Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium 9781786610218, 9781786610225

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Copyright © 2019. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.

Walking Networks

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks : The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest

Radical Cultural Studies Series Editors: Fay Brauer, Maggie Humm, Tim Lawrence, Stephen Maddison, Ashwani Sharma and Debra Benita Shaw (Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, UK) The Radical Cultural Studies series publishes monographs and edited collections to provide new and radical analyses of the culturopolitics, sociopolitics, aesthetics and ethics of contemporary cultures. The series is designed to stimulate debates across and within disciplines, foster new approaches to Cultural Studies and assess the radical potential of key ideas and theories. Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture, by Maria Tamboukou Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice, edited by Debra Benita Shaw and Maggie Humm Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, by Dan Hassler-Forest EU, Europe Unfinished: Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis, edited by Zlatan Krajina and Nebojša Blanuša Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities, by Iain Chambers

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Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles, by Kirsten Forkert Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, edited by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis Gender, Sexuality, and Space Culture, by Kat Deerfield Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture, by Jamie Hakim Writing the Modern Family: Contemporary Literature, Motherhood and Neoliberal Culture, by Roberta Garrett Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium, by Blake Morris

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks : The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest

Walking Networks The Development of an Artistic Medium

Copyright © 2019. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.

Blake Morris

London • New York

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks : The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2019. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2020 by Blake Morris All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-021-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78661-021-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78661-022-5 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks : The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest

Contents

Figures ix Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xiii Preamble: Walking Exercise #1

xv

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Prologue: A Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking

xvii

1  Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 1.1  Contemporary Considerations of Walking as an Artistic Medium 1.2  The Medium is the Memory 1.3  Walking’s Accepted Forefathers: Richard Long and Hamish Fulton 1.4  Participatory, Relational, and Dialogical: Ways of Discussing Walking Art 1.4.1  Participation Performance 1.4.2  Relational Aesthetics 1.4.3  Dialogical Aesthetics 1.4.4  Bishop’s Critique 1.5  The Attributes of Walking 1.6  A Walk through the Book 1.7  Conclusion: Establishing a Medium

7 8 9 10 11 11 13 15

2  A Romantic Drift through the History of Walking 2.1  Dorothy Wordsworth and the Romantic Social Network 2.2  Drifting with Bernstein and Khatib

23 24 28

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1 2 4 5

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Contents

2.3  From the Feet of Dada and Surrealism 2.4  An Incomplete Memory of the Medium

33 37

INTERLUDE: WALKING EXERCISE #2 47

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3  Artistic Foundations for Walking Networks 3.1  The Formation of WAN 3.1.1  walkwalkwalk: An Archaeology of the Familiar and Forgotten 3.2  From Social Practice to the Pedestrian Turn 3.2.1  Rebranding Huntly and Making Room for the Walking Institute 3.2.2  Fulton and the Movement of the Medium 3.3  Before the Walk Exchange 3.3.1  The Coyote Walks 3.3.2  [untitled/Robert Moses] Walk Projects 3.3.3  Walk Study Training Courses 1 and 2

49 49 50 54 55 57 61 62 64 68

4  The Walking Artists Network: Digital Paths to Analogue Practice 79 4.1  New Psychogeographies 81 4.1.1  The Loiterer’s Resistance Movement 81 4.1.2  Mythogeography 84 4.2  Recasting the Canon: WALKING WOMEN and The Circulation of Theory as Impetus for Practice 89 4.2.1  Walking Library for Women Walking 90 4.2.2  Walking the Embankment in a Burqa 95 4.2.3  Getting Lost with Lady Somerset 96 4.3  Conclusion: Walking through Digital Spaces to Create Physical Experiences 99 5  Deveron Projects: The Walking Institute 107 5.1  Slow Marathon: From Artist’s Work to Annual Walk 108 5.1.1  From Huntly to Addis and Back Again 108 5.1.2  Lost in the Wilderness of Walking Art: Slow Marathons 2013 and 2014 112 5.1.3  Slow Marathon 2015: Lines Lost, Medium Found 114 5.1.4  Slow Marathon 2018: Digital Connections between Gaza and Huntly 117 5.2  Perambulator 120 5.2.1  Chain: Pram Walking as Performance Experience 120 5.2.2  Huntly Perambulator 121 5.3  Beyond Performance: The Medium of Walking as a Mode of Community Engagement 124

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Contents vii

INTERLUDE: WALKING EXERCISE #3 129 6  Walk, Study, and Exchange 6.1  At a Distance: Developing a Model for Distance Exchange 6.2  WSTC 5: The Walk as a Point of Exchange 6.2.1  Participants in Overlapping Networks 6.2.2  Walking Landscapes: Digital, Physical, Social 6.3  Conclusion: Local Analogue Walking through Global Digital Exchange

131 132 135 135 137 152

FINALE: WALKING EXERCISE #4 159 7  Conclusion: The Medium is the Memory (Palace) 7.1  The Memory of the Medium: A Network of Knights Leave the White Cube 7.2  The Contours of Walking: Convivial Group, Antagonistic Landscape, Slow Tempo 7.3  Walking as a Generative Practice 7.4  Future Pathways 7.5  Final Thoughts

161 162 164 165 166 168

EPILOGUE: WALKING EXERCISE #5 173 Bibliography 175 Index 185

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About the Author

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189

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Figures

Figure 2.1.   C  aspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) (Source: Kunsthalle Hamburger)

25

Figure 3.1.   H  untly town sign with Room to Roam branding (Source: Deveron Projects)

56

Figure 3.2.   C  oyote walkers meet in Central Park for the first day of the walk (Source: Dillon de Give)

63

Figure 3.3.   Brooklyn Bridge dérive (Source: Jeff Morris)

65

Figure 3.4.   ‘ stop, walk y [sic] roll,’ London (Source: Carissa Hope Lynch)

65

Figure 3.5.   A  yano Oride, Trash Monster Walk, Tokyo (Source: Ayano Oride)

65

Figure 3.6.   [ Robert Moses] Walk Project, Routes Walked (Source: Blake Morris)

66

Figure 3.7.   A  rtist Chloë Bass leads the [Gallery] walk in Sunset Park (Source: Chloë Bass)

67

Figure 3.8.   F  lyer created for inaugural WSTC (Source: Walk Exchange)

69

Figure 3.9.   G  oogle map of route for WSTC 1 (2011) (Source: Google Maps)

70

Figure 3.10.  W  illiams leads walkers for the WSTC 2 ‘midterm’ in Woodside, Queens (Source: Walk Exchange)

72

ix

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Figures

Figure 4.1.   P  eople browsing the WLfWW collection at Somerset House, London (Source: Blake Morris)

92 109

Figure 5.2.   K  ebede leads Slow Marathon 2012 in Scotland (Source: Deveron Projects)

110

Figure 5.3.   P  articipants in ‘Baby Slow Marathon’ (Source: Clare Qualmann)

113

Figure 6.1.   S  creenshot of Walk Study Training Course 5 Homepage (Source: Walk Exchange)

139

Figure 6.2.   S  imm, Millington, and Aufrichtig (left to right) in NYC (Source: Aliza Aufrichtig)

151

Figure 07.1.  D  iagram created by a participant after a walk for The Bureau of Self Recognition (2011–2013)

173

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Figure 5.1.   W  alkers participating in Slow Marathon 2012 in Ethiopia (Source: Deveron Projects)

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Abbreviations

AHRC ATP DP EDL HDT LI LRM NYC RCA [RM]WP SCUDD SI TWRG UK UEL USS [u]WP WAN WE WLfWW

Arts and Humanities Research Council Aberdeenshire Towns Partnership Deveron Projects English Defence League Huntly Development Trust Letterist International Loiterers Resistance Movement New York City Royal College of Art [Robert Moses] Walk Project Standing Course of University Drama Departments Situationist International The Walking Reading Group United Kingdom University of East London University Square Stratford [untitled] Walk Project Walking Artists Network Walk Exchange Walking Library for Women Walking

xi

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Acknowledgments

Writing a book is not a solitary task, and a number of people supported me intellectually and emotionally throughout the process. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family, and especially my parents, who have encouraged me in all my endeavours (no matter how opaque). My dear friends Chris Wellington and Carissa Hope Lynch were key to keeping me sane throughout the entirety of the research and writing process, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. This book originated in my doctoral thesis, and my supervision team (Toby Butler, Clare Qualmann and Jeremy Gilbert, as well as Luis Sotelo) were essential to its development. Additionally, the longstanding intellectual support and leadership of Kimberly Jannarone has shaped me as an artist and academic and in many ways this book is a result of her consistent mentorship. This book reflects the robust and critical engagement of the wider artistic walking community and the networks I discuss within. The members of the Walking Artists Network have been incredible partners, resources and inspirations throughout this process; I would especially like to thank Mark Hunter and Clare Qualmann for facilitating and funding the Walking Artists Network’s Footwork Research group and inviting me to take part. The team at Deveron Projects, and particularly Claudia Zeiske, Joss Allen, Racheal Disbury, and Robyn Wolsey, have been incredibly helpful, both during my visits to Huntly, where their focus on hospitality was clear, as well as through online correspondence. Additionally, I would like to thank the Scottish Society for Art History, who funded my first trip to Huntly, and Zeiske for inviting me to Huntly as a Thinker in Residence for Slow Marathon 2018. A huge thanks to my partners in the Walk Exchange (Dillon de Give, Bess Matassa, Vige Millington, and Moira Williams) who worked with me to develop the xiii

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xiv

Acknowledgments

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ideas and methods articulated here. To everyone who has ever participated in the Walk Study Training Course, thank you. Without you, this research would not exist. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Debra Shaw, who guided me through the process of transforming my doctoral thesis into a book. She has been a patient and insightful editor, and the arguments of this book are stronger based on her critical engagement with its ideas.

Morris, Blake. Walking Networks : The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest

Preamble Walking Exercise #1

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It is best not to discuss it too much to begin; better, rather, to be out walking.

Go to an online mapping site and search for the name of the neighbourhood, town, or city in which you are reading this text. Get walking directions to a desired location from your current location. Study the route and keep it in your memory. When you go on your walk, put down your phone and leave all maps behind. When you’ve arrived at your destination, decide what you want to remember about your walk and transform it into a memory image— the more absurd the better. The memory image doesn’t have to be purely visual; feel free to experiment with sounds and smell as well. Imagine your memory image somewhere in the landscape. Commit the newly transformed area to memory. This is the first addition to your Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking.1 NOTE 1.  I originally created a version of this exercise for Walk Study Training Course 2 (see chapter 3). I further developed it in response to a meeting of the Walking Artists Network’s Footwork Research Group (see https://footworkwalk.wordpress. com/2014/10/27/blake-morris-memory-proposal-exchange/). It was subsequently included in Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann’s Ways to Wander (2015), a book of artistic walking scores created by members of the Walking Artists Network (see chapter 4).

xv

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Prologue

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A Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking

The memory palace, or method of loci, is an ancient Greek technique for remembering. Memory palaces link symbolic images to specific locations and are based on the strength of human spatial memory. To create a memory palace, one chooses a specific space and imagines vivid symbolic images throughout it. The more absurd the image, the easier it is to recall. To retrieve the memories, one imagines walking through the space and looking at the different images. For example, to remember the term artistic medium of walking one might imagine a giant foot dressed as a psychic medium (complete with a crystal ball) in the front doorway of their childhood home. Historians attribute the origin of the memory palace to Simonides of Ceos, ancient Greece’s first for-profit poet, in a story that is likely apocryphal.1 At a banquet for Scopas, Simonides recited a poem peppered with praise for Castor and Pollux, two newly appointed gods. Scopas, affronted, refused to pay Simonides in full and referred him to the twin gods to collect the rest of his payment. Shortly after, a messenger hailed Simonides and told him two young men were waiting for him outside. He left the building, but the young men were nowhere to be found. Upon his exit, the banquet hall’s roof collapsed and those inside were killed and disfigured beyond recognition. Through the destruction of the banquet hall, Castor and Pollux exacted revenge upon Scopas and his guests for their disrespect. Simonides, the only surviving member of the party, remembered the table and the positions of each reveller, and attached family names to those beyond physical recognition. Through this action he realised the power of spatial memory, and the memory palace was born.2

xvii

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xviii

Prologue

As an artist, I work in the medium of walking. In my first two walking works, [untitled] Walk Project (2008–2009) and [Robert Moses] Walk Project (2010), I grappled with the relationship between walking and documentation (see chapter 3). In the memory palace, I discovered a way to document a walk with a walk, and it is now one of my core artistic techniques. The first memory palace I created was as a participant in artist Chloë Bass’s project The Bureau of Self Recognition (2011–2013). Bass ran a series of “Free Consultations” that opened her private artisticresearch methods to the public. She provided two exercises—one standardised and one customised—and each consultee “was allowed to select his or her desired medium” to record the results of the exercise.3 I chose walking. Through our consultation, Bass and I agreed that I would go on thirty walks and document them through the creation of a memory palace. As the project’s finale, I would provide one-on-one tours of the palace to members of the public, by taking them on a walk and asking them to imagine the images I had created to record my memories. The location I chose for my memory palace was the same route I walked when I originally learned the technique. Earlier that summer, Heather Gardner, a friend from my teenage years, introduced me to the concept as we strolled from my apartment in Astoria to Socrates Sculpture Park, situated on New York City’s East River in Queens. In this way, my discovery of the memory palace was not a solitary discovery; rather, a network of friends and collaborators helped me to discover the technique and its application to the artistic medium of walking. I walked the same route Gardner and I had taken twenty times, implanting it firmly in my memory; additionally, I did ten walks in Fresno, California, always starting at my childhood home. I completed all thirty walks alone. After each walk I created a new image for the route that captured whatever I thought was important to remember, a process that resulted in a completely subjective walking archive. For example, one image consisted of the Addams Family’s Wednesday Addams standing on the pavement in front of my apartment.4 In her hand was a pull cord, which led up to a giant grey cloud. When I stepped out of the lobby and headed down the front stairs to the street, I imagined Addams pulling the cord and triggering a cloudburst. The walk this image memorialised took place on a stormy day, and rain, thunder, and lightning dominated my experience. In addition to the weather, the image captures another important aspect of my experience: while walking an elderly woman called me over to her front stoop and asked me what day it was. “Wednesday,” I replied. The image, which I imagined on my own stoop, captured the two most memorable aspects of my walk: my interaction with that woman and the atrocious weather conditions.

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A Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking xix

I repeated the process thirty times: thirty different walks, thirty different images. Eight people signed up to tour the resulting memory palace. I met them individually, leading them through Astoria, from my apartment to Socrates Sculpture Park. We stopped at each spot where I recorded a memory, and I described the image I created so that we could imagine them together. Each memory image was also the catalyst for a story, and through them I shared memories of my walks. At the end of the walk we sat on the East River and added a new image to the palace that recorded our experience together. As we walked back to my apartment, I showed them the contributions made by previous participants. In this way, each walk was explicitly generative, adding new memories to the landscape through walking and imagining together. Since The Bureau of Self Recognition, I have created memory palaces in Brooklyn (Home: A Nomadic Exploration [2013]), San Francisco and London (Slow Lunch [2013]), Fresno, California (Former Fresnans [2013–ongoing]) and Wales (Footwork Workshop [2014]). Each memory palace records a different set of walks, sites, circumstances, and collaborations, activated through walking and imagining together. Through this practice I link memory to place and engage audiences in creative re-imaginings of the landscape. Unlike an object created in response to a walk, a memory palace has to be imagined, and each participant manifests the images differently depending on their individual interpretations. Interspersed with the chapters of this book are walking exercises that ask you to engage in the construction of a Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking. As I discuss in chapter 1, walking is not an established artistic medium, and works in the medium of walking are almost always discussed as performance or in terms of what is produced in other media after the walk.5 In contrast, I argue that the properties of going for a walk constitute an artistic experience distinct from that of encountering a walk represented in another medium, such as performance, sculpture, painting, video, installation, or writing. As such, the act of actually going for a walk is essential to my argument. The exercises in this book don’t just illustrate my argument; they activate and articulate it. The process of building a memory palace is relatively simple: after your walk, decide what you want to remember and translate it into an image. Imagine that image within a specific landscape (the location of your memory palace). The more absurd, vibrant, or ridiculous the image, the easier it is to remember. Walking Exercise #1 established the location of your memory palace; subsequent exercises will add memories to the same location, turning the landscape of your first walk into a Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking, available for you to access twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as you choose to remember it.

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xx

Prologue

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NOTES 1.  Simonides is generally considered the first Greek poet to accept coins, a relatively recent innovation, as payment for his poems. Historian George Sarton points out, that while “Simonides was perhaps one of the first to be paid in money” due to the increased circulation of coins, it was previously common to “barter . . . talent for other goods.” Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 228. See also C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (Wotton-under-Edge: Clarendon Press, 1961), 360; Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 16. 2.  The story of Simonides and the memory palace was first recorded in the ancient Roman text Rhetorica ad Herennium, traditionally attributed to Cicero, though its authorship has recently been disputed. My telling draws from Francis Yate’s Art of Memory (1966), and Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein (2012). 3.  Chloë Bass, ‘Free Consultations,’ CHLOË BASS | Artist & Public Practitioner (blog), 12 October 2012, http://chloebass.com/work/bureau-of-self-recognition/free -consultations. 4. Wednesday Addams is a character from The Addams Family, a series of cartoons for the New Yorker by Charles Addams that was adapted for television in 1964 and has subsequently been adapted into films, animated series, and a Broadway musical. 5.  Bill Aitchison, ‘The Walking Encyclopaedia,’ Airspace Projects, 2014. http:// www.airspacegallery.org/index.php/projects/the_walking_encyclopaedia; Hayden Lorimer, ‘Walking: New Forms and Spaces for Studies of Pedestrianism,’ in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 26; Luis Carlos Sotelo, ‘Looking Backwards to Walk Forward: Walking, Collective Memory and the Site of the Intercultural in Site-Specific Performance,’ Performance Research 15, no. 4 (1 December 2010): 60; Lexi Lee Sullivan, Walking Sculpture 1967–2015 (Lincoln, MA: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2015), 83. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000), 269.

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Chapter One

Walking

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A Distinct Artistic Medium

This book identifies a new artistic medium—walking—pioneered by artists working in a networked, collaborative approach. My research reflects an increased interest in walking as both method and subject across the arts, humanities, and social sciences—something cultural geographer Hayden Lorimer has identified as a ‘new “walking studies”.’1 Despite this increased focus, considerations of artistic walking practices are dependent on vocabularies designed for other artistic media, or approached through theories such as relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, or participation performance. This shifts attention from the sensory experience of walking to its relationship with what it produces in other media, and relegates walking to a process for making art. The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics states, ‘[i]n its most general sense, a medium is a means of transmitting some matter or content from a source to a site of reception.’2 Work within the artistic medium of walking transmits the artwork through the audience’s walking body. It is the experience of going for a walk, rather than the way the body performs for spectators, or aesthetic objects produced after the walk, that constitutes the location of the artwork. Scholars such as Rosalind Krauss and Dominic McIver Lopes have recently discussed medium as a way to centre critical consideration on specific works of art, rather than art in general.3 For Krauss, ‘[i]t is only the word medium that conjures the recursive nature of the successful work of art’;4 Lopes argues for medium as a way to develop ‘theories of the arts, especially new arts of the avant-garde.’5 I have chosen to consider walking as a medium rather than establish a new theoretical category such as walking aesthetics to provide a flexible approach that responds to the needs of artists and scholars working across disciplines. 1

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2

Chapter One

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I distinguish works that must be experienced as a walk from works that use walking as a process or technique to create art in other media. As a medium, however, walking does not consist strictly of walking: artists depend on other ways to communicate the design of the walk, such as through verbal, physical, visual, digital, written or recorded instructions. Because walking artists emerge from a broad set of disciplines, they make use of techniques in a variety of media to frame the walk and invite participation. Phil Smith, perhaps the most prolific scholar to argue for a focus on the walk itself as a work of art, notes that the ‘new movement’ of walking artists often use ‘documents, handbooks, and exemplary objects designed to encourage others to further exploratory walking,’ rather than as commodities for sale on the art market.6 These documents are often freely distributed online as well, and digital technologies have expanded the medium’s global reach. Blogs, listservs, and other online media allow artists to easily share walks globally, and artists are using these tools to create a networked approach to walking as an artistic medium. This interaction with a variety of media necessitates that any consideration of the artistic medium of walking must also consider its use of interdisciplinary techniques. Scholars have handled this in different ways, such as Jerrold Levinson’s theory of hybrid forms, Berys Gaut’s nesting media, or Dominic McIver Lopes’s medium profiles.7 I draw on Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the expanded field and her argument that ‘the medium is the memory.’8 In following Krauss, I foreground the founding logic of the work itself—the practice of going for a walk—and bring critical consideration to how walking functions as an aesthetic experience. 1.1 CONTEMPORARY CONSIDERATIONS OF WALKING AS AN ARTISTIC MEDIUM Scholars, artists, and curators have not entirely ignored the notion of walking as an artistic medium. In the exhibition catalogue for Walk-On (2013), a walking exhibition that toured the United Kingdom, curator Cynthia Morrison-Bell identifies a difference between ‘“walking as art,” and “art walks” themselves.’9 In the first category are the sculptures of Richard Long, the textual works of Hamish Fulton, and the video art of Francis Alÿs; the second, smaller category consists of the audio walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, or Fulton’s choreographed group walks. Likewise, the ‘Vision Document’ for Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute notes that many contemporary artists who engage with walking approach it ‘both as subject and medium,’ and that it is ‘a loose term or definition’ encompassing a wide range of

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 3

work that spans disciplines.10 This book further establishes Morrison-Bell’s ‘art walks’ as works in the specific medium of walking. In doing so, I offer a critical model specific to works that position the walk itself as the art. In establishing the medium of walking, it is key to focus on the physical experience of going for a walk and to identify different techniques artists use to facilitate that experience. Artists working with walking must make decisions regarding the route, rhythm, group composition, and how to inform participants about these decisions. Whether a walk is designed for an individual walker, a small group, or a large group, where it takes place, how the walker is asked to engage with the landscape, the group, and the experience of walking itself are all paramount to how the walk communicates as a work of art. Though walking has consistent attributes such as slowness and fostering creative and convivial responses, the artist’s design, the particular context of the walk, and participants’ previous knowledge and experiences determine how specific walks function as artistic works. Through defining the artistic medium of walking, I aim to clarify ambiguity around the use of the term ‘medium’ in relation to walking-based art and bring direct attention to how the medium of walking generates new relationships between people, the places through which they walk and the human and nonhuman actors they encounter in the landscape (both incidentally and by design). My work here builds on recent scholarship calling for new critical approachs to walking that stress collaborative, collective, and relational modes of practice.11 Inasmuch as the artistic medium of walking is based on inviting people to go on a walk, it is a participatory practice (in contrast to the dominant tropes of the solitary Romantic walker in the wilderness or the detached urban flâneur). Following this, my research focuses on three networks that are working to develop and make visible the medium of walking: the University of East London’s Walking Artists Network (WAN) (chapters 3 and 4); the Walking Institute at Deveron Projects (DP) based in Huntly, Scotland (chapters 3 and 5); and the Walk Exchange (WE), a walking cooperative I co-founded in New York City (NYC) focused on critical and creative walking practices (chapters 3 and 6).12 The Walking Institute, Walking Artists Network, and Walk Exchange support the artistic medium of walking through varied approaches to its development, and make visible the burgeoning work happening in the field. These networks, and the artistic walks their members are creating, demonstrate how artists are using the local analogue practice of walking to create global connections through digital tools. As I discuss in the next section, Krauss argues that the medium is undergirded by its memory, the rules transmitted by guilds of previous practitioners. In her return to the guilds, Krauss highlights the collective memory of the medium and how contemporary practices emerge from techniques and

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Chapter One

rules developed by artistic forebears. Though Krauss’ framework focuses on individual ‘“knights” of the medium’ who are defenders of specificity,13 my approach stresses the networked and collaborative aspects of walking and argues the medium of walking is being developed, made visible and supported by networks of practitioners.

