Column

Writer

Walking

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Performance

Participation

Collaboration

This article discusses approaches and examples of group writing, and writing together as a special case of working together that can allow particpants to explore the paradigm of singularity within community. It discusses How to Work: A Performance Encyclopaedia held in Toronto, a collaborative performance-making project for which artists recorded what was most central to their performance practice over a month of office hours.

On Writing: Group Writing

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Libraries

This section features a photograph and a short description of the “Walking Library,” an initiative by a London-based woman who carried books for lending on a shelf tied to her back.

Primer: The Walking Library

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Exhibitions

Location

This section features an inventory of notable books and events, including: Karen O’Rouke’s book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (2013); David Evans’ book The Art of Walking: A Field Guide (2013); Phil Smith’s book Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways (2013); the 15th annual Walk 21 International Conference on Walking and Livable Communities in Sydney, Australia; the exhibition The Walking Encyclopaedia held at AirSpace in Staffordshire; the exhibition Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff – 40 Years of Art Walking; Marlene Creates’ site-specific work A Virtual Walk of the Boreal Poetry Garden (2010); and Tom Stone’s project Stand up, dear city!, which organized bi-monthly group walks through Bristol, UK.

Inventory: Walking

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Food

Economy

Dylan Gordon writes about his experience with mushroom pickers, and their relation to foraging and resource economies.

Artefact: Mushroom Magic, Mushroom Gold

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Editorial

In this issue we look at the work of artists who use walking as their medium. Recently there have been numerous exhibitions, publications and research projects that deal with walking as an aesthetic practice. This focus is nothing new: walking has been a staple of art practices since the 1960s — in sculpture, conceptual art and, more recently, social practice. In fact, throughout history, countless writers, philosophers and artists have used walking to explore and describe a relationship between movement and thought. Writers ranging from William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Charles Baudelaire to Robert Walser; philosophers including Jean–Jacques Rousseau and Walter Benjamin; Dadaists and members of the Situationist International; and contemporary artists including Stanley Brouwn, Trisha Brown, Janet Cardiff, Lygia Clark, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and George Macuinas — among innumerable others — have all employed walking as a shaping force in their work. And, to look further into the past, walking was an integral part of the teaching of philosophy in ancient Greek society. 

But why look at walking _now_? Arguably walking practices are emphasized when there are significant transitions in how the body senses and moves through the spaces it occupies. During the 18th century, as the middle and upper classes began to travel increasingly by horseback and coach (and later by trains, cars and by air), writers such as Wordsworth saw new forms of travel as immobilizing the body and separating us from one another, reflecting the Romantics’ rejection of scientific rationalism and their emphasis on having a direct connection with nature. For Wordsworth, and for others of his time, walking came to be seen as representative of bodily and intellectual freedom, and expressive of a politics where the politically disillusioned could share common ground with the economically disenfranchised.[^1] Two centuries later, in the early decades of the 21st century, sensation and movement have become increasingly directed by new kinds of infrastructure both real and virtual. Transportation networks and technologies circumscribe physical movement in increasingly complex ways, and web–based technologies such as email and social networking programs now govern our movement through virtual space. By emphasizing bodily experience, and sometimes using these very technologies, walking practices evoke a similar critique of how the relationship between the body and space is configured in contemporary society. 

Physical spaces are also being transformed through the construction of communication and transportation infrastructure; for instance, the extraction of resources needed to maintain these systems results in the destruction of ecosystems and the dissolution of memory. Specific places become destinations for leisure or tourism where walking is the predetermined activity. In contrast to the 18th and 19th century, 1st century walking is increasingly an activity of the well–to–do, who are more likely to have both leisure time and access to walkable places. The walkability score of a neighbourhood, which can be checked online by entering one’s postal code, also affects property values. Amidst these changes, it is urgent that we consider how we occupy the spaces around us, and how movement structures and shapes our relationships to others. 

The artists in this issue offer an embodied critique of these new spatial conditions. Many of them employ walking as “walking with,” such as those featured artists who evoke Canada’s past and ongoing treatment of First Nations cultures, for whom walking is both an evocation of memory and a political action, engaging the complex historical and cultural conditions that shape our experience of the land itself. Some artists in this issue use walking as a way to open up their non–ocular senses, finding ways of knowing and communicating in the absence of the visual. And others employ walking as a form of play that aims to discover new ways of engaging with public space. 

As the contributors to this issue reveal, walking is a way of re–inhabiting the spaces we occupy, and finding new ways of relating to those with whom we share it. As we move through space, we let space move through us, feeling the land and its memories in our muscles and bones. And, most importantly, these are shared spaces, where we walk with others, where audience members are also collaborators, and where, together, we create our own landscapes.

[^1]: Neil Lewis, _The Climbing Body, Nature and the Experience of Modernity,_ Body & Society Vol. 6, issue 3–4, p. 64\. 

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

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Infrastructure

Body

Technology

The editor discusses the issue’s theme around projects that deal with walking as an aesthetic practice. He discusses the contemporary relevance of walking practices, which, by emphasizing bodily experience, evoke a critique of how the relationship between the body and space is configured in contemporary society. He discusses the various aesthetic approaches to walking, including walking as a way to open up non-ocular senses and as a form of play.

