56. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice

In Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, architect Francesco Careri constructs a genealogy of walking that is somewhat different from Phil Smith’s in Walking’s New Movements. It moves from the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists, as does Smith, but it ends up with Minimalism and Land Art, rather than performance. My sense that walking as an aesthetic practice is a very broad field is confirmed by the twin genealogies Smith and Careri create. 

In his 2017 forward, Christopher Flynn suggests that walking is “as much an architectural act as a pilgrimage” (8), and that is a good summary of Careri’s argument. The book also has two introductions (one from 2013 by Careri, the other from 2002, the date of the book’s original publication, by Gilles A. Tiberghien). In the 2013 introduction, Careri describes the colonial urban grid of South American cities, and his comments on such grids, and on walking in those cities, also apply to cities in North America, at least to a degree:

I have to look for the points in which the grid breaks up, lose my way along rivers, skirting around the new residential zones, plunging into the mazes of the favelas. Walking in South America means coming to terms with many fears: fear of the city, fear of public space, fear of breaking rules, fear of usurping space, fear of crossing non-existent barriers, fear of other inhabitants, nearly always perceived as potential enemies. To put it simply, walking is scary, so people don’t walk any any more; those who walk are homeless, drug addicts, outcasts. The anti-peripatetic and anti-urban phenomenon is clearer here than in Europe, where it still seems to be on the verge of taking form: never leave the house on foot, never expose your body without an enclosure, protect it in the home or in the car. (13)

There are no favelas in North America, not exactly, but there is a sense of fear attached to urban walking (to a lesser degree, no doubt, than in South America), and those who walk are considered as marginalized (unless, in this city, they are taking a stroll around the artificial lake in the park). There’s no question, though—particularly when it comes to rural walking—that the “anti-peripatetic” phenomenon is deeply rooted here: no one goes anywhere outside of the cities without protecting their bodies inside an automobile. It’s worth noting as well that Careri sees the urban grid as a colonial imposition, whereas Smith (in Rethinking Mythogeography in Northfield, Minnesota) suggests that such grids are utopian. Is there a crossover (from the perspective of the colonizer) between colonial imposition and utopian construction? If colonialism was intended as a utopian project (not for the colonized, obviously), does that help to explain why it is so hard for settlers, for colonizers, to address its ongoing legacy? 

Careri’s remarks on the politics of urban walking echo Jane Jacobs: 

It might sound banal, but the only way to have a safe city is to have people walking in the street. This factor alone allows people to watch and watch out for each other, without any need for fences and surveillance cameras. And the only way to have a living, democratic city is to be able to walk, without erasing conflicts and differences, to be able to walk in protest, to reassert our right to the city” (13)

Walking trains citizens; it is “capable of lowering the level of fear and of unmasking the media construct of insecurity” (13-14). So Careri walks with his students: “One motto that guides our walks is ‘lose time to gain space’” (14). He wants them to “get out of a functional-productive system in order to enter a non-functional, unproductive system” (14): 

You have to learn how to lose time, not always seeking the shortest route, letting yourself get detoured by events, heading towards more impenetrable paths where it is possible to ‘stumble,’ maybe even to get stuck, talking with the people you meet or knowing how to stop, forgetting that you were supposed to proceed; to know how to achieve unintentional walking, indeterminate walking. (14)

He calls the Situationist dérive a form of indeterminate walking, and suggests that it has the potential “for the transformation of the nomadic—or more precisely informal—city (14). “Drift,” he suggests, is a nautical metaphor: it connotes ways “to designate a direction, but with extensive openness to indeterminacy, and to listen to the projects of others” (15). That’s important, because determinate projects will fall apart at the first gusts of wind: “There are definitely greater hopes of achieving an indeterminate project” (15). 

At this point, Careri looks back at what he’s written so far, and sees it as connected to “relational” or “participatory” creative processes, which “cannot meet fulfillment without an exchange with the Other” (15). I’m hearing echoes of Smith or even Pujol here: in such relational creative processes, 

the operation usually happens in one of two ways: either you get the ‘other’ involves in your own project, to obtain consensus, or you cancel out your own creativity, leaving the completion of the work completely up to the other. Instead, I believe it is interesting to navigate between these two shores, aware of the fact that we have our own creative project (even our desire to participate is a project in its own right), but also knowing that we want to leave it open, indeterminate. The steering will therefore be done by the inner coherence between the things we come across and those we create, between things that happen and things we make happen, the ongoing discovery of a hidden order we can observe as it comes to life beneath our feet and the perspective they afford us, the possibility of constructing a meaning and a coherent, shared story-route. (15)

This is a reasonable take on relational aesthetics, worth remembering if (or when) I engage in that kind of project later on.