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1.2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MEMORY In her seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979), Krauss argues that within ‘postmodernism’ practice is not defined in relation to a given medium—sculpture—but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used.’14 She moves ‘the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material’ to one that is based on a logic of representation.15 In contrast to Clement Greenberg, the ‘most prestigious’ theorist of medium-specificity in relation to modernism, Krauss provides an approach to medium that is not ‘empirically tied to a physical substance’; 16 instead, she focuses on a work’s logic of representation. In Under Blue Cup (2011), she expands this further, identifying the original medium specificity of painting in the requirement of artisans ‘to conquer the drumhead flatness of wall or panel as it obstructed their efforts to resonate an opening behind it.’17 This approach emphasises what the work is communicating to the viewer, rather than its relationship to the specific materiality of the canvas. Krauss reworks media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase ‘the medium is the message’ to form a new aphorism: ‘Brain—The medium is the memory.’18 For Krauss, McLuhan’s concept is referential, it always refers to ‘another, earlier medium’;19 in contrast, she emphasises ‘medium as a form of remembering.’20 In this way, medium is not referential but recursive; it looks back on itself through the memory of its development. In the expanded field of medium, ‘various artistic supports . . . serve as the scaffolding for a “who are you” in the collective memory of the practitioners of [a] particular genre.’21 When artists invent a medium they are tapping into the memories of the medium—what Krauss terms ‘the rules of the guilds’22—and ‘resisting contemporary art’s forgetting of how the medium undergirds the very possibilities of art.’23 This insists ‘on the power of the medium to hold the efforts of the forebears of a specific genre in reserve for the present.’24 In this way, she links medium to its logic of representation as held by the collective memory of a guild of practitioners rather than by any specific material form.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 5

Krauss’s framework offers a way to unify the diverse field to which works in the medium of walking belong. As Phil Smith points out, ‘[w]hile walking artists hold many differing views about the roots of their practice, it is rare to find one who does not have some sense of their work as being part of a history of practice.’25 Beyond just a history of practice, I argue that they are drawing on the memories of the medium, the rules and techniques developed by previous guilds of walking practitioners. Drawing on this memory, networks of contemporary artists are developing a new medium.

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1.3 WALKING’S ACCEPTED FOREFATHERS: RICHARD LONG AND HAMISH FULTON Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are the two artists who dominate considerations of walking as an artistic practice. In Wanderlust (2000), her influential cultural history of walking, Rebecca Solnit argues that Long is the ‘contemporary artist most dedicated to exploring walking as an artistic medium,’26 while Hayden Lorimer identifies Fulton and Long as jointly responsible for promoting ‘the walk’ gaining ‘such widespread recognition as art medium.’27 Together they have established a specific form of walking in which individuals engage in epic treks and create tangible (and saleable) art works that point to the experience of their walks. Despite their position as the so-called founding fathers of walking art, in much of their work walking functions as a process, technique, or conceptual support for the creation of art in other media. As Smith points out, though Long ‘has declared that the unrecoverable walk itself is his art . . . their documentation in high resolution, super-textured photographs and elegant texts, is retailed through the gallery system.’28 These documents, what Krauss refers to as ‘the photographic experience of marking,’29 are circulated as art rather than the walks themselves. Thus, Fulton and Long establish a model for artistic walking based on the commodified representation of walks. The artistic walking paradigm established by their practices, and many of the tropes it perpetuates, is one of the things this book intends to challenge. Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967) is routinely cited as the first work of walking art.30 The iconic photograph depicts a patch of grass Long trampled underfoot through a repetitive walking practice. An exhibition preview in The Guardian calls it ‘quietly revolutionary, for it claimed the act of walking as art.’31 It is not, however, a work which we can walk, nor is the walk the work itself; rather, it is a walked sculptural work, documented by a photograph. In Overlay (1983), one of the first texts to consider the relationship between walking and art, critic and scholar Lucy Lippard refers to it as ‘a subgenre of dematerialized sculpture.’32 Long has corroborated this, stating that walking

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‘enabled [him] to extend the boundaries of sculpture,’ to ‘be about place as well as material and form.’33 Though he has made important contributions to artistic practices linking walking and the landscape, his most iconic (and highest-valued) artistic outputs are textual works, maps, photographs, and sculptures (both gallery-based and site-specific). These works rarely offer a new walk to experience, instead they point to a walk the artist has already completed. While he has stated that his art ‘consists in the act of walking itself,’34 walking is not central to the audience’s experience of most of his work. Though Solnit identifies Long as the artist most dedicated to exploring walking as a medium, it is Fulton who most forcefully identifies as a walking artist. In contrast to Long, he adamantly states that he is not a sculptor or a land artist, and that ‘walking is an art form in its own right.’35 Walking, however, isn’t his primary artistic medium: ‘walking is the constant, the art medium is the variable.’36 In this way, his commitment to walking art is not a commitment to the medium of walking; rather, it is a commitment to representing walking experiences as artworks. For instance, Fulton’s France on the Horizon (1975) consists of a black and white photograph of the English Channel, accompanied by the caption, ‘a one day fifty mile walk by way of the white cliffs of Dover.’ In the catalogue it is listed as ‘[p]hotograph, black and white, on paper and transfer lettering.’37 Ultimately, it is the medium of photography combined with text that communicates the experience of Fulton’s circular walk between his home and Dover. Fulton notes the impossibility of conveying the experience of a walk through an artwork in a gallery: ‘Either you completed the walk or you didn’t, and if two people make the same walk they will experience it in different ways.’38 He has stated that walking and creating a physical work of art are ‘simply separate activities’ and any artwork he makes ‘will contradict the spirit of the walk.’39 In this way, the audience for his work does not have access to the experience of the walk, only his suggestion of it. As I discuss in chapter 2, the memory that supports the medium of walking is based on the walk as a disruptive, anti-art tool; it is a mode of radical praxis that calls on anti-capitalist traditions to move art out of the gallery or theatre and into the street. In contrast, Fulton and Long bring the walk back into the gallery and offer it for sale, promoting a model of practice that positions the walk as a generator of capital. This is an issue Fulton addresses through his group walks, which he began making in 1994 after working with performance artist Marina Abramović in Japan.40 In his group walks, the observation and production of the art are simultaneous and communal, and the audience is invited to create the invisible object of a walk with him.41 In contrast to the physical artworks he makes, which offer a secondary reference to his walks in the form of an object for the

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 7

marketplace, the group walks do not create a saleable object, only the experience of a walk. In this shift, Fulton moves his work from the representation of walking in other media to the medium of walking itself, something I discuss further in chapter 3. Fulton’s movement towards group walks coincides with his increased interest in politics; I do not believe this is coincidental, and I argue his movement to the medium of walking reflects the radical political memory of the medium. As I discuss in chapter 2, the guild of practitioners who establish the memory of the medium, exemplified by the Letterist and Situationist Internationals and the Dadaists, are motivated by considerations that are anti-capitalist and anti-art. The memory that undergirds the medium of walking develops from this history and its commitment to radical political change.

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1.4 PARTICIPATORY, RELATIONAL, AND DIALOGICAL: WAYS OF DISCUSSING WALKING ART Since Fulton and Long began their artistic walking practices in the 1960s, walking has gained increased prominence as a mode of art making. Solnit’s Wanderlust (2000) and Francesco Careri’s Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002) have been influential on a new generation of artists and curators, and contributed to a renaissance in work considering the relationship between walking, writing, and art. Additionally, exhibitions such as ‘Walking and Thinking and Walking’ (1996) at the Louisiana Art Museum in Denmark, Les Figures de la marche, un siècle d’arpenteurs de Rodin à Neuman (2000-2001) at the Musée Picasso in Antibes and Stuart Horodner’s Walk Ways (2002), which toured North America and paved the way for increased interest and activity around walking art.42 The notion that walking art consists in objects or documents created in response to a walk remains prevalent, even amongst those who consider walking a distinct medium. In Deveron Projects’ ‘Vision Document’ for the Walking Institute, walking art is declared ‘a loose term or definition’ due to artists translating ‘their experience through other mediums [sic] such as sculpture, photography or text based works.’43 Likewise, Francis Alÿs, one of the most prominent international artists to work with walking, states, ‘any work a visual artist is likely to produce, I would say more than 90% of its perception will happen through documentation and not the live event, documentation being a film, a photograph, a text, any possible media.’44 Artist Bill Aitchison, in an essay commissioned for The Walking Encyclopaedia, argues that walking has ‘become a medium in itself’; regardless, he identifies walking artists’ primary work as ‘the creation and

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documentation of walks.’45 This emphasis on documentation moves the encounter of an artwork from the experience of the walking body to the representation of someone else’s experience of walking. It also situates the discussion of walking works within critical vocabularies attached to what is produced after the walk. When the walk itself is positioned as art, it is consistently discussed in relation to performance. Although Solnit follows Lippard in emphasising ‘the parentage for walking as a fine art to sculpture, not performance,’ she discusses the walking body as ‘a medium for performances.’46 She cites Abramović and Ulay’s Great Wall Walk (1988), Joseph Beuys’ Bog Action (1971), and the conceptual works of Stanley Brouwne, who was ‘[p]robably the first artist to have made walking into performance art.’47 In another example, the ‘Exhibition Checklist’ for Walking Sculpture 1967–2015 (2015) at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, identifies Todd Shalom and Katy Colby’s Duly Noted (2015) as ‘three participatory walks’;48 the text that accompanies the catalogue, however, discusses them as ‘a series of participatory performances.’49 Other works that ask the audience to walk, such as Hamish Fulton’s slowalks, are listed as works of ‘spectacle and durational performance.’50 While these walking works are performative, I argue performance is not the primary location of the artistic experience. As art historian Grant Kester has discussed in relation to his category of dialogical aesthetics, these works do not ‘depend on the concept of the “performer” as the expressive locus of the work’;51 rather, the mode of art making is specific to the experience of going for a walk.

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1.4.1 Participation Performance Solnit claims that ‘one new realm of walking opened up in the 1960s, walking as art.’52 For her, this fulfils the prophesies of artist Allan Kaprow, who established an invitation for art to cease being ‘a craft-based discipline of making objects and become a kind of unbounded investigation into the relationship between ideas, acts, and the material world.’53 Kaprow is best known as the founder of Happenings, a practice he describes as a ‘species of audienceinvolvement theatre . . . traceable to the guided tour, parade, carnival test of skill, secret society initiation and popular texts on Zen.’54 Happenings looked to blur the boundaries of art making and everyday life through interactive art experiences, and, as his list indicates, walking was a key technique. The distinct characteristic of Happenings was the fact ‘that people were to take part, were to be, literally, the ingredients of the performances’;55 the audience was ‘simultaneously agent and watcher.’56 Kaprow calls for an art where the artist’s vision is realised through the generative power of the audience, who

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 9

bring the work to fruition through their participation. For Kaprow, the goal is to create an art based on ‘conversation,’ in which the artist’s ‘message is sent on a feedback loop: from the artist to us (including machines, animals, nature) and around again to the artist.’57 Artists and scholars looking for a way to articulate their artistic walking works have adopted Kaprow’s term. For example, walking artist and performance scholar Luis Sotelo identifies participation cartography, his theory of walking as a way to perform the self through the body-in-motion in the landscape, as ‘a specific form of . . . “participation performance”.’58 Likewise, Clare Qualmann describes two walks for her project Huntly Perambulator (2014), as ‘participatory performance walks’ (see chapter 5).59 Qualmann, one of the founders and key stewards of the Walking Artists Network (chapter 4), is explicitly engaged in the exploration of walking as an artistic medium; however, she utilises existing nomenclature that prioritises performance as the location of artistic action rather than the walk itself. Though the artistic medium of walking does not preclude performance, it is not limited to performance, and draws on a wider memory of artistic practice related to its development as an art form.

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1.4.2 Relational Aesthetics Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics has been a touchstone in discussions of participatory art including walking, and the catalyst for a wide variety of critical debate.60 First theorised in a book of the same name, Bourriaud identifies a generation of artists who focus on the development of social relations rather than the production of static art objects; he argues that art can give rise to a ‘specific arena of exchange’ through which new subjectivities can be formed.61 Works of relational aesthetics ‘involve methods of social exchange’ that ‘link individuals and human groups together’ through interactive aesthetic experiences and ‘various communication processes.’62 That is not to say that the object does not play a part in relational aesthetics. Indeed, objects are ‘an intrinsic part of the language’ and exist as ‘vehicles of relations to the other.’63 In the medium of walking, the ‘vehicle of relations’ is the walking body as it moves in relation to the landscape and those who inhabit it, rather than an object in a gallery space. For Bourriaud, artists working in relational aesthetics offer a laboratory for exchange in which a community can reconfigure itself through alternatives to the dominant modes of capitalist subjectification.64 These artists take ‘the whole of human relations and their social context’ as practical and theoretical starting points.65 As cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert points out, however, ‘an experiential laboratory with no ability to publicise its results, with no

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“strategic orientation” to the outside and to the future, remains nothing but an enclosed territory and a depoliticised space.’66 For many artists, the walk is a response to this lack of orientation to the outside; it represents a desire to move beyond the depoliticised laboratory of commodified gallery spaces and into the everyday streets.

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1.4.3 Dialogical Aesthetics Another theory commonly applied to walking art is Grant Kester’s concept of dialogical aesthetics.67 Dialogical aesthetics responds to ‘the lack of resources in modern art theory for engaging with projects that are organised around a collaborative, rather than a specular, relationship with the viewer.’68 In Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004), Kester locates the work of art in ‘a process of communicative exchange rather than a physical object.’69 Similar to Kaprow’s feedback loop, or Bourriaud’s aesthetic exchange, dialogical art engages in an exchange with the audience in which ‘subjectivity is formed through discourse and intersubjective exchange itself.’70 Importantly, dialogical projects are durational and engage their audiences in the overall creation of the artistic work. Dialogical aesthetics ‘unfold through a process of performative interaction,’ which positions the artistic work as a durational process that occurs in collaboration with its audience, rather than a process of aesthetic absorption, as with a traditional art object.71 Though this shift ‘approaches the conditions of theater,’ dialogical aesthetics are based on an aesthetic process of exchange rather than on the way an individual or group performs for an audience.72 This is not, however, a choreographed social exchange that is ‘an a priori event for the consumption of the audience “summoned” by the artist,’ a criticism Kester levels at relational aesthetics;73 rather, works of dialogical aesthetics engage audiences in ‘cumulative process of exchange and dialogue’ in which they help shape the work beyond simply participating in a moment of aesthetic execution.74 While not all of the works I discuss would comfortably fit within Kester’s paradigm—for example, Fulton’s slowalks summon the audience for a specifically choreographed experience—the artistic medium of walking overlaps with dialogical aesthetics in many ways. In particular, Kester’s focus on durational collaboration and exchange are present in many of the works I discuss. Works in the medium of walking, however, are distinguished by their basis in the walking body, which creates a specific type of aesthetic experience. While participation performance, relational aesthetics, and dialogical aesthetics offer ways of approaching works in the medium of walking, I argue these works would benefit from a critical approach that foregrounds the action of walking itself.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 11

1.4.4 Bishop’s Critique

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Art critic and scholar Claire Bishop has offered the most sustained critique of theories around participatory, relational, and collaborative art. In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), Bishop notes the ‘significant presence’ of participatory work in ‘art schools, museums and commercial galleries’; she argues for ‘a more nuanced language to address the artistic status of this work’ to avoid ‘discussing these practices solely in positivist terms, that is, by focusing on demonstrable impact.’75 For Bishop, there is ‘an ethically charged climate in which participatory and socially engaged art has become largely exempt from art criticism.’76 Discussing relational aesthetics, Bishop argues, ‘[w]ithout a sense of what the medium of installation art is, the work cannot attain the holy grail of self-reflexive criticality.’77 Though she acknowledges that ‘in any art that uses people as a medium, ethics will never retreat entirely,’78 she calls for the development of a criteria to address relationality as an aesthetic encounter. My interest in the establishment of the distinct medium of walking responds to Bishop’s critique. In defining walking as a specific artistic medium, I look to contribute to the development of a satisfactory mode of aesthetic critique for walking that provides this self-reflexive criticality. Bishop has dismissed walking as one aspect in a predictable formula of participatory and socially engaged art;79 I position it, however, as the centre of an artistic formula rather than a supporting outreach activity. Though the theories discussed above offer important critical tools for considering artistic walking practices, centreing critical conversation on walking as an artistic medium will allow for a more rigorous engagement with how the specific attributes of walking create a distinct aesthetic experience. 1.5 THE ATTRIBUTES OF WALKING Artists, writers, and philosophers have anecdotally associated walking with creativity, conviviality, well-being, and increased capacity for intellectual thought, a paradigm perhaps mostly strongly established in the United Kingdom by the walks of the British Romantics (see chapter 2). In a study of Nordic academics who walk as part of their research practice (though not as a method for research), Mia Keinänen identifies a ‘connection between space, memory and walking,’ and notes that ‘[w]alking somehow stimulated the subjects’ memory so that they could remember things more easily.’80 The creative capacity of walking has also been confirmed by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, whose study, ‘Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,’ demonstrates that

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walking ‘improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas.’81 The relationship between walking, memory, and creativity is key to its efficacy as a practice, and works in the artistic medium of walking call on the creative stimulation of the walking experience. An essential aspect of this experience is walking’s rhythm—the self-powered body moving through the landscape at an average speed of three miles per hour—which allows for a detailed exploration of the world at an intimate, human-scaled pace. For performance scholar Fiona Wilkie, pace ‘seems to be one of the most enduring claims made about the value of walking,’ and the ‘claim for slowness is used to set walking apart.’82 In A Philosophy of Walking, a treatment of male walking philosophers, Frederic Gros suggests ‘[w]alking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.’83 For Shortell and Brown, editors of Walking in the European City (2014), walking’s ‘slower speed yields enormous richness—narrative and sensory—but at the cost of breadth.’84 In the artistic medium of walking, this lack of breadth is often addressed through the durational nature of the works, many of which unfold through repetition and over time. Wilkie notes, ‘[w]alking performance is often, by its very nature, durational performance, and it therefore foregrounds questions of time and the significance we attach to it.’85 The participants in Keinänen’s research identified the importance of getting into their own rhythm on the walk, and she observed that this ‘was the key for the interviewees to get into a state where they felt they could access and order their knowledge.’86 In the artistic medium of walking, the artist sets a rhythm, which interacts with the personal rhythm of the participant to create a specific artistic experience. Whatever the rhythm set by the artist, however, walking’s slowness is a defining feature. Also important is the design of the walking route. Artists approach routemaking in a variety of ways. Some make use of strictly delineated routes, such as the guided audio walks of Jennie Savage (see chapter 4), or Fulton’s choreographed slowalks (see chapter 3); while others favour free form explorations and collective decision making, such as the mythogeographical walks of Phil Smith (see chapter 4), or Qualmann’s perambulator walks (see chapter 5). In their discussion of walking-talking methodologies, geographers Evans and Jones identify the importance of ‘whether the route is set by the interviewer or the interviewee,’ which is incredibly influential on the method’s results.87 This is also true of artists working with walking, and the route’s design strongly influences the audience’s experience of the walk. Anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Vergunst call walking ‘a profoundly social activity,’88 and multiple researchers have identified the creative potential of talking-walking methodologies.89 Deirdre Heddon, in a discussion of The Walking Library (2012–ongoing), an artwork created in collaboration

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 13

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with Misha Myers (see chapter 4), asserts, ‘walking is always a convivial activity, if you’re not doing it on your own.’90 This is one of the ways that artists working with walking link to dialogical and relational aesthetics, through the creation of convivial spaces of intersubjective exchange. In contrast, however, the convivial environment of the walk occurs in ‘the real world with its protrusions and intrusions and textures of slipperiness or stickiness.’91 These intrusions come from all sorts of places—the topography and built environment, the people encountered on the walk, the social and cultural boundaries established by the location, among others—and people who engage in artistic walks are asked to encounter these textures through the specific design of the artist. Research shows that walking stimulates conversation and creates closer engagements with the environment.92 While the experience of the walking group is characterised by conviviality, engagement with the built environment often takes a critical mode. As Lorimer notes, ‘[m]any contemporary walking studies personify the walker in one of two ways: either as a politically-savvy activist, or, as an artistically-inclined activist,’ both predicated in some way on the radical potential of walking practice.93 Though Lorimer demonstrates this is too simplistic a categorisation, many of the artists I discuss in this text actively interrogate physical and social constructs through their walking works. As an artistic medium, walking emerges, at least in part, from the anti-art and anti-capitalist rules and techniques developed by previous practitioners that form the memories of the medium. While not inherently radical, walking’s unique attributes contribute to its radical potential. 1.6 A WALK THROUGH THE BOOK My focus in this book is primarily on walking practices within the United Kingdom. While geographic and linguistic limitations have contributed to my focus on English-speaking traditions, it also reflects the pioneering role practitioners in the United Kingdom have played in the development of walking as an artistic medium. The British Romantics are commonly considered foundational in the establishment of walking as a cultural act, and prominent British artists such as Long and Fulton have been at the forefront of the use of walking in art. Additionally, there is a strong tradition of psychogeographical walking inspired by the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (see chapters 2 and 4). While psychogeography is best known through the texts of authors such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self, who have turned the dérive into a successful