Editorial: Walking

Feature

Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines as well as maintains an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and walking. Her art practice takes up themes of food and sustenance through performance, video and textual strategies. In the intersections of gender, art, science and technology, she investigates the emergence of new cultural forms and expression. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

> I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.   
> —Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

> All enjoyment, all taking in and assimilation, is eating, or rather: eating is nothing other than assimilation.

—Novalis 

How does motion affect consciousness? What are the ways in which motility — slowness or speed — alter one’s experi­ence of space and time? A most personal form of transportation, walking induces mind travel and flows of the imagina­tion. In _Confessions_, Jean ­Jacques Rous­seau suggests that there is something about walking that stimulates and en­livens thoughts. He adds that, for him, meditation could only happen when walking; when he would stop, think­ing would cease, which conjectures that the movement of his mind depended on the movement of his legs. Rousseau has a role in a long and richly variegat­ed history connecting walking with speculative thought in literature and philosophy where the process engen­ders conscious and unconscious states of becoming, opening towards a fluid sense of embodiment where surround­ings are taken in and assimilated. This edifying passage is durational, occur­ring in real time, which is of course unique to each instance, to each happen­ing, and indeed, to each walk. 

Numerous terms capture an experi­ence that is simultaneously corporeal and cerebral, including perambulation, peregrination and wayfaring.[^1] A per­sonal favourite is “peripatetic,” which means “one who walks from place to place.” This word originates with Ari­stotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Ath­ens. The Peripatetic school was found­ed around 335 BC, the name taken from the Lyceum’s covered walkways or paths known as _peripatoi_.[^2] One might even con­jecture that walking and speculating are core elements of metaphysics, and of reasoning in general. As Rebecca Sol­nit tells us, “…the association between walking and philosophizing became so widespread that central Europe has places named after it: the celebrated Philosophenweg in Heidelberg, where Hegel is said to have walked; the Philos­ophen­damm in _Königsberg_, where Kant passed on his daily stroll (now replaced by a railway station); and the Philos­opher’s Way Kierkegaard mentions in Copenhagen.”[^3] In her book _Wanderlust: A History of Walking_, Solnit lists an im­pressive array of people who walked as a way of developing their imagined ter­rains, including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the 18th century, William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, advanced the taste for walking long distances in the countryside. Their walks are central to our perceptions of Romantic poetry and particularly its adulation of nature. Numerous pathways can be traversed through a study of walking and its ex­panded relationship to thinking. Mem­orable writings on the subject include Rousseau’s _Reveries of a Solitary Walker_ (1782), Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” (1862),[^4] Charles Baudelaire’s _The Painter of Modern Life_ (1863), Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), Walter Benjamin’s “On Some Mo­tifs in Baudelaire” (1939), and W.G. Se­bald’s novel _The Rings of Saturn_ (1995). 

Walking has also given rise to emer­gent and radical ways of being in the world: protests, public demonstrations and social formations are engaged in, and indeed are produced, through the democratic use of public space. Walk­ing as political and collective action has played a role in many significant his­torical events such as the Women’s March on Versailles in 1789 to protest the high price and scarcity of bread, an important precursor to the French Revolution; Gandhi’s 240­mile Salt March in 1930, also known as the Salt Satyagraha, pro­testing the British salt monopoly and taxation system and leading to the In­dian independence movement; Martin Luther King Jr.’s 54­ mile march in 1965 from Selma, Alabama to the state cap­ital of Montgomery to protest unjust voting laws; and Cesar Chavez’s 340­ mile March for Justice from Delano to Sacramento in 1966 to protest mistreat­ment of farm workers in California.[^5] More recent is the 1,600 ­kilometre walk of a group of James Bay Cree youth from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill in 2013\. And Nelson Mandela’s 1995 autobiography is titled _Long Walk to Freedom_. Such a commonplace activity, walking can both feed the soul and alter the course of history. 

The penchant for walking while thinking is a human activity further enhanced by the presence of natural and human­ made panoramas. Perhaps the quality of imaginative explorations is afforded by geographical place _and_ atmospheric condition: charming vistas, shadows cast, light quality and the arduousness of the terrain. It takes time and distance to unfold an idea or disentangle a motif in one’s imagination. Often ideas come in an oblique yet generative manner while distracted by a setting and the progress of the syncopating beats beneath one’s feet. This evokes what psychologist Mi­haly Csikszentmihalyi describes as the “flow state,” which ensues when one is engaged in focused and meaningful ac­tions.[^6] Usually marked by an intensi­fied temporal awareness, there is a sort of free-­floating attentiveness afforded by the extended walk where a diffusion of consciousness tends to set the mind to thinking. And a more exact clarity might occur with remapping how a thought has unfurled by returning to the spaces where it was born: an eter­nal return as eternal cogitation, per­haps. How long does it take to figure an image, develop an idea, or embody a narrative? And in what ways might this form of speculative walking become a luminous reverie, a collaged flow of innovation and recollection? What is fundamental here is the embodied af­fect of movement on the imagination, the peristaltic waves of the mind. Plus walking is extremely good for you and aids digestion. 