In the 2002 introduction, Tiberghien suggests that Careri offers “a rereading of the history of art in terms of the practice of walking” (20). The book’s main idea, he writes, is that “walking has always generated architecture and landscape, and that this practice, all but totally forgotten by architects themselves, has been reactivated by poets, philosophers and artists capable of seeing precisely what is not there, in order to make ‘something’ be there” (21). Walking serves practical needs, Tiberghien contends, but once they have been satisfied, it takes on a symbolic form that enabled humans “to dwell in the world. By modifying the sense of space crossed, walking becomes man’s first aesthetic act, penetrating the territories of chaos, constructing an order on which to develop the architecture of situated objects” (25). “Walking is an art from whose loins spring the menhir, sculpture, architecture, landscape,” he continues. “This simple action has given rise to the most important relationships man has established with the land, the territory” (26). Only in the 20th century has walking 

freed itself of the constraints of religion and literature to assume the status of a pure aesthetic act. Today it is possible to construct a history of walking as a form of urban intervention that inherently contains the symbolic meanings of the primal creative act: roaming as architecture of the landscape, where the term landscape indicates the action of symbolic as well as physical transformation of anthropic space. (26)

This is the perspective through which Careri looks at the shifts from Dada to Surrealism, from the Lettrist Internation to the Situationist International, and from Minimal Art to Land Art (26): 

By analyzing these episodes we simultaneously obtain a history of the roamed city that goes from the banal city of Dada to the entropic city of Robert Smithson, passing through the unconscious and oneiric city of the Surrealists and the playful and nomadic city of the Situationists. What the rovings of the artists discover is a liquid city, an amniotic fluid where the spaces of the elsewhere take spontaneous form, an urban archipelago in which to navigate by drifting. A city in which the spaces of staying are the islands in the great sea formed by the space of going. (26)

For the first part of the 20th century, walking was a form of anti-art: in a series of excursions “to the banal places of the city of Paris” in 1921, the Dadaists, for the first time, rejected art’s assigned places and set out to reclaim urban space; walking was one of the tools they used “to achieve that surpassing of art that was to become the red thread for any understanding of the subsequent avant-gardes” (27). Three years later, the Dadaists travelled to the open country, where they “discovered a dream-like, surreal aspect to walking and defined this experience as ‘deambulation,’ a sort of automatic writing in real space, capable of revealing the unconscious zones of space, the repressed memories of the city” (27). Then, in the 1950s, the Lettrist International, began to construct the theory of drifting (27). After the Lettrists had transformed into the Situationists, Guy Debord began making the “first images of a city based on the dérive,” as the Situationists experimented “with playful-creative behaviour and unitary environments” (27). 

In the second half of 20th century, walking seen as one of the forms used by artists to intervene in nature (27). In 1966, the journal Artforum published an account of Tony Smith’s journey along a highway under construction. After that, sculptors began exploring theme of the path, first as object, then as experience (27). According to Tiberghien, “Land Art re-examined, through walking, the archaic origins of landscape and the relationship between art and architecture, making sculpture reclaim the spaces and means of architecture” (27-28). In 1967, Richard Long’s created his famous A Line Made By Walking and Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (a work I had never heard of) became “the first such voyage through the empty spaces of the contemporary urban periphery,” a tour which led Smithson to conclude that “the relationship between art and nature had changed, nature itself had changed, the contemporary landscape autonomously produced its own space, in the ‘repressed’ parts of the city we could find the abandoned futures produced by entropy” (28). “Today’s city,” Tiberghien writes, “contains nomadic spaces (voids) and sedentary spaces (solids) that exist side by side in a delicate balance of reciprocal exchange. Today the nomadic city lives inside the stationary city, feeding on its scraps and offering, in exchange, its own presence as a new nature that can be crossed only by inhabiting it” (28). If you’re hearing echoes of Deleuze and Guattari in the types of space Careri identifies in the city, you’re probably right. 

According to Tiberghien, the first aim of this book is “to reveal the falseness of any anti-architectural image of nomadism, and thus of walking” (29). Paleolithic hunters and nomadic shepherds are “the origin of the menhir, the first object of the landscape from which architecture was developed. The landscape seen as an architecture of open space is an invention of the civilization of wandering. Only during the last ten thousand years of sedentary living have we passed from the architecture of open space to the architecture of filled space” (29). The second aim is “to understand the place of the path-journey in the history of architectural archetypes,” which means looking at the relationship between path and architecture, between roaming and the menhir, “in an age in which architecture did not exist as the physical construction of space, but as a symbolic construction—inside the path—of the territory” (29). In this context, “path” means three related things: “the act of crossing (the path as the action of walking), the line that crosses the space (the path as architectural object) and the tale of the space crossed (the path as narrative structure)”—he intends another meaning, path as aesthetic form available to architecture and landscape (30) In the 20th century, the rediscovery of the path happened first in literature (the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists were writers), then in sculpture (Carl Andre, Long, Smithson), while in architecture it led to radical anti-architecture in nomadism, without (yet) a positive development (30). Through the path different disciplines have produced their own “expansion of the field,” paraphrasing Rosalind Kraus, as a way to come to terms with their own limits (30). “Retracing the margins of their disciplines, many artists have attempted not to fall into the abyss of negation consciously opened by Dada . . . but to leap beyond it”: so Breton transformed Dadaist anti-art into Surrealism by expanding the field into psychology; the Situationists tried to transform anti-art into a unified discipline by expanding into politics; and Land Art transformed the sculptural object “into construction of the territory by expanding the field toward landscape and architecture” (30). “Today architecture,” Tiberghien continues,

could expand into the field of the path without encountering the pitfalls of anti-architecture. The transurbance between the edges of the discipline and the place of exchange between the nomadic and the settled city can represent a first step. In this space of encounter walking is useful for architecture as a cognitive and design tool, as a means of recognizing a geography in the chaos of peripheries, and a means through which to invent new ways to intervene in public metropolitan spaces, to investigate them and make them visible. (30-32)

