Village Savant™

The need to wander the city on foot is as powerful a compulsion as the need to make art about what we find while we’re doing it. Charles Baudelaire was a prose poet who walked the streets of Paris. He wandered, wrote, and saw himself as a writer who responded to the urban environment in all its forms. As a writer, he had to be present in the banlieue of slums and society gatherings. Somehow, like the streets themselves, he negotiated both worlds and everywhere in between. The relationship was problematic between himself and the people he observed. He was too well placed to be a slum dweller and not a dandy enough to be a full member of society. Writing became Baudelaire’s social passport into worlds where he certainly did not belong but were too familiar to be entirely strange. He envisioned the writer as the “flaneur”, a French word meaning the incognito stroller; elegant, a bit louche, a jack of all social classes while belonging to none as he strolled.

The artists included in this exhibition have each fit the model of the word flaneur. They are travelers, cataloguers, and reporters. They are bad journalists, bad anthropologists. They routinely get too close to their subjects and place themselves in their stories. Their bases are at the same time obvious and nuanced. What these artists reveal of themselves is at times a deeply personal story and at times an icily removed commentary. These men and women are raconteurs who bring into Punch Gallery stories that are sometimes a mess, and yet, sometimes verging on making perfect sense.