As I’ve been working on this project, I’ve occasionally read things that made me stop and wonder how I’ve managed to do anything without having already read that text. One example of a text with that kind of power is Phil Smith’s book, Walking’s New Movement: Opportunities, Decelerations and Beautiful Obstacles in the Performances, Politics, Philosophies and Spaces of Contemporary Radical Walking. Another is this relatively short article by Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner. I don’t know how I would have written the conference paper that I must write in the next week without reading this essay. In fact, I don’t know how I could carry on with this project without reading this essay. If Smith’s book, as I wrote in my summary, should have been the first thing I read, this article should have been the second. And honestly, it leaves me thinking that what I know about walking art couldn’t fill a sweat-stained Tilley hat.
According Heddon and Turner, “earlier theories and interpretations of walking continue to exert influence on cultural understandings of aestheticized walking, informing and shaping current knowledge”; the reiteration of a particular genealogy—“or fraternity”—that includes such figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, André Breton, and Guy Debord, “generates an orthodoxy of walking, tending towards an implicitly masculinist ideology” (224). In that ideology, walking is framed and valued as “individualist, heroic, epic and transgressive,” and these qualities “are understood predominantly in relation to a historically masculinist set of norms” (224). “It is our proposition that a persistent iteration of these features marginalizes other types of walking practices and the insights they might prompt, a marginalization that this essay seeks to address,” Heddon and Turner write (224). Because women are conspicuously invisible in the canon of walking, they began their research project, “Walking Women”: “Having established, with relative ease, that many contemporary women artists use walking as an integral material to their art, in 2009 we walked with and talked to thirteen artists based in the UK, discussing in some detail their practices, motivations, and experiences, including their sense of walking as a woman” (225). They didn’t set out to identify a particular way of walking specific to women: “given that there is no singular ‘woman,’ there can be no such practice” (225). Nevertheless, they recognize that the body that walks can make a difference to the experience of walking (225). Moreover, they write, “setting the work we have encountered thus far beside persistent narratives of walking prompts a necessary and renewed attention to the relative and contextual—mobile—nature of concepts of freedom, heroism and scale, on the one hand, and to the relational politics that make up the spatial on the other” (225).
First, though, they set out to summarize “the predominant and influential narratives attached to walking,” which are framed by “two enduring historical discourses: the Romantics and Naturalists, tramping through rural locations; and the avant-gardists, drifting through the spectacular urban streets of capitalism” (225-26). Two related sets of imperatives recur in both discourses: “seek out adventure, danger and the new; and release oneself from the relations of everyday life” (226). Both discourses tend to presume a universal walker, but “explicitly and implicitly the walker is typically male” (226). That walker is also completely free of any kind of relationship with others. Rousseau could only engage in contemplation while walking, and he needed to erase anything that reminded him of being dependent (226); Thoreau saw walking as a form of detachment from family and friends, a solo excursion into “the fields and woods” (226). “This might be dismissed as belonging to nineteenth-century chauvinism,” they write, “yet contemporary artists acknowledge a debt to past walkers”—Wrights & Sites, for instance, cite Thoreau’s words approvingly, for example, even though they are a mixed-gender group that often walks with family and friends (226). “This construction of walking as an act of heroic resistance to norms reappears in the postmodern figure of the rhizomatic nomad, pitted against the State and stasis,” they suggest (226). It is also close to Nicholas Bourriaud’s notion of the “radicant” artist, whose art is characterized by “‘wandering practices’ and journey-structures, refusing stable identity or location” (226).