“The aim is to indicate walking as an aesthetic tool capable of describing and modifying those metropolitan spaces that often have a nature still demanding comprehension,” he writes, “to be filled with meanings rather than designed and filled with things” (32). Walking is a tool which, “due to the simultaneous reading and writing of space intrinsic to it,” enables attending and interacting with “the mutability of those spaces, so as to intervene in their continuous becoming by acting in the field, in the here and now of their transformation, sharing from the inside in the mutations of these spaces that defy the conventional tools of contemporary design” (32). This is a transformation of the path “from anti-architecture into a resource,” a way of expanding architecture’s field of disciplinary action (32), and Careri’s book is intended to be a contribution in that direction (32). I’m not interested in architecture, of course, but I am interested in walking, so my approach to this book was to skim over the passages devoted to architecture (including the final chapter, about Stalker, Careri’s walking group, which investigates the design of urban spaces) and focus on the genealogy of walking Careri constructs.

After Tiberghien’s summary of the book’s argument, Careri begins unpacking his ideas. In the first chapter, Errare Humanum Est . . . (wandering is human), Careri’s thinking takes an anthropological (even mythical) turn: “The primordial separation of humanity into nomads and settlers results in two different ways of living in the world and therefore of thinking about space” (35). He reads the story of Cain and Abel (one of his sources of information about nomadism and settlement) in architectural terms, arguing that it demonstrates“how the relation nomadism and settlement establish with the construction of symbolic space springs from an original ambiguity” (35). That story is about a division of labour: Cain is sedentary, a farmer, while Abel is nomadic, a herder (35). “[I[n the wake of an argument”—there is no Biblical justification for this claim, but never mind—“Cain accused Abel of trespassing and—as we all know—killed him, condemning himself to a destiny of eternal wandering as punishment for his fratricidal sin” (36). According to Careri, as a pastoralist, Abel has more free time, which allows him to experiment, to construct a symbolic universe, to map space and attribute symbolic and aesthetic values to the territory, all of which lead to landscape architecture (36). “So from the very beginning artistic creation, as well as that rejection of work and therefore of the opus that was to develop with the Parisian Dadaists and Surrealists, a sort of recreational-contemplative sloth that lies at the basis of the anti-artistic flânerie that crosses the 20th century, was associated with walking,” he writes (36). The two brothers’ different ways of dwelling (pastoralist versus agriculturalist) “correspond to two conceptions of architecture itself: an architecture seen as physical construction of space and form, as opposed to an architecture seen as perception and symbolic construction of space” (38). That doesn’t mean that settlement led to architecture: “it is probable that it was nomadism, or more precisely ‘wandering,’ that gave rise to architecture, revealing the need for a symbolic construction of the landscape” (39):

The division of labor between Cain and Abel produced two distinct but not fully self-sufficient civilizations. The nomad, in fact, lives in contrast to but also in osmosis with the settler: farmers and shepherds need to continuously trade their products and require a hybrid, or more precisely neutral, space in which this trade is possible. (39)

The Sahel, on the southern the edge of the Sahara desert, functioned as “an unstable buffer zone between the settled city and the nomadic city, the full and the empty,” or as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, striated and smooth space (39):

In other words sedentary space is denser, more solid, and therefore full, while that of the nomad is less dense, more fluid, and therefore empty. The nomadic space is an infinite, uninhabited, often impervious void: a desert in which orientation is difficult, as in an immense sea where the only recognizable feature is the track left by walking, a mobile, evanescent sign. The nomadic city is the path itself, the most stable sign in the void, and the form of this city is the sinuous line drawn by the succession of points in motion. (39-41)

Those points in motion, the “space of going,” are the “very essence of nomadism” (41): “Just as the sedentary path structures and gives life to the city, in nomadism the path becomes the symbolic place of the life of the community” (41). According to Careri, “The nomadic city is not the trail of a past left as a tracing on the ground, it is the present that occupies, again and again, those segments of the territory on which the journey takes place, that part of the landscape walked, perceived, and experienced” (41). “It is from this vantage point,” he continues, “that the territory can be interpreted, memorized, and mapped in its becoming” (41). 