The assimilation of one’s surround­ings coupled with rhythmic journeying is an intricate process that arouses the potential for metaphor and analogy. For example, a relationship between cities and bodies, and how the former are of­ten described in bodily ways, provides entry into symbolic content. Here, one can point to the metaphors of veins and arteries in relation to lanes and streets. Canals, tracts and ducts have their mirror worlds inside and outside the body. I am especially intrigued by how metaphors of digestion inform and complement our daily peregrinations. Literary critic, essayist and philosopher Walter Benjamin extolled the art of “slow walking” as the instrument of modern urban mapping, as if one is grazing the terrain for pleasure, experience and sus­tenance.[^7] Walking becomes a form of rumination where cogitation moves from the literal to the figurative. As peristal­tic waves move food through the body by its own motility, the physical move­ments of walking similarly allow for the slow digestion of thoughts and experi­ences. Through involuntary nerve im­pulses, peristalsis helps to draw nutri­ents from food through a dynamic and circuitous digestive system. Rhythmic contractions allow for passage through the body and, by extension, the imag­ination. Metabolism moves in myste­rious ways.[^8] Like cows, we also rumi­nate as we roam. The word “ruminant” comes from the Latin _ruminare_, which means “to chew over again.” Perhaps perambulation is a method or mode of aerating nascent ideas by breaking down the constituent elements, enab­ling space between thoughts. And of course, all this takes time and energy. If food takes on average 12 hours to di­gest, how long does it take to formu­late a thought, digest a landscape and incorporate an idea? Consider that walk­ing burns about four calories per min­ute and the brain, a notorious energy guzzler, can burn a calorie and a half per minute when actively thinking. Quick assimilation is not the ideal; in its place is the deliberate, slow rumination of to­tal digestion. 

There are several models for peri­patetic engagement. Walking can be said to represent a twofold mediation; between the corporeal movement in space and time, and its provision for the peristaltic waves of reflection afforded by that movement. It is from this double perspective that we explore how walk­ing can be understood as a form of mo­bile thinking. Walking has long nour­ished creative urges, whether writing, art­making or political meditations, and indeed mediations. With its long history, peripateticism characterizes explorato­ry expeditions that support the unfurl­ing and digestion of an idea. Walking is a form of reflection that generates com­pelling metaphors. Whether in urban or rural spaces, pathways suggest the folds and multiple passages of a digestive tract where indeterminable and endless contours might be discovered, where front­iers are made porous and turned into thresholds, where motility arouses inter­nal apprehensions. Walking aerates mind, body and the spaces in between so that a sustainable life force emerges between the rhythm of walking and that of a poetic digestion, forming a site and an event where the outside world meets with the interior realm of human re­flection and creativity. 

Through walking, one ingests or as­similates the landscape for fuel and nourishment. In this way, walking is tied to a kind of productivity, to making something with one’s body and imag­ination. What does it mean to be at­tuned to one’s own creative urges via roaming and rumination? And how might we feed lavishly upon all sorts of ambulatory comestibles while on the lookout for the thing that will satisfy our emergent desires? This relation is contingent upon the personal response and cravings of the one who ambles. Walking thus becomes part of a gener­ative cycle of assimilating and absorb­ing the world around us, taking (without taking) things in with all of the suste­nance this process entails; each of us has our own rhythms, ways of moving and responding to the world around us. Some are sluggish, others swift, with one no better than the other. In a metabolic sense, the process involves specu­lative walking from the peripatetic to the peristaltic, where momentum is simultaneously corporeal and cerebral. Perhaps spatial passages with their con­tinual circulation of nutrients highlight the ways in which the metaphoric and the metabolic are not so easy to disen­tangle. 

[^1]: Two important aesthetic concepts related to walking include the flâneur and the dérive. The former, originally connected to 19th­ century poet Charles Baudelaire means someone who strolls, lounges or saunters: the latter, connected to Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International (1957–1972), suggests an unplanned journey through an urban landscape. Both embrace complex conceptual histories that deserves separate discussions of their relation to walking and modernity. 
[^2]: Interestingly, another group of philo­sophers, the Stoics, also acquired their name from the architectural sur­roundings where they too walked and talked, sauntering through _stoa_ or covered colonnades. 
[^3]: Rebecca Solnit, _Wanderlust: A History of Walking_ (New York: Penguin, 2001), 16\. 
[^4]: Thoreau talks up the strong spiritual dimension of walking as epitomized by the pilgrimage. His essay expands upon the etymology of the word “saunter,” which he believes may come from the French _Sainte-Tiere_ (“Holy Land”) or _sans terre_ (“without land”).
[^5]: See Robert Manning’s essay “Long Walks, Deep Thoughts,” in _Chronicle of Higher Education_, December 15, 2012\. 
[^6]: See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). 
[^7]: Quoted in Anthony Vidler, _Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture_ (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 74.
[^8]: Connected via the spinal cord and other nerves, the brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication and share a networked intelligence. Some scientists have hypothesized that we have two brains. See Michael Gershon’s _The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).

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Philosophy

Activism

The article discusses the relation between the corporeal and the cerebral, captured by words such as perambulation, peregrination, wayfaring, and peripatetic. The author discusses walking as a mobile form of thinking. The article discusses the link between walking and its expanded relationship to thinking within literature, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” among others. The author also discusses the relationship of walking to radical ways of being, including public demonstrations and social formations.