A parallel legacy can be seen in psychogeography: the Situationists shared with the Romantics concepts of “adventure,” “newness,” and “freedom” (227): “The artist, set apart from the crowd, aims to shock us out of our commonplace perceptions into a revaluation of the everyday, reality itself” (227). Given their awareness of subjective experience, one might expect the Situationists to be aware of embodied experiences of space, but their “renderings of space, though complex, seem to fix it, as if space exists separate to its occupations”—that there is a possibility of accessing some form of “pure space” (227). Other psychogeographers, or walkers associated with psychogeography or cited by its practitioners as influences, repeat these ideas. Iain Sinclair, for instance, echoes the need for detachment and “proposes the possibility of being able to read the city as a text . . . without much concern for the specificity of one’s own body and cultural position” (227). Michel de Certeau also suggests that the city is a language that can be spoken by the walker—an idea that is resonant with Sinclair’s claims (227). However, geographer Doreen Massey rejects this notion of space, understanding it instead as “a ‘sphere of relations’” and calling for “a ‘relational politics of the spatial’” that is concerned with the construction of spatial relationships” (228). “Following Massey,” Heddon and Turner write, “we might suggest that the detachment implicit in Romanticism, Naturalism and avant-garde practices (and after them, contemporary psychogeography) refuses to recognize or take any responsibility for its implication in the construction of asymmetrical spatial power relations” (228). Once again, I am reminded that I need to reread Massey’s For Space; somehow, reading it in the context of Yi-Fu Tuan’s ideas about space and place, I missed its importance. (Plus, it’s a difficult book that undoubtedly will require more than one attempt.)
Situationist International member (and spouse of Guy Debord) Michèle Bernstein’s fictionalized account of walking in Nice and attracting unwanted male attention suggests that she was “acutely aware of the constitution of space as a constant, ongoing activity in which bodies are active and implicated” (228). In other words, Bernstein “locates her gendered self within the landscape—her experience as a woman standing in stark contrast to the masculinist presumptions so often iterated within the historical and contemporary explications of walking art” (228). In the remainder of their article, Heddon and Turner introduce various ways in which walking by women “offers possibilities for—and suggests the necessity of—revising and widening the discourses attached to walking, challenging critical orthodoxies” (228). Indeed, the frame of reference of aesthetic walking “might be productively unsettled” by this research (228)—and I would argue that this claim is borne out by their analysis.
First, they discuss questions related to so-called “epic” or “heroic” walking—terms I resisted when I read them in Smith’s book, because I understood them as critical evaluations rather than neutral descriptions. For example, two women artists they interviewed, Simone Kenyon and Tamara Ashley, walked the Pennine Way in 2007 as a durational art project, attempting “to stay attuned to the way the changing landscape made their (trained, dancers’) bodies feel,” and to the fact that they were walking as a duo (229). They had intended “to walk the path as dancers, noting relationships between space and movement and each other,” but male walkers often saw them as lesbians (intended as an insult), and they were exposed to “the persistence of certain ideological assumptions about appropriate places for women to walk, alongside appropriate types of walking for women” (229). “For this reason, we would propose that women’s ‘heroic walking’—walking that takes place on long-durational and geographical scale—is performative, claiming equal right for women to traverse the ‘wild,’ the open spaces,” Heddon and Turner write. “However, the ‘heroic’ attributes might also resonate doubly here, since the perceived risks of the ‘wild’ are gendered; part of the assumed threat for women is generated by the still-dominant cultural perceptions of the implicit threat of men” (229). “Ashley and Kenyon’s work prompts us to ask the difficult question whether women who walk in the ‘wild’ are considered especially heroic,” they continue; such questions are difficult, “because an affirmative answer reiterates cultural presuppositions about gender,” that women are vulnerable and victimized (229).