While settlers see nomadic spaces as empty, “for nomads these voids are full of invisible traces: every little dissimilarity is an event, a useful landmark for the construction of a mental map composed of points (particular places), lines (paths), and surfaces (homogenous territories) that are transformed over time” (41). “The ability to know how to see in the void of places and therefore to know how to name these places was learned in the millennia preceding the birth of nomadism,” in the earlier Paleolithic period (41). “The slow, complex operation of appropriation and mapping of the territory was the result of the incessant walking of the first humans,” Careri continues (44). He calls the kind of walking characteristic of hunters and gatherers in the Paleolithic period “erratic” and distinguishes between such roaming and nomadism: “While the nomadic journey is linked to cyclical movements of livestock during the transhumance, erratic movement is connected to the pursuit of prey of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era” (44). Both nomadism and settlement result from “the new productive utilization of the land that began with the climate change following the last glacial period” (44). They are simultaneous developments, Careri is arguing; settlement did not come out of nomadic transhumance.  Nomadism is not wandering: it “takes place in vast empty spaces, but spaces that are familiar, and a return trip is planned; wandering, on the other hand, happens in an empty space that has not yet been mapped, without any defined destination. In a certain sense the path of the nomad is a cultural evolution of wandering, a sort of ‘specialization’” (49). “[B]oth the routes of the sedentary world and the journeys of the nomad are derived from the erratic, Paleolithic path,” he continues. “The notion of path belongs simultaneously to both cultures, i.e. to the builders of ‘settled cities’ and to those of ‘errant cities’” (49). But the path comes out of the Paleolithic world: the path was “the first anthropic sign capable of imposing an artificial order on the territories of natural chaos” (49). Eventually there was a change from a quantitative to a qualitative space, “filling the surrounding void with a certain number of full places that served for orientation. In this way the multidirectional space of natural chaos began to be transformed into a space ordered, in keeping with the two main directions clearly visible in the void: the direction of the sun and that of the horizon” (49). At the end of the Paleolithic era, then, the landscape, deciphered by human activity, was “a space constructed by vectors of erratic pathways, by a series of geographical features connected to mythical events and assembled in sequence, and it was probably ordered in keeping with the fixed directions of the vertical and the horizontal: the sun and the horizon” (49-50). 

Walking, Careri writes, “though it is not the physical construction of a space, implies a transformation of the place and its meanings” (50). Prior to the Neolithic period and its menhirs, “the only symbolic architecture capable of modifying the environment was walking, an action that is simultaneously an act of perception and creativity, of reading and writing the territory” (50). The menhir, “[t]he first situated object in the human landscape,”

springs directly from the universe of roaming and nomadism. While the horizon is a stable, more or less straight line depending on the landscape itself, the sun has a less definite movement, following a trajectory that appears clearly vertical only in its two moments of vicinity to the horizon: sunrise and sunset. The desire to stablize the vertical dimension was probably one of the motivations behind the creation of the first artificial element in space: the menhir. (50)

Menhirs, simple objects with great density of meaning, were the first human, physical transformation of landscape: they are stones raised vertically, planted in the ground, and thereby “transformed into a new presence that stops time and space: it institutes a ‘time zero’ that extends into eternity, and a new system of relations with the elements of the surrounding landscape” (50). There are many different interpretations of the way menhirs were used, because this invention “could satisfy many different aims” (50-51). They might have had many different simultaneous functions, possibly linked to fertility cults, possibly places where heroes had died, sites where water was found, or boundaries (51). What interests Careri, though, is where they were placed—the possibility that they revealed the geometry and geography of the place, that “they were signals placed along the major routes of crossing” (51):

It is hard to imagine how the travelers of antiquity could have crossed entire continents without the help of maps, roads and signs. Yet an incredible traffic of travelers and merchants continuously crossed nearly impassable forests and uncharted territories, apparently without excessive difficult. It is very probably that the menhirs functioned as a system of territorial orientation, easily deciphered by those who understood its language: a sort of guide sculpted into the landscape, leader the traveler to his destination from one signal to another along the intercontinental routes. (51-52)

Some menhirs are megaliths, requiring large populations to erect, so they may have been situated in neutral zones between populations (52). For Careri, that fact suggests that the places in which the megalithic works were built were “either a sort of sanctuary utilized by the surrounding populations for festivities, or more probably stopping places along the main routes of transit, places with the function of today’s highway rest stops,” visited by many different people, perhaps communicating “the presence of singular facts and information regarding the surrounding territory, information useful for the continuation of the journey,” but also perhaps places of ritual celebrations (52-56). If they were intended to pass along information about the journey, then “[t]he entire voyage, which had been the place of events, stories, and myths around or along the menhirs, encountered a space for representation of itself: tales of travels and legends were celebrated and ritualized around the stones planted in the ground” (56). 

The important thing about menhirs, for Careri, is what came before them: 

Before the physical transformation of the face of the Earth that began with the menhirs, the territory had undergone a cultural transformation based on walking, an action that took place only on the surface of the planet, without penetrating it. The space of the path, therefore, precedes architectonic space; it is an immaterial space with symbolic-religious meanings. For thousands of years, when the physical construction of a symbolic place was still unthinkable, the crossing of space represented an aesthetic means through which it was possible to inhabit the world. (58)

Architecture, then, was not the invention of a sedentary, settled world, if the path was the first example of human place-making.

I’m not sure whether the anthropological evidence supports Careri’s argument. It’s rather Eurocentric, for one thing, despite the reference to the Sahel. In this part of the world, there are no menhirs—medicine wheels, yes, but no standing stones. What does that mean? There was also little pastoralism in North America, as far as I know, although agriculture and hunting and gathering existed side by side. What might that do for Careri’s claims? What about the temporary or semi-permanent structures hunting and gathering peoples built? Don’t they count as architecture? For that matter, what about the structures pastoralists must have erected for shelter? Besides, as Robert Moor points out in his book on paths and trails, many human paths are (or were) first made by animals, not people; people simply used paths that were already in existence. Since Careri’s argument is that paths were the first human interventions in a landscape, what might that point do to his argument? Nevertheless, the suggestion that architecture was nomadic is key to his argument, especially his conclusion (which, as I indicated at the outset, I only skimmed) about the types of urban space Stalker investigates.