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literary device, it is better exemplified through the participatory explorations of groups such as Manchester Area Psychogeographic (1995­ –1998), the Leeds Psychogeography Group (2009–2012), the Fife Psychogeographical Collective (2010–ongoing), the Huddersfield Psychogeography Network (2012–ongoing), and the Loiterers Resistance Movement in Manchester (2006–ongoing).94 The diversity of these varying groups attests to the strength of psychogeographical practices in the United Kingdom. Along with the rich artistic and cultural history associated with walking in the United Kingdom, there is also a strong relationship between walking and protest. As Bryant, Burns and Readman note in their introduction to Walking Histories, 1800–1914 (2016), during the nineteenth century ‘in England especially, walking was closely associated with a radical politics.’95 The protest walks of the Chartists, the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, and women’s marches for suffrage are all examples of how walking has been used to forward radical politics.96 This radical walking history is another aspect of the memory of the medium that contemporary artists in the United Kingdom call on in the creation of new work. My discussion of the artistic medium of walking begins with the memories of the medium. In chapter 2, I establish a web of practice that ranges from the foundational walks of the Romantics, to the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Letterist and Situationist Internationals. My approach responds to a call by Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner to look beyond the canonical fraternity of walkers that currently dominates critical considerations of walking.97 Following this, I base my exploration on the walks of two women who were foundational in the establishment of Romantic and Situationist walking practices, but whose contributions have remained marginalised: Dorothy Wordsworth and Michèle Bernstein. Though this chapter will not serve as an exhaustive history of the walking practices that support the work of contemporary practitioners, it establishes the guild of practitioners from which my consideration of the artistic medium of walking develops. Chapters 3 through 6 focus on three organisations that support the artistic medium of walking through varied approaches to its development and make visible the burgeoning work happening in the field: the Walking Artists Network, Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute, and the Walk Exchange. The artistic medium of walking is an emerging conceptual terrain, and it is premature to engage in a detailed comparison of these relatively new organisation’s approaches. Rather than take a comparative approach, I outline their contributions to the field and focus on how they develop overlapping networks of practitioners who are creating a new artistic territory. In chapter 3 I discuss each network’s formation. I look at the specific artistic walking practices from which they emerge, and the role of those practices in their development. I follow this with an in-depth look at each network and the artistic walking works they support.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 15

Chapter 4 focuses on the Walking Artist Network (WAN), the largest international network dedicated to walking as an artistic and research practice. WAN is an open-access network that supports a cross-disciplinary group of artists and researchers working with walking. It does not follow a specific program; rather, it is a member-generated incubator that provides a location for walking practitioners to address the medium critically through both online and offline opportunities. It prioritises meetings based on actually going for a walk, and thus supports the development of work within the artistic medium of walking. Chapter 5 discusses the Walking Institute at Deveron Projects (DP). Located in the remote Scottish town of Huntly, DP is the only arts organisation in the United Kingdom with a specific program focused on commissioning artists to create walks. Their approach emphasises collaborative community practice and makes it imperative that artists create walks that engage with local townsfolk; as such, it encourages work in the artistic medium of walking, rather than creating artistic works in other media that represent the experience of artists’ walks. Through the Walking Institute, DP looks to make global impact through the resolutely local act of walking, while also creating new paths and ways of walking in the Huntly community. Chapter 6 focuses on my creative and critical practice with the Walk Exchange (WE), a NYC-based cooperative I co-founded in 2011 with Dillon de Give, Bess Matassa, Virginia Millington, and Moira Williams. The Walk Exchange developed out of a shared desire to create a community around the walking arts and offer a space to exchange approaches to critical and creative walking practices. It is institutionally unaffiliated and run on an informal, volunteer basis. This provides a contrasting model to the other two organisations, both of which are supported by institutional funding. In this chapter, I offer a specific methodology for a critical approach to creative walking practices and the digital exchange of those practices. The method proposed embraces the digital realm as a way to facilitate the interconnected experiences of walking in different landscapes; in this case between two sets of participants in London and NYC. Rather than a disembodying experience, the digital realm served to connect walkers on different continents through the exchange of walking exercises. 1.7 CONCLUSION: ESTABLISHING A MEDIUM In ‘Walking in the City,’ one of the most referenced theoretical treatments of walking, Michel de Certeau argues for the walk as ‘a space of enunciation.’98 Walking, he argues, requires one to learn a spatial language and act

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out that language through movement; it facilitates an exchange between the space and the self. If walking is akin to a speech act, then it can also function as a storytelling mechanism. For de Certeau, the ‘story does not express a practice. It does not limit itself to telling about a movement. It makes it.’99 He argues the only way to understand a story is ‘if one enters into this movement oneself.’100 This resonates with another oft-quoted figure in the history of walking, Walter Benjamin. In ‘The Storyteller,’ Benjamin argues that storytelling privileges experience over information, it ‘does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report.’101 He prizes the experience of the story over its veracity, and ultimately encourages the creation of new stories. For Benjamin, a story’s counsel is received when the listener is transformed into the storyteller. It is my contention that walking as an artistic medium is predicated on the participant’s movement into the story of the walk. It is in the creation rather than the reception of experience that the medium of walking can be found. The action of going for a walk activates a specific relationship between the artist, audience and the landscape, which distinguishes it from other modes of artistic practice. For Krauss, attention to medium allows the artist and the critic to ‘reclaim the specific from the deadening embrace of the general’ and move away from discussions of art in general, to the discussion of artworks specifically.102 In following Krauss, I focus on specific works in the artistic medium of walking, and use medium to identify what distinguishes them from works that use walking as a process or technique to create art in other media. In contrast to her focus on individual artists as inventors of the medium who embrace the enclosed walls of the gallery space, I look to networks of artists who are making the artistic medium of walking visible through the combination of digital spaces and a penetration of the world beyond the gallery, museum, or exhibition space. This book puts walking at its core: it is vital to its research, practice, and dissemination. It offers a definition for walking as a distinct artistic medium as well as a walking-based critical model for the consideration of creative walks. The contours of walking cannot be discovered by simply reading about them; one must experience the physical and topological intrusions of the landscape on the walking body. Because of this, it is imperative that any critical model for the consideration of walking place the act of walking at its centre. This book combines critical and creative walking approaches to forward its argument for walking as a specific medium. The walking exercises that frame this book articulate my arguments, rather than simply illustrate them, and through the construction of a memory palace I look to articulate the medium of walking through the practice of walking itself.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 17

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NOTES   1.  Lorimer, ‘Walking: New Forms And Spaces For Studies Of Pedestrianism,’ 19.   2.  David Davies, ‘Medium in Art,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181–90, emphasis in original.   3.  See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium,’ Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 305; and Dominic McIver Lopes. Beyond Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7.  4. Rosalind Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 19.  5. Lopes, Beyond Art, 202.   6.  Phil Smith, ‘Radical Twenty-First-Century Walkers and the Romantic Qualities of Leisure Walking,’ in The Routledge International Handbook of Walking, eds. C. Michael Hall, Yael Ram, and Noam Shoval (London: Routledge, 2017), 44.   7.  Jerrold Levinson, ‘Hybrid Art Forms,’ Journal of Aesthetic Education 18, no. 4 (1984): 5–13; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Lopes, Beyond Art.  8. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 127.   9.  Cynthia Morrison-Bell, ‘Foreword,’ in Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff: 40 Years of Art Walking, eds. Cynthia Morrison-Bell and Mike Collier (Sunderland, UK: University of Sunderland, 2013), 9. 10.  Claudia Zeiske, ‘Walking Institute: Vision Document’ (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, June 2013), 13, http://www.deveron-arts.com/site_media/uploads/walking_institute_vision.pdf. 11.  Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner, ‘Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility,’ Contemporary Theatre Review 22, no. 2 (1 May 2012); Simon Pope, ‘Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art and Walking,’ C Magazine Spring, no. 121 (2014); Phil Smith, Walking’s New Movement (Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press, 2015). 12. In 2016, Deveron Projects celebrated its twenty-first birthday and changed their organisation’s name to Deveron Arts. For consistency, I use Deveron Projects throughout the book. 13. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 32. 14.  Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ October 8 (1979): 42. 15.  Krauss, ’Sculpture,’ 43. 16. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 7. 17. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 3. 18. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 127. 19. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 127. 20. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 2. 21. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 2. 22. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 7. 23. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 19. 24. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 127.

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25.  Phil Smith, ‘Walking-Based Arts: A Resource for the Guided Tour?’ Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 13, no. 2 (1 June 2013): 105. 26. Solnit, Wanderlust, 270. 27.  Lorimer, ‘Walking: New Forms,’ 26. 28.  Smith, Phil, ‘The Contemporary Dérive: A Partial Review of Issues Concerning the Contemporary Practice of Psychogeography,’ Cultural Geographies 17, no. 1 (1 January 2010): 108. 29.  Krauss, ‘Sculpture,’ 41. 30.  See Lorimer, ‘Walking: New Forms,’ 26; Charlotte Higgins. ‘Richard Long: “It Was the Swinging 60s. To Be Walking Lines in Fields Was a Bit Different”,’ Guardian, 15 June 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jun/15/ richard-long-swinging-60s-interview; Karen O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (Boston: MIT Press, 2013), 43. 31.  Higgins, ‘Richard Long.’ 32.  Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Reissue Edition (New York: The New Press, 1995), 125. 33.  Richard Long, Richard Long: Heaven and Earth, ed. by Clarrie Wallis. (London: Tate, 2009), 146. 34.  Cited in Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice = El Andar Como Practica Estetica (Barcelona: Editorial Gustava Gili, GG, 2002), 122. 35.  Fulton, Hamish, Mountain Time, Human Time (Milan: Charta, 2010), 39. 36. Hamish Fulton, Wild Life: Walks in the Cairngorms. (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000), 197. 37. Hamish Fulton, France on the Horizon, 1975, black and white photograph and letraset mounted on paper, 43 3/16" × 51 3/4" (110 × 129.5 cm), Tate Modern, London, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fulton-france-on-the-horizon-t03268. 38. Fulton, Wild Life, 192. 39. Fulton, Wild Life, 192. 40. Hamish Fulton, St. Moritz Art Masters 2012—Hamish Fulton Artist Talk, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBFHK6-mfl8. 41. Hamish Fulton, ‘Hamish Fulton, Conversation with Peter Lodermeyer,’ in Personal Structure, Time-Space-Existence, ed. GlobalArtAffairs Foundation (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag Gmbh & Co. KG, 2007), 182. 42.  Some examples of more recent exhibitions include: Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff—40 Years of Walking (2013–14), which toured the United Kingdom; Earl Miller’s Artists’ Walks and the Persistence of Peripateticism (2013) at New York City’s Dorsky Curatorial Galleries; Airspace Gallery’s The Walking Encyclopaedia (2014) in Stoke-on-Trent; Walking Sculpture 1967–2015 (2015) at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; Loitering with Intent (2016) at the People’s History Museum in Manchester; and S.T.E.P (2018) at New York City’s Flux Factory and Queen Museum. For a list of contemporary exhibitions focused on walking, see: http://www.walkingartistsnetwork.org/exhibitions/. 43.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 13. 44.  Francis Alÿs, ‘Transcript of Conversation with Francis Alÿs: Conversations Around Choreography,’ Interview by Siobhan Davies, 2010, http://www.siobhanda vies.com/conversations/alys/transcript.php.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 19

45.  Aitchison, ‘The Walking Encyclopaedia,’ emphasis added. 46. Solnit, Wanderlust, 269. 47. Solnit, Wanderlust, 272. 48. Sullivan, Walking Sculpture, 83. 49. Sullivan, Walking Sculpture, 56. 50. Sullivan, Walking Sculpture, 36. 51.  Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 90. 52. Solnit, Wanderlust, 267. 53. Solnit, Wanderlust, 268. Arguably, this could be traced back to John Cage, who taught seminal courses at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the New School for Social Research in NYC that were attended by Kaprow and other members of the networks that formed around the Neo-Avant-Garde movements of the 1960s. See O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, 75. 54.  Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 184. 55. Kaprow, Essays, 184. 56. Kaprow, Essays, 188. 57. Kaprow, Essays, 204. 58.  Sotelo, ‘Looking Backwards,’ 62. 59.  Clare Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ Studies in the Maternal 8, no. 2 (15 December 2016): 6. 60. For discussions of walking and relational aesthetics, see Simone Hancox, ‘Contemporary Walking Practices and the Situationist International: The Politics of Perambulating the Boundaries Between Art and Life,’ Contemporary Theatre Review 22, no. 2 (1 May 2012): 243; Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ n. 15; Jo Vergunst and Anna Vermehren, ‘The Art of Slow Sociality: Movement, Aesthetics and Shared Understanding,’ The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (1 March 2012): 129; Smith, ‘Walking-Based Arts: A Resource for the Guided Tour?’, 105. 61.  Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel, 2002). 62. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 43. 63. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 47. 64.  Bourriaud’s argument builds largely on notions of subjectivity put forward by Félix Guattari, who provides a ‘toolbox’ for thinking about art as a potential location for the development of subjectivities that are oppositional to capitalism. In The Three Ecologies, Guattari calls for the use of ‘transversal tools’ to enable subjectivity to ‘install itself simultaneously in the realms of the environment, in the major social and institutional assemblages, and symmetrically in the landscapes and fantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual’ (69). The goal being ‘to reduce blindness and bureaucratic-mindedness in favor of openness, overcoming the impasses of both vertical and horizontal organizations, by means of creative organizational innovations’ (ibid.). He forwards a theory of ecosophy, which involves a ‘reframing and a recomposition of the goals of the emancipatory struggles’ (49). For Guattari, ecosophical ways of operating will be ‘more like those of an artist,’ and will lead us to ‘reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and death’ (35). The ethico-aesthetic paradigm that Guattari forwards is

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particularly appealing as a way to theorize the strategic power of the arts. In identifying revolutionary modes of thought as functioning ‘more like those of an artist’ (35), Guattari provides a way to think about art making as a critical and emancipatory tool, one that can rehearse, or create spaces to produce, new modes of subjectivity. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000). 65. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 113. 66.  Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 191. 67.  See Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ n. 15; Misha Myers, ‘“Walk with Me, Talk with Me”: The Art of Conversive Wayfinding,’ Visual Studies 25, no. 1 (2010), 60; and Hilary Ramsden, ‘Walking & Talking: Making Strange Encounters within the Familiar,’ Social & Cultural Geography 18, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 53–77. 68. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 11. 69. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 90. 70. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 112. 71. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 10. 72. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 90. 73.  Grant Kester, The One and the Many (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 32. 74. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 12. 75.  Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 18. 76. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 23. 77.  Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,’ October 110 (October 2004): 63–64, emphasis in original. 78. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 39. 79. Bishop, Artifical Hells, 21. 80.  Mia Keinänen, ‘Taking Your Mind for a Walk: A Qualitative Investigation of Walking and Thinking among Nine Norwegian Academics,’ Higher Education 71, no. 4 (2016): 600. 81.  Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, ‘Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40, no. 4 (2014): 1142. 82.  Fiona Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 35. 83.  Frederic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking (London: Verso Books, 2014), 2. 84.  Timothy Shortell and Evrick Brown, Walking in the European City: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 10. 85. Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility, 37. 86.  Keinänen, ‘Taking Your Mind for a Walk,’ 8. 87.  James Evans and Phil Jones, ‘The Walking Interview: Methodology, Mobility and Place,’ Applied Geography 31, no. 2 (April 2011): 850. 88. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Aldershot, England: Routledge, 2008), 1. 89.  Anderson, 2004; Myers, 2009; Ramsden, 2014, p. 241.

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Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium 21

  90.  Dee Heddon, ‘An Interview to: The Walking Library,’ interview by My Bookcase (blog), 20 October 2014, http://mybookcase.org/an-interview-to-the-walkinglibrary/. It is important to note that not all works in the medium of walking set up convivial or group atmospheres. Oppezzo and Schwartz argue that walking fosters creativity in ways that move beyond increased capacity for discussion: ‘[s]imply talking more’ they argue ‘[is] not the sole mechanism for increased creativity’ (1144). Indeed, works in the medium of walking are sometimes completed in silence, or by solitary walkers, where increased conversation is not the focus of the walking experience.   91.  Jo Lee Vergunst, ‘Taking a Trip and Taking Care in Everyday Life,’ in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, eds. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (Aldershot, England: Routledge, 2008), 120.   92.  Evans and Jones, ‘The Walking Interview,’ p. 850; Maggie O’Neill, Brian Roberts, and Andrew Sparkes, eds., Advances in Biographical Methods: Creative Applications (London: Routledge, 2014), 76; Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, ‘Towards a Walking-Based Pedagogy,’ Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 14, no. 1 (25 November 2016): 157; Keinänen, ‘Taking Your Mind for a Walk.’   93.  Lorimer, ‘Walking: New Forms,’ 25.   94.  For an overview of contemporary psychogeographic practices, see Tina Richardson, ed., Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), or Shortell and Brown, Walking in the European City: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography, 8–10.   95.  Chad Carl Bryant, Arthur Burns, and Paul Readman, eds., Walking Histories, 1800–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 22–23.   96.  For a good overview of Chartist and other protest walks of the period, see Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016). For a discussion of the walking and protest in the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, see John Walton, ‘The Northern Rambler: Recreational Walking and the Popular Politics of Industrial England, from Peterloo to the 1930s,’ in Labour History Review 78, no. 3 (2013): 262–68. Regarding the role of walking in the women’s suffrage movement, see Jennifer L. Borda, ‘The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910–1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy,’ Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 1 (2002): 25–52.   97.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 224.   98.  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 98.  99. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 81. 100.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 81. 101. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 86. 102.  Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium,’ 305.

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Chapter Two

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A Romantic Drift through the History of Walking

If the artistic medium of walking is undergirded by its memory—the practices and techniques developed by a guild of previous walking practitioners—then it is necessary to begin with a discussion of the forbears of the medium. I will not attempt an exhaustive review of the history of walking and its relationship to art, which is beyond the scope of this book; rather, I look to provide a foundation from which to consider contemporary walking practices. Scholars have started to map a history of walking focused on the relational, dialogic, and social nature of the practice;1 however, considerations of walking remain dominated by a specific type of walker: the white, able-bodied male who drops his everyday relationships to engage in epic journeys, be these solitary rambles through remote locales, or wild urban explorations with a likeminded group.2 In contrast, I focus on marginalised influences in walking’s history, to contribute to a recasting of the canon that puts race, gender, and ability at the forefront of any critical consideration of walking art. The need for a new critical approach has been argued most forcefully by Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner in their essay ‘Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility’ (2012). Heddon and Turner argue considerations of walking feature ‘the reiteration of a particular genealogy—or fraternity’ of walking practices, which has contributed to a masculinist image of walking and walkers.3 In response, they call for a framework that positions the history of walking ‘as part of a web, rather than as a single trajectory,’ and which stresses the interdependence of walking practices, both solitary and collective.4 For Heddon and Turner, ‘[t]he represented landscape of walking as an aesthetic practice is 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.’5 Both of these discourses ‘presume a universal walker, whose experience is uninflected by 23

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gender’ and where the walker is ‘explicitly and implicitly . . . typically male.’6 Class, race, and physical ability are also overlooked, a fact which results in a walking canon focused on those perceived to be socially and physically independent, and able to freely traverse both urban and rural spaces. In response, this chapter centres marginalised perspectives in its discussion of the enduring historical discourses around walking. I begin with the British Romantics, who are often considered to establish walking as a cultural practice.7 In particular, I look at the walks of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose journals and travel writings reveal the Romantic practice of walking together, in contrast to the dominant trope of the solitary male walker in the sublime wilderness. Following this, I discuss the explicitly anti-art walks of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (LI/SI), one of the most consistent reference points for discussions of contemporary artists working with walking.8 Few accounts of LI/SI walks exist, however, Michèle Bernstein’s The Night (1961) provides a literary version of one, from which my discussion draws. I then consider a drift attempted by Abdelhafid Khatib, which illuminates some of the tensions around walking, race and access to public space often overlooked in discussions of the SI. Bernstein has remarked that the SI was born from the twin heads of Dada and Surrealism,9 and in the final section of this chapter I look at their contributions to the web of practices that are foundational to the memory of the medium.