Another example of a woman engaged in epic walking is Linda Cracknell, who in 2007 undertook a dozen walks to gather material for a writing project, including a 200-mile walk on a Scottish drover’s road and a seven-day walk on the Camino Mozarabe in Spain. Cracknell recalls a phrase she heard repeatedly during the project: “God, you must be so brave” (229). “Rather than suggesting a greater scale of heroism for the female walker, it may well be more useful politically to draw attention to the many women who do undertake walking on this scale and emerge unscathed,” Heddon and Turner comment. “This might generate reassurance that the wild is neither more nor less dangerous to women than it is to men, which in turn may serve to rewrite the inscriptions of space and gender, as well as presumed walking competencies” (229). At the same time, however, they want to go beyond “adding women to a landscape from which they have been absented,” to problematize the values of scale and expose “the mobility and relationality of scales” (230). “For example,” they continue,
though Ashley and Kenyon have walked the Pennine Way, they also point out that on the long durational journey, walking becomes underscored as a repetitive and familiar action—simply one foot after another. The next move is defined. As they state, the long-distance path provided them with a long-term purpose and focus, a choreographic or action-score that guided them and pulled them along each day. In this way, Ashley and Kenyon represent the epic and heroic as in-step and co-incidental with the habitual and the known. (230)
Similarly, Cracknell walked everyday paths in a Kenyan village and made a short walk behind her home: “Contrasting with the narratives of discovery that are attached to the new and unfamiliar,” she suggests that such walking is like revision, that “[i]t is through rewalking, like rewriting, that original stories emerge” (230). All of Cracknell’s walks generated valuable stories, regardless of “their scale of distance covered,” and wherever she walked, she attended to “the details of the micro-landscape,” which “makes the smallest landscape gigantic”: “Attending to detail in this way equalizes walking practices and the focus is on the nearby—not the distant horizon (an open space to be conquered). Wherever one is walking, one is right here, on this foot of land” (230). Cracknell’s experience resonates with my own thinking on walking and place—that one needs to repeatedly encounter a place before one can truly come to know it. And I can confirm that Ashley and Kenyon’s experience of an epic walk as propelled forward by the repeated action of putting down one foot after another—a repetition that sometimes makes the attention Cracknell pays to her surroundings impossible—is absolutely correct. Sometimes, in fact, my walks are experiences of small gestures and tiny distances, in which I tell myself “you can stop at the next haybale,” or “one more kilometre,” or even “just a few more steps.” Focusing on the epic quality of a long walk misses the smallness of the steps which constitute it.
Artist Elspeth Owen is another walker engaged in long-distance, long-duration projects. However, her walks are structurally unpredictable—in other words, she doesn’t know where she is going when she begins. For example, in Looselink (2005), she invited 10 people—all but the first strangers to her—to give her messages to be hand-delivered to another person, who would give her another message, and so on: “In this way, Owen criss-crossed Britain, walking from her home in Cambridgeshire to Newcastle, to South Wales, to Norfolk, and finishing some three months later in Cornwall. Her walking served to create a network of eleven people” (230). Turner and Heddon write,
Whilst Owen is undeniably engaging with the epic, she simultaneously challenges notions of the heroic, solitary walker by inserting a gesture of intimacy into her work, becoming a “link” between people. Her inordinately personal touch reduces the epic to the local scale—one human to one human: one sender, one messenger, on recipient. This simple gesture serves to remind us that, irrespective of distances between, we are connected to each other. (230-31)
The paradox of Looselink, however, is that it’s the long distances between the people, the effort required to cross them, that gives her work its impact, “making the gesture of delivery profoundly committed rather than banal. The small scale gesture (the detail) depends on, is entangled with, the large scale action (the monumental)” (231). Adding to the heroic quality of the project is the fact that at the time Owen was in her seventies (231). However, Owen resists any notions of heroism:
she is adamant that her walking is not in any way related to endurance or suffering. She willingly accepts the kindness of strangers when offered (spare rooms and hospitality) and admits to carrying a large golfing umbrella in her rucksack (useful for shelter, to scare cattle, and as a walking stick). There seems an everyday pragmatism to Owen’s practice that deflates overblown concepts of the heroic—the single walker pitched against the enormity of the open lands—rescaling it in the process. (231)
“Owen, they conclude, “is simply going for a walk.” (231).
