Stuart Horodner, then at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon and now at the Singleton Center for the Arts in Lexington, Kentucky, curated a 2002 exhibition on walking art, Walk Ways, which travelled to, among other places, the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Oakville Galleries, in Oakville. It’s possible that some people reading this blog post might have seen the show. I managed to find the catalogue through Abebooks; it includes an essay by Horodner, documentation of works included in the exhibition, and pages from Horodner’s notebooks on walking. It’s a relatively short book, compared to Rachel Adams’s Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017, a massive catalogue of an exhibition of walking art at the University of Buffalo in New York, which I’ll be writing about here at some point in the next couple of weeks. But because I’m interested in the various ways that walking art is brought into gallery spaces, I thought I would begin Horodner’s catalogue first, on this cloudy morning.
Horodner’s essay, “Walk This Way,” begins with an expression that was current on college campuses in the U.S. in the 1980s: “Walk with me, talk with me” (10). This expression was intended to convey “sympathy and trust,” Horodner recalls (10). He then invites his readers to imagine that they are walking with him as he tells us about Walk Ways, “this exhibition of works by nineteen contemporary artists who have incorporated walking into their diverse practices and productions” (10). These artists “walk in their studios, on concrete streets, on sandy beaches and snowy mountains,” he states. “Their strides are a purposeful or meandering activity that combines bodily and mental freedom to yield distinct artworks that deal with politics, geography, history, and the architecture of the body” (10).
Horodner notes that “[t]he history of walking is long and various,” written about by writers ranging from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit and discussed on web sites. “There are walks of historic importance, including Mahatma Gandhi’s 200-mile-long pilgrimage with his countrymen to the sea to make salt, or Martin Luther King’s numerous group marches on behalf of voting rights and racial justice, culminating in the march on Washington, D.C. in 1963,” he continues (11). Groups like the Sierra Club and the American Hiking Society bring together people who walk in the mountains, while in cities there are urban walks for fundraising and parades. “We walk down the aisle, walk to work, walk the dog, walk the plank, and as Lou Reed suggested, we occasionally ‘take a walk on the wild side’”; there are silly walks, too, like those made by John Cleese or Charlie Chaplin (11). Walk Ways, however, “takes its cue from Claes Oldenburg’s ‘I Am For an Art” manifesto of 1961, which promotes and art that ‘imitates the human’ and ‘embroils itself with the everyday crap’” (11). Walk Ways, Horodner suggests, takes Oldenburg’s call seriously by choreographing “a seemingly unremarkable activity, offering a series of How To’s that present walking as a subject or method or as a metaphor for human agency” (11). The artists involved include Francis Alÿs, Hamish Fulton, and Janet Cardiff, whose walks are “most often documented in combinations of photography, video/audio, and text”; Tom Marioni, Curtis Mitchell, and Rudolf Stingel, who “use walking as a means of producing gestures in what are primarily expanded drawing and painting practices that take place in the studio”; Eleanor Antin and François Morelli, who “perform walking-related tasks that feature sculptural acts of pilgrimage in public spaces”; Mowry Baden, whose work is kinesthetic; Jim Campbell, Martin Kersels, Douglas Ross, Janine Antoni, and Paul Ramirez-Jonas, who explore “the psychology of locomotion”; Nancy Spero, who uses walking to explore history; Sharon Harper, who uses it to explore rural landscape; and Matthew McCaslin and Richard Wentworth, who walk to explore urban space (11).
The exhibition could also have included Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of people walking, Alberto Giacometti’s bronze sculptures of figures striding through space; Bruce Nauman’s videotaped studio walks; and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece of 1969, in which he chose people at random for 23 days and followed them until they entered an office or private residence (11). Another work Horodner wanted to include, but which was unavailable, was David Hammon’s video Phat Free (1995-1996), “which follows the artist, a solitary black man making lonely music by repeatedly kicking an empty can down several darkened New York City streets” (13). Horodner mentions these possibilities, he writes, “as an indication of how deep the pool of possibilities is for an investigation of walking as a subject of art” (13). He also notes the existence of other exhibitions and books that cover similar territory (Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, of course; Walking and Thinking and Walking, a show in Denmark from 1996, the catalogue for which is apparently unavailable now; and another Les Figures de la Marche, held in Antibes, France, in 2001, which didn’t know about). “This may simply indicate a shared interest on the part of the organizers and writers, or it may reveal the more profound connection between contemporary art and the human body in motion,” Horodner concludes (13).