On Speculative Walking: From the Peripatetic to the Peristaltic

Artist Simon Pope’s work, such as the film _Memory Marathon_ (2010), often involves walking and talking with others. More recent work, such as _A Song, A Dance And A New Stannary Parliament_ (2014) continues an ongoing interest in how objects appear within dialogue. These concepts form the basis of Pope’s doctoral study at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, establishing more-than-human through dialogic art practice. Formerly a member of  
the Net.Art artists’ group I/O/D, he is also the author of _London Walking_ (2000). Pope represented Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

The recent history of walking as contemporary art owes much to a previous generation’s prepossession with theories of “space” (in expanded sculptural practices) and “place”(for avant-gardist, resistant tendencies). However, there may be other concepts that have greater resonance for current “walking art” practice and which suggest, with echoes of Robert Frost, that there’s a path perhaps “less travelled by.”[^1] Namely, there may exist a different historical lineage that brings us closer to current preoccupations with participation, dialogue and encounter.

Even while still students at St. Martin’s College of Art in London, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton rapidly gained a reputation as being the archetypal “walking artists.” Their journeys by bicycle around the UK, or hitch–hiking across Europe as sculptural practice — echoing the interests and methods of their North American contemporaries, such as Douglas Huebler[^2] — were soon extended by their use of walking. 

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. 

It was through the radical pedagogy of St. Martin’s that Fulton, Long and others came to consider walking as a viable artistic strategy, explored through a number of workshops organized by faculty. The best known saw a group of students bound together with a cord — reminiscent of Lygia Clark’s group–work[^3] — and instructed to negotiate their way back to the art school through the streets of Soho. While this earliest work is recorded photographically, as a group of young art students huddled on the corner of Greek Street, another exercise lives on through myth alone: students were instructed to “walk to the countryside,” heading westward out of London. It’s rumoured the aim was reaching Oxford; however, a wrong turn landed them north of the Chiltern Hills, their numbers depleted. While these instances appear to establish the fate of “walking art” — in the UK at least, where Fulton adopted the term and imposed it on Long — its origins are perhaps less straightforward. As well as being promoted, it is claimed, as a typically “British” mode of art–making by certain curators[^4] (most notably Anne Seymour in _The New Art_ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery), the work made by Fulton and Long _individually_ does not reflect the nascent participatory or collaborative approaches that are inferred in their student work. Or rather, that is the case unless we discount one work by Richard Long that suggests an altogether different historical trajectory for “walking work.” 

In a photograph of a performance by the artist[^5] held by the Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples and taken in Amalfi in 1968, we see Richard Long standing, arm outstretched, a toothy smile on his face, shaking the hands of passers–by. Although Long himself, in conversation, dismissed _HandShaking Piece_ (1968) as a mere “student performance,”[^6] this work 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.

The ease with which Long greets those crossing the harbourfront in Amalfi — with the Italian summer sun shining on them and their relaxed, casual clothing — bolsters Claire Bishop’s criticism when she appends “walks” to her list describing the “predictable formula” of participatory art.[^7] But this does not mean that we can tar all walking work with the same brush. We can find a wide gamut of work, some of which would dispel these criticisms, and which demonstrates the whole range of artistic strategies, constructing manifold relations to others.

André Cadere’s incessant, insistent skirmishes and gate-crashings of the art worlds of Western European and the USA during the early to late 1970s — who he saw as excluding him as just a “dirty” Eastern European[^8] — present something of a contrast. His walks between galleries supporting Conceptual and Minimal art and artists, _Barre de Bois Rond_ (1975) conveyed on his shoulder, were anything but a disinterested meander, his itineraries far from a list of arbitrary spatial coordinates. There were no “chance operations”[^9] at work: walking was a means to precisely explore the political dimension of the artist’s world. Even Gustav Courbet’s casual greeting[^10] — apparently a benign “hail fellow traveller, well met” — is more nuanced than it at first appears. This is a meeting between artist and dealer after all, whose handshake enables the artist to take his place within the market, temporarily assuaging some of the anxieties that come with relying on patronage and sales as indicators of status and self–worth. While these examples of work by Long, Cadere and Courbet apparently prefigure the contemporary artist in participatory mode, they only highlight the messy engagement of artists with their world: negotiating institutional demands; living with status–anxiety; the low-down, base business of making sales, placating patrons and dealers.

The frictionless world of participation imagined by critics exists only as a paper tiger of course, useful only as a rhetorical device. There is never an _a priori_ reality — an extant, smooth “social space” — which artists choose to inhabit; the “social” is in the making, produced with every footstep[^11] and with every handshake. Walking is in no 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.[^12] 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. 

It is this “anthropological” space that “the maverick philosopher of the every day”[^13] Michel de Certeau recognizes — in _lieu_ of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty — as being distinct from the abstract, the totalizing and the “geometrical.”[^14] This thickening of space described by de Certeau et al. is redolent with the crush and clamour of pedestrian life, an “opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city,”[^15] and an enforced proximity out of which springs familiarity; a dense togetherness from which comes the formation of the crowd, the multitude.[^16] But as Markus Miessen asserts, as a criticism of participation in art and politics, proximity does not necessarily correspond to empathy, despite our best intent.[^17] This criticism is also present in the work of anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee who question the common sense of walking within anthropological fieldwork. At face value, the proximity brought about by being with others on foot appears to produce insights and understandings that would otherwise be denied to us. But in their incisive invocation of fellow anthropologist Clifford Geertz, they recognize that walking in close proximity does not necessarily admit the researcher into others’ lives. ”We cannot simply walk into other people’s worlds, and expect thereby to participate with them,” they state,[^18] noting that a further “attunement” is required.Through their discussion of the shortcomings of Georg Simmel’s theory of the Dyad as the basic social unit subtended by the eye, they conclude that ”to participate is not to walk _into_ but to walk _with_ — where ‘with’ implies not a face–to–face confrontation, but heading the same way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same threats behind.”[^19] It is the _physical_ attitude of bodies and their _spatial_ arrangement that suggests something of their _relational_ attitude. Walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow — of conversation, of movement. Moreover, it becomes symbolic of an ideal type of relation, where moving together, shoulder–to–shoulder, conveys the potential for _mutuality, parity or equality._