Other artists locate their practice in their local vicinity, problematizing the notion of “local,” which is often “tainted with notions of the parochial” and “marked by the same cultural conceptions that enabled Thoreau to frame his ‘wilderness’ walks as more valuable than walks around a landscaped garden” (231). Notions of wild (or epic) and local are related to scale (and duration) (231). I was surprised to read that Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” devalues the local (231-32)—I really will have to dig into the writings of the Situationists, won’t I? “The limits of Debord’s own perspective are apparent within the work of many contemporary artists who value the local and habitual,” Heddon and Turner continue, “while other work makes evident the ways in which specific roles and bodies shape the geographies of our lives” (232). For example, Dan Belasco Rogers and Sophia New of plan b, a duo based in Berlin, have recorded every journey they’ve made using GPS since 2007, and the resulting project, You, Me and Everywhere We Go, a visual exhibition of those recordings, “offers unique data concerning not only their habitual, everyday walking practices . . . but the differences between their movements while collaborating as artists, partners and parents” (232). Another example is Wrights & Sites split-screen video presentation that accompanied their performance-lecture Simultaneous Drift: 4 walks, 4 routes, 4 screens. In the video, the three male members of the group are walking in Exeter, Bristol and London, “walks characterized by spaces of sterility and frustration, as sites in the process of redevelopment are frequently barred, blocked or monitored,” while Cathy Turner attempts a dérive inside her house with her baby daughter (232). Turner had imagined that as a celebration of the domestic, but realizes that the results are sad and ambivalent, generating a sense of entrapment (232-33). “In these examples,” Turner and Heddon continue, “plan b and Wrights & Sites deliberately set the local/domestic and wide-ranging/public side by side” (233).
Another example is furnished by walkwalkwalk, a group of three women (Clare Qualmann, Gail Burton and Serena Korda) who map their own daily routes to define a triangle, hosting night walks on those routes twice a year (233). According to Turner and Heddon, walkwalkwalk “recognize the value of their local, habitual and everyday practice, seeing it as filled with immanent potential” (233). Their vision of walking as a web, rather than a single trajectory, “suits a walking philosophy that values the familiar, local, temporal and socio-cultural, as well as the unknown, immediate, solitary, wild—and indeed, finds them entangled with one another” (233). In a similar way, Emma Bush’s Village Walk (2008), based on her village in Devon, “was notable for the way it opened up unexpected spaces and connections within this village environment” (233). Bush’s research process took months and involved repeatedly walking a route with elders from the village, and alone (233). The final route linked the walking to the elders’ autobiographical stories (233-34). Indeed, relational aesthetics seem to be characteristic of work that is focused on the local, and when a critic or artist values relational aesthetics (as Smith does), then “epic” walking will tend to be dismissed. For instance, Misha Myers’s project Way From Home (2002), which was created for refugees living in Plymouth,
reminds us of the always contextual nature of risk. Myers constructed a framework for walking, with the work actually being made by a collaboration between a single refugee and a single Plymouth resident. Refugees were invited to map a route from the place they considered home to a special place they often visited. They used these maps to then walk the city of Plymouth (their new “home”), accompanied by a city resident, transposing one set of landmarks onto another. (234)
The mismapping of space is a standard psychogeographical tactic, but that is not the purpose of this project: it is intended to bring refugees and residents together. However, Myers came to realize that this “seemingly simple formulation is not empty of risk, adventure or hazard to everybody”; women refugees were frequently unable or unwilling to participate in a walking partnership, preferring to participate in group walks among women of their own cultural group (234). According to Heddon and Turner, Myers’s and Bush’s work suggests that “rather than presuming a safety in the ‘local,’ we might usefully acknowledge and consider the value of risk attached to differently embodied experiences of place, to intimacy, to working in one’s own back yard, to finding oneself in someone else’s everyday” (234).
