Before I start reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I thought I would tackle one of the articles from my giant stack of things I thought I should read. This time it’s Simon Pope’s “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,” published in C Magazine seven years ago. Pope begins by suggesting that “[t]he recent history of walking as contemporary art owes much to a previous generation’s prepossession of theories of ‘space’ (in expanded sculptural practices) and ‘place’ (for avant-gardist, resistant tendencies)” (Pope). However, he wants to identify “a different historical lineage that brings us closer to current preoccupations with participation, dialogue and encounter” (Pope)—in other words, a lineage that situates walking within social or relational aesthetics.
However, Pope then turns in a surprising direction: to Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and their walks and bicycle trips, which they considered to be sculptures:
Whether walking in precisely predetermined circles on rough upland terrain, or walking for a set number of days and nights, or walking without talking, these artists adhered to the artistic preoccupations and conceptual determinants of the day—working within spatial, temporal and behavioural constraints to produce work in a sculptural tradition, albeit on a hugely expanded scale and presented starkly, in a informational or bureaucratic form. (Pope)
But walking was part of “the radical pedagogy” of St. Martin’s College of Art in London; the best known walking workshop organized by faculty there “saw a group of students bound together with a cord” and “instructed to negotiate their way back to the art school through the streets of Soho” (Pope). For Pope, “the work made by Fulton and Long individually does not reflect the nascent participatory or collaborative approaches that are inferred in their student work,” such as Long’s 1968 performance in Amalfi, Italy, in which he shook the hands of passersby (Pope). Pope argues that this work—which Long has dismissed as mere student performance—“suggests that there are other social modalities—even in the work of those artists associated most strongly with the spatial and sculptural concerns of walking—which could define a lineage of ‘walking work,’ which would include theoretical and practical concerns closer to our current preoccupations: participation, conversation, and dialogue, for instance” (Pope).
For instance, Pope discusses André Cadere’s walks between galleries supporting Conceptual and Minimalist art and artists, which he suggests “were anything but a disinterested meander” but “a means to precisely explore the political dimensions of the artist’s world” (Pope). Like Long’s handshaking performance, Cadere’s walking prefigures “the contemporary artist in participatory mode” (Pope). The social, Pope suggests, “is in the making, produced with every footstep and with every handshake,” rather than something that exists a priori as a reality, as “an extant, smooth ‘social space’” (Pope). “Walking is in now way free from either the overt disciplining or naturalized cultural mores that influence artists’ and others’ lives; it is in no way a technique that will guarantee access to—and equal exchange within—the public sphere,” he continues. “The messiness of the world and the constant need to build and rebuild it in relation to others, to negotiate it and parlay it into being, is at the heart of ‘walking work’ in this mode” (Pope). This messiness is the “‘anthropological’ space that Michel de Certeau discusses as something distinct from “the abstract, the totalizing and the ‘geometrical’” in his essay on walking, according to Pope; de Certeau’s account suggests a certain “crush and clamour of pedestrian life,” “an enforced proximity out of which springs familiarity,” although perhaps not empathy (Pope). Walking does not necessarily allow us access into the lives of others, although it suggests the possibility of sharing, of walking with (Pope). “It is the physical attitude of bodies and their spatial arrangement that suggests something of their relational attitude,” Pope explains. “Walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow—of conversation, of movement” (Pope). It also “becomes symbolic of an ideal type of relation, where moving together, shoulder-to-shoulder, conveys the potential for mutuality, parity or equality” (Pope).
Yet not all examples of walking art involve walking side-by-side with another: take Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), or Marina Abramović and Ulay’s walk along the Great Wall of China. The first example “alludes to a malevolent, sinister—or at least indifferent—attitude to others,” while the second suggests walking as a test of artistic and personal commitment (Pope). “Perhaps we could imagine a world of different relationships, beyond aloof, impermeable monads, marching in-step, colliding, coinciding or skirting around each other?” he asks. “Could we imagine a ‘walking work’ where artists and/or participants are less intact, inscrutable or unscathed following their encounters with each other?” (Pope). That kind of work “would require more of the artist than simply walking with others, suggesting an acknowledgment of vulnerability and an openness to the influence of others that runs contrary to art’s recent history” (Pope). I wonder if the collaborative walking of psychogeography might suggest that kind of vulnerability and openness to the influence of others, although Pope might respond that psychogeography isn’t an art practice like the examples he has provided.
In his conclusion, Pope cites Tom Finkelpearl’s praise (in a book I haven’t read, although I believe I have a copy) of Paulo Freire’s emancipatory approach to pedagogy, an approach which “levelled the hierarchies otherwise taken for granted: student and teacher journeyed together, learned together” (Pope). By analogy, there would be no division between artist and audience, either; instead, there would be “an expectant and eager fellow-traveller” participating in a dialogue that allows them to see the world as in a process of transformation (Pope). “Exploring this potential for participants to be changed in themselves, as well as in the relations between them could align the work of walking artists with a spectrum of concerns that have broader currency, bringing them into conversations with other artists to explore the concepts of encounter, negotiation, participation and dialogue, which their own history of practice exemplifies so readily,” he continues, citing Paul Carter’s discussion of agoraphobes and their “hyper-sensitivity to the potential for innumerable new encounters” within open physical and social spaces “and the anticipation of relational openness that induces this panic”—a panic that Carter thinks is due to a fear of transformational events (Pope). “We can wonder at the fate of walking art had Richard Long, striding into the brilliantly sun-lit quayside southeast of Naples, continued with such bold, public encounters—a stranger on the road; a fellow traveller,” Pope concludes. “It is perhaps the very openness to the possibility of being changed by encounters with others—anticipated by the agoraphobe—that we need to grasp and which might take us farther along the path not taken” (Pope).
This is a short, dense essay, and while I’m not sure there’s any point criticizing Long for not engaging in social aesthetics, I think that there are lots of examples of walking art that involve the possibility of being changed by encounters with others. I mean, isn’t the recent history of walking art filled with that kind of work? And what would happen if one expanded the definition of “others” to include more-than-human others? What would happen then? Something surprising, I would expect. We could ask David Abram about that idea. I’m sure he would have something to say about it.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, second edition, Vintage, 2017.
Pope, Simon. “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking.” C Magazine, issue 121, 2014. https://cmagazine.com/issues/121/walking-transformed-the-dialogics-of-art-and-walking.