Next, Horodner turns to discussions or descriptions of individual works included in the exhibition. First are two text and photograph works by Hamish Fulton. Horodner states that Fulton decided, after a walk of more than 1,000 miles in 1973, that he would only make art resulting from similar walks in the future. He cites Fulton’s description of his work from a 1999 exhibition catalogue, which compares walking to the art, which cannot, Fulton argues, represent the experience of the walk (13). “Fulton’s efforts extend the British tradition of the country walk, magnified severalfold in endurance and transcendence,” and his text recalls the haiku of Basho, Horodner suggests (15). I know that Fulton’s long walks, and those of his friend Richard Long, are not currently fashionable—their difficulty does not lend them to the kind of walking that includes large groups of people—but to be honest, Fulton’s and Long’s work was the first walking art I ever encountered, and I am drawn to long walks as a way of attempting to bring myself into relationship with territory or Land. Something happens to me on such walks, and while it’s hard to articulate what that something is, I think it’s close to Craig Mod’s assertion that long walks create “a heightened sense of presence” (Mod); at least, that’s the closest description I’ve found, and I haven’t been able to come up with one on my own. (Doing so is one of my goals.)
Sharon Harper’s Walkabout photographs, Horodner writes, “depict dreamlike visions of women walking in rural areas” (15). The works consist of multiple overlapping prints, “positioned side by side to create a shifting panorama,” and use techniques like “blurred focus, overexposure, and multiple perspectives to evoke feelings of detachment, isolation, and introspective” (15). Harper’s “female protagonists appear to roam a landscape that is drenched in memory” (15). Horodner notes that the word “walkabout” refers to a cultural and spiritual practice of Australian Indigenous people, and suggests that “Harper’s figures are caught in the act of creating their own songline or following those laid down by others” (15); it’s possible, though, that the use of the term “walkabout” in this context could be considered cultural appropriation—if Harper is a Settler, that is—and I think the work would stand without that particular framing.
In 1985, François Morelli observed the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by carrying a hollow fibreglass sculpture shaped like a charred human torso on a kind of pilgrimage. During this work, which he called Transatlantic Walk, “[h]e often stopped to breathe air into the figure (which was equipped with plastic tubes) or to fill it with water from public fountains, lakes, and rivers. . . . gestures [which] served to provide symbolic sustenance, as if he were keeping his companion alive” (17). The exhibition included “performance artifacts”—slide photographs transferred to video and his journal of drawings—along with the sculpture itself, hung “at torso height, allowing viewers to imagine themselves carrying it” (17).
Douglas Ross’s pan-American project “involves him wearing a self-made robotic video camera that is guided by a compass” (17). The camera records the relationship of north to his body. “When Ross wanders the streets, he appears to others as a city cyborg, making use of his home-made prosthetic for mysterious reconnaissance work,” Horodner writes. “Like Morelli, his performing presence in the community can be baffling or unsettling, and each of them seems to enjoy presenting an image of ‘the artist’ in the process of being one” (17). The work exhibited in Walk Ways included Ross’s equipment and a selection of documentary videos, installed so that the viewer faced north.
Migration, a video by Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez-Jones, “takes the romantic notion of lovers on a beach and adds the troubling elements of domination and subservience” (20). The artists, who are married, “take turns following each other while documenting their footsteps-in-the-making with video cameras” (20). When Antoni follows Ramierz-Jonas, her feet fall within his footprints; when he follows her, however, his footprints obliterate hers. As installed in a gallery space, the work is a two-channel video “shown on a pair of up-ended monitors placed next to each other, seemingly uniting the two separate walks into one extended horizontal image,” transforming “what at first appears to be an unequal power dynamic into a complex progression of reciprocity and love” (20).
Audio artist Janet Cardiff was represented in the show by a video, Hillclimbing, made with her husband and frequent collaborator George Bures Miller, who holds the camera. In the video, the pair are “heard walking toward the top of a snow-covered hill” with their dog (21). “We hear the sounds of their physical effort: their labored breaths and the crunch of boots in the snow,” Horodner writes. “When Miller falls down, we hear Cardiff say, ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yeah,’ he answers, and the piece loops back to the beginning, so that, at least on the video, the summit is never reached” (21).
Nancy Spero’s work included in the exhibition was Vietnamese Woman, a print work made on a long piece of paper using a single polymer plate, with the image repeated over and over, in different colours and at different heights, achieving “a kind of stop-action walking sequence” (22). The work refers to “news images of people fleeing the massacre of civilians in the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai by American troops in 1968,” Horodner notes. “Spero insists on using anti-heroic means—paper, printing by hand, collage—to create large-scale friezes that are impossible to see completely at a single glance, and therefore must be ‘walked’” (22).
Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots “consists of fifty-one photo-postcards, each one showing fifty pairs of black rubber boots arranged in a different location across the United States . . . like scenes from a ‘road movie’” (25). The work took more than two years to make, and Antin travelled from California to New York posing the boots in various places. “100 Boots obliquely evokes the United States’ engagement in the Vietnam War, with Antin’s bodiless ‘army’ appearing to protest, parade, trespass, and commune with nature as it makes its way east,” Horodner writes. “Antin mailed the postcards to many artists, writers, critics, museums, galleries, and universities, enabling the recipients to follow the humorous pilgrimage story being told in installments. The project was a ground-breaking example of staged photography and Mail art, strategies that have been used by numerous artists since” (25).