Careri begins his second chapter, “Anti Walk,” with an account of the Dadaists’ first excursion, to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, on 14 April 1921. This was the first of what was to be a series of excursions to banal places in the city, “a conscious aesthetic operation backed up by press releases, proclamations, flyers and photographic documentation” (67). For Careri, it “remains the most important Dada intervention in the city,” “the first step in a long series of excursions, deambulations and ‘driftings’ that crossed the entire century as a form of anti-art” (67). The excursion also “marks the passage from the representation of motion to the construction of an aesthetic action to be effected in the reality of everyday life” (67). “With the Dada visits and the subsequent deambulations of the Surrealists the action of passing through space was utilized as an aesthetic form capable of taking the place of representation, and therefore of the art system in general,” he writes (68). In other words, “Dada effected the passage from the representation of the city of the future to the habitation of the city of the banal” (68). “Dada raised the tradition of flânerie to the level of an aesthetic operation” (74). In fact, that first excursion was an urban ready-made work, “the first symbolic operation that attributes aesthetic value to a space rather than an object. Dada progressed from introducing a banal object into the space of art to introducing art—the persons and bodies of the Dada artists—into a banal place in the city” (74). The excursion was neither decoration nor representation; it was not a material operation and left no physical traces except documentation (74-75). It merely consisted of an event, and actions performed during that event: reading from a dictionary, giving gifts to passers-by, attempts to get people to join them in the street (75). But for Careri, “[t]he work lies in having thought of the action to perform, rather than in the action itself” (75). That would suggest that this excursion was the first example of Conceptual art as well.

In May 1924, the Dadaists performed another intervention in real space, but this time “the plan was for an erratic journey in a vast natural territory”: this event, a deambulation in open country in the center of France, a country walk from Blois, a small town chosen randomly, to Romorantin, marks the passage from Dada to Surrealism (78). It was organized by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise, Roger Vitrac; afterwards Breton wrote the introduction to Poisson soluble, what would become the first Surrealist manifesto (78). According to Careri, “[t]he trip, undertaken without aim or destination, had been transformed into a form of automatic writing in real space, a literary/rural roaming imprinted directly on the map of a mental territory” (78). The choice or rural space was important for what would become the Surrealists:

Space appears as an active, pulsating subject, an autonomous producer of affections and relations. It is a living organism with its own character, a counterpart with shifting moods, with which it is possible to establish a relationship of mutual exchange. The path unwinds amidst snares and dangers, provoking a strong sense of apprehension in the person walking, in both senses of ‘feeling fear’ and ‘grasping’ or ‘learning.’ This empathic territory penetrates down to the deepest strata of the mind, evoking images of other worlds in which reality and nightmare live side by side, transporting the being into a state of unconsciousness where the ego is no longer definite. Deambulation is the achievement of a state of hypnosis by walking, a disorienting loss of control. It is a medium through which to enter into contact with the unconscious part of the territory. (78-79)

The rural deambulation only happened once, but there were walks through the outskirts of Paris: “one of the most assiduously practiced activities of the Surrealists for investigating that unconscious part of the city that eluded bourgeois transformation” (79). The Surrealists saw the city as amniotic fluid, “where everything grows and is spontaneously transformed, out of sight”—that is where “the endless walks, the encounters, the trouvailles (discoveries of objets trouvés), the unexpected events, and collective games happen” (80). 

Dadaism and Surrealism had different ways of thinking about the city, Careri notes. In Dadaism, the city becomes a place “to notice the banal and the ridiculous” and “unmask the farce of the bourgeois city” (80). The Surrealists, in contrast, move to a positive project, using psychoanalytic theory to look for what is hidden in the city’s unconscious, its non-visible reality (80): “The Surrealist research is a sort of psychological investigation of one’s relationship with urban reality, an operation already applied with success through automatic writing and hypnotic dreams, and which can also be directly applied in walking through the city” (80-81). According to Careri, “[t]he Surrealist city is an organism that produces and conceals territories to be explored, landscapes in which to get lost and to endlessly experience the sensation of everyday wonder” (81). The phrase “everyday wonder” made me wonder if there’s a connection between Surrealism and Smith’s mythogeography—although that is incorrect, or at least premature. Careri suggests that there is one more distinction to be made between the Dadaist exploration of the city and those of the Surrealists:

Dada had glimpsed the fact that the city could be an aesthetic space in which to operate through quotidian/symbolic actions, and had urged artists to abandon the usual forms of representation, pointing the way toward direct intervention in public space. Surrealism, perhaps without yet fully understanding its importance as an aesthetic form, utilized walking—the most natural and everyday act of man—as a means by which to investigate and unveil the unconscious zones of the city, those parts that elude planned control and constitute the unexpressed, untranslatable component in traditional representations. (81)

The Situationists would later accuse the Surrealists of failing to take the potential of the Dada project to its extreme consequences, Careri suggests: “The ‘artless,’ art without artwork or artist, the rejection of representation and personal talent, the pursuit of an anonymous, collective and revolutionary art, would be combined, along with the practice of walking, in the wandering of the Lettrist/Situationists” (81).

