‘Walk On’ attempts to gently challenge the orthodox distinctions through which artists’ work created by walking has been understood. The selection of work here includes both well-established figures who have pursued their entire careers through walking and figures that might seem surprising inclusions. In the genesis of this exhibition, we have considered both the longer history of walking as a means of inducing thought and of storytelling and the more recent history of artists’ explicit adaption of walking as a mode of art production. The literature about both subjects has expanded considerably in recent years. The latter, in particular, has been the subject of a number of exhibitions in the last decade. These have explored some of the territory that ‘Walk On’ covers, but have taken partial views. The predecessors to this show range from Bruce Ferguson’s ‘Walking Thinking Walking’ at the Louisiana Museum in 1996 to Stuart Horodner’s ‘Walk Ways’ of 2002. The remit of ‘Walk Ways’ was an examination of the “agency of pedestrianism in the realm of civic creativity”, which we might paraphrase as urban games undertaken through walking. ‘Walk On’ includes artists who have made work in the city and country. More importantly, it challenges the binary thinking that defines those categories as separable. Accordingly, the show puts forward playful and contrary points of views. The exhibition proposes, instead, that there is an almost unlimited range of ways in which artists have used walking as the pretext for new forms of art production, or new forms of relationship between artist and viewer. The roles that artists ask us to adopt in response to their works include instigating new forms of political participation, imagining ourselves in a future after the end of civilization, and seeing ourselves as though we were in a panoptican overseeing the city. ‘Walk On’ asks us to think again about what the possible purposes of undertaking a walk as an artwork could yet be and what walking can achieve poetically and politically. Accordingly, we should begin by considering what the most commonly imagined uses have been, in order to measure how far some artists have travelled away from it in order to find their own roles. There is, perhaps, one particularly
Alistair Robinson
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well-worn story or established chain of associations between artists and thinkers and walking. This set of associations has been circulated from at least the eighteenth century onwards. As is well known, several Romantic thinkers and writers from Rousseau to Wordsworth valorised walking as an activity, describing it as offering almost limitless rewards. The business of walking, for subsequent Romantics, has often lain in the idea that it provides the opportunity to immerse oneself in open space, whilst simultaneously allowing access to one’s truest or best self. The narrative here is that walking allows one to become an infinitely receptive being, or else opens the channels to one’s deepest imaginative resources. In other words, the act of moving through space allows the walker to occupy a distinct or special mental space in which habits of mind can be cast off or refreshed or else be exposed to new stimuli that sharpen their perceptions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often thought of as the central culprit in this story, arguing that walking away from one’s fellow man and into the ‘natural world’ was to begin to open one’s senses, and to become truly alive: “Never did I think so much, exist so vividly and experience so much as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts.” 1 Even Rebecca Solnit, in her monumental and much-quoted Wanderlust: A History of Walking, repeats the image: “A solitary walker is in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveller rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group.” 2 She has also repeated the idea of walking as a fundamentally redemptive activity – where ‘landscape’ is both a refuge and a promise of freedom: “One of the functions of landscape is to correspond to, nurture, and provoke exploration of the landscape of the imagination. Space to walk is also space to think.” 3 To expand on this narrative, we might say that in wide open spaces, the walker can feel a kinship with the infinite number of species of flora and fauna that have been banished from the man-made
1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, 1782, quoted in Ian Thompson, The English Lakes: A History, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, p.83.
2
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Penguin, 2001, p.21.
3
Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008, p 48