At 6 feet, 7 inches, Martin Kersels is a big man. His Tripping Photos is a series of self-deprecating photos that depict him “flamboyantly falling face down onto the sidewalks of Los Angeles in a series of carefully orchestrated stop-action ‘trips’” (27). “These slapstick gestures seem to confirm the societal assumptions regarding a large person’s awkwardness,” Horodner writes, “while the staged precision of Kersels’s actions contradicts such generalizing” (27).
For Francis Alÿs, walking is “a metaphor for the creative act,” and “he has performed numerous passeos (walks) that he has documented in the form of postcards, each of which features an enigmatic photograph and a brief, carefully written text” (25). “Such actions allow Alÿs a mobile practice of interacting and observing the social fabric of different cities. His ability to entertain people while critiquing particular contexts was evident in his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale”: a work called The Ambassadors in which two peacocks (standing for Alÿs) were paraded around the festival grounds by two guardians, who handed out postcards. Walk Ways included several of Alÿs’s postcards.
Walk Ways also included Richard Wentworth’s poster project, To Walk, which included photographs of “a variety of sites in southeast England” taken during different psychogeographic dérives and which in local communities in the form of a broadsheet which encouraged people “to take a fresh look at both the rural and urban landscape in these locations by reproducing the distinct structures and semiotics that Wentworth found there” (29).
Sculptor Matthew McCaslin “makes installations that incorporate common household lighting components, hardware, and video sequences of daily events” (30). His work Check It Out, “an industrial handcart stacked with V.C.R.’s, working safety lights, a clock and T.V. monitors that show repeated images of urban commuters. . . . presents walking as the ritualized and gear-laded activity of people caught up in the hustle and bustle—wheeling carts, schlepping suitcases, and carrying briefcases containing our essential tools for the day” (30).
Jim Campbell’s Ambiguous Icon series consists of “modest-size L.E.D. displays that feature changing patters of blinking red lights, which he has programmed to create impressions of silhouetted figures walking, running, and falling” (31). According to Horodner, “[t]hese rather rudimentary sequences are ‘completed’ by the minds of the viewers, which fill in the ‘missing’ information between the black ground and the pulsing grid of red dots, producing the effect of movement” (31).
Tom Marioni’s Walking Drawing, Horodner suggests, literalizes the phrase “get your walking papers” (34). The artist taped “a long horizontal sheet of paper to a wall in his studio at a height that was level with the midsection of his body, attach[ed] coloured pencils to his waist, and then repeatedly walk[ed] close enough to the wall to create a series of overlapping lines” (34). “The drawing is pinned in place by two vertical wooden strips,” Horodner continues, “and is best seen and understood when the viewer re-creates the movements of the artist—a simple act that documents the up-and-down affair that walking really is” (34).
Rudolph Stingel’s work refers to Conceptual and Minimalist art. His eight square foot Untitled is made of thick sheets of styrofoam, which Stingel put on his studio floor and then walked on while wearing acetone-soaked boots, which melted the styrofoam in the shape of his footprints. “The resulting object recalls the clunky steps taken on the lunar surface in 1969 by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to set foot on the moon,” Horodner contends (34).
In Dirt Event #5, Curtis Mitchell clogged a patterned rug with a paste made of dirt and then paced back and forth on it “until he wore away a rough path in the new ground, revealing glimpses of the rug’s original design” (37). In Walk Ways, the carpet was paired with “a large sheet of glossy photo paper pinned to the wall, which turned black after being exposed to light” (37). The juxtaposition of the two objects “provides an architectural stage where the viewer can consider the ravaging effects of time together with his or her own dark reflection,” Horodner suggests (37).
Mowry Baden’s Wolf Cane is, Horodner writes, “a devious tool to be used in the landscape: a collapsible metal cane modified with the cast of a wolf’s paw attached at the bottom, designed to leave false prints on the ground” (37). In Walk Ways it was presented with a travel case and instructions. “Someone using it on a walk through fields or woods would create interpretive quandaries for others walking by after them,” Horodner notes: “Was a wolf pursuing a man, or vice versa? Or were they companions?” (37). I wonder how one could tell the difference between the paw of a wolf and the paw of a big dog, myself.
“The artists in Walk Ways explore the connections between mind and body, motion and site, process and residue,” Horodner concludes. “Their diverse practices serve to illuminate how a simply daily movement can inspire a complex meditation on the physical world and the self as a ‘mover and shaker’ within it” (39). As with other exhibitions of walking work, Walk Ways demonstrates the variety of ways that artists can respond to walking, either as a practice or as a theme. I particularly like Francis Alÿs’s postcards; what a great way to document walks and to invite others to participate, however vicariously, in the experience of walking. That, I think, is an idea worth stealing.
Works Cited
Horodner, Stuart, ed. Walk Ways, Independent Curators International, 2002.
Mod, Craig. “The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan.” Wired, 29 May 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/six-weeks-100s-miles-hours-glorious-boredom-japan/.