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2.1 DOROTHY WORDSWORTH AND THE ROMANTIC SOCIAL NETWORK Romantic concepts exercise an outsized influence on contemporary considerations of walking. Solnit argues that during Romanticism, walking ‘become[s] an expressive medium,’10 and scholars consistently cite the Romantics, and particularly the British Romantics, as foundational to the development of walking art.11 The mode of walking that continues to be most associated with Romanticism is that of the solitary explorer who discovers his individual genius through epic encounters with the sublime.12 Despite this stereotype, there exists an alternative lineage of Romantic subjectivity and behaviour evidenced by sources outside of the canon, such as the journals and travelogues of Romantic women. Scholar Anne Mellor argues that Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals evidence ‘a model of affiliation rather than a model of individual achievement,’13 and it is this model on which I build my consideration of Romantic walking behaviours. In Keywords, cultural theorist Raymond Williams identifies several tropes established by the Romantics: ‘uniqueness’; nature as a cure for an ‘obsolete or corrupt society’; and ‘a free or liberated imagination.’14 Building on Williams, Jeremy Gilbert points out that Romanticism is largely responsible for

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A Romantic Drift 25

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the notion that our subjective internal lives are ‘in some sense where the truth of our selves is to be located.’15 Since the Romantics, he argues, ‘“[c]reativity” is understood to be a quality possessed by talented individuals rather than by groups.’16 These tropes have come to symbolise a certain set of priorities that are represented through the image of the solitary Romantic walker, often considered the iconic Romantic image.17 This is typified by Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) (see figure 2.1),

Figure 2.1.  Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) (Source: Kunsthalle Hamburger)

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which has come to represent the wild, mythical, sublime creativity and solitude of the Romantic self-made genius. William Wordsworth is the Romantic poet most closely associated with walking, and he exerts a strong influence on the establishment of Romantic tropes. In ‘“Who’s Afraid for William Wordsworth?”: Some Thoughts on “Romanticism” in 2012,’ Gillian Russell argues that by the 1970s, the Romantic ‘canon was effectively narrowed to the work of one man, Wordsworth.’18 Sparknotes, a compendium of concise summaries of canonical texts designed to give students in secondary education a brief overview of a (likely unread) work, provides a good example of how his walks are framed for contemporary readers. Sparknotes tells us,

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The speakers of [William] Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers: they roam solitarily, they travel over the moors, they take private walks through the highlands of Scotland. Active wandering allows the characters to experience and participate in the vastness and beauty of the natural world. Moving from place to place also allows the wanderer to make discoveries about himself.19

In these notes, one can identify the shorthand used to describe Romantic walking: the walker, set apart from society, moves into the natural world to discover himself through sublime exploratory journeys. Though William Wordsworth’s poems are associated with the epic, seemingly solitary walks he took through different wild locations, they were composed in collaboration with his sister, who acted as walking companion, secretary, editor, and wordsmith.20 In her journals, Dorothy discusses the creation and revision of poems, both William’s and her own, in the orchard near their lodging, or the fir grove of Brothers Wood.21 She and William walk ‘backwards and forwards’ as they work on their poetry, reading the poems aloud, rewriting and pacing for new ideas.22 As literary scholar Scott Krawczyk has noted, Dorothy’s journals were ‘an integral part of the joint labor of poetic production’ and played an important role in shaping William’s writing.23 Indeed, one of his most famous poems, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ often referred to as ‘Daffodils,’ was drawn from an account in her journal.24 Dorothy’s walking has been addressed—Morris Marples, Jeffery Robinson, Anne Wallace, and Robin Jarvis all dedicate space to her walks—but, as Robinson points out, critics often deny ‘the prodigious walking, in her journals and recollections’ in favour of her position as ‘the poet of the home.’25 Walking, however, was an essential part of her daily life. It was so embedded in her routine that not walking merits mention in her journals: ‘A cold evening. Molly stuck the peas. I weeded a little. Did not walk.’26 Notes such as these occur throughout her journals, with an accompanying reason for the lack of ambulation.27

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A Romantic Drift 27

Her writings reveal walking as simultaneously social and solitary. For example, reflecting on a walk home after inquiring about nearby lodgings for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their friend and fellow Romantic collaborator, Wordsworth writes with relief that she was ‘only accompanied by Mrs. Nicholson as far as Rydale.’28 ‘This was very kind,’ she reflects, ‘but God be thanked, I want not society by a moonlit lake.’29 When Wordsworth does walk alone, she is often accompanied by memories of those who have walked with her. In a letter to her friend Jane Pollard, Wordsworth gives attention to the natural surroundings, as well as their position as a social space: ‘often have I gone out when the keenest north wind has been whistling amongst the trees over our heads, and have paced that walk in the garden, which will always be dear to me—for remembrance of those very long conversations I have had upon it supported by the arms of my brother.’30 In another passage in her journal, she writes of sitting in the fir grove and sensing the presence of her missing companions: ‘I sate [sic] a while upon my last summer seat, the mossy stone. William’s, unoccupied, beside me, and the space between, where Coleridge has so often lain.’31 Likewise, her travel writings offer insight into how she and her brother inhabited solitary spaces together and reveal the relational, networked nature of Romantic walking practices. In Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, 1803 A.D. (1874), she demonstrates the social nature of walks into epic and remote locales. Throughout the travelogue, she walks extensively, with her brother and Coleridge, local guides, and people they encounter along the way. She comments on ‘the effect of solitary places in making men friends,’32 and the way that chance encounters can forge strong bonds. On a walk from Stirling to Falkirk, the Wordsworths are ‘greeted by a Highland drover’ who, though they had never met him before, spoke as if they ‘had been well known to him.’33 In another passage, she describes how she and William walk ‘cheerfully along in the sunshine, each of us alone’ as they traverse a hill to Johncrawford.34 She identifies Scotland as ‘the country above all others that I have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve out his own pleasures; there are so many inhabited solitudes.’35 Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings demonstrate how the solitary and social intermingle, and offer an example of Heddon and Turner’s walking web, where the ‘familiar, local, temporal and socio-cultural, as well as the unknown, immediate, solitary, wild’ are ‘entangled with one another.’36 As literature scholar Barbara Taylor points out, in the eighteenth century solitude meant many things—‘religious devotions, scholarship, leisure, introspection, daydreaming, a melancholy disposition’—but it only rarely meant ‘total aloneness,’ which was denominated as ‘absolute solitude.’37 Wordsworth’s text brings attention to the way solitary spaces are inhabited together and

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provides evidence of the social interactions and walking behaviours that contributed to the Romantic representations of walking practice. As scholar Betty Hagglund has noted, Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings functioned as a navigational tool, both geographically and socially, and ‘reflect her intimate community.’38 Despite lack of publication during her lifetime, her journals and travel writings were read by her brother and circulated among her peers. Though not officially part of the canon of Romantic literature, her texts reveal that the dominant notion of the Romantic genius discovering himself by walking alone in the landscape is a myth. In her writings, the local and remote, the solitary and communal are entangled and interconnected. Vergunst points out that critics of William Wordsworth’s poetry ‘have not generally been concerned with the tread of the walk itself.’39 For Vergunst, it is essential to focus critical consideration on ‘the actions of the walking body and the rhythms of walking as the source of creativity.’40 Journals and travelogues from the period offer insight into the actual behaviours of walking through their detailed focus on the everyday. Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings demonstrate that the Romantics often walked together, and the process of translating those walks into the medium of poetry was a collaborative process. Indeed, she is simply one example of the collaborative role women played in the development of Romantic walking practices. There are a variety of other Romantic walking women, including Anne Lister, Sarah Stoddart, and Mary Shelley, and there is scope for further research into the role women played in the construction of the walking sensibilities of the period. A new memory of artistic walking must start with this reconsideration and remember the contribution of a variety of social actors to the foundations of cultural walking practices. 2.2 DRIFTING WITH BERNSTEIN AND KHATIB The practices of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (LI/SI) have also heavily influenced the artistic medium of walking. The SI was formed in 1957 by a group of artists, theorists, and activists comprised of an amalgamation of already existing artists’ collectives: The Letterist International, The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association (represented by sole member Ralph Rumney). Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle (1967) has become a canonical distillation of the Situationist critique, is the dominant figure in considerations of the LI/SI.41 In contrast, little has been said about the role of Michèle Bernstein, who joined the LI in 1952 and remained a part of the

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A Romantic Drift 29

SI through 1967, shortly before its official dissolution in 1972 and a few years after the end of her romantic relationship with Debord.42 As Anthony Hayes rightfully argues in his doctoral thesis, ‘How the Situationist International Became What It Was’ (2017), the SI was above all a collective endeavour, created through collaboration.43 Through my focus on Bernstein, I do not intend to diminish the collective nature of the group; rather, I look to bring attention to a particularly active member of the collective who contributed primarily through practice, rather than individually signed public proclamations. The dérive, a method of drifting conceived by the LI and developed by the SI, is a consistent point of reference for contemporary artists and theorists working with walking.44 It is a technique in which participants drop their everyday relationships, ‘their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action,’ to participate in exploratory walks through urban spaces, guided ‘by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’45 At its most basic, the dérive is about walking through the city together. In ‘Theory of the Dérive’ (1958), Debord states that ‘[o]ne can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.’46 Though the solitary dérive is possible, it is fundamentally a group activity designed to actively interrogate and potentially transform the city. The dérive has two stated goals: the discovery and détournement of the city’s ‘psychogeographical’ contours, and ‘engagement in playful-constructive behaviour.’47 Détournement, short for ‘détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements,’ is a method by which already existing materials are combined to create new meanings, ostensibly in the service of overthrowing capitalism and the society of the spectacle.48 The dérive is a physical détournement, in which the city itself is re-spliced and overdubbed through a physical resistance to, and playful deconstruction of, urban space. As stated in the ‘Situationist International Manifesto’ the ultimate goal of the SI is the ‘realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.’49 It is a theory of interaction, dialogue and ‘total participation’ through the ‘organization of the directly lived moment.’50 As Bernstein explains, the dérive ‘wasn’t a hobby, [the SI] wanted to make it a way of life.’51 It was through practice that the SI would contribute to ‘the social revolution,’ replacing ‘the old world with a new one.’52 For Bernstein and the Situationists, the dérive was a foundational practice in the impending revolution. In an interview with Bernstein’s second husband, Ralph Rumney, artist and activist Stewart Home asked about her role in the International, noting, she is

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‘always lurking in the background of the situationist [sic] saga.’53 Rumney’s response is worth quoting in full:

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[y]ou can’t put your finger on it because she won’t tell you and she wouldn’t thank me if I told you. Since she was my wife, I’ve got to respect her wishes. I can tell you various little things. She typed all the Potlatchs [sic], all the [SI] journals and so on. One of the curious things about the [SI] was that it was extraordinarily anti-feminist in practice. Women were there to type, cook supper and so on. I rather disapproved of this. Michèle had, and has, an extraordinarily powerful and perceptive mind which is shown by the fact that she is among the most important literary critics in France today. A lot of the theory, particularly the political theory, I think originated with Michèle rather than Debord, he just took it over and put his name to it.54

As Bernstein’s ex-husband and a founder member of the SI excluded by Debord only a year after its foundation, Rumney is not an entirely reliable narrator. His perspective, however, does reveal Bernstein’s likely influence on the theoretical foundations of Situationist practice. Though Bernstein did not ‘write a lot,’ she ‘was speaking a lot with Guy [Debord] in private and in public, sharing ideas,’ and presumably walking with him.55 Her reticence to produce work for the consumption of the spectacle, and her focus on dialogue, interaction and the directly lived moment, in some ways make her an ideal Situationist. Indeed, Rumney identifies her as ‘the most Situationist of all.’56 According to Rumney, it was Bernstein who ‘picked everyone up on the fact that one does not say “Situationism” but “Situationist”’ to prevent it from becoming just another ideology, something that remains a guiding tenant of Situationist theory.57 More than just an attendant lover, Bernstein was vital in the production and dissemination of Letterist and Situationist ideas. Indeed, it was the success of her two novels, All the Kings Horses (1960) and The Night (1961), that led to the publication of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.58 According to Bernstein, she convinced her publisher, Edmund Buchet, to publish Debord’s text despite a probable profit loss by promising he could deduct any losses ‘out of the sales of [her] next novel.’59 Greil Marcus’s narration of the origin of the novels serves as a fitting example of the marginalisation of her labour in the LI/SI. In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), the first major text to trace the SI’s legacy, he credits the initial idea for the novels to Debord: ‘Michèle must write a novel, Debord said. I cannot write a novel, she said—I have no imagination.’60 Recent interviews with Bernstein have corrected the record, and she has clearly stated that writing the novels was her decision.61 All the Kings Horses and The Night were regarded as jokes created only to make money, and were not discussed by the Situationists, or mentioned in

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any publications.62 As Bernstein explains, ‘in 1957 my husband [Debord] and I were rather skint. . . . So, to make ends meet, to earn our bread and butter, I decided to write a novel.’63 Both novels follow the same storyline, taken from Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), but they détourn different literary styles, with All the Kings Horses drawing from the racy pulp novels that were popular at the time, and The Night employing the literary avant-garde style of nouveau roman, which ‘was then at the cutting edge of received modernity.’64 The novels, which function as unintentional romans à clef,65 provide insight into key Situationist concepts, such as dérive, detournement, and psychogeography, as written from Bernstein’s perspective. Heddon and Turner argue that All the Kings Horses ‘evokes the way that the solitary female walker may be made painfully aware of her own body as spectacle’; for them, this ‘gendered self’ stands ‘in stark contrast to the masculinist presumptions’ that dominate the practices of the SI.66 All the Kings Horses is often cited for its description of the dérive in an exchange between Gilles and Carole, characters based roughly on Debord and cabaret singer Michèle Mochot:

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“What do you do, exactly? I have no idea.” “I reify,” he answered. “It’s a serious job,” I added. “Yes, it is,” he said. “I see,” Carol observed with admiration. “Serious work, with big books and a big table cluttered with papers.” “No,” said Gilles. “I walk. Mostly I walk.”67

In this passage, Bernstein’s characters elevate walking beyond a simple pastime or hobby, it is serious work embedded in Marxist critique. The ephemeral practice of the drift flips reification on its head through the organisation of the directly lived moment and the development of new relationships to the social and spatial contours of the city. Though this passage is the most oft quoted from Bernstein’s novels, it is The Night (1961) that uses the dérive as a framing mechanism. There are two stated goals for a dérive, ‘to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself,’ though the two goals ‘overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state.’68 In The Night, Bernstein frames the dérive as a moment of emotional disorientation through the experiences of two lovers on their final drift through Paris’s Fifth Arrondissement, the famous Left Bank traipsed by earlier generations of the avant garde. Bernstein’s characters walk through the night, entwined in each other’s arms, following deserted paths to ‘avoid the usual encounters in the square, which would doubtless be rather dull, not to mention untimely.’69 They drop the everyday habits of their relationships, both romantic and social, to discover the contours of the city as inflected by their walk.

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As they wander along the Rue de l’Estrapade, Carole states, ‘[i]t’s funny walking at night without any purpose. Or rather, it’s funny what others consider goals, the things they think they have to do.’70 Carole is a new initiate to the drift and still discovering its contours. Gilles explains it is better to drift during the day, ‘it’s more difficult, the day. . . . Everything takes you back to daily life.’71 In ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ Debord notes ‘that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives,’ in part because the need to resist the habits of everyday life are less magnified.72 This sense of friction is essential to the Situationist mission—the work is playful but also constructive; it pushes against the established everyday in an effort to replace it with a new way of living. At the end of the novel, Gilles’s and Carole’s drift finishes near where it started, at Petit-Pont, just past the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Though they have drifted together through the night, the distance from their starting point is small. They leave the Fifth Arrondissement in search of a taxi, which brings the novel, and ostensibly their relationship, to a close. While the fictional Gilles and Carole drift in a relatively unobstructed manner through Paris at night, Situationist Abdelhafid Khatib’s ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles’ (1958) identifies social factors that shape and often limit participants’ experiences. As noted in an editorial included in the original publication, Khatib’s night drift through Paris was ‘incomplete on several fundamental points’ due to police regulations that banned North Africans ‘from the streets after half past nine in the evening.’73 Following two arrests for breaking curfew, he abandoned his attempt at a psychogeographical exploration of the area. Khatib’s text brings attention to the challenges of drifting for a person whose movement is restricted, be this by gender, race, or ability. In ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ Debord famously cites a study that diagrammed the movement of a female student in Paris over the course of one year, whose ‘itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations’; however, he never factors in other limitations that might restrict a woman’s movement in space.74 As performance scholar Sharanya Murali notes in her discussion of drifting in New Dheli, India, her freedom to move, while not legally restricted, is dictated by concerns for her safety and how people interact with her while drifting through public space. She describes ‘ignoring the “playful” element of the drift that encourages venturing into unknown sites’ unless ‘the sky was lit and the crowds were heavy,’ which allowed her to ‘familiarise [herself] with it and then walk out quickly.’75 For Murali, her inability to enact a traditional drift relates to Khatib’s inability to complete his: ‘Much like Khatib, my failed moments as a native/ethnographer discomfortingly at “home” on the drift reveal much about drifting and Old Delhi even if they do

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A Romantic Drift 33

not illuminate traditionally Situationist concerns such as ambiances.’76 Likewise, psychogeographer Morag Rose has noted that while conducting walking interviews with women for her doctoral research she was ‘reminded there are hazards integral to a merely being a female with the audacity to desire a presence on contemporary streets. Interviews were frequently disrupted by men, and women spoke of a need to be alert to threats and a constant underlying sense that the city privileges a certain kind of masculinity.’77 This gendered element of walking in certain spaces changes the nature of the dérive and the way participants engage with it. Murali also considers Khatib’s drift in relation to ‘disability and other forms of marginalisation’;78 for Murali, the obstructions to activity caused by barricades, lorries, and other movement of the city in this inhospitable region of Paris, can be translated or applied to the everyday experiences of barriers and boundaries experienced by disabled drifters. As Steve Graby has discussed, disabled persons may have their wandering pathologised, as evidenced by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions’ suggestion that ‘“wandering behaviour” in people diagnosed with autism or other cognitive impairments’ be added to the International Classification of Diseases.79 Graby notes that this pathologises the dérive and psychogeography for walkers with cognitive impairments, and where it might ‘seem pretentious, perhaps even ridiculous, when claimed as a revolutionary act’ by ‘white, male, nondisabled and, mostly, class-privileged’ participants, it has the potential to be a radical act of resistance for those marginalised or stigmatised for their assertion of a right to public space.80 The derive continues to influence contemporary practitioners working with walking, and Letterist/Situationist practices form an important base for the memory of the medium. In addressing the Situationist legacy, I have focused on Bernstein and Khatib to highlight the role gender, race, and ability play in walking practices both historical and contemporary.81 Though Bernstein’s novels are not straightforward presentations of LI/SI practices, they highlight an under-considered strand of Situationist thought focused on emotional disorientation. Additionally, despite Khatib’s limited contributions to the literature of the drift, his experience illuminates its challenges for those whose movement is restricted. 2.3 FROM THE FEET OF DADA AND SURREALISM Members of LI/SI maintained the avant-garde tradition of opposition, and the establishment of the Internationals was marked by a denunciation of their predecessors. In The Tribe, his autobiographical retelling of the Letterist

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story, Jean Michel Mension notes, ‘Dadaists, Surrealists, they were our prime enemies.’82 The Surrealists were ‘old timers who had tried to do things but failed.’83 Or, as the SI states in their text ‘The Sound and the Fury’ (1958), ‘[i]f we are not surrealists, it is because surrealism has become a total bore.’84 Regardless, the Situationists remain indebted to their avant-garde predecessors, something Bernstein acknowledges by ending The Night in front of ‘the church of Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre,’ the site of the fabled Dada excursion of 1921.85 Indeed, Bernstein has said that the SI was born from the twin heads of Dada and Surrealism—Dada the father they loved and Surrealism the father they hated—and one can see the traces of those movements in the development of LI/SI walking practices.86 I will now take a moment to move backward toward the Romantics and trace a web of memory that encompasses the walking practices of the Dadaists and Surrealists. There is some agreement that the Dada excursion to the Church of SaintJulien-le-Pauvre in Paris established the walk itself as a work of art, or, rather a work of anti-art.87 The excursion took place on 14 April 1921, ‘[u]nder the supervision of: Gabrielle Buffet, Louis Aragon, Arp, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Th. Fraenkel, J. Hussar, Benjamin Péret, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jacques Rigaut, Phillippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara.’88 Despite this collective supervision, André Breton is the most influential voice in the historical record, no doubt due in part to his authorship of the most widely read history of the event, ‘Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the 1921 Dada Season.’ The excursion was intended to be the first in a season of visits to sites ‘that do not really have any reason to exist,’ though none of the other walks came to fruition.89 Details concerning the event are both vague and conflicting. In Breton’s telling, hundreds of people arrived, though it was more likely a group of about a dozen Dadaists and fifty spectators huddled together under umbrellas on a soggy grey day.90 By all accounts, the inclement weather discouraged further walks and changed the nature of the sole excursion executed. To keep the audience’s attention in the rain, the Dadaists presented a series of improvised lectures. Breton opened the event with a speech that explicitly connected the excursion to Romantic walking practices. He addressed the crowd and proclaimed, ‘[i]t may seem sweet to you, on a day of pleasant spring rain (good for the harvest), to stroll by the Seine and see in us a mischievous youth similar to the young Romantics, who gave their vigor to the nineteenth century.’91 The walk was not a retread of Romantic tropes, rather, it was ‘a new interpretation of nature, applied this time not to art, but to life.’92 In a radical reclaiming of Romantic walking traditions, the Dada excursion highlighted the social and collective aspects of walking in the ‘nature’ of urban space.

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A Romantic Drift 35

Breton calls walking an ‘odd pleasure’ that requires the goodwill of the audience.93 In contrast to the shock tactics exemplified by Dada performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, or at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris, walking created a convivial space for an artistic experience (not a mere entertainment) that confronted the world around them. ‘By conjoining thought with gesture,’ Breton states, ‘Dada has left the realm of the shadows to venture onto solid ground.’94 One of the key techniques the excursion established was the subversion of the guided tour. Rather than historical information regarding picturesque sites, the Dadaists engaged in a variety of seemingly nonsensical tactics. For example, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes functioned as a tour guide for the walk. Holding ‘a big Larousse dictionary,’ he would stop before a monument, sculpture, or column and ‘read an article chosen at random from the volume.’95 After ninety minutes of Dada performance, the remaining audience (who by that point had begun to disperse) ‘were offered surprise envelopes containing “sentences, portraits, business cards, bits of cloth, landscapes,” [and] obscene drawings,’ among other things.96 The Dadaists did not physically alter the space, and the envelopes were one of the few bits of ephemera produced by the walk; otherwise only programs, flyers, stories, and a single photograph remain.97 The refusal to produce art objects or create public sculptures focused the excursion entirely on the relationship between the artists, walkers, and the space they encountered/inhabited together, and is an essential part of its mythology. Though walking-based art since Fulton and Long has since transformed the walk into a saleable object, the Dada excursion actively rejected the capitalist market.98 This aspect of the Dada legacy, which was also a key influence on the development of the dérive and the anti-art focus of the Situationist International, continues to inform the work of artists using walking as an anti-capitalist practice. Though considered a failure, the Dada excursion is an essential part of the memory of the artistic medium of walking; it established precedents and techniques that continue to influence contemporary practitioners. Art historian T. J. Demos argues that, while the excursion ‘never had time to develop fully as an artistic paradigm,’ it figures as an experimental modelling of a new kind of activity and ‘still might be added to the list of Dada’s major contributions to modern art, including the ready-made, montage, and performance.’99 Its key contributions include: the movement of art from the closed space of the gallery or theatre into the open space of the street; the foregrounding of the audience’s subjective experience of walking together; the development of the walk as a convivial space dependent on the goodwill of participants who confront the landscape together; and the establishment of the walk as art, or anti-art (Breton fails to distinguish between the two).100 Breton would further develop artistic walking strategies as a founder member of the Surrealists,

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an avant-garde movement formed by members of the Paris Dada contingent, among others. As Breton defined it in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), Surrealism looked to express the ‘actual functioning of thought’ through ‘psychic automatism in its pure state.’ The Surrealists rejected ‘control exercised by reason’ and looked to subconscious and unconscious processes in the creation of art.101 From unplanned group walks through Paris to Meret Oppenheim’s fabled walks on high ledges, walking is present throughout the Surrealist project.102 In 1923, Breton organised an excursion with three other Surrealists, Louis Aragon, Max Morise, and Roger Vitrac; together they set out to Blois, a place they had chosen randomly on a map, for a walk in the countryside.103 The excursion ended in ‘mounting hostility, fatigue, and disorientation,’ but Breton claimed it ‘hardly disappointing, no matter how narrow its range, because it probed the boundaries between waking life and dream life.’104 Unlike the Dada excursion, Surrealist walks were rarely public art events; rather, walking formed an important part of their process of art making. The most famous manifestations of Surrealist walks exist in novels, such as Breton’s Nadja (1928) or Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926), which follow the authors as they stalk through Paris (and after the women within it).105 In her doctoral thesis, ‘A Few Steps In A Revolution Of Everyday Life: Walking With The Surrealists, The Situationist International and Fluxus’ (2010), Lori Waxman argues for the central role of walking in the production of Surrealists works. Waxman notes the Surrealist ‘project was less about solo than collective production’ and stresses the role of unplanned group walks throughout the city.106 Though solitary walking provided access to some of the mysterious forces of urban spaces, ‘walking with a compatriot, a companionable, like-minded soul, or following in the footsteps of the other’s uncontrolled passions, promised even more.’107 In this way, the Surrealists continued the recasting of Romantic walking practices through collective, social behaviour, and further developed walking as a mode of affiliation. Though Surrealism is often associated with strong personalities such as Breton and Aragon, the Surrealist project was about tapping into the collective unconscious, and walking through the city together was a primary way to do that. Benjamin argues that Surrealist writings are ‘not literature but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature’; rather, they are ‘concerned literally with experiences, not with theories and still less with phantasms.’108 In this way, written expressions of Surrealist walking practices are not simply literature; rather, they invite the reader into the mystical world of Surrealism through encounters on foot—a shift that continues the move to the street begun through the Dada excursion. Though the Surrealists didn’t necessarily frame their walks

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A Romantic Drift 37

as public events, the art they created continues to serve as an inspiration for actual walking practices. Bernstein identifies the Surrealists as a despised influence, but they are responsible for developing the potential of the unplanned drift through Paris in search of urban mysteries.