In the early 1950s, the Lettrist International began to see getting lost in the city as “an aesthetic-political means by which to undermine the postwar capitalist system,” and the term dérive was coined. Literally, dérive mean “drift,” “a recreational collective act that not only aims at defining the unconscious zones of the city, but which—with the help of the concept of ‘psychogeography’—attempts to investigate the psychic effects of the urban context on the individual” (86). In the dérive, “the contruction and implementation of new forms of behaviour in real life, the realization of an alternative way of inhabiting the city,” outside the rules of bourgeois society, aimed at going beyond Surrealist deambulations (86). According to the Lettrists/Situationists, the Surrealists didn’t understand “the potential of deambulation as a collective art form, as an aesthetic operation that, if performed in a group, had the power to annul the individual components of the artwork” (86). Moreover, they depended too much on a Freudian model of the city:

The miserable failure of the Surrealist deambulation was due, according to the Situationists, to the exaggerated importance assigned to the unconscious and to chance, categories that were still included in the Lettrists’ practice, but in a diluted form, closer to reality, within a constructed method of investigation whose field of action must be life, and therefore the real city. (86)

Lettrist drifting attempted to transform the subjective interpretation of the city (of the Surrealists) into an objective method of urban exploration (86): “The Lettrists rejected the idea of a separation between alienating, boring real life and a marvellous imaginary life: reality itself had to become marvellous” (87). That notion suggests that Smith’s mythogeography is closer to Lettrists rather than Surrealists—not a surprise, given the importance he gives to the Lettrists and the Situationists in his own genealogy. “It was no longer the time to celebrate the unconscious of the city,” Careri writes; “it was time to experiment with superior ways of living through the construction of situations in everyday reality: it was time to act, not to dream” (87).

Walking in a group was, for the Lettrists, 

a means of escaping from bourgeois life and rejecting the rules of the art system. The dérive was, in fact, an action that would have a hard time fitting into the art system, as it consisted in constructing the modes of a situation whose consumption left no traces. It was a fleeting action, an immediate instant to be experienced in the present moment without considering its representation and conservation in time. (87)

For that reason, the dérive fit with the Dadaist logic of anti-art (87). Although the term dérive first appears in an essay by Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain), it was Debord, in 1955, who sets out to define experimental methods for observing urban spaces, and 1956, in “Theory of the Dérive,”  he formulates a definition of the dérive and its relation to psychogeography (92). According to Careri, the dérive and psychogeography “replaced the unconscious dream city of the Surrealists with a playful, spontaneous city”: they 

replaced the randomness of Surrealist roaming with the construction of rules of the game. To play means deliberately breaking the rules and inventing your own, to free creative activity from socio-cultural restrictions, to design aesthetic and revolutionary actions that undermine or elude social control. The theory of the Situationists was based on an aversion for work and the premise fo an imminent transformation of the use of time in society,” through automation, work would be reduced, free time increased, “Therefore it was important to protect the use of this non-productive time form the powers that be. Otherwise it would be sucked into the system of capitalist consumption through the creation of induced needs. (97)

For the Situationists, the revolution would have to be based on desire: “to seek the latent desires of people in the everyday world, stimulating them, re-awakening them, helping them to take the place of the wants imposed by the dominant culture” (100). “The construction of situations was therefore the most direct way to realize new forms of behavior in the city, and to experience the moments of what life could be in a freer society within urban reality,” Careri writes (100). And the way to realize new forms of behaviour was through the dérive: “The Situationists saw the psychogeographical dérive as the means with which to strip the city naked, but also with which to construct a playful way of reclaiming its territory: the city is a toy to be utilized at one’s pleasure, a space for collective living, for the experience of alternative behaviors, a place in which to waste useful time so as to transform it into playful-constructive time” (100). The city needed to be experienced as a playful territory that could lead people toward authentic lives (100).

Careri begins his third chapter, “Land Walk,” with the story sculptor Tony Smith’s journey along the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Smith was the “father” of American Minimal Art, and this event said to be the origin of Land Art and a series of walks in deserts and suburbs in the late 1960s (111). “The story leads to many questions and many possible paths of investigation,” Careri writes. “The road is seen by Tony Smith in the two different possible ways that were to be analyzed by Minimal Art and Land Art: one is the road as sign and object, on which the crossing takes place; the other is the crossing itself as experience, as attitude that becomes form” (111-14). In both cases, art was moving out of the gallery and museum and reclaiming the experience of lived space and the larger scale of the landscape (114). It is a crucial moment, according to Careri:

from this moment on the practice of walking begins to be transformed into a true autonomous artform. What seemed like an aesthetic realization, an immediate flash of intuition, an almost indescribable ecstasy, is then utilized in countless ways by a great number of artists—most of them sculptors—who emerged at the end of the 1960s in a passage from Minimalism to that series of very heterogenous experiences categorized under the generic term of ‘Land Art.’ (114)

Careri compares the work of Carl Andre and Richard Long: Andre “tried to make objects that could occupy space without filling it, to create presences that were increasingly absent within real space”; for him, the ideal sculpture was a road (114). What distinguishes Long’s work from Andre’s is that Andre makes flat sculptures on can walk on, whereas Long’s art is made by walking (114-15):