For anthropologists, as we have seen, this participatory mode of walking with others is itself something of an ideal, and has been formalized into a method of fieldwork in geographer Jon Anderson’s “Talking Whilst Walking” (2004)[^20] for example. Yet for artistic practice, there’s a compulsion from some quarters[^21] to explore the less literally sociable or “ameliorative”[^22] aspects of being together — to explore the inevitable distanciation that come from art historical positioning of artists as “autonomous,”[^23] rather than as “insider\[s\];”[^24] or from an art–theoretical perspective, the outright refusal to be “included.”[^25] Vito Acconci’s _Following Piece_ (1969) — and subsequent artworks influenced by it[^26] — also proves the inverse of Ingold and Lee’s theory, where a walking _with_ alludes to a malevolent, sinister — or at least indifferent — attitude to others. Marina Abramović and Ulay,[^27] while confirming the confrontational and anti–social aspects of walking _into_ do so as a test of commitment — both artistic and personal — by walking towards each other not knowing whether the increase in proximity that this affords will bring them together or force them apart. Their eventual falling apart appeases philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy[^28] in his insistence that it is the _declination_ of individuals, rather than an _inclination_ towards others, that shapes our social reality.[^29] Perhaps we could imagine a world of different relationships, beyond aloof, impermeable monads, marching in-step,[^30] colliding, coinciding or skirting around each other? Could we imagine a “walking work” where artists and/or participants are less intact, inscrutable or unscathed following their encounters with each other? 

Such a work would require more of the artist than simply walking with others, suggesting an acknowledgment of vulnerability[^31] and an openness to the influence of others that runs contrary to art’s recent history.

It was Tom Finkelpearl who saw Paulo Freire’s radical, emancipatory approach to pedagogy as providing a way out of the Modernist impasse for contemporary art — in particular, as “a counterpoint to the Greenbergian notion of aesthetic isolation.”[^32] Freire’s[^33] _dialogic_ approach levelled the hierarchies otherwise taken for granted: student and teacher journeyed together, learned together; and, by implication, there is no longer an audience or spectator waiting patiently for the “transmission”[^34] of the artist’s monologue. Rather, there is an expectant and eager fellow-traveller. They are thus participants in a dialogue that “brings them together while holding them apart”[^35] and through which they “come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation.”[^36] 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. Historian and philosopher Paul Carter writes of an altogether different pedestrian figure — but one which also exemplifies this shift in correspondence between spatial and relational modes and which prefigures the trajectory of my argument here. Writing of agoraphobes’ anxiety at the threshold of entering open space, Carter suggests that there is more to the condition than the fear of _spatial_ openness. Rather, it is a hyper–sensitivity to the potential for innumerable new encounters within this space and the anticipation of _relational openness_ that induces this panic. Furthermore, Carter concludes that their condition stems not from a fear of the catastrophic consequences of coming into proximity with others, but in the potential for a “cross over”[^37] or _transformational_ event to occur. 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. 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. 