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2.4 AN INCOMPLETE MEMORY OF THE MEDIUM Historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, ‘though it is by no means clear what romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed.’109 The memory of the artistic medium of walking develops from this radical foundation. Multiple scholars have discussed British psychogeography in relation to the Romantic urban walks of William Blake and Thomas de Quincey;110 likewise, Sam Cooper in his text The Situationist International in Britain: Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde (2017) illuminates the Romantic foundations of Situationist experiments in England.111 These discussions link practices on opposite ends of the historical avant garde and demonstrate the web of walking practices that undergird the memory of the medium. The Romantic foundations for the art of walking out, the Dadaist establishment of the walk as anti-art, the Surrealist commitment to the exploration of the collective unconscious through wandering the city, and the SI’s refusal to make art in favour of the directlylived moment, all contribute to a web of radical practices that support the medium of walking. Though supported by a radical memory, it is important to note that the practices inherited from the LI/SI and other radical walkers remain vulnerable to the recuperation they were originally intended to combat.112 In Walking’s New Movement, Phil Smith asks whether the resistant tendencies of walking have been overstated.113 Likewise, Simon Pope asserts that ‘[w]alking is in no way free from either the overt disciplining or naturalized cultural mores that influence artists’ and others’ lives.114 Indeed, this danger is indicated by what Alastair Bonnett identifies as the diversification of the term psychogeography ‘to include a wide range of artistic and literary’ products that drain it of its radical edge.115 Arts scholar Simone Hancox argues, ‘it is important not to presuppose that walking is inherently political simply because it requires participation.’116 For Hancox, ‘[t]he politics at stake’ depend on the ‘latent possibility that . . . the participant’s personal aesthetic co-ordinates will be transformed,’ a transformation facilitated by the artist’s framing of the walking experience.117 The politics of a walk are based on how it is framed by the artist and experienced by the participant, and though walking art emerges from an anti-art, anti-capitalist memory, it is not necessarily immune to recuperation

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by market forces. Nevertheless, the attributes of walking—its slow pace, the relationship it builds to the landscape and the other people in the landscape, and its ability to stimulate creative and critical thinking—combined with the memory of the medium that I have outlined in this chapter, make it uniquely suited to radical practice. The breadth of walking’s history, both artistic and otherwise, makes mapping the full memory of the medium beyond the scope of any individual’s research; as Careri suggests, walking is the first ‘symbolic form with which to transform the landscape.’118 As a result, I have skipped a number of important precedents, perhaps most notably, the flâneur. The flâneur is an archetype known for a style of strolling through urban spaces in a detached manner. As Wilkie notes, it is one of the ‘standard positions from which to theorize one’s walking’ and it is often evoked in discussions of walking art.119 Flânerie, however, is by definition a solitary activity characterised by ‘anonymity and observation’;120 and, as Janet Wolff has pointed out in her seminal essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity,’ ‘invariably male.’121 In contrast, the memory of the medium I am tracing looks beyond the commonly-considered fraternity of walkers, of which the flâneur is an essential figure, to trace walking’s social web. I have also not discussed artistic uses of walking in the 1960s and 1970s, which continued to expand as a new avant garde drew from earlier walking traditions. Gutai artists in Japan,122 the pedestrian dance explorations of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and other members of the network around the Judson Church,123 the walking scores, both practical and imaginary, of Fluxus,124 the Happenings of Allan Kaprow and others,125 and minimalist, land, earth, and conceptual artists working in the United Kingdom and United States,126 all used walking in their artistic practice. They blurred the lines between art and everyday life, and challenged social, spatial, and artistic structures. More recently, the site-specific walking performances of groups such as Wrights & Sites, Lone Twin, and Brith Goff have established new relationships between walking and site-specific performance in the United Kingdom.127 The memories of the medium are based on this diverse history, and the specific works I discuss throughout this book are animated by practices beyond what I have been able to cover here. Through my focus on previously marginalised figures I have attempted to respond to Heddon and Turner’s call to recast the canon of walking beyond the standard fraternity of white, able-bodied men. NOTES   1.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women’; Pope, ‘Walking Transformed’; Smith, Walking’s New Movement.

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A Romantic Drift 39

  2.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 225–26; Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility, 20–21.   3.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 224.   4.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 233.   5.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 225–26.   6.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 226.   7.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 225; Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 50–61; Solnit, Wanderlust, 104; Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1994), 15.  8. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes, 88–118; Smith, ‘The Contemporary Dérive’; Simone Hancox, ‘Contemporary Walking Practices and the Situationist International’; O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, 6–12; Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility, 20.  9. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1989), 181. 10. Solnit Wanderlust, 101. 11. Paul Goodfellow, ‘Mapping Art to Systems Thinking,’ Journal of Professional Communication 3, no. 2 (4 June 2014): 112; Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 51–52; Lydia Wevers, ‘The Pleasure of Walking,’ New Zealand Journal of History 38, no. 1 (2004): 40. 12.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 225–26; Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility, 22. 13. Anne Kostelanetz Mellor, Romanticism & Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 166. 14.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 164, 223, 275. 15. Gilbert, Common Ground, 32. 16. Gilbert, Common Ground, 33. 17.  Jeffrey Cane Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 5. 18.  Gillian Russell, ‘“Who’s Afraid for William Wordsworth?”: Some Thoughts on “Romanticism” in 2012,’ Australian Humanities Review May, no. 54 (2013): 70. 19.  ‘SparkNotes: Wordsworth’s Poetry: Themes, Motifs & Symbols,’ SparkNotes, accessed 29 July 2018, http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/themes/. 20. The fundamental role of a variety of women in the constructions of William Wordsworth’s poems has been noted by a number of scholars. In ‘Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry,’ Eleanore Widger argues that William Wordsworth’s shift from seeking out epic landscapes to focusing on ‘[w]hatever scene was present’ was inspired by the two most important women in his life: his sister Dorothy, and his wife Mary Hutchinson. According to Widger, ‘it is Mary who entices Wordsworth down from the mountain and into the view.’ Likewise, Poet Charlotte Smith has been cited as a profound influence on William Wordsworth during his childhood, and they engaged in a reciprocal poetic exchange as adults. Their relationship has been discussed in detail by Jacqueline Labbe,

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who argues ‘Smith and Wordsworth perform perhaps the most creative partnership of the many that flourished within the period.’ She credits Smith with a foundational role in the ethos of Romanticism. See Eleanore Widger. ‘Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry,’ in Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 9, no. 1 (16 January 2017), and Jacqueline Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4. 21.  Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. William Angus Knight (London; New York: Macmillan, 1897). 22. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 121. 23.  Scott Krawczyk, Romantic Literary Families (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 62. 24.  Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, revised edition (London: McFarland, 2009), 32. 25.  Morris Marples, Shank’s Pony: A Study of Walking (London: Dent, 1959); Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture; Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Robinson, The Walk, 48. 26. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 40. 27. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 13, 53, 86. 28. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 36. 29. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 36. 30.  Cited in Marples, Shank’s Pony, 88–89. 31. Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 121. 32. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth Vol 2, ed. William Knight (London; New York: Macmillan, 1897), 123. 33. Wordsworth, Journals Vol. 2, 122. 34.  Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803, ed. J.C. Shairp (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874), 25. 35. Wordsworth, Recollections, 26, emphasis in original. 36.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 233. 37.  Barbara Taylor, ‘Rousseau and Wollstonecraft: Solitary Walkers,’ in Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt, eds. Helena Rosenblatt and Paul Schweigert (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 219. 38.  Betty Hagglund, Tourists and Travellers: Women’s Non-Fictional Writing about Scotland, 1770–1830 (Bristol; Buffalo, NY: Channel View Publications, 2010), 3. 39.  Vergunst, ‘Taking a Trip and Taking Care in Everyday Life,’ 106. 40.  Vergunst, ‘Taking a Trip and Taking Care in Everyday Life,’ 106. 41.  The other core text of Situationist critique is Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), published shortly before Society of the Spectacle. Vaneigem was an active member of the SI from 1961 to 1970, when he submitted a letter of resignation citing the failure of the Situationist project and the dissolution of the Situationist community. 42.  Mckenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London; New York: Verso, 2011), 23;

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A Romantic Drift 41

Michele Bernstein, ‘The Game,’ interview by Gavin Everall, Frieze, 6 September 2013, https://frieze.com/article/game-0. 43. Anthony Hayes, ‘How the Situationist International Became What It Was’ (PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, 2017). 44.  Smith, ‘The Contemporary Dérive,’ 106–107; O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, 9–10; Sullivan, Walking Sculpture, 16; Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility, 20; Stevphen Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 49. 45.  Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, revised and expanded edition, 2006), http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm. 46.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 47.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 48. Situationist International, ‘Situationist Definitions,’ in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, revised and expanded edition, 2006), http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.definitions.htm. 49. Situationist International, ‘Situationist Manifesto,’ trans. Fabian Thompsett. Situationist International Online, 17 May 1960, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/ manifesto.html. 50.  Situationist International, ‘Situationist Manifesto.’ 51.  Michèle Bernstein, The Night, ed. Everyone Agrees, trans. Clodagh Kinsella (London: Book Works, 2013), 13. 52. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 376. 53.  Stewart Home, ‘The Situationist International and Its Historification: Ralph Rumney in Conversation with Stewart Home,’ in What Is Situationism? A Reader, ed. Stewart Home (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 137. 54.  Home, ‘The Situationist International and Its Historification,’ 137. 55.  Bernstein, ‘The Game.’ 56.  Ralph Rumney, The Consul: Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), 110. Bernstein’s lack of visibility and enigmatic position in the Internationals is also based on her limited availability for interviews and her refusal to publish her private correspondence with Debord. See Bill Brown, ‘Steal This Book,’ in Not Bored! Anthology 1983–2010 (Cincinnati, OH: Colossal Books), 490. 57. Rumney, The Consul, 110–11. 58. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 422–23. 59.  Bernstein, ‘The Game.’ 60. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 422. 61. Michele Bernstein, The Night, 9; Bernstein, ‘The Game.’ The first English translation of All the Kings Horses was published in 2008, and The Night in 2013. The translation of The Night was released with a companion publication, After the Night (2013), which featured a détournement of the original novel, set in London. Bernstein’s novels have not merited much mention in English-language considerations of SI practices, and their recent translation has prompted her to give more interviews

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clarifying her participation in the LI/SI. McKenzie Wark is one of the few scholars to actively address the texts, and has served as an important reference for this research. See Beach Beneath the Street, 76–82 for her discussion of Bernstein’s novels. 62.  Bernstein, ‘The Game’; Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 423. 63. Bernstein, The Night, 9. 64. Bernstein, The Night, 11. 65. Bernstein, The Night, 10. 66.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 228. 67. Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street, 77. 68.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 69. Bernstein, The Night, 45. 70. Bernstein, The Night, 52. 71. Bernstein, The Night, 53. 72.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 73. Abdelhafid Khatib, ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles,’ trans. Paul Hammond, Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958), https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/leshalles.html. 74.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 75.  Sharanya Murali, ‘Walking the Walled City. Gender and the Dérive as Urban Ethnography.’ Etnološka Tribina 46, no. 39 (21 December 2016): 207. 76.  Murali, ‘Walking the Walled City,’ 209. 77.  Morag Rose, ‘Women Walking Manchester: Desire Lines Through The “Original Modern” City’ (PhD thesis, The University of Sheffield, 2017), 267. 78.  Murali, ‘Walking the Walled City,’ 206. 79.  Steve Graby, ‘Wandering Minds: Autism, Psychogeography, Public Space and the ICD’ (paper presented at Critical Disabilities Conference, Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2011), 1. 80.  Graby, ‘Wandering Minds,’ 6. 81.  There is scope for more research on these aspects of the SI. Bernstein’s contributions remain under-researched, as do the contributions of other overlooked women, such as Debord’s second wife Alice Becker-Ho and artist Jacqueline de Jong, who were vital to the artistic and intellectual fabric of the movement. 82.  Jean-Michel Mension, The Tribe, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 200), 118. 83. Mension, The Tribe, 114. 84.  Situationist International, ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb, revised and expanded edition (1958), emphasis in original, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.fury.htm. 85. Bernstein, The Night, 151. 86. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 181. 87. Careri, Walkscapes, 68–75; O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, 13; Lori Waxman, ‘A Few Steps In A Revolution Of Everyday Life: Walking With The Surrealists, The Situationist International, And Fluxus’ (PhD diss. New York University, 2010), 12. 88.  Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmila Ganguly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 178.

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A Romantic Drift 43

 89. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 178.   90.  André Breton, ‘Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the “1921 Dada Season”,’ trans. Matthew S. Witkovsky, October 1, no. 105 (1 July 2003): 143; Bishop, Artificial Hells, 69; Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 179.   91.  Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 140.  92. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 177.   93.  Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 139.   94.  Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 139.  95. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 179.  96. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 179.  97. Careri, Walkscapes, 71; David Pinder, ‘Urban encounters: dérives from surrealism,’ in E. Adamowicz (ed.), Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers (Peter Lang, Oxford), 55.  98. Peter Burger, Theory Of The Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53–54; Gene Ray, ‘Avant-Gardes as Anti-Capitalist Vector,’ Third Text 21, no. 3 (1 May 2007): 244–45; Gavin Grindon, ‘Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde,’ Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 1 (2011): 88–89.   99.  T. J. Demos, ‘Dada’s Event: Paris, 1921,’ in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009), 138. 100.  In ‘Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the 1921 Dada Season,’ Breton states, ‘[l]ast year, Dada activity remained wholly artistic (or anti-artistic, if one prefers—I don’t distinguish between the two.’ Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 6. 101. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Paperbacks), 26. 102.  Meret Oppenheim was one of the few women directly associated with the Surrealists, who were notoriously anti-feminist. She is most famous for her work Object (1936), a saucer, cup, and spoon covered in fur. The stories of her walks on high ledges are repeated in a number of texts, all of which reference Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1991, 47). Chadwick provides no citation for this fact in her text, and when I contacted her she replied she was unsure where she had discovered it and that her notes were packed away. 103. Careri, Walkscapes, 79. 104.  Waxman, ‘A Few Steps In a Revolution of Everyday Life,’ 33. 105.  Bernstein’s novels can be seen as a détournement of the walking novels of Breton and Aragon. Rather than positioning the women in her text as mythical creatures to be stalked in the landscape, the narratives are controlled by a stand-in for herself, Geneviève, who mediates the relationship between Carole and Gilles. 106.  Waxman, ‘A Few Steps In a Revolution of Everyday Life,’ 21. 107.  Waxman, ‘A Few Steps In a Revolution of Everyday Life,’ 27. 108.  Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ in One-Way Street, and Other Writings (London: NLB, 1979), 227.

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109.  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co., 1962), 258. 110.  Christopher Pittard, ‘“We Are Seeing the Past through the Wrong End of the Telescope”: Time, Space and Psychogeography in Castle Dor,’ Women: A Cultural Review 20, no. 1 (1 April 2009): 60; Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle Books, 2010), 11; Phil Baker, ‘Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London,’ in London From Punk to Blair: Revised Second Edition, eds. Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 326. 111.  Sam Cooper, The Situationist International in Britain: Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, 2017), 122–38. 112.  Recuperation is the Situationist term for the nullification of a radical idea or gesture by capitalist society, i.e., the society of the spectacle, through absorption into the system. Ken Knabb, a key translator of SI texts, provides the following definition in his introduction to the Situationist International Anthology: ‘Recuperation: used in the sense of the system’s recovering something that was lost to it, bringing back into the fold a potential revolt against it. The term “cooption” is similar but more limited. Thus, a reformist demand is coopted (and recuperated) by being taken over and implemented by the state. But a more radical act or idea can be recuperated by being pigeonholed within the dominant categories, integrated into the spectacle as a confusionist [sic] or extremist foil which thus serves to complement and reinforce the system, while not necessarily obtaining the approval or implementation implied by cooption.’ Cited in Doyle L. Perdue, Subversion of the Revolutionary Impulse: The Influence of Recuperation on the Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Master’s Thesis, University of North Carolina, 2012), 3. 113. Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 91. 114.  Pope, ‘Walking Transformed,’ 14. 115. Alastair Bonnett, ‘The Enchanted Path: Magic and Modernism in Psychogeographical Walking,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (2017): 3. 116.  Hancox, ‘Contemporary Walking Practices and the Situationist International,’ 243. 117.  Hancox, ‘Contemporary Walking Practices and the Situationist International,’ 239. 118. Careri, Walkscapes, 19. 119.  Wilkie, ‘Three Miles an Hour,’ 19. 120.  Kieth Tester, ‘Introduction,’ in ed. Keith Tester, The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 121.  Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity” in Theory, Culture and Society (Nov. 1985: 37–46), 40. Since Wolff, there have been strong debates around the gendered position of the flâneur and the viability of a flâneuse; see Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds.) The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-century Paris (2006); or Lauren Elkin, The Flâneuse (2016). 122.  Liz Kotz, ‘Max Neuhaus: Sound into Space,’ in Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon, eds. Karen J Kelly, Barbara Schröder, and Max Neuhaus (New

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A Romantic Drift 45

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York; New Haven, CT: Dia Art Foundation, 2009), 98–99; O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, 12. 123.  Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983); Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity,’ SubStance 31, no. 2/3 (2002). 124.  See Waxman, A Few Steps In A Revolution Of Everyday Life. 125.  See Mariellen Sandford ed., Happenings and Other Acts (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Judith Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Boston: MIT Press, 2011). 126. Lippard, Overlay. 127.  Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson, and Katie Normington, Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices (London: Routledge, 2007), 142; Carl Lavery, ‘Mourning Walk and Pedestrian Performance: History, Aesthetics and Ethics,’ in Walking, Writing and Performance, ed. Roberta Mock (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2009), 42; Victoria Hunter, ed., Moving Sites: Investigating SiteSpecific Dance Performance (London: Routledge, 2015), 10.

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Interlude Walking Exercise #2

Brett Van Aalsburg’s ‘Walk Slowly’ was created for week two of Walk Study Training Course 5 (see chapter 6): Walk as slowly as you can for twelve minutes in silence. Focus intently on a project that you have been thinking about doing for a long time. Visualize the way forward and allow yourself the luxury of uninterrupted attention on something that you wish to create.1

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Feel free to do the walk anywhere you like. At the end of your walk, decide what you want to remember about it and transform it into a memory image. Imagine the memory palace you created for the prologue and place your new image somewhere in its landscape. NOTE 1.  Brett Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Walk Slowly’, Walk Exchange, 2015, available at https://walkexchange.org/brett-walk-slowly/.

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Chapter Three

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Artistic Foundations for Walking Networks

I now turn to the origin of the three networks on which this book focuses— the Walking Artists Network (see chapter 4), Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute (see chapter 5), and the Walk Exchange (see chapter 6). The growth of these organisations makes visible the ephemeral practices of artists working with walking, and attests to the breadth and scope of art being made in the medium. I focus on the artists that were instrumental in founding these organisations and discuss how their practices influenced the organisations’ development. Essential to this chapter is the discussion of my own artistic work in the medium of walking, which led to the formation of the Walk Exchange and the methodology proposed by this book. Overall, the artists discussed in this chapter draw on the memories of the medium from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and demonstrate the challenges of defining walking as an artistic medium. 3.1 THE FORMATION OF WAN In 2008, a group of a twenty people, including ‘postgraduate students, artists, musicians, writers, and urban planners’ met at London Metropolitan University to discuss the future of walking art.1 As part of the event, artists including Melissa Bliss, Clive A Brandon, Viv Corringham, and walkwalkwalk (Gail Burton, Serena Korda, and Clare Qualmann) presented on their practices. WAN’s founding members come from an array of artistic backgrounds, and the projects presented at the pilot meeting reflect the wide-ranging disciplines from which walking art emerges. These artists demonstrate the many ways walking can be used in the creation of artistic works and establishes walking as one medium among many. 49

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Clive A. Brandon, for example, primarily distils his walking experiences through the media of watercolour and collage, while Viv Corringham demonstrated how walking can serve as both a process for creating art as well as a specific work of art. She walks alone and with others to create ‘audiowalks, radio pieces, [installations] at listening posts around a town and, most frequently, . . . sound installations in art galleries.’2 Melissa Bliss discussed her residency at Chelsea College of Art during which she explored the nearby Millbank Estates, one of the earliest examples of social housing in London, through a series of community events and walking interventions. Her final project for the residency, Snipe Hunting (2011), tapped into the longstanding relationship between walking art and the guided tour, through a collaborative walk that asked local residents and community members to share stories of the neighbourhood in situ. The move toward the medium of walking can be seen most explicitly in the works of walkwalkwalk (2005–2010). Though walkwalkwalk make use of a variety of media in their work, the project positions walking as the central artistic gesture. As such, it illustrates the approach toward walking that undergirds the development of WAN: the centrality of going for a walk, rather than just talking, writing, thinking about, or otherwise representing the act of walking.

