that sits at the back of a stone courtyard, and entering feels both like an intrusion and a welcome disruption—as if the objects are waiting for you to discover them. The series has been described as creepy, melancholic, and also humorous, in a similar campy expression as the floats in the Macy’s Day Parade. I enjoy Armstrong’s pieces sitting in display cases because they start to talk about ideas of display and a stage-like quality. I’ve always felt that the performers in parades are on display, almost becoming puppets.

 

Prompt 2.

I really enjoyed reading On Procession. There was a humor and lightness in its language that felt really relatable. One of the ideas that stuck out to me most was that of a parade being a disruption of the usual order of things, like a kink in typical patterns. The author had a strangely optimistic view of parades that are completely contrary to my innate feels on such events. The reading offers up that events are vital to fostering community energy and challenging our traditional uses of the grid, streets, and roads. These ideas link back to Timothy Speed Levitch’s critique of the grid plan. I especially enjoyed when the reading talks about the unexpected experience of performer and audience in the East Meets West parade. Stewart discusses similar ideas both the figurative and literal distance between audience, performer, or author and audience. These ideas arrive as early as page 7 in On Longing: “at some arbitrary point in the unarticulated – but obviously unconsciously sensed – spectrum of performer-audience relationships, folklorists decide that there is too great a distance between performer and his audience to call an enactment folklore…” She goes on to discuss the relationship between maker and user. This relationship comes back in later chapters regarding the gigantic, when Stewart writes about the physical and psychical distance makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question and object. (p.78) I think the discussion of this is quite relevant to our relationship to experiencing art (and architecture). This can be clearly seen in Ann Hamilton’s The Event of a Thread. The audiences engaging with the installation almost become performers and new, possibly unexpected components to the sculpture. Ann Hamilton has a similar way of reflecting back on this process like in the reading, when the author seems ecstatic to welcome any new possible outcomes.