Therefore, Smith’s perplexities seem, just a few years later, to have already found resolutions in two directions: for Andre the road experienced by Smith is not only art, it is the ideal sculpture; Long goes further, saying that art consists in the very act of walking, of living the experience. At this point is seems clear that the fundamental step has been taken. With Long the passage has been made from the object to its absence. The erratic path returns to its status as an aesthetic form in the field of visual arts. (115)

“The first attempts to use walking as an art form—or, more precisely, as a form of anti-art—were made as an expansion of the field of action of literature into the visual arts”—the field visit, deambulation, the dérive (115). In the 1960s, however, performance art and sculpture expanded to include walking as well (115), and this expansion—especially into sculpture—is important, according to Careri, because it leads back to the path and the menhir:

The return to walking in the field of sculpture is an integral part of a more general expansion of sculpture itself. The artists take steps that seem to trace back through all the stages that led from the erratic journey to the menhir, and the menhir to architecture. In their works we can once again see a logical thread that goes from minimal objects (the menhir), to the territorial works of Land Art (the landscape) and the wanderings of the Land artists (walking). A thread that connects walking to that field of activity that operates as transformation of the earth’s surface, a field of action shared by architecture and landscape design. To effect this passage it is again necessary to find an empty field of action, in which the signs of history and civilization are absent: the deserts and the terrain vague of the abandoned urban periphery. (115)

Later, artists would engage with history and geography, adding their walks as layers of investigation into space.

The next step in the evolution of walking, Careri writes, is the shift from Minimalism to Land Art:

Minimal sculpture, in order to re-appropriate architectonic space, had to go back to come to terms with the menhir, in order to then evolve in the direction of Land Art. And in this journey back to and from the menhir, the path suddenly reappears, seen this time as sculpture in an expanded field, and no longer as a literary form. (124)

Minimal artists, by attempting to annul everything that had been considered sculpture up to that point, found themselves as a sort of “ground zero” of their discipline:

In this process of subtraction they had found objects extraneous to nature, contrasting the natural landscape by means of the artificial signs of culture, erasing that sort of animated presence that had always lurked inside sculpture. The artists had undertaken a series of passages that led them back to the menhir: the elimination of the base or pedestal to return to a direct relationship with the sky and the ground (the menhir is directly planted in the ground); the return to the monolith and the mass (the three parts of the column in architecture corresponded, in sculpture, to the subdivisions of the totem); the elimination of color and natural materials in favor of artificial, industrial materials, artifacts (the stone of the menhir was, in the Stone Age, the most “artificial” material found in nature, and its vertical position was the least natural imaginable); compositions based on simple rhythmical, and serial repetition (points, lines, surfaces); elimination of any adjectival impulses in favor of pure, crystalline forms; removal of the figurative mimesis that still existed in zoomorphic, anthromorphic, and totemic modern sculptures; recovery fo a sort of human dimension and therefore of a more abstract, theatrical anthropomorphism due to that residual ‘animated presence’ that continues to persist in sculpture. (124)

The result of all of these operations was “a monomateric, situated, fixed, immobile, inert, inexpressive, almost dead object,” but nevertheless 

an object that imposes a certain distance and has a new relationship with its space; it is a character without internal life but, at the same time, it takes possession of the space, forcing the observer to participate, to share an experience that goes beyond the visible and that addresses, like architecture, the entire body, its presence in time and space. (124-25)

“While the Minimal object moves toward the menhir, still seen as an object with an internal presence,” Careri continues, “Land Art moves, instead, more directly toward architecture and landscape, i.e. toward the menhir as an inanimate object to be utilized to transform the territory” (125). Land Art was no longer interested in modeling objects in space; instead, it sought 

the physical transformation of the territory, the use of the means and techniques of architecture to construct a new nature and to create large artificial landscapes. Any sculptural anthropomorphism still surviving in Minimalist sculptures is abandoned in favor of that even more abstract mimesis that characterizes architecture and landscape. (125)

In other words, “[i]n Land Art we can see a conscious return to the Neolithic” (125). What interests Careri about Land Art is the way some of its practitioners “rediscovered walking as a primary act of symbolic transformation of the territory, but a crossing of it that doesn’t need to leave permanent traces, that acts only superficially on the world, but can achieve proportions even greater than those of the earthworks” (126).

One of those artists (although he rejects the label Land Art) is Richard Long, particularly his work A Line Made by Walking, which, “thanks to its radical clarity and formal simplicity, is considered a fundamental point of passage in contemporary art” (126-28). It is a line that avoids transforming into an object (128): instead,

A Line Made by Walking produces a sensation of infinity, it is a long segment that stops at the trees that enclose the visual field, but could continue around the entire planet. The image of the treaded grass contains the presence of absence: absence of action, absence of the body, absence of the object. But it is also unmistakably the result of the action of a body, and it is an object, something that is situated between sculpture, a performance, and an architecture of the landscape. (128)

For Long’s fellow walking artist Hamish Fulton, walking is a celebration “of the uncontaminated landscape, a sort of ritual pilgrimage through what remains of nature,” an engagement with ecological concerns and a form of protest (128). In the work of Long and Fulton, “nature corresponds to an inviolable Mother Earth on which one can walk, design figures, move stones, but without effecting any radical transformation” (129). 