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3.1.1 walkwalkwalk: An Archaeology of the Familiar and Forgotten walkwalkwalk was formed in 2005 when Burton, Korda, and Qualmann were looking for a way to create artistic work that didn’t require a budget or institutional affiliation.3 Together they created a series of walks that looked at the ‘archaeology of the familiar and the forgotten’ in London’s East End.4 walkwalkwalk’s project encompassed work in a variety of media and positioned walking as the central logic of representation. It draws on the history, tradition, and practice of the medium of walking, and is best considered through a focus on the walks themselves. To initiate their project, walkwalkwalk created a manifesto, focused on fostering an environment of social exploration and convivial exchange. In their manifesto, they establish the guidelines that direct their work as artists: to ‘re-explore the places [they] think [they] know,’ ‘create a context for exchange (ask for directions etc.),’ and ‘collate the product of [their] research in a communal space.’5 The manifesto links their project to the history of the Dadaists, Situationists, and Surrealists, all groups that produced their own manifestos identifying the radical gesture of their work. For walkwalkwalk, this is a set of inclusive entreaties based on social engagement and intimate

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Artistic Foundations 51

interactions that create moments of exchange with the landscape and the other actors they encounter in it. It offers an opportunity for the critique of everyday life through a durational walking practice. The routes explored by walkwalkwalk embraced the artists’ small triangle of London’s East End and focused on a resolutely local exploration. Rather than epic walks through the outer reaches of London—typified by literary psychogeographer Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002), which recounts his exploration of the M25 motorway—walkwalkwalk’s walks reflected the overlapping area of their shared everyday routes: home to work and home again, walks to the pub or supermarket, walks to friend’s houses and public swimming pools.6 Heddon and Turner frame walkwalkwalk’s walks as ‘a sort of anti-dérive’7 through their focus on the repeated exploration of local spaces rather than ‘rapid transit through varied ambiences.’8 Indeed, Qualmann positions their practice in explicit contrast to Debord’s assumption of the pathetically limited movement and narrow lives of urban dwellers.9 In this way, walkwalkwalk détourned the dérive and gave precedence to the repetition of everyday walking experiences, and particularly the experience of women walking through the city. One of the project’s key outputs was Nightwalks (2005­–2010), a semiregular series of walks at night that took place over five years. For Nightwalks the public was invited to ‘experience the city in a new way—without shopping, without a destination, for its own sake—with no other purpose than walking.’10 Recalling the season of Dada excursions ‘to selected spots . . . that do not really have any reason to exist,’11 the walks focused on ‘cut off places, roads that go nowhere . . . [p]laces that really have no reason to exist—perhaps other than to offer relief from the places that are designed, the places with purpose and meaning.’12 In this way, walkwalkwalk drew on the history of the Dada excursion and the anti-capitalist drifts of the LI/SI to construct an ongoing exploration of their local environment, in which they invited the public to walk the routes with them and chart the changes to the landscape. Nightwalks interrogated the shifting nature of public space, and particularly the overlooked or marginal aspects of everyday spaces; through these walks they opened their private routines to the public, with groups typically numbering between fifteen and thirty people. As they walked together, they temporarily transformed the spaces through which they passed. As Burton notes, areas that she would usually perceive as ‘intimidating or risky’ to walk through as a woman alone at night ‘became safe, or places for a party.’13 Groups they encountered that might have caused tension or fear among solitary walkers were diminished: ‘Gangs on corners were tiny compared to ours,’ she states.14 The walks set up a convivial group environment that functioned as a mobile safe space, while also identifying places in the landscape that might otherwise

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be perceived as dangerous or antagonistic. As participant Dawn Scarfe notes in her response to the second night walk, the walk ‘opened up’ new parts of the city. Though she has a desire to ‘wander around,’ she is ‘too cautious to do it on [her] own.’15 The walks were attended by a mixed group of men and women, however, the walks were led by women, and the participants who have shared their experiences on the project website are predominately women. Because of this, the documentation and discussions that accompany the work bring greater attention to how gender affects access to the city, than similar projects facilitated and commented on by groups of men. Rights of occupation were evident throughout the walks. On the first night, a fire was started in an oil drum to heat soup, a ritual that was repeated on subsequent excursions. Participant Juliette Adair reflected on the soup’s ‘associations with homelessness,’ which caused her to reflect on the privilege of the walking group.16 ‘We all have homes,’ she writes, before commenting on the irony of transforming a place usually reserved for rough sleeping into a creative destination. For Adair, the sense of home created by the community of walkers was in contrast to the ‘marginal . . . unhomely’ venue.17 The soup ritual recalls one of the foundational pieces of relational aesthetics: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 1992/1995 (free/still) (1992/1995/2007/2011). For untitled 1992/1995 (free/still), Tiravanija cooks Thai curry in a gallery space and gives it freely to visitors who enter. Bourriaud has identified these itinerant cafeterias as locations where people can learn again ‘what conviviality and sharing mean.’18 Those experiences, however, are only open to members of the public who enter the space of the gallery or museum, spaces that have strict codes of conduct and limited accessibility to the uninitiated. In taking their soup out of the confines of the gallery space and into the street, walkwalkwalk create a new strategic orientation that situates the art in direct relation to the world outside the gallery. Walking art remains limited to an initiated public, and walkwalkwalk’s participants were predominantly white and middle class; however, their project’s traversal of the city streets put it in direct relation to spaces inhabited by those who don’t necessarily have access to the art world. The use of public space provides greater opportunities for someone to join the convivial shared space of the walk, even momentarily, than a similar activity in a gallery space. walkwalkwalk’s walks follow similar, but not identical routes, a technique that creates the varied ambiences of the dérive through a local mode of repetition. In reflections on the first anniversary of the walks, Adair, a regular attendee, notes, ‘the ritual is now well established. . . . There are some new people, but many of us know the route.’19 Over the five years of the project, walkwalkwalk catalogued the lost and forgotten aspects of the neighbourhood. Changes to the neighbourhood were included in maps of their routes.

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The front of each map displays the route the group walked, while the back lists things they encountered on the walk, such as places to have a pint, abandoned pubs, places to sit, pee, or visit, as well as things that have gone. As the maps progress through time, the list of things that have gone expands, culminating in the final map, ‘Nightwalk Midwinter: More Things That Have Gone’ (2010). This map is dominated entirely by a list of things that have changed or no longer exist, ranging from physical buildings such as the Coppermill warehouses on Cheshire Street, to sensory experiences such as the smell of pastries and cakes on Russia Lane or Glass Street. For Adair, ‘[m]emories accrue’ as the walks encounter shared and familiar spaces:

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A year on, and this is the difference: we have been here before. It is not the walk into the unknown we experienced last year. We can anticipate. We can get bored or notice small changes. We can wonder if that was there before, or if we just didn’t notice. We are part of the mundane ritual which began the whole thing.20

The walks brought active attention to and provided a communal location to discuss the changes and shifts in the neighbourhood. These maps remain available on the project website, something that creates further opportunities for engagement through a digital invitation to explore the routes and add to the collection of lost and forgotten things. Qualmann has linked the project to Robert Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic (1967), a landmark work in conceptual art. In a presentation at London Metropolitan University for the Design History Society’s conference Locating Design (2005), she called on Smithson’s ‘assertion that the art does not consist of the photographs exhibited in a gallery, nor of the maps the artist made, nor of the bringing of other people to the location, but in the combination of all of these elements, and the creation of an experience.’21 The outputs created by walkwalkwalk, which encompass a variety of media, are linked through the practice of walking and the invitation to go on a walk. The production of an installation or exhibition of those outputs is not the conclusion of the project, rather, it is ‘the first step in opening it out to others.’22 This is further encouraged by the project’s website, which exists as both an archive of the project and an invitation to continue the spatial exploration initiated by the artists. It provides maps and invites people to try out the walks and share their experiences with the artists, creating the potential for a continued expansion of the archive. Though the website is no longer actively updated, it exists as a continuing invitation for the public to revisit the routes. While not indicative of the entirety of the practices that comprise the network, walkwalkwalk’s project reveals some of the formative notions that animate WAN. First and foremost, the idea that the walk itself can be the location of artistic experience. WAN emerges from a set of questions around what

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the medium of walking is, how this medium can be advanced, and whether medium is a fruitful way to think about this work in the first place. These questions are generated through the practices of the group’s founder members and the memories of the medium they bring to the network. The artists that were part of the original development of WAN indicate the multidisciplinary paths to artistic walking practices and the network’s broad approach.

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3.2 FROM SOCIAL PRACTICE TO THE PEDESTRIAN TURN In 1995, Annette Gisselbaek, Jean Longley, and Claudia Zeiske founded Deveron Projects, a socially engaged arts organization located in the remote town of Huntly in northeast Scotland.23 It is named after the River Deveron, which passes through Huntly, and features in many of their projects, both walking and otherwise. Gisselbaek, Longley, and Zeiske relocated to Huntly from urban areas (Copenhagen, London, and Berlin), and the feeling of being cultural outsiders in such a small town spurred them to ‘try and take action instead of waiting for others to provide’ the type of activities they desired.24 They ‘wanted to bring some of their ideas and influences to Huntly,’ particularly in relation to contemporary art, in order to increase the cultural life of the town.25 Of those three residents, Zeiske has remained DP’s long-term director, and she has developed it from a ‘very small, very traditional community arts organisation’ run on a volunteer basis into one that employs a small staff, interns, and has a regular commissioning schedule.26 Zeiske has identified the work of DP as ‘socially engaged or anthropological art’ that looks ‘deeply at what our very local place can offer and how it responds and corresponds to the wider world.’27 Her background in anthropology, curation, and cultural activism influenced her interest in ‘bringing local issues onto a global level.’28 In keeping with this, and in response to their isolated location, DP employs a ‘50/50 approach,’ which ensures each project is ‘half local and half international; half community and half artistic.’29 Their interest in equal engagement with local and international communities is key to the development of the Walking Institute, which looks to link Huntly to the surrounding areas and beyond through artistic walks in, out of and around the town. The DP methodology weaves art into the everyday fabric of Huntly, and each project ‘immerse[s] the curatorial team in the community and set[s] up discussions between its inhabitants and . . . incoming artists’ to create artistic projects that respond to and collaborate with the already existing community.30 Zeiske and scholar/curator Nuno Sacramento outline DP’s

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methodology in ARTocracy (2010), a curatorial handbook for collaborative practice. As they explain, DP has no central exhibition space; instead, the town is the venue, and artistic works commissioned by the organisation are displayed throughout Huntly—in pubs, libraries, restaurants, and other public spaces—as part of the Town Collection. Zeiske and Sacramento frame DP’s work as community collaborative practice, and many of the projects they discuss relate to dialogical aesthetics and ‘deal with issues and approximate communities through conversational frameworks.’31 Huntly, Zeiske asserts, is ‘not a natural breeding ground for progressive contemporary artistic practice’;32 it is a rural town and much of its cultural activities focus on traditional Scottish arts, such as Cèilidh music and dancing. For this reason, it is important to frame the work as ‘collaborative art’ or ‘collaborative practice,’33 and focus on creating collaborations between incoming artists and the local community. She notes that the success of works is based on ‘feeling, word of mouth [and] verbal feedback’ from the Huntly community as well as the local press.34 Zeiske credits Deveron Projects, along with other local organisations such as the Huntly Development Trust, with helping Huntly to earn the reputation ‘for being a place where society and art are associated.’35 For Zeiske, cultural organisations are necessary for the healthy functioning of a town in the same way that health centres or post offices are necessary. The Walking Institute was inspired by walking artist Hamish Fulton’s residency in Huntly. DP commissioned Fulton to create 21 Days in the Cairngorms (2010), a solitary walk from Huntly’s town square to Glenmore Lodge in the heart of the Cairngorms National Park (Britain’s largest mountain range). Additionally, the project included two group slow walks: A Walk Around the Block (2010) in Huntly’s city centre on 17 April, the day before he began his journey; and Slowalk (2010) at Aviemore Ski Car Park on 9 May, the day after he completed his walk.36 3.2.1 Rebranding Huntly and Making Room for the Walking Institute Though Fulton’s project was the inspiration for the Walking Institute, it was not DP’s first project to address walking. In 2008, DP and the Aberdeenshire Towns Partnership (ATP) commissioned South African artist Jacques Coetzer to create a new town motto. His project Room to Roam (2008) resulted in a change of the town motto from ‘Huntly: A Family Town’ to ‘Room to Roam’ and engaged with Huntly’s long relationship to walking.37 The development of the Walking Institute continues this shift, furthering Huntly’s position as a key destination for walking of all kinds.

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For Room to Roam (2008), Coetzer engaged intimately with the Huntly community to discover its rich cultural heritage. He lived as a resident in the community for six months and met with local stakeholders and community residents in one-on-one meetings in order to ‘gather views of the town’s identity.’38 Additionally, he attended local events and created opportunities for public input through advertisements and editorials in the Huntly Express, which invited community response and outlined the progress of the process. Over the course of the project Coetzer developed a new logo, coat of arms and musical anthem as part of the overall transformation of the town’s identity (see figure 3.1). For Coetzer, the local music and poetry scenes stood out ‘as a strong part of social life,’39 and he found the phrase ‘room to roam’ in a poem written in 1858 by Huntly-born poet George MacDonald, which had been set to music by Scottish folk-rock band The Waterboys. Coetzer contacted the band’s lead singer, Mike Scott, who agreed to participate in the project by ‘teaching town musicians the song as [a] potential town anthem.’40 During the brand’s official launch, Scott performed the anthem with local musicians, which was then followed by a reprise sung by the audience of around two hundred

Figure 3.1.  Huntly town sign with Room to Roam branding (Source: Deveron Projects)

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people.41 This served as a way to engage a large segment of the community in the launch of the town’s new brand. A video of this performance is now part of the Aberdeen Art Gallery’s permanent collection, expanding the reach of the work beyond Huntly and into the international art world.42 Coetzer credits the success of the ‘Room to Roam’ project in large part to ‘the creative vision of town coordinator Donald Boyd and the ATP’ and ‘the financial backing of the sponsors that made this project possible.’43 The combination of time to foster intimate community engagement, commitment from community stakeholders, and the financial resources to execute the project, allowed for a deep engagement with place that has shaped the long-term cultural strategy of the town.44 In 2010, DP and the Huntly Development Trust (HDT), a group established after funding was reduced for the ATP, organised the Huntly Walking Festival to ‘encourage more local residents to enjoy the glories of their local landscape and to raise the profile of the town as an ideal base for walking holidays.’45 It built on the ‘Room to Roam’ rebranding project and featured presentations and walks by the Huntly Hillwalking Club and Strathbogie Ramblers, guided walks with the Aberdeenshire Council and an exhibition of Zeiske’s Walking Lunches project. In addition, artist Norma Hunter collaborated with disabled community members to create a choreographed wheelchair walk, Walk This Way (2010). The choreographed walk featured three members of the local community—two wheelchair users and a parent of a disabled child—who supported and advised participants in their experience of navigating Huntly’s town square in a wheelchair. Participants were asked to traverse the square twice before embarking on a specific mission, such as going to the post office. Hunter’s piece is one of the few walking projects to address the relationship between walking and wheelchairs, and created a space for the discussion and inclusion of an often marginalised group of walkers.46 Overall, the festival looked to expand the image of Huntly as a town made for walking, and laid the foundation for DP’s pursuit of walking as an artistic medium. 3.2.2 Fulton and the Movement of the Medium As part of the festival, Fulton gave a talk, led a group slow walk, and invited the public to walk with him for the first day of 21 Days in the Cairngorms. For Fulton, ‘an artist who walks, not a walker who makes art,’ it is important to contextualise the artistic concepts that animate a walk.47 Crucially, he participated in ‘Can Walking be Art?,’ a free arts breakfast and public discussion with the project’s shadow curator, Mary Jane Jacobs.48 This gave him an opportunity to position his practice within a longer tradition of walking art, and provide examples of his previous walking work.

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As Fulton has moved toward the medium of walking, through the advent of group walks, his work has also become more political. In the exhibition catalogue for Walk On (2014), Alistair Robinson notes, ‘Fulton emphasises that rather than being a “retreat” from the world, his walk-works should be read as political actions in the fullest sense of them—as urgent forms of public address.’49 His group walks don’t simply address the public, they mobilise it through a specific practice of walking together in the landscape. In an interview with French paper Le Monde, when asked if walking is a political act, he replied: ‘Je crois, à présent, que oui. De plus en plus’ [I think, at present, yes. More and more].50 In contrast to his solitary walks, group walks allow for direct communication of what he views as urgent political realities via the experience of walking, and I view Fulton’s move to the medium of walking as a product of his increased interest in the intersection between art, walking and politics. DP’s collaborative ethos made it imperative for Fulton to actively engage the community in his walks. He had previously created fifteen seven-day walks (1985–2004) and one fourteen-day walk (2002) through the Cairngorms as part of his artistic practice. Prior to his residency in Huntly, Fulton had always started his walks alone, entering the park via an anonymous ‘platform at Aviemore station’; in contrast, for the first day of 21 Days in the Cairngorms he was accompanied by ‘a group of generous walkers’ from the community.51 He describes this as a ‘unique experience, to set off with what might be termed a support group.’52 More than just a support group, however, the group walk was essential to Zeiske’s vision for the project: to activate Huntly’s Room to Roam motto through ‘geographic links to the wilds of the Cairngorms and its national park.’53 The park had been established in 2003 as part of a larger reorganisation of national strategies for Scottish tourism, and Huntly was not within its boundaries, nor was it included when the boundaries were extended in 2010.54 Zeiske makes the economic implications of this clear, noting that communities that ‘fall within the boundaries’ of the Cairngorms ‘benefit from tourism and other advantages the park may bring,’ including increased focus for public funding initiatives and in national ad campaigns.55 For her, Fulton’s project functioned as a way to show the arbitrariness of the parks boundaries, which are partially based on complex land ownership rights and bureaucratic convenience.56 The first of Fulton’s two group slow walks, A Walk Around the Block, took place in Huntly Town Square as part of the Walking Festival. It consisted of ‘33 PEOPLE ATTEMPTING TO WALK EQUI-SPACED IN SILENCE ROUND AND ROUND CLOCKWISE FOR TWO HOURS ON THE PAVEMENTS.’57 There was no set number of walkers—anyone who was

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there when the walk began was welcome to join—and Fulton did not rehearse or practice the walk beforehand. When participants arrived in the square, he provided a verbal explanation of the walk’s design. The instructions were simple: walk silently around the block for two hours, keeping a two-metre distance from the person in front of you. Fulton’s technique for A Walk Around the Block was a style introduced to him by French choreographer Christine Quoiraud when they collaborated in 2002. Working with twenty-three students in France at the Domaine de Chamarande, they created a series of slow, equi-spaced walks. Fulton’s collaboration with Quoiraud links his practice to the history of what Susan Leigh Foster terms ‘walking dance.’58 In the 1960s and 1970s, artists associated with New York City’s Judson Church, such as Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown experimented with walking as a way to ‘enhance our perception of the environment and to deepen our apprehension of physicality.’59 At the arts breakfast, Fulton commented that working with Quoiraud was ‘very interesting’ because her background in dance offered a new perspective on how to concentrate on the space of the walk, and achieve ideas together through group walks.60 In contrast to his solitary practice, where the rhythm and relationship to the landscape is entirely his, the choreography of group walks bring attention to how bodies move through the landscape in relation to each other. For Fulton’s slowalks, the practice of walking is slowed further, which forces walkers to adjust to a new rhythm dictated by the artist. Through dictating the rhythm of his participants and their spatial configuration, Fulton places slow, silent walkers in proximity to each other within a specific landscape. For Zeiske, meditation is the connecting thread through a variety of walking practices: ‘What all these walks have in common . . . is the notion of meditation, of being able to think differently through the rhythms of our feet.’61 For some participants, such as Susan Mansfield, A Walk Around the Block became ‘a secular meditation, a stilling of the mind’;62 however, this meditation is always in relation to the group. In the case of A Walk Around the Block, this requires participants to remain entirely attuned to the person walking in front of them. The second group walk organised by Fulton was Slowalk, which took place in a car park at the Cairngorm funicular in Aviemore the day after he finished his twenty-one-day walk. Slowalk saw ‘28 people walking a distance of three metres side by side in silence for the duration of one hour.’63 As mentioned above, Aviemore Station is Fulton’s usual entrance and exit for his solitary journeys through the Cairngorms, and he ‘deliberately located’ the final group walk in the nearby car park to make reference to his previous walks.64 In contrast to Fulton’s typical anonymity, however, the group of slowalkers in the car park created a visible public intervention.

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Slowalk participants commented on their conspicuousness to the public. Emily Rodway, editor of The Great Outdoors magazine, tried not to laugh when ‘passing skiers and snowboarders’ attempted to ‘provoke a response from the 28 blank faces’ slowly walking through the car park;65 likewise, participant Simon Fildes commented on ‘being occasionally scrutinised by [the] passing public.’66 This illustrates how artistic walking practices create different experiences for those who encounter them and those who participate in them. As Quioraud has noted in relation to her walking-dance practice, every person who encounters a walk ‘has their own hypothesis depending on the vision they project upon [the walkers].’67 The passing public experienced Fulton’s walk as an aesthetic intervention into a public space, one that possibly shifts their view of how that space can be used. Participants in the walk, however, experience the work as part of a collective creation of what Fulton terms the ‘invisible object’ of the walk.68 Though Fulton contextualised the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the walk during his discussion with Jacobs, some participants were not as prepared as they needed to be for the physical realities of his strict walking practice. In feedback received after the walks, participants reported that more guidance was necessary regarding appropriate clothing, equipment, and the length/style of the walk.69 For some, the lack of preparedness ‘had a distracting effect on them throughout the walk and therefore they could not fully engage with the piece’;70 this was particularly true of the slowalks, where participants found themselves very cold as they attempted to maintain the pace required by the work. Other physical challenges also emerged through participants’ reflections. Due to a difference in height, Mansfield had to jog to maintain the two-metre distance between her and the person in front of her for Fulton’s A Walk Around the Block.71 Mansfield’s experience highlights that the footsteps of a group cannot be made homogenous and demonstrates how the design of that particular walk didn’t fully account for physical variations in how people walk. Fulton’s slow, silent walks were designed to create a space of intense collective focus that highlighted the relationships of each walker to the space in which they walked and the people with whom they walked. This physical engagement is one of the essential things that distinguishes works in the medium of walking from works that represent an artist’s walk in another media. Fulton’s practice has always foregrounded the relationship between his walking body and the landscape; group walks, however, shift the focus from the representation of a walk to the experience of individuals walking together. Rather than a conceptual imagining of a walk an artist has already completed, the experience of the walking body, with its cold shivers, uncomfortable feet, and relationship to other walkers, is the location of the art.

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As I have demonstrated, the establishment of the Walking Institute occurred in relation to a larger strategy of redevelopment centred on walking. Though DP had been experimenting with walking in projects prior to working with Fulton, Zeiske credits him with triggering ‘much thought and discussion about the many different rural and urban forms and interests in the acts of walking and their relationship to art’ and inspiring ‘the idea of setting up a walking appreciation initiative.’72 Fulton’s specific contribution was to highlight how the artistic medium of walking can tie together a variety of developmental and philosophical objectives identified by local and regional stakeholders. Through his talks and group walks, Fulton introduced Huntly to the memories of the medium and made artistic walking practices more legible to the community.

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3.3 BEFORE THE WALK EXCHANGE In 2011, I co-founded the Walk Exchange (WE) in New York City with Dillon de Give, Bess Matassa, Virginia Millington, and Moira Williams. WE developed out of the Walk Study Training Course (WSTC), a sixweek walking project de Give and I initiated to create a rigorous critical environment to explore artistic walking practices. The course uses theoretical readings and artistic case studies to ground participants in common themes and ideas, which are explored at length through the practice of walking together. As discussed in chapter 6, through WSTC we developed a methodology for the distance exchange of walking practices using digital tools. This section outlines the creative and critical practices that led to the development of the course and demonstrates how it developed from a desire to make the act of walking central to any critical consideration of walking as a medium. The course was originally linked to questions and concerns de Give and I had about our own practices. The projects we were working on, de Give’s Coyote Walks (2009–2017), and my [untitled] Walk Project (2008–2009) and [Robert Moses] Walk Project (2010), were foundational to our movement to the medium of walking from other disciplines, primarily theatre, performance, and film. The first two iterations of the course led to the formation of the Walk Exchange and expanded the network of artistic walkers with which we were engaged. In the next section I outline how these artistic practices, and the desire to make walking central to any critical consideration of walking, led to the Walk Study Training Course and the development of a community of critical and creative walkers.