In fact, Heddon and Turner note that these examples, both the epic and the local, are about establishing relations, rather than escaping them (234). That realization “might lead us to conclude that women’s walking is predicated on relationships to a significantly greater degree than that of their male colleagues, and yet such an idea must be treated with caution, given the danger of essentializing and the complexity and range of contemporary practice” (235). After all, walking as “a convivial practice” (their lovely term to describe Myers’s project) can also be found in the work of Graeme Miller, PLATFORM (John Jordan and James Marriot), and Tim Brennan; it’s not necessarily “a gendered propensity” (235). They note,
While it may be easier to place men within histories and conventions of epic walking, discovery, and colonization and to place women within conventions of the companion, the domestic, the vulnerable and socially dependent traveller, both men and women are engaged in both sites and actions. And yet, if these convivial walks indicate a wider cultural shift towards relational or dialogical aesthetics, by no means exclusive to women, their preponderance draws attention to a need to consider what we mean by “relationship” and “dialogue,” rather than using these terms generically. (235)
“In contrast to Thoreau’s appeal to the ‘ideal walker,’” they continue,
in the work of these women artists we repeatedly encountered an embracing of “obligations” rather than their abandonment. This suggests, at the very least, the necessity of rethinking the relation of walking to relationships. Further, a willingness to acknowledge and exploit entanglement in community and coalition often locates the artist as mediator for communication between people and places, begging the question of whether this role is one reason these walkers are less visible? It is visible that in setting up convivial events, these artists are not the flâneurs, nor yet the Situationists, within, yet separate from, the ambulating crowd. They consider the crowd as their fellow walkers and companions. Some also recognized freedom in companionship—walking in a group, as walkwalkwalk does, opens up night time spaces that may otherwise be considered off-limits (certainly to many individual walkers). (235-36)
Many of the women walkers they interviewed are aware of the ways that “walking itself is framed, compromised and directed by what Rebecca Schneider refers to as ‘monumentality,’ the fixity of a patriarchal culture” (236). Walking, in that sense,
might be a way of taking issue with constraints—with cultural assumptions about who can walk where, in what way, and with what value—but such constraints are never entirely absent. However uncompromising the walker, she is aware of the ways in which her body is complicit in maintaining the monumental, whether through an internalized fear of transgressing boundaries, whether through domestic constraints that keep her “local,” whether through the coding that makes her own body attract unwelcome attention or whether through cultural norms that constrain or alienate her geography. (236)
I need to read Schneider’s essay, I think; luckily (and for a change, to be frank), the book in which it is found is actually in the library here.
Turner’s and Heddon’s interviewees acknowledge that anxiety infiltrates their practices (236). Indeed, “[d]espite the political optimism of these women, theirs tends towards a practice that does not offer wholesale alternatives or absolute freedoms (not even from representation and recuperation), since it observes the tensions within spatial practice and within subjectivity—our simultaneous resistance to and entanglement within macro structures” (236). So, Turner and Heddon propose that because problematizing binary scales (local/epic) and the values attached to them, or using walking as a “practice of relations, of social making,” recur within the practices they’ve researched, and because these themes “are not recurrent or even much in evidence in the existing critical evaluation of walking art” (236), new frames of reference are needed, ones “that allow for different engagements with walking art, and for different types of walks to be critically approached” (236). In fact, they argue that their research into the practices of women walking artists “draws attention to a set of possibilities that have not been sufficiently analysed or acknowledged, wherever they occur”:
the political potential of a walking that mobilizes social relationships, without aspiring to an idealized notion of the free man, or free-footed nomad, without the abstract freedom of the epic task, and without prioritizing or opposing distance and dislocation over locality and rootedness. Such walking troubles the values we continue to attach to singularity and to spatio-temporal scale, confirming that the former is illusory and the latter entirely relative. (236)
In other words, looking at the practices of women walkers could lead to a reconfiguration of the way aesthetic walking is theorized and understood.
There is so much to think about in this essay, and it is going to be at the centre of the paper I am about to write. I have a sense that I need to explain the ways that my walk last August was not a solitary experience, that I did engage with people during the walk, that relationships (however fleeting) were created. At least, that’s one of the things this essay leaves me thinking about immediately after having read it. Another reading will leave me thinking about other issues. That’s how this process works. In any case, I won’t be tossing this essay into the pile of things I’ve already read when I leave my studio tonight; no, I’ll be taking it home to reread tomorrow.
Works Cited
Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.
Smith, Phil. Walking’s New Movement: Opportunities, Decelerations and Beautiful Obstacles in the Performances, Politics, Philosophies and Spaces of Contemporary Radical Walking, Triarchy, 2015.