Junebum Park, I Parking and III Crossing, both 2002
Single-channel video, colour, silent
I Parking, 4 min 58 sec; III Crossing, 1 min 29 sec
Courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
A city’s urban architecture and spatial design often dictate the primary mode of getting from A to B. In LA the done thing is driving, whilst in Amsterdam you get on your bike and in Tokyo the main means of transport is rail. In these two video works, Junebum Park hones in on two distinct forms of getting oneself to a new location: on foot or arriving by car.
Filmed from above, both works show the graphic patterns of urban planning in the form of the white lines of zebra crossings and parking lots, being used by city dwellers. Seen from this birds-eye view the humans become like bugs and Park plays with this scale further with the introduction of his hand, about ten times larger than the ant-like people, directing the action. As the viewer we see the scene from Park’s viewpoint, as the omni-present, all-seeing entity in charge. Like Diego Maradona’s infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 World Cup as a moment of claimed ‘divine intervention,' Park’s giant hand is there to give a last little push in the right direction.
There is more at stake here though. It is telling that hardly any of the parking cars manage to do so straight or in their assigned parking lines, sometimes even blatantly double parking and ignoring the allocation of space all together. Similarly, in III Crossing it is significant that Park’s hand spends more time holding the pedestrians back, despite the presence of traffic lights and zebra crossings, rather than pushing the cars along. However hard city planners might try to dictate human movement with these kinds of directives and rules, the inhabitants will, to a certain extent, just keep going where they want to.
The chapter called ‘Walking the City’ in Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) looks at this phenomenon. For de Certeau it is the pedestrians of a city that make the space they inhabit by the very act of walking through it. For him, walking is a type of language that gives meaning to place from the ground up, with the everyday users both reading and rewriting the city. To be travelling from a here to a there is a 'pedestrian enunciation,' which can affirm or transgress the ‘spoken’ trajectories, for example by taking a shortcut or making a detour.1What de Certeau brands as ‘voyeur-gods’ are the cartographers, urbanists and anyone that enters the skyscrapers of towering corporations to access viewing platforms. Like Park’s own top-down perspective, they are all trying to gain a 'celestial eye' over a city.2 Simply put, de Certeau thinks that those who ignore these schematised rules and change direction create 'liberated spaces that can be occupied,' taking back some power from a panoptic regulating of movement and reclaiming the streets through these minor acts of autonomy and defiance.3
1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (University of California Press, 1984) p.99
2 Ibid., pp.92-94
3 Ibid., p.103
Following this logic, the unruly jaywalker or the parallel parker who is just popping to the shops are both figures to be celebrated. Park brings into focus these very routines that shape daily activities and give a bustling city its character. By calling attention to the upscaled hand, he also puts a spotlight on to the impact of the ‘invisible hand’ of systems and regulations that shape any given society.