New York Drifters

Abstract

This article examines the legacy of the 'drift' in the work of two artists based in New York in the 1980s: Tehching Hsieh and David Wojnarowicz. Although distinctive in their methods and practices, both Hsieh and Wojnarowicz interrogate vagrancy as an extreme of urban walking, the unspoken endpoint of drifting. Wojnarowicz, who lived on the streets as an adolescent, reworks his experience of aimlessness into his fragmented, autobiographical prose work and his photographic project 'Arthur Rimbaud in New York'. Hsieh, a performance artist, embarked upon a durational work for which he vowed not to enter an interior of any kind for one year, and was thus forced to live on the streets of New York during this time. This article argues that these works re-assert the experience of the homeless, which is often elided or glossed over in accounts of urban walking and the traditions of thought that stem from Walter Benjamin's work on the flâneur and Guy Debord's theory of the dérive. Hsieh and Wojnarowicz also cast light upon the theatricality of the street, where social deviance or alterity is inferred according to outward appearances, and upon the mythologised figure of the 'drifter'. The article concludes by addressing tensions surrounding the ways that evanescent performance works like Hsieh's come to be immortalised, as well as the domesticating of once provocative works in gallery spaces caught up in networks of gentrification and/or erasure. It suggests that 'haunting' offers a way to conceive of the relationship between walking and vagrancy and the drift and its ghosts, obscured from view.