[^1]: Extract from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (1920) in Louis Untermeyer, _The Road Not Taken; an Introduction to Robert Frost_ (New York: Holt, 1951). 
[^2]: See Douglas Huebler’s _Variable Piece no.1_ (1968) for example, or his _Duration Pieces_. See, for instance, Alexander Alberro, _Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
[^3]: See, for example, Suzanne Stein, “Interview: Rudolf Frieling on The Art of Participation” 2008\. [blog.sfmoma.org/2008/11/interview-rudolf-frieling-on-the-art-of-participation/](http://blog.sfmoma.org/2008/11/interview-rudolf-frieling-on-the-art-of-participation/)
[^4]: See William Wood’s “Still You Ask For More: Demand, Display and ‘The New Art’” in Michael Newman and Jon Bird, eds. _Rewriting Conceptual Art_ (London: Reaktion, 1999) for an account of how Long, in particular, was pitted against artists like Art & Language, whose stoic, austere silence was deemed to be more “British” than philosophic, conversational work, which supposedly demonstrated an allegiance with “American” tendencies in Conceptual art. This “Britishness” entwined prehistoric and Romantic references — the ironically titled _The Long Man of Wilmington_ and the popular interpretation of the English Romantic tradition as a silent reverie in the face of “wilderness.” 
[^5]: Reproduced in Frances Morris and Richard Flood, _Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972_. 1st ed. (London: Walker Art Centre, 2001). 
[^6]: From an unpublished interview with the artist, 2005\. 
[^7]: Claire Bishop, _Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship_ (London: Verso, 2012), p. 21\. 
[^8]: André Cadere in conversation with Lynda Morris, Lynda Morris, ed. _André Cadere: Documenting Cadere, 1972–1978._ (Ostend, Belgium: Modern Art Oxford, 2013), catalogue of an exhibition at the Mu. ZEE gallery, Ostend, March 2 – May 2, 2013\. 
[^9]: Marc G. Jensen, “John Cage, Chance Operations, and the Chaos Game: Cage and the ‘I Ching’,” in _The Musical Times_ (Vol. 150, No. 1907, July 1, 2009): 97–102.
[^10]: Gustav Courbet’s, _La Rencontre Ou Bonjour M.Courbet,_ 1854, oil on canvas, 129 cm × 149 cm. 
[^11]: Thoroughly elucidated in Michel de Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1984). 
[^12]: Craig J. Calhoun, _Habermas and the Public Sphere_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 
[^13]: Christopher Prendergast, “Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present” in _French Studies_ (Vol. 60, No. 4, October 1, 2006), 536–537\. 
[^14]: de Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_, 93\. 
[^15]: _Ibid._ 
[^16]: See Elias Canetti, _Crowds and Power_, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Phoenix, 2000) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, _Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire_ (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 
[^17]: “A lot of recent talk on participation assumes that the closer you get to something or someone, the more empathy you develop. This is a scary assumption.” Markus Miessen, _The Nightmare of Participation_ (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 45\. 
[^18]: Tim Ingold and Jo Lee, “Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing” in _Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology_, eds. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), p. 67.
[^19]: Ibid. This also finds resonance in Andrew Roddan, _Vancouver’s Hoboes_ (Vancouver: Subway Books: 2005), 20 “that kind of brotherhood we find when the forest fire sweeps the mountainside and animals and human beings flee together from a common foe.” 
[^20]: Jon Anderson, “Talking Whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge,” in _Area_ (Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2004), 254–261\. 
[^21]: Bishop 2004; 2011; 2005; and in Dusan 2009\. 
[^22]: Bishop, _Artificial Hells_, 12\. 
[^23]: See, for example, Peter Bürger, “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society” in _Theory of the Avant-Garde_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 
[^24]: See, for example, Robert K. Merton, “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge” in _The American Journal of Sociology_ (Vol. 78, No. 1, 1972), 9–47 for discussion of sociology’s grapplings with insider-ness. 
[^25]: Dave Beech, “Include Me Out.” in _Art Monthly_ (No. 315, April 2008), 1–4\. 
[^26]: In a 1992 Frieze article on Sophie Calle’s _Suite Vénitienne_ (1980–1996), Stuart Morgan writes, “If every artwork has a prototype which it emulates and corrects, Calle’s would be Vito Acconci’s _Following Piece…_” 
[^27]: Marina Abramović and Ulay, _The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk_, 1988, performance documented on video, 65:32\. 
[^28]: Jean-Luc Nancy, _The Inoperative Community_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1991), 4\. 
[^29]: See also Bakhtin’s conjecture that we are formed and transformed by social interaction — in a sense, from our inclination towards others. See Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, _Mikhail Bakhtin_ (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984). 
[^30]: As exemplified in Francis Alÿs’ _The Guards_ (2004–5). 
[^31]: This dialogic relationship is recognized by Homi Bhabha as “a process that sloughs off the calloused, dead skin that covers up our vulnerabilities to ‘difference&rsquo.&rdquo Homi Bhabha, “Conversational Art,& in Mary Jane Jacob and Michael Brenson, eds., _Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 45–46\. 
[^32]: Tom Finkelpearl, _Dialogues in Public Art_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 272\. 
[^33]: Paulo Freire, _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ (New York; London: Continuum, 2005). 
[^34]: Jacques Ranciére, _The Emancipated Spectator_ (London, Verso. 2009), 14\. 
[^35]: Dwight Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance” in _Literature and Performance_ (Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1985), 1–13\. 
[^36]: Donald Marcedo in Freire’s _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_, 12\. 
[^37]: Paul Carter, _Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia_ (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 184.

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Dialogue

This article investigates the historical lineage that informs contemporary art practices involving walking and current preoccupations with participation, dialogue, and encounter. The article discusses works by artists Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Andre Cadere, and Gustav Courbet.

Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking

Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator and writer. He recently received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University.

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Children

Pop culture

Internet

This article explores queer identity as it relates to the self-representation of young boys through social media networks. It addresses the tension between privacy and publicity within user-generated media sites such as youtube, as viewed through the lens of both pop culture and queer theory.

Sissy Boys on Youtube: Notes Towards a Cultural History of Online Queer Childhood

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Landscape

Relational art

Representation

Euginia Kisin and Amish Morrell compiled 13 brief accounts of individuals who have participated in walking-based projects. Public space, landscape, memory and representation are some of the many themes discussed in relation to these projects, with numerous perspectives producing multiple accounts and interpretations of the projects discussed.

Walking with Artists

Interview

Earl Miller is an independent critic and curator residing in Toronto.

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Education

Urban studies

Earl Miller speaks with Moira Williams about her activity with New York City-based walking cooperative The Walk Exchange. The cooperative produces performance and participatory projects that involve walking, dialogue and education. They discuss psychogeography and urban planning, and the impact that walking within a city can have on one’s relationship to it.