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3.3.1 The Coyote Walks Dillon de Give’s The Coyote Walks (2009–2017) ‘linked the center of New York City to the wild with an annual walk’ to commemorate the spirit of Hal, a coyote captured in New York City’s Central Park who died shortly after being re-released into the wild.73 For the project, de Give engaged in an annual three-day walk following green spaces out of NYC. Through walking, he hypothesised possible paths that coyotes might take in and out of the city. Though it started as a solo exploration, de Give evolved the project to consist of a ‘small group trek.’74 This shifted the medium of the work from one based in the representation of his walks in other media (performance, installation, and sculpture in the expanded field), to the experience of walking itself. For the inaugural walk, de Give embarked on a sixty-six-mile, three-day solitary trek from the Hallett Sanctuary in Central Park toward where the coyote Hal was thought to have originated in Westchester, New York. The evening before his walk, de Give held a memorial event and send off at Brooklyn’s City Reliquary, a not-for-profit museum and civic organisation. Attendees were ‘invited to bring a small gift or message inspired by Hal’ to be ‘taken on the journey and distributed along the path, forming a temporary 60-mile monument.’75 Over the course of his route, de Give deposited the miscellaneous objects—a Hawaiian lei, a sculpture made of pipe cleaner, a wooden rabbit, and other items of personal meaning—and created a temporary public monument linked to those who attended his send-off. He did not, however, give them access to the walk itself. Following the walk, de Give translated his experience into a work of performance art. At Fritz Haeg’s Dome Colony X in New York City, he set up Coyote Dome (2009), ‘an information booth and invitation to take part’ in the walk the following year; additionally, he crafted a ‘performance’ centred on his toe, which had ‘remained numb since completing the walk’ to Westchester.76 In this instance, the walk was presented through a dialogic and durational performance focused on the physical experience of walking and the ongoing consequences to his toes. de Give’s performance, a ritual toe cleansing to ‘insure a lack of danger’ for future participants, also functioned as an invitation for others to join him on the second version of the walk.77 I joined de Give and a group of other walkers for the second annual coyote walk. We met early on a chilly April morning in Central Park’s Hallett Sanctuary. Each walker wore a personalised felt bib—we had created them during a pre-walk meeting—and had a backpack with camping gear and other supplies necessary for the walk (see figure 3.2). de Give began by introducing the group to the project. He briefly told the story of Hal in the location he was originally found and outlined our journey north through Connecticut. As we prepared to set off, he lit incense and led us in a processional around the Hallet Sanctuary

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Figure 3.2.  Coyote walkers meet in Central Park for the first day of the walk

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(Source: Dillon de Give)

pond. We banged noisemakers and played instruments in a ritual beginning to our journey. We pulled out the noisemakers again uptown, as we walked across the campus of Columbia University. The processionals took place at locations of verified coyote sightings in Manhattan and brought the group’s attention to the specific task at hand: the physical tracing of coyote routes. In contrast to the inaugural Coyote Walk, the second version was created through the act of walking possible coyote routes together. de Give notes that his walk ‘is not animal tracking; it’s a hike that articulates a hypothesis about how the city is connected to nature.’78 The project opens a space in which humans explore a nonhuman embodied movement, and in doing so, questions the seeming distance between the urban sphere and the natural environment. Artist and scholar Hermione Spriggs considers The Coyote Walks within the tradition of landscape art, and links de Give to artists such as Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and Richard Long.79 The work also recalls Joseph Beuys’s seminal performance piece I LIKE AMERICA AND AMERICA LIKES ME (1974), in which Beuys lived in a gallery with a coyote for three days, the same length as de Give’s walk. de Give frames the walk as ‘a short walking residency’ that encourages ‘collaborative considerations of a messy entanglement between what we might perceive as the chaos of nature and the rational orderliness of civilization.’80 In contrast to these earlier artists, however, Spriggs argues de Give is

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part of a new generation of artists ‘more concerned with the corporeal act of walking itself’ than making interventions in the landscape or performances in a gallery.81 As he notes, ‘the routes do not always indicate established trails’;82 instead, the project creates new paths as it connects islands of green space around and out of NYC. The maps de Give creates following each walk offer further explorations of the territory beyond the routes trekked on the annual group walk. Through this process, de Give crafts new connections to the wild, most explicitly through the annual group walk, but also through potential walkers who encounter the route via the map. This positions the location of the art in the action of walking and brings attention to how walking informs our relationship to the landscapes we traverse and those with whom we traverse them. In The Coyote Walks, de Give calls on the memories of the medium of walking as they emerges from landscape art, expanded sculpture and performance art. Over the course of the project his practice moves from the representation of walking in other media to the specific medium of walking.

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3.3.2 [untitled/Robert Moses] Walk Projects When I met de Give, I had just finished the [untitled] Walk Project ([u]WP) (2008–2009), a year-long exploration of walking as art linking walkers in New York City, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. This was the beginning of my personal exploration of the boundaries of walking as an artistic medium. Every month for a year, I invited a small group of friends and artists to join me to explore different techniques in the medium of walking. Walks in NYC included a dozen people participating in a dérive across the Brooklyn Bridge (see figure 3.3), a group of four engaging in an eight-hour slow walk down Wall Street, and ten walkers carrying a hundred helium balloons down the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade route. In addition, I invited artists in other countries to create walks, which resulted in a group walk/roll across the Millennium Bridge in London, organised by dramaturg and producer Carissa Hope Lynch (see figure 3.4), a stroll along the Hollywood Walk of Fame led by cultural producer Marie-Reine Velez, and three solo walking projects in and around Tokyo by artist Ayano Oride (see figure 3.5). The project’s culminating walk was a three-week journey from Brooklyn to Washington, DC. Over the course of the walk a variety of people joined us for sections, though only Brett Van Aalsburg and I managed to complete the entire journey.83 When we encountered people along the route, we actively engaged them regarding the content of the project. We handed out business cards fashioned from cut-up cereal boxes that featured quotes about walking and a link back to the project’s website. In this way, our happenstance

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Figure 3.3.  Brooklyn Bridge dérive (Source: Jeff Morris)

Figure 3.4.  ‘stop, walk y [sic] roll,’ London

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(Source: Carissa Hope Lynch)

Figure 3.5.  Ayano Oride, Trash Monster Walk, Tokyo (Source: Ayano Oride)

encounters on the road pointed back to a digital space that framed the overall project for the people we encountered.84 Through a dispersed program of walking practices, [u]WP tested a variety of walking techniques to explore the potential of walking as an artistic medium. It asked how, when, and why walking functioned as art and explored the contours of the form with an international cohort of participants. The

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project consisted of a network of walkers linked by an exploration of walking and focused on creating walking experiences to be retained in the memories of the international set of participants. The existence of a variety of walks internationally created a project that no single person could fully experience. In this way, I extended my interest in developing walking networks and creating ways to share local walking practices globally. My following project, [Robert Moses] Walk Project ([RM]WP) (2010– 2011) looked to explore more specifically the construction of NYC. If the dérive is not random but instead responds specifically to the contours of the city, it seemed important to explore who developed those contours.85 In NYC, that person was Robert Moses, an urban planner responsible for shaping the city over a forty-year period. Moses was influential in the development of parkways, expressways, playgrounds, beaches, public housing, swimming pools, and a multitude of other public works throughout the state of New York; in particular, he was associated with the ascension of the automobile in public transportation infrastructure, and I conceived of a pedestrian exploration of his public works as a détournement of the city’s car culture.86 The [RM]WP project consisted of over fifty walks designed to foster discussion and encourage exploration of Moses’s role in the reshaping of NYC (see figure 3.6). I invited artists to collaborate with me on the development

Figure 3.6.  [Robert Moses] Walk Project, Routes Walked (Source: Blake Morris)

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of pedestrian responses to Moses’s public works. The collaborative ethos of [RM]WP was a further attempt to use walking as a way to create an artwork that did not belong to any one individual, but instead reflected the footsteps and perspectives of a network of walkers. Whereas [u]WP focused on the creation of an international network of walking practitioners, [RM]WP was a resolutely local exploration that expanded on the network I had established in NYC through a responsive, collaborative series of walks. Similar to the walking exercises that frame this book, the walks for [RM]WP were generated in response to collective walking explorations and actively encouraged the public to participate in further walks. Some of the walks created for the project were explicitly theatrical, such as The [Gallery] Walks (2011), created in collaboration with Chloë Bass. For these walks, Bass presented public infrastructure as artworks, in a series of tours that recalled both the Dada excursion of 1921 and the museum tours of Andrea Fraser (see figure 3.7). She led participants on guided tours through three Moses sites in NYC. In contrast to the free-form explorations that characterised many of the walks for this project, Bass’s explicitly theatrical walking performances followed a specific script and route. For me, these walks tested the boundaries of performance within the medium of walking. When is the walk itself the work, rather than simply a vehicle for spectating someone else’s performance? Over the course of the three tours, the walks became more interactive, with the final walk breaking down the tour-guide persona almost entirely and focusing instead on engaging participants in imagining future possibilities for the site. Alternatively, my collaboration with Maya Baldwin, a series of three Doc Walks (2011), considered the relationship between walking and documentation through photography, installations, parties, and public walks. We looked to explore how the document itself can be a work of art—different from, but

Figure 3.7.  Artist Chloë Bass leads the [Gallery] walk in Sunset Park (Source: Chloë Bass)

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related to, the initial walk that inspired it. For Doc Walk 3: The Solo Walks (2011), we invited members of the public to complete one of five solitary walks Baldwin and I had devised and document the results. These documents were then shared during a public walk in Brooklyn, with each participant presenting their documentation along the route. This process furthered my interest in documenting walks through walks and foreshadowed my use of the memory palace technique. Through [RM]WP, I applied the practice of walking to a specific topic and engaged other people to walk and create walks in relation to that topic. For me, it confirmed walking’s generative potential, with walks serving as catalysts for future walking practices. It was during this period that I met de Give, and these priorities were at the forefront of our mutual interest in walking and the development of WSTC. The course developed in relation to our artistic walking practices, and our interest in how walking together changes one’s understanding of the urban landscape. Through the course we looked to create a way to critically investigate walking as an artistic medium with a community of practitioners.

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3.3.3 Walk Study Training Courses 1 and 2 de Give and I were introduced by mutual friends who knew of our interest in walking. During a wander through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, we discussed our artistic work and the lack of a community in NYC around the walking arts. There was no location for walking artists, and those interested in walking art, to seriously discuss their practice. In response, we developed the Walk Study Training Course (WSTC), a six-week walking course that consists of ‘reading about walking and walking about reading.’87 The course combines site-specific walks with case studies of contemporary artists using walking in their work and theoretical texts about walking. The WSTC methodology takes ‘walking as both practice and subject’ and responds to walks, and ideas about walks, through the creation of more walks.88 In this way, it explores the medium of walking through the primary logic of the medium: the practice of going for a walk. As de Give has noted, the course developed out of a desire to create an ‘experimental education technique’ for approaching walking art.89 It was de Give who came up with the WSTC moniker; he was attracted by the dual meaning of ‘course,’ which hints ‘toward the academic . . . as well as the “course” we followed physically as a group.’90 We drew on John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), and the theories of the LI/SI to design a nonhierarchical environment that prioritised the experience of walking in the city as a method of learning.

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As a mobile classroom, we expected participants to actively engage with course materials and participate in all the course’s walks. This reflected our desire to build a temporary, but committed, walking ensemble who would participate in a journey together, over time. We framed the course as follows: A series of meetings of walking about reading, and reading about walking. Each week case studies of strategic walking practice and theory in art, politics, ecology, and philosophy, are combined with specific short walks. The course will result in an understanding both theoretical and practical and culminates with a group walk constructed by the class for the public. WSTC meets 6 times in different public spaces throughout New York City. We are offering the course for up to 10 participants. It is free. Participants should commit to attending all sessions. Led by Blake Morris and Dillon [d]e Give.91

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The call for participants was circulated amongst our peers and other members of the public whom we knew from our previous walking work and posted on Nonsense NYC, ‘a discriminating resource for independent art, weird events, strange happenings, unique parties, and senseless culture in new york city [sic]’ run by Jeff Stark (see figure 3.8).92 When initially putting out the call, we were not aware of how many applications we would get, or who might apply—indeed, the notion of getting anyone to join us dominated our thoughts rather than how we would craft the specific demographics of the group. In our design and recruitment for the course, we focused on artists and academics, as we imagined the course would appeal to practitioners around our age (in their twenties and thirties) who were interested in exploring walking, rather than the general public. The

Figure 3.8.  Flyer created for inaugural WSTC (Source: Walk Exchange)

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Figure 3.9.  Google map of route for WSTC 1 (2011)

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(Source: Google Maps)

resulting group consisted of eight predominately white, middle-class walkers who had moved to NYC from other places. The group was majority female, a trend that would continue throughout following versions of WSTC. Together we spent six weeks exploring walking and art as we traversed a loop through Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx (see figure 3.9). de Give and I framed the course around ‘Walking as an Artistic Practice’ and the syllabus included works by prominent international artists such as Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, and Janet Cardiff. Our first walk proved auspicious. We were following the trail of Alÿs’s The Modern Procession (2002), for which he organised a processional carrying art objects to commemorate the temporary relocation of NYC’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from Manhattan to Queens while the museum’s flagship building was under renovation.93 As we passed through MoMA’s atrium, we found Alÿs’s upcoming retrospective A Story of Deception (2011) prominently advertised. Our intersection with the advertisement for his upcoming retrospective provided an additional catalyst for conversation on the walk and indicated that we were on the right track. Each week we covered new ground, both in our understanding of walking and its relationship to art, as well as the city through which we were walking. de Give and I did not approach the course as experts; rather, we presented ourselves as facilitators interested in a collective excavation of walking ideas. The course ended with the creation of a convergence potluck, in which each walker started at their home and gathered friends and food on the way to a

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community kitchen at the Educational Alliance in NYC’s Lower East Side. As the walkers came together from different parts of the city, bringing along a friend or two on the way, there was a palpable sense of community. Together we shared the food we had brought and reflected on walking, community and what we had discovered over the last six weeks. Participant Natalie Doonan later cited the course as inspiration for her work:

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[m]any other small collectives work in similar ways, and have inspired the work that I do. One example is the Walk Exchange in New York City, initiated by filmmaker Dillon de Give and theatre artist Blake Morris. My experience in the first series of walks that they curated has influenced my approach to urban walking as a collaborative, pedagogical and aesthetic strategy. It is from them that I took the idea of circulating texts to read in preparation for research walks. I continue to follow their work through Facebook and email and we all belong to an international group called the Walking Artists Network.94

Likewise, Doonan’s participation in the first version of the course helped shape its development. She was the person who originally alerted us to the existence of the Walking Artists Network, which allowed us to engage with an international community of walkers in the development of the course (see chapter 6). The WSTC 2 project focused on walking as a way of reading and writing the city. Though de Give and I had set the readings in advance, the group devised the routes, something we would continue to prioritise in future courses. For our first walk, we met at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows. The focal point of the museum is a scale model panorama of NYC commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair. The panorama provided an overview of the city that linked to the group’s assigned reading: Michel de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City.’ Though we were not able to go to the top of the World Trade Center as in de Certeau’s text (a memorial of it was included on the panorama), the panorama did allow us to take in a representation of the city from above and think about how we wanted to descend into the ‘thicks and thins of the urban “text”.’95 The group identified a piece of rubbish dropped on the map and decided that the trash marked the spot, and the next week we set out on a long walk around John F. Kennedy International Airport, located in the outer reaches of Brooklyn and Queens, in search of that particular location. Veteran WSTC participant and Walk Exchange founder Millington identifies this walk as a stand-out moment in her participation in WSTC. For Millington, ‘its duration and wild conceit, seemed to . . . be a distillation of the essence of the Walk Exchange: arduous, fun, whimsical, theoretical, thoughtful, communal, collaborative, tiring.’96

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Through our embodied response to a piece of rubbish on the Queens Museum’s panorama of New York City, we pushed the boundaries of our walking experiences, and illuminated the specific attributes of the course that we would continue to develop. During WSTC 2, we introduced midterms and finals to the course.97 Participants were asked to create walking responses to course materials, which we hoped would create a further mode of walking exchange in which walks responded to walks. For the midterm, we asked course participants to design a ten-minute walk in Woodside, Queens. Exchange founding member Moira Williams tied everyone together and led us through the Woodside subway station in a walk reminiscent of Long and Fulton’s student work at St. Martins Art School in London, in which they tied their fellow students together with a cord, or Lygia Clark’s Möbius Strip (see figure 3.10). Audrey Hope’s quick walk to a dead-end recalled the Dada excursion to places that have no reason to exist. My walk took participants to the location Google pinned as Woodside on the map, in an exploration that was the template for the walking concept that opens this book. Our course final, Walking Stories (2011), invited the public to join us for a weekend of walks that further developed these walking responses. Importantly, this solidified our commitment to articulating the experience of walking through the creation of more walks. Additionally, it was a first step in opening the walks to the public and moving beyond a small cohort of artist-walkers. The WSTC project was explicitly designed to bring interested practitioners together to create a rigorous environment to consider artistic walking practices and develop a community of walkers with whom to explore these ideas. After WSTC 2, Millington, Matassa, and Williams joined de Give and I to form the Walk Exchange and further develop the ideas explored on the course. Millington, Matassa, and Williams have backgrounds across the arts and social sciences, which reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of walking, and the formation of the Walk Exchange expanded our approach beyond the specifically artistic exploration de Give and I initiated.

Figure 3.10.  Williams leads walkers for the WSTC 2 ‘midterm’ in Woodside, Queens (Source: Walk Exchange)

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Bess Matassa has a background in cultural geography; when the Walk Exchange was formed, she was a postgraduate researcher at George Washington University in American studies. Her doctoral dissertation, From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of NYC: The Embodied Production of Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977–1983 (2014), focused on how the walking practices of New Yorkers in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to ‘construct, maintain and negotiate the meanings of decline and survival’ associated with that period.98 Virginia Millington works as an archivist for Storycorps, an organisation committed to sharing and preserving stories from the community, and brought a background in Library Sciences to the Exchange. Moira Williams is a freelance artist with a background in walking and conceptual art. When the Walk Exchange formed, she was working on Dirt Shirt (2012), which saw her germinate hairy vetch seeds in her armpit with soil from contaminated hazardous waste sites as a bodily process of growing and planting hairy vetch in public areas in Brooklyn. Together we have continued to develop methods of exchange and models for the sharing of walking practices, which have continued to expand internationally (see chapter 6). As de Give suggests, the original development of WSTC, which occurred around the same time as WAN and DP’s Walking Institute, ‘indicated the growing interest in the walking “genre” or medium.’99 Each organisation is inspired by different artistic practices, which inform their specific approach to the medium of walking. They make visible work happening in the medium and provide locations for the sharing of practice and sustained critical attention among practitioners. In this chapter, I have foregrounded how these networks develop from the memory of specific artistic practices through a discussion of how they were formed. Though the artistic practices and organisational structures discussed in this chapter differ, they all look to develop communities around creative and critical practices. In the development of their approaches, they draw on the memories of the medium and the techniques and ideas developed by guilds of previous practitioners, ranging from the Romantics to the Situationists, as well as more contemporary precedents such as the walks of Fulton or Alÿs. In the next three chapters I will look at each network, and specific artistic projects they support, in more detail. NOTES 1. ‘History,’ Walking Artists Network, last modified 2 June 2014, http://www. walkingartistsnetwork.org/history/. 2.  Viv Corringham, ‘A Talk Given at the Deep Listening Institute, Kingston, NY, 2010, Archived at Deeplistening.Org,’ Viv Corringham, 2010, http://www.vivcor ringham.org/shadow-walks.

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  3.  Jude Cowan Montague, ‘Breaking the Bounds: Walking London and Beyond,’ The News Agents, 6 February 2016, https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/.  4. ‘About,’ walkwalkwalk, 2010, http://www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk/toplevel pages/about.html.   5.  Clare Qualmann, ‘WalkDHStalk,’ powerpoint presentation, 2005.  6. Qualmann, ‘WalkDHStalk.’   7.  Dierdre Heddon and Cathy Turner, ‘Walking Women: Interviews with Artists on the Move,’ Performance Research 15, no. 4 (1 December 2010): 18.   8.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’   9.  Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ 10.  ‘Invitation for Night Walk One,’ walkwalkwalk, 2005, http://www.walkwalk walk.org.uk/thirdlevelpages/nightwalkinvite.html. 11. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, 178. 12.  Qualmann, ‘WalkDHStalk.’ 13.  walkwalkwalk, ‘Some Notes on the Night Walk: Based on Sarah Jacobs’ Interview with Gail,’ unpublished notes for ICA talk ‘Modes of Multiplication’ January 2006, December 2005. 14.  walkwalkwalk, ‘Some Notes on the Night Walk.’ 15.  ‘Night Walks 2 Texts,’ walkwalkwalk, 2006, http://www.walkwalkwalk.org .uk/thirdlevelpages/nightwalk2texts.html. 16.  ‘Night Walks 1 Texts,’ walkwalkwalk, 2006, http://www.walkwalkwalk.org .uk/thirdlevelpages/nightwalk1texts.html. 17.  walkwalkwalk, ‘Night Walk 1 Texts.’ 18. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 70. 19. ‘walkwalkwalk Midwinter—with Special Film Screening by Gimpo,’ walk walkwalk, 2006, http://www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk/thirdlevelpages/nightwalkmid wintertexts.html. 20.  ‘walkwalkwalk Midwinter.’ 21.  Qualmann, ‘WalkDHStalk.’ 22.  Qualmann, ‘WalkDHStalk.’ 23. Claudia Zeiske, ‘The Town Is the Venue: A Methodology for the North?,’ in COOL: Applied Visual Arts in the North, eds. Timo Jokela, Glen Coutts, Maria Huhmarniemi, and Elina Härkönen (Rovaniemi, Finland: University of Lapland, 2013), 113. 24. Nuno Sacramento and Claudia Zeiske, ARTocracy (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2010), 23. 25.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 23. 26.  Claudia Zeiske, ‘How Deveron Arts Made an Entire Town its Venue,’ Interview by Creative Scotland, 29 November 2016, http://www.creativescotland.com/ explore/read/stories/features/2016/deveron-arts. 27.  Zeiske, ‘How Deveron Arts Made an Entire Town its Venue.’ 28.  Mary Jane Jacob and Claudia Zeiske, eds., Fernweh: A Travelling Curators’ Project (Berlin: Jovis, 2015), 95. Zeiske began her career in human rights working with the British Refugee Council before establishing her own charity, the Refugee Support Centre. See Claudia Zeiske, ‘Lifelines,’ The Herald Magazine, 17 February 2007, http://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-herald-magazine/20070217/281517926655178.

