Art

James Walsh “Walks” is at the Area Gallery, University of Southern Maine, through March 1; Mon-Thurs 8am-10pm, Fri 8am-5pm, Sat 9am-5pm; 780-5008

On one side is an assortment of information you’d expect to find in a contemporary art gallery: brochures accompanying the show, pamphlets about upcoming talks related to it, and an introductory essay to Walsh’s work written by the gallery director Carolyn Eyler, printed up on a wall-mounted placard. On the opposite wall of the gallery entrance, a more subtle kind of welcome is offered by the display case for the USM bookstore: books by Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. We’re more than halfway through it, but unless you are among Maine’s most exceptionally aware, you may not have noticed that February is Black History Month. The feeling that the juxtaposition between these two displays is unplanned provides a fitting introduction to Walsh’s show, which is about staying open to the surprising and unsettling encounters that happen to us in our daily travels, about willing himself to notice things we’d usually pass right by.

In her essay, Eyler compares Walsh’s way of working — finding unplanned routes through urban spaces and documenting his experience by photographing and collecting specific kinds of debris — to a history of artists and writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Walter Benjamin who have committed themselves to documenting their urban wanderings. In his “Homerton Rubberband Walk” (2000), we get a sense of Walsh playing out this role of the cosmopolitan man meandering through London; making this practice ironic by focusing his low-impact urban interventions not on London’s crowds and its spectacles, but on discarded rubberbands left on its sidewalks and in its gutters.

“Rubberband Walk” has two versions: one is a rope made of the four dozen rubberbands he collected on his journey, new ones and weather-beaten ones, all tied together end to end and hung in a wave-like pattern underneath the big black letters announcing his exhibition. Its other version is a photographic timeline chronicling the stroll that yielded these treasures. He did this work almost exactly one year ago, on the kind of day that may only happen once in a lifetime: a sunny afternoon in London that happened to be the 29th day of February. It’s this sense of having to prepare yourself to be open to conditions that only exist once, for a flashing second, before they disappear and you miss them forever, that is at the heart of these works — and that links Walsh to the tradition of the “flâneur,” the 19th-century urban male wanderer.

But in works like “Persembepazar Wire Walk” — a gnarled and knotted horizon-line made of wires tied together and casting their thorny shadows against the gallery wall — there is evidence of Walsh’s connection to a different and more politicized tradition in Western cultural history, one made by a group of European artists and intellectuals who from the late ’50s to the early ’70s worked together as the “Situationist International.” Their theories, slogans, and proposals for the creation of an alternative to media-saturated capitalist culture were to have an enormous impact on a whole generation, and especially on the uprisings of students and workers in Paris in May 1968 which almost toppled de Gaulle’s government. One of their most important ideas was something they called “derive,” drifting on foot through the urban environment, abandoning familiar routes and letting yourself get lost, navigating not with map or compass but by your nose and your mood.

It’s hard to imagine a more faithful performance of this than Walsh’s “Persembepazar String Walk.” Made during a visit to Turkey, it records a Sunday early afternoon walk through the aftermath of Saturday’s bazaar. Like his rubber-band works, “String Walk” has two versions. One consists of photos of the walkabout, and the other of what was found during its course: lengths of string, stepped on, ripped and torn, sitting in dirty damp spots in the sun-baked asphalt that once were puddles. Walsh has fastened them together into a makeshift map of his experience, a long, spiraling path of discarded string, winding a labyrinthine perimeter around his three other works displayed on the gallery’s back wall.

In Situationist spirit, Walsh gives a slogan for his own work: “Solvitur ambulando” (“Solve it by walking”). Solve what by walking? This is the question he asks himself, too — and what “it” is only gets revealed during the walk itself, hitting him in a flash that makes him realize “it” was right there in front of him all along.

It’s kind of like the realization that calling February “Black History Month” allows people to forget black history the rest of the year. Just as being the flâneur was a privilege reserved for white Parisian men, Walsh’s work underscores the realization that the freedom to wander is something that even today, right here, not everyone has.

String theory

James Walsh’s “Walks” at USM