The Walk Exchange: Pedagogy and Pedestrianism, An Interview with Moira Williams

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Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo, New York and Toronto. His research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards and legitimacy. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Artist

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Memory

History

Sheilah Wilson explores the local history of the now defunct Seaview Racetrack in Nova Scotia. Her performance involved a mock spiritual summoning, addressing collective memory, nostalgia, and her relationship to the land.

The Visible Inside the Invisible

Stephen Horne’s text introduces Sheilah Wilson’s Artist Project, which traces her performance involving a mock spiritual summoning, addressing collective memory, nostalgia, and her relationship to the land, through the local history of the now-defunct Seaview Racetrack in Nova Scotia. 

The Visible Inside the Invisible by Sheilah Wilson: Text

Review

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Mass media

Conceptual

Institutional critique

This article reviews Garry Neill Kennedy’s exhibit Pattison, which was at Or Gallery in Vancouver from November 1 to December 7, 2013.

Garry Neill Kennedy: PATTISON

**Sydney Hart** is a settler artist, cultural critic and Cultural Studies PhD student at Queen’s University, ON.

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Architecture

Museums

Installation

This article reviews Samuel Roy-Bois’ exhibition Not a new world, just an old trick, which took place at the SFU Art Gallery in Burnaby, BC, from September 14 to December 14, 2013.

Samuel Roy-Bois: Not a new world, just an old trick

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Abstract

Violence

Painting

This article reviews Will Gill’s exhibition Bloodredlife, which appeared at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, BC, from October 11, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

Will Gill: Bloodredlife

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Figurative

Drawing

This article reviews Zachari Logan’s exhibition Fugitive Garden at Illingworth Kerr Gallery, ACAD, in Calgary, AB, from September 26 to October 26, 2013.

Zachari Logan: Fugitive Garden

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Love

Video

This article reviews the exhibition As Perennial as the Grass, which includes the work of Amalie Atkins, Brian Cauley, Kathryn Ruppert-Dazai and Ellyn Walker. The exhibition appeared at the Elora Centre for the Arts in Elora, ON, from October 19 to December 14, 2013.

As Perennial as the Grass

Ben Portis is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

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Multimedia

This article reviews the group exhibition Surface Tension, which was curated by Jacob Korczynski and includes the work of Matthew Buckingham, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Youngmi Chun, Kelly Jazvac, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Jimmy Robert, and Mark Soo. The exhibition was at the Oakville Galleries at CEntennial Square from September 15 to November 17, 2013.

Surface Tension

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Printmaking

Found a

Sculpture

Social

This article reviews Tom Dean’s exhibition Mercy which was at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto, Ontario, from October 11 to November 8, 2013.

Tom Dean: Mercy

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Politics

This article reviews the exhibition Land|Slide: Possible Futures, which was curated by Janine Marchessault and included works by IAIN BAXTER&, Adrian Blackwell and Jane Hutton, Blue Republic, Angel Chen, Terrance Houle, Allyson Mitchell, and others. The exhibition was hosted by the Markham Museum in Markham, Ontario, and ran from September 21 to October 14, 2013.

Land|Slide: Possible Futures

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Documentary

Feminism

This article reviews Sarah Febbraro’s exhibition Minor Threats, which appeared at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in Montreal from July 26 to August 24, 2013.

Minor Threats

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This article reviews the exhibition Artists’ Walks: The Persistence of Peripateticism, which was curated by Earl Miller and includes works by Hamish Fulton, Neil Goldberg, General Idea, and others. The exhibition appeared at Dorsky Gallery in New York from September 8 to November 17, 2013.

Artists' Walks: The Persistence of Peripateticism

**Gloria Hickey** is an independent curator and writer living in St. John’s, NL. In 2017, Routledge published her book chapter on curatorial strategies in _Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm_.

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Sexuality

This article reviews Kailey Brian’s exhibition Bits & Places. which appeared at Rogue Gallery, Eastern Edge Artist Run Centre in St. John’s, NF, from September 7 to 27, 2013.

Kailey Brian: Bits & Places

Heather White is a writer, and a psychotherapist-in-training, in Toronto.

> We were, I thought, a compassionate society. I don’t think that way anymore. Now we’re good at masking things. We’re good at not taking responsibility now. This is deeply sad to me.  
> —Dancer Margie Gillis in a performance clip excerpted by Sun News, 2011 

To further an “exploration of…funding to the arts,” Krista Erickson hosted interpretive dancer Margie Gillis on the Sun News Network program _Canada Live_ in 2011\. Towards the end of the interview, Erickson admitted to her acclaimed guest: “I’m just a cultural philistine…I don’t understand high-falutin’ concepts.” The contrition was feigned; understanding hadn’t been Erickson’s endgame as she guilted Gillis for costing the taxpayers. More a deposition than an interview, the segment provoked widespread outrage.

The new book _Art as Therapy_ opens with a strikingly Ericksonian premise. Alain de Botton and John Armstrong present the arts as a sector that doesn’t adequately account for the capital — both cultural and fiscal — awarded to it. The authors then take up the accounting on art’s behalf, by making explicit what has long been implicit: that art can improve people.

If the claim is intuitively obvious, itsexpounding here pleases the zeitgeist. If humans have always sought to better themselves, overt instructions are ubiquitous these days. Even our fiction and our scholarship riff on the conventions of self-help manuals and how-to guides. And this new book’s authors are immersed in the genre. Each recently penned a _How To_… title (_How to Think More about Sex_, and _How to Worry Less About Money_) for a series produced by The School of Life (the pop philosophy empire, founded by de Botton, that also spawned _Art as Therapy_). But _Art as Therapy_ isn’t self-help.