However, their approaches are different. One of the main problems in the art of walking is the communication of the ambulatory experience in aesthetic form (129). The Dadaists and Surrealists did not map and avoided literary representation; the Situationists produced psychogeographic maps but avoided representing the real routes of their dérives (129-34). Fulton and Long, though, use maps as an expressive tool (134): “The two English artists in this field follow two paths that reflect their different ways of using the body. For Fulton the body is exclusively an instrument of perception, while for Long it is also a tool for drawing” (134). In Fulton’s work, “the representation of the places crossed is a map in the abstract sense. The representation of the path is resolved by means of images and graphic texts that bear witness to the experience of walking with the awareness of never being able to achieve it through representation” (134). His text works are “a sort of geographical poetry” (134). (What about Long’s text works?) For Long, on the other hand, “walking is an action that leaves its mark on the place,” “an act that draws a figure on the terrain and therefore can be reported in cartographic representation”; also, though, in an inverse sense, “the paper can function as a surface on which to draw figures to be subsequently walked” (134). Walking is thus both an action and a sign, “a form that can be superimposed on existing forms, both in reality and on paper” (134). As a result,

the world becomes an immense aesthetic territory, an enormous canvas on which to draw while walking. A surface that is not a white page, but an intricate design of historical and geographical sedimentation on which to simply add one more layer. Walking the figures superimposed on the map-territory, the body of the wayfarer registers the events of the journey, the sensations, obstacles, dangers, the variations of the terrain. The physical structure fo the territory is reflected on the body in motion. (134-37)

I think this is true of both Long’s work and Fulton’s, although one difference between them is that Fulton tends not to make any alteration to the surface of the earth while he walks, unlike Long, who makes lines and arranges stones. Perhaps, then, Fulton’s work is a better model for my practice than Long’s.

Robert Smithson’s emphasis is “on the quality of the landscape crossed,” Careri suggests. (144). For Smithson, earth art opened up new spaces for physical and conceptual experimentation (144). But first came walking, in the form of Smithson’s exploration of the outskirts of Passaic, New Jersey, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic:

For Smithson urban exploration is the pursuit of a medium, a means to glean aesthetic and philosophical categories with which to work form the territory. One of Smithson’s most extraordinary abilities lies in that constant mingling in his explorations of physical descriptions and aesthetic interpretations: the discourse crosses several planes simultaneously, loses its way on unfamiliar paths, delves into the material surrounding it.(146)

Smithson’s explorations took place in the city, unlike Long’s and Fulton’s: “The urban periphery is the metaphor for the periphery of the mind, the rejects of thought and culture” (152). The point, for Smithson, is not to condemn the destruction of the river or the industrial wastes that poison it; instead, 

there is a delicate balance between renunciation and accusation, between renunciation and contemplation. The judgement is exclusively aesthetic, not ethical, never ecstatic. There is no enjoyment, no satisfaction, no emotional involvement in walking through the nature of suburbia. The discourse starts with an acceptance of reality as it presents itself, and continues on a plane of general reflection in which Passaic becomes the emblem of the periphery of the occidental world, the place of scrap, of the production of a new landscape made of refuse and disruption. The monuments are not admonishments, but natural elements that are an integral part of this new landscape, presences that live immersed in an entropic territory: they create it, transform it, and destroy it, they are monuments self-generated by the landscape, wounds man has imposed on nature, and which nature has absorbed, transforming their meaning, accepting them in a new nature, a new aesthetic. (153)

In the territory Smithson crosses, “one perceives the transient character of matter, time and space, in which nature rediscovers a new ‘wilderness,’ a wild, hybrid, ambiguous state, anthropically altered and then escaping man’s control to be reabsorbed again by nature” (154). I didn’t know about Smithson’s walk in Passaic, and I intend to learn more about it; Careri’s description of the territory Smithson explores is surprisingly similar to the rural/industrial/natural landscapes of rural Saskatchewan.

So, Careri presents a genealogy of walking as an art practice that is similar to, yet different from, Smiths—no doubt because Careri is an architect, whereas Smith is a playwright and performer. Is it possible to bring those genealogies together? Is that necessary? Must one choose between them? Does Careri’s genealogy leave more room for the kind of walking Smith criticizes as epic or heroic and therefore undemocratic? These are some of the questions that Careri’s book leaves me thinking about. One thing is certain, though: I am going to need to dig into the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Lettrists/Situationists beyond the summary I’ve read in Merlin Coverley’s book on psychogeography. I’m also going to need to learn more about Fulton, and about Smithson’s walk in Passaic (and the art that came out of that walk). As is always the case, one book demands more, leads to more. That’s the point of this exercise: to open doors, to get me thinking, to identify the areas of inquiry of which I’ve been unaware.

Works Cited

Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, translated by Steven Piccolo, Culicidae Architectural Press, 2017.

Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials, 2010.

Moor, Robert. On Trails: An Exploration, Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Pujol, Ernesto. Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, Triarchy, 2018.

Schott , John, and Phil Smith, Rethinking Mythogeography in Northfield, Minnesota, Triarchy Press, 2018.

Smith, Phil. Walking’s New Movement: Opportunities, Decelerations and Beautiful Obstacles in the Performances, Politics, Philosophies and Spaces of Contemporary Radical Walking, Triarchy, 2015.