It’s closer to institutional critique. Arguing that “the art establishment” is emotionally negligent, the authors bracket the self and propose an institutional overhaul. The call comes in large type tucked between sturdy Phaidon covers. Art as Therapy boasts the heft and colour plates of a coffee-table book. It is squeakily jargon- free. Its authors advocate accessibility. They lambaste the establishment for catering only to those who already care. They dissemble.

The book is “for” the little guy, but its takeaway is for the tyrants. It champions the layperson and the uninitiated, but champions like an anaesthetist. The authors proceed by numbing, seducing with dreamy abstractions that render the audience unresponsive. They make the selves who stand to be helped lie passively in wait. _Art as Therapy_ views enlightenment as something that’s not achieved, but administered. The book palliates unto paralysis.

Readers can’t respond and are not responsible; that we are too often unmoved by art is not our flaw, but the system’s. So out goes the baby of agency with the bath-water of blame. “The problem is not primarily in the individual,” but neither is the solution. In fact, the individual is all but absent here. Though Armstrong and de Botton decry the “impersonal” tack of the art world, their approach to the personal doesn’t inspire much confidence.

They abstract the individual into a crowd, and don’t account for dissent. There’s no “I” in _Art as Therapy_.

Instead, “we” prevails, shepherding motley readers into a single, univocal group. When the authors identify human frailties and interpret corresponding artworks, they speak for all of us. “We look up at the clouds and feel moved;” “we derive a more joined-up sense of human nature.” Before the book is through, “we have already found, and benefitted from, all there is to be gained in the direction of complete freedom.” The authors build this last point into an argument for censorship: we have too much freedom, and would thrive with more restrictions.

The book’s other core arguments are shaped congruently, through reductive assessments that assume a shocking degree of privilege. For Armstrong and de Botton, complexity and relativity are overrated; it’s possible, and productive, to assess the emotional needs of a mass (to diagnose “the psyche of a nation,” even); there are essential truths to be learnt from artworks, and over-attending to context distracts; essence is best conveyed from the top down; the oppressive conditions that incited the post- modern paranoia of authority are over.

The authors’ methods are typified in an illustration of “rebalancing.” The caption “a home to rebalance a nervous soul” runs under an image of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1951 Farnsworth House. The accompanying description imagines the building as balm, as respite from our inboxes, “clogged with 200 messages every hour.” Presenting the work as an antidote for contemporary anxieties, the book doesn’t offer historical background. Art’s lessons are timeless; works can be reshuffled into non-chronological categories.

Armstrong and de Botton are not the first to reconceptualize the order of aesthetic things, but their emphasis on emotion is bold. Their ideal museum includes a gallery of suffering, and one of love. This push for psychological sensitivity would be exciting, were it not so unplastic and so exclusive. Art may be therapeutic, but not like this. Therapy works on individuals in their specificity, in their contexts.

Consider that Farnsworth House was a glass home (it’s now a museum). Its architect is known as a universalist who often eschewed pragmatic needs in his pursuit of transcendent principles. The house was commissioned as a retreat, but provoked anxiety. Edith Farnsworth was irate with the liberties Mies van der Rohe had taken, and unsettled by the home that resulted.[^1] Yet Armstrong and de Botton expunge her perspective wildly. Like Mies van der Rohe, they are pro-authority and pro-universalism. They are against truths that interrupt what’s simple.

The authors claim that complexity is an unnecessary pet project of art scholars pursuing “ever more exacting research.” Unlike those scholars, Armstrong and de Botton already know what an artwork is trying to say. They transcribe a selection of art’s messages, and dictate how audiences should respond.

Farnsworth hated how her house was transparent, “like an X-ray.”[^2] A common fear about therapy is that its gaze is, also like an X-ray, intrusive and unnaturally omniscient. This worry gives the practice a bad name and pause to some who might seek help. Unfortunately, Armstrong and de Botton exploit this myth of an elite’s direct access to flawed souls. They play uncritically into the hang-ups of the “cultural philistines” who don’t exist. They claim to know what we all feel, and what we all should feel, to feel better. By making such sweeping, presumptive claims, they expose the flaws of their own compassion.

_Art as Therapy_ will be interpreted as an exhibition at the AGO in Spring 2014\. 

[^1]: See Alice Friedman, “People who live in Glass Houses,” _Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History_ (New York, 1998). Friedmann considers the implicit misogyny of Farnsworth House: finding license in Farnsworth’s status as a single woman, Mies van de Rohe designed quarters that ensured her constant display and denied her any privacy.
[^2]: Ibid.

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Psychology

This article reviews the book Art as Therapy by John Armstrong and Alain de Botton, published by Phaidon Press (2013).

Art as Therapy, by John Armstrong and Alain de Botton

Artist-run centres

Film

This article reviews the book Explosion in the Movie Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists’ Film and Video, edited by Chris Gehman and published by Images Festival and LIFT (2013).

Explosion in the Movie Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists’ Film and Video, Edited by Chris Gehman

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Work

This article reviews the book It’s the Political Economy, Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis in Art and Theory, edited by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler and published by Pluto Press (2013).

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Issue 121