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29.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 39. 30.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 39. 31.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 183. 32.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 20. 33.  Glasgow School of Art, Claudia Zeiske with Nuno Sacramento, The Town Is the Venue, talk at Glasgow School of Art, 2013, https://vimeo.com/61527720; Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 180. 34.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 133. 35.  Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 25. 36. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 41. 37.  In addition to her interest in walking as an artistic medium, Zeiske is also an accomplished hill walker. She is a Munroist, which requires walking to the top of all 282 Munros (mountains over 3,000 feet) in Scotland and has successfully completed all of the walks. 38.  Jacques Coetzer, ‘Final Report of Huntly Branding Project (Room to Roam),’ Huntly: Deveron Arts, 1 October 2008, 1, https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_ media/uploads/jacques_coetzer_report.pdf. 39.  Coetzer, ‘Final Report,’ 2. 40.  Coetzer, ‘Final Report,’ 2. 41.  Coetzer, ‘Final Report,’ 3. 42.  Zeiske, ‘The Town is the Venue: A Methodology for the North?,’ 120. 43.  Coetzer, ‘Final Report,’ 3. 44. Since Coetzer’s project the ‘Room to . . .’ formulation has been used in a variety of projects, including ‘Room to Run,’ ‘Room to Ride,’ and ‘Room to Sing.’ In 2017, Coetzer returned to Huntly for ‘Room to Reinvent’ and set up a People’s Café in the Town Square, where he asked people who passed through to share their thoughts on ‘town regeneration and local economy.’ See Deveron Projects, Deveron Express, spring, 2017, print newsletter, 1. 45. Huntly Development Trust, ‘Huntly, the Town with “Room to Roam”, Launches Annual Walking Festival,’ Huntly: Huntly Development Trust, 2010, https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_media/uploads/hfulton_press_release.pdf. 46.  Deirdre Heddon and Sue Porter’s Walking Interconnections (2014), a practiceas-research project that paired disabled and able-bodied walkers in an exploration of resilience and sustainability, has been groundbreaking in this overlooked area of walking. 47. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time 39. 48.  Originally developed by Sacramento, the Shadow Curator methodology draws on Westminster politics’ concept of shadow ministers to provide a constructive critical foil to an organisation. Shadow curators open new curatorial possibilities through challenges to the curator’s ‘proposals and actions . . . in order to consolidate his/her methodology.’ The shadow curator works against institutional lethargy by providing the critical viewpoint of a professional outsider. In ARTocracy, Sacramento serves this function and interrogates potential problems or challenges with DP’s approach through critical questions and comments printed in the text’s margins. See Sacramento and Zeiske, ARTocracy, 16.

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49.  Alastair Robinson, ‘On Walking,’ in Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff: 40 Years of Art Walking, eds. Cynthia Morrison-Bell and Mike Collier (Sunderland: University of Sunderland, 2013), 17. 50.  Henry Bellet, ‘Pour Hamish Fulton, La Création Artistique Naît de la Pratique Intensive de La Marche,’ Le Monde, 8 June 2010, sec. Culture, http://www.lemonde .fr/culture/article/2010/06/08/pour-hamish-fulton-la-creation-artistique-nait-de-la -pratique-intensive-de-la-marche_1368966_3246.html. 51. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 44. 52. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time. 44. 53. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time. 4. 54. Cogent Strategies International, ‘The Economic and Social Health of the Cairngorms National Park,’ report prepared for the Cairngorms National Park Authority, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise, Huntly, 2010, 15, https://cairngorms.co.uk/resource/docs/publications14092010/CNPA.Paper1633. The%20Economic%20and%20Social%20Health%20of%20the%20Cairngorms%20 National%20Park%202010%20-%20complete%20document.pdf; Ordnance Survey, ‘UK location programme,’ 2011, https://data.gov.uk/data/map-preview?e=2.79316 &n=57.418042&s=56.765359&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsedsh127.sedsh.gov.uk%2Far cgis%2Fservices%2FScotGov%2FProtectedSites%2FMapServer%2FWMSServer% 3F&w=-4.503201. 55. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 4. 56.  Claudia Zeiske, email to Blake Morris, ‘Tourism Article,’ 28 April 2018. 57. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 41. 58.  Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics,’ 126. 59.  Foster, ‘Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics,’ 127. 60.  Deveron Arts, ‘Arts Breakfast with Hamish Fulton and Mary Jane Jacob,’ 10. For more information on their collaboration, see Christine Quoiraud and Hamish Fulton, Walk Dance Art C° (Trézélan, France: Filigranes Editions, 2003). 61. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 4. 62.  Susan Mansfield, ‘When Is a Walk a Piece of Art? When Artist Hamish Fulton Brings His Transcendental Approach to the Pedestrian to Town,’ The Scotsman, 21 April 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20190915185811/https://www.scotsman.com/life style-2-15039/when-is-a-walk-a-piece-of-art-when-artist-hamish-fulton-brings-his -transcendental-approach-to-the-pedestrian-to-town-1-800779. 63. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 43. 64. Fulton, Mountain Time, Human Time, 43. 65.  Emily Rodway, ‘A Life’s Walk,’ TGO, December 2010. 66.  Simon Fildes, ‘A Short Walk,’ Wild Land Reflections, 10 May 2010. 67.  Quoiraud cited in Luc Boucris, Territoires, Fraying at the Edges, in Choreographic Dwellings, eds. Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100. 68.  Fulton, ‘Conversation with Petere Lodermeyer,’ 182. 69. Deveron Arts, ‘21 Days in the Cairngorms Hamish Fulton 18/19 April 2010 Project Report,’ unpublished internal report (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts Archive, 2010). 70.  Deveron Arts, ‘21 Days in the Cairngorms Hamish Fulton 18/19 April 2010.’

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71.  Mansfield, ‘When Is a Walk a Piece of Art?’ 72.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 3. 73.  Dillon de Give, ‘Connective Filaments, Coyote Walks on the Map,’ Livingmaps Review 2, Spring (17 February 2017): 1, http://livingmaps.review/journal/index .php/LMR/article/view/48. 74.  Dillon de Give, ‘The Coyote Walks,’ The Coyote Walks, 2016, https://coyote walks.wordpress.com/. 75.  City Reliquary, ‘LAH: Returning the Spirit of Hal to the Wilderness,’ press release (Brooklyn: City Reliquary, 24 March 2009). 76.  Artbook@x, ‘NYC RELEASE EVENT: The Sundown Salon Unfolding Archive,’ (Fritzhaeg, 2009), http://www.fritzhaeg.com/salon/events/book-release-nyc .html. 77. Dillon de Give, ‘Coyote Dome: The Five Toe Spirits Stand Up for Themselves,’ brouchure, courtesy of the artist (New York City: Dome Colony X, 2009). 78.  Dillon de Give, ‘Coyote Walks: Tracking the Call of the Wild from the Heart of Manhattan,’ Trailwalker Summer (2012): 7, https://coyotewalks.files.wordpress. com/2014/10/tumblr_m71z0ltjti1qz9wm3o1_1280.jpg. 79.  Hermione Spriggs, ‘“Uurga Shig”—What Is It like to Be a Lasso? Drawing Figure–Ground Reversals between Art and Anthropology,’ Journal of Material Culture 21, no. 4, 2016: 10, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183516662673. 80.  Dillon de Give, ‘Connective Filaments,’ 4, http://livingmaps.review/journal/ index.php/LMR/article/view/48. 81.  Spriggs, ‘Uurga Shig,’ 10. 82.  Dillon de Give, ‘Routes,’ The Coyote Walks, 24 October 2014, https://coyote walks.wordpress.com/maps/. 83.  Kyle Grousis-Henderson accompanied us to Baltimore and had planned to join us for the entire walk. An unfortunate mishap (followed by a few miles of walking) sent him to the emergency room and rendered him unable to finish the rest of the journey. He met us in Washington, D.C., via public transit, having missed only about fifty miles of walking. 84.  [untitled] Walk Project did not make robust use of digital tools to create walking exchanges, but it represented my first considerations into how digital platforms might facilitate and contextualise the analogue experience of walking as an art practice. The website for the project is now defunct and was not officially archived, though a few pages from the site were captured by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library that archives websites. In this case, the digital site doesn’t live on and invite future walks; it disappeared shortly after the project and only remains through its partial capture by an archive. What remains of the walks, primarily, are the memories of an international set of participants who walked together and apart over the course of a year. 85.  In ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ Debord states, ‘if chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. . . . Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes.’ Rather than a random stroll, the dérive actively responds to the specific construction of the city.

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86. The definitive text on Moses’s relationship to NYC is Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), though it has a decidedly antiMoses stance. A more positive approach can be found in Kenneth Jackson and Hillary Ballon (eds.) Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York City (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008). 87. Walk Exchange, ‘WSTC #1,’ Walk Exchange, 14 April 2011, http://walk exchange.org/walk-study-training-course-1/. The eight people who took the course are those who attended a majority of the walks. There were other participants who stopped attending after the first few walks, and a few who joined us halfway through the course. 88.  ‘About the WSTC,’ Walk Exchange, 29 April 2014, http://walkexchange.org/ about-the-wstc/. 89.  de Give, ‘WSTC—Why a “Course”,’ Email to Blake Morris, 17 October 2016. 90.  de Give, ‘WSTC—Why a “Course”.’ 91.  Jeff Stark, ‘Nonsensenyc: 3.11 to 3.17,’ Nonesense NYC, 11 March 2011, http:// nonsensenyc.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/nonsensenyc/20110311133855/. 92.  Stark, ‘Nonsense NYC,’ Nonesense NYC, 2016, http://nonsensenyc.com/cgi -bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/nonsensenyc/. 93.  For the procession, Alÿs had participants carry replicas of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, and Alberto Giacometti’s Standing Woman, as well as the living artist, Kiki Simth. See https://www.publicart fund.org/view/exhibitions/5997_the_modern_procession for more details. 94.  Natalie Doonan, ‘Techniques of Making Public: The Sensorium Through Eating and Walking,’ Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches ThéâTrales Au Canada 36, no. 1 (25 March 2015): n. 10. 95.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 96.  Millington, ‘Walk Exchange response,’ response to Questionnaire by Blake Morris, 21 June, unpublished (New York: Walk Exchange, 21 June 2017). 97.  In the United States, students in higher education take two examinations per term, one in the middle and one at the end. They are referred to as midterms and finals, respectively. 98.  Bess Matassa, From the Cracks in the Sidewalks of NYC: The Embodied Production of Decline, Survival, and Renewal in New York’s Fiscal-Crisis-Era Streets, 1977­–1983’ (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2014). 99.  de Give, ‘WSTC—Why a “Course”.’

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Chapter Four

The Walking Artists Network

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Digital Paths to Analogue Practice

The Walking Artists Network (WAN) is the largest international network focused on the discussion, development, and promotion of art related to walking. WAN ‘seeks to connect those who define themselves as walking artists—or who are interested in walking as a mode of art practice.’1 It is not specifically localised, nor does it follow a regular commissioning schedule; rather, it offers a location for those interested in critical and creative walking practices to discuss their work and share invitations to walk. It is an open point of access for the pursuit of artistic walking practices from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The network is most visible online where members ask questions, organise walks, and promote their work through a JISCmail listserv, Facebook group, and the WAN website. Additionally, it hosts offline events where network members meet to walk and talk together. At the time of this writing, the network has just over six hundred members, approximately half of whom are based in the United Kingdom. Members come from diverse disciplinary pathways; most work in the fine or performing arts, but they also have backgrounds in psychology, biology, criminology, cultural studies, and library sciences, among others.2 This creates an artsfocused network that also reaches out to other disciplines. Phil Smith posits that WAN is ‘probably the only organisation with a sizeable membership to offer radical walkers connectivity with each other.’3 It supports and facilitates the development of multiple strains of walking practice through a nonhierarchical, member-led approach. As discussed in chapter 3, WAN first met in 2008 during a pilot meeting which is described on the network website’s ‘History’ as ‘effective’ and ‘fruitful’; however, no one volunteered to organise a follow-up meeting and the network experienced a fallow period. One of the organisational challenges of unfunded networking without institutional support is the dependence on 79

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unpaid labour to organise events and meetings. The opportunity to revive the network was a result of institutional support for the project: in 2011, while working together at the University of East London (UEL), Clare Qualmann and Mark Hunter successfully bid for an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Networking Grant, under the aspect of the scheme focused on international development. This formally established the network through institutional support from a university and a major UK funding body. With funding from the AHRC, Qualmann and Hunter created a website and organised a variety of activities that expanded the network’s profile internationally. During the 2nd International Research Forum on Guided Tours in Plymouth, some members of the network met and came to the ‘consensus’ that WAN ‘should work on the basis of events that have walking at their core (rather than arranging things at which people sit and listen to talking about walking).’4 This has continued to guide the network’s activities, and has resulted in a variety of walking-based initiatives, including a series of Walkie Talkie workshops, the Footwork research group and the WALKING WOMEN (2016) exhibition. With specific exceptions—such as Step by Step, a nonwalking-based seminar series for walking practitioners to share ideas— WAN gets people together to walk. In Walking’s New Movement (2015) Smith identifies WAN as a location that ‘provides walkers with a means to connect with each other,’ which due to its ‘undemanding and minimum programme’ may require a more specific and rigorous approach to walking practices.5 Its loose nature is a unique feature that supports a multitude of approaches to walking. Rather than mandating a specific program, WAN provides an open-access space focused on the discussion and facilitation of walks. The ideas, conversations, and concepts explored through the digital aspects of the network are necessarily physicalised through the imperative to walk. The rigorous approach for which Smith calls is not the remit of the network, rather the network provides a location for members to explore and develop their own methodologies. In this way, WAN demonstrates how online discussion and activities create and inform offline walking practices. In this chapter, I look at how WAN supports individuals, groups, and organisations to discuss, develop, and promote critical and artistic walking practices. I begin with one of the most popular categories of aestheticallyinflected walking, psychogeography, through a look at the practices of two active network members: Morag Rose and Phil Smith. Following this, I discuss WALKING WOMEN, an exhibition curated by Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks. The exhibition developed from ongoing discussions amongst network members about the invisibility of female walking practitioners; it demonstrates one way the network’s online discussions have manifested of-

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fline. Through these two strands of network practice, I look at the work of a variety of artists and demonstrate how the medium of walking is emerging through a networked approach. WAN asks: ‘how we might define walking art as a medium, and whether attempting a definition is a fruitful method for generating discussion and debate’;6 this chapter looks to practices by network members to argue that it is through consideration of the medium that we can best understand how walking communicates as an artistic practice. 4.1 NEW PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES Sam Cooper, in his text outlining the influence of the Situationist International in Britain, argues that ‘psychogeography retained a privileged position in the British adoption of Situationist practices.’7 This privileged position has made it fundamental to the memory of the medium as it has developed in the United Kingdom, and psychogeography is a core area of discussion and practice for WAN members. In addition to individual members of the network whose work is psychogeographically inflected, groups such as the Loiterers Resistance Movement, Leeds Psychogeography, Radical Stroud, and The Huddersfield Psychogeography Network discuss their work on WAN, and invite network members to walk with them and contribute to their events.

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4.1.1 The Loiterers Resistance Movement The Loiterers Resistance Movement (LRM), founded by Morag Rose in 2006, is the most consistently active psychogeography group in the United Kingdom. Based in Manchester, the LRM has met on the first Sunday of every month for ‘a free communal wander, open to anyone curious about the potential of public space and unravelling stories hidden within our everyday landscape.’8 Key to the LRM’s practice is the Situationist concept of playfully constructive behaviour. Rose stresses the affirmative aspects of her practice—she wanted to develop a ‘radical theory that was fun, irreverent and active, a praxis developed out of the desire to find appealing methods to critique the hegemonic view of the city.’9 The group actively argues that the ‘streets are free and belong to everyone,’10 and has a fluid membership model, in which ‘people float in and out and define their own level of commitment.’11 This noncommercial ethos is embedded in the practice: LMR walks are always free to the public and ‘no one makes a monetary profit.’12 In her doctoral thesis, ‘Women Walking Manchester: Desire Lines Through The Original Modern City’ (2017), Rose identifies three brands of contemporary psychogeography: literary, activist, and creative; her own work

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falls distinctly within the latter two modes. She returns to psychogeography’s core focus on practice, as opposed to the literary deployment of psychogeographical processes by authors such as Iain Sinclair or Will Self. For Rose, the creative walking practices happening ‘beyond the celebrity literary psychogeographers’ are ‘far more diverse,’ and a focus on these practices can help to move beyond the trope of physically mobile white men on self-focused walks.13 She identifies undercurrents of ‘misogyny and neocolonialism’ in much psychogeographic practice and looks to ‘democratize the practice of the dérive and reclaim it from the occult and for all classes and genders.’14 A ‘working-class, queer, disabled woman,’ Rose updates Situationist and Letterist concepts through an intersectional approach.15 She argues that the ‘pavement is one of the few opportunities for casual, embodied encounters with difference,’16 and works to establish the right to the city through a walking practice that addresses issues of class, race, gender, and ability. Rose credits the influence of artists such as walkwalkwalk, Laura Oldfield Ford, and Phil Smith on the development of the LRM. Additionally, the group draws from the ‘rich history of walking the Mancunian way,’ including the Kinder Trespass, the marches of the Suffragettes, and the ‘poetic agit-prop of the Manchester Area Psychogeographic.’17 Like walkwalkwalk, the group is guided by a manifesto:

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We can’t agree on what psychogeography means but we all like plants growing out of the side of buildings, looking at things from new angles, radical history, drinking tea and getting lost; having fun and feeling like a tourist in your home town. Gentrification, advertising and blandness makes us sad. We believe there is magic in the Mancunian rain. Our city is wonderful and made for more than shopping. The streets belong to everyone and we want to reclaim them for play and revolutionary fun.18

Though psychogeography has ‘a reputation for being arcane and difficult,’ the LRM offers opportunities to enter theory through practice.19 For Rose, the most important aspect of the LRM is how it creates new relationships to Manchester through a repetitive walking practice that looks ‘to prove the streets are “made for more than shopping. The streets belong to everyone”.’20 Key to the LRM’s practice, and any practice in the medium of walking, is how it responds to the landscape itself, and the events that unfold in that landscape. In June 2017, the LRM’s first Sunday walk coincided with the city’s response to a terrorist attack that occurred the week before. As Rose writes, on 22 May ‘the landscape of Manchester had been irrevocably changed by an act of terrorism’ when a suicide bomber attacked an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena.21 Twenty people were killed and over two hundred were injured in an act of violence that resonated throughout the United King-

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dom. In response to this event, Rose questioned for the first time whether the LRM’s monthly dérive was appropriate. Rose’s initial invitation for the walk didn’t mention the bombing directly, stating only that ‘[i]t seems to be more important than ever to celebrate creative wandering and the poetry of the streets.’22 After she posted the invitation to the WAN listserv, Stephen Bottoms, a professor of theatre at Manchester University, responded that it might be ‘inadvisable’ to loiter given the heightened security following the Manchester bombing. He cited the occurrence of two high-profile events at the Old Trafford football and cricket grounds—the Michael Carrick testimonial match for Manchester United and the One Love Manchester benefit concert for victims of the terror attack—that would further increase scrutiny. Bottoms worried that ‘[t]he line between resistant and just plain inappropriate will be hard to distinguish.’23 The ensuing conversation on the network expressed a variety of views, mostly from artists outside Manchester who were in support of the walk. Ultimately, Rose thought ‘cancelling would be more disrespectful and alarming than walking sensitively with eyes, ears, heart, minds and arms wide open,’ and the walk happened as planned. She was particularly interested in asserting the rights of women to the streets, as the attendees at Grande’s concert were predominately young women.24 The LRM’s first Sunday walks make use of a variety of tactics drawn from the medium, ’including algorithmic walks, transposing maps, throwing dice, [and] concentrating on specific senses.’25 For the June 2017 walk, Rose drew a cross on a map of Manchester and asked walkers to follow it, ‘trying to stay as true as possible to its contours.’26 Helen, one of the participants, had brought ‘decorative fluffy bee[s]’ to ‘act as a totem should [walkers] need a guiding wing,’27 and each participant received a bee to guide them. In Manchester, bees are seen as a symbol of ‘cooperation, industry, and resilience,’28 and have long represented the city’s important position at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Rose encouraged participants to use the bees to decide where to walk in case obstructions prevented them from following their mapped line, a technique that combined psychogeographical mapping strategies with chance-based approaches. Participants in the walk, a ‘welcome mix of familiar faces and curious first timers’ split into three groups, with each exploring a different spur of the cross.29 As Rose walked through the city with a small group of women, they noticed bees everywhere; they had begun to ‘swarm with renewed vigour through the post-bomb city,’ with bees added to ‘billboards, bins, stickers, making homes on tattooed flesh and in rooftop hives.’30 At the end of the walk, the three groups reconvened and shared stories of their different perspectives of the cross. As Rose points out, these ‘parallel world[s] revealed by

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another random line on our shared map’ serve as ‘a reminder that each step is a choice,’31 and these choices alter our experiences and understandings of the spaces we inhabit and the people with whom we inhabit them. Rose’s experience, walking with a group of women through a specific part of the city, resulted in different resonances than the other two groups who participated in the walk, despite the fact that they followed the same tactics, at the same time, in the same city, starting from the same location. Though Rose notes that their ‘footsteps won’t change the world alone,’ they do provide a way to ‘imagine radical new paths which make it a different, better place, if only for a moment.’32 After the walk, Rose wrote again to the network, thanking ‘everyone who sent supportive messages’ and engaged in a productive and critical conversation. For Rose, the experience reminded her ‘what an inspiring and generous community WAN is.’ The initial critique by Bottoms, which she characterised as thoughtful, reminded her to ‘to be mindful of context and assumed knowledge.’ The walk itself resulted in ‘deeply poignant and troubling questions’ and she stated that ‘it felt good, and important, to be having conversations on and with the streets.’33 Rose has argued that the community of radical walkers and contemporary psychogeographers ‘nurtured online’ through email and social media provides opportunities to exchange locally-based critical and creative practices globally.34 This is corroborated in the thread’s final message, from walking artist and sculptor Karen McCoy who is based in the United States. McCoy expressed that ‘[t]he critical thinking, genuine interest, and ability to articulate the many fine threads of [the network’s] activities is always heartening and supportive to [her].’ Though she notes that she doesn’t often contribute herself, she is ‘constantly interested in listening in’ to the conversations on the network, which support her own scholarly and artistic practices.35 In this way, the discussions on the network have both local and global ramifications, with the international network of practitioners engaging with and contributing to walks happening in specific locations. 4.1.2 Mythogeography Phil Smith is a prolific author and artist who has contributed much to the field of walking through both practice and theory. He is a founding member of Wrights & Sites, a group of four artist-researchers formed in 1997 (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Cathy Turner) who pioneered the use of walking in site-specific performances in the United Kingdom. One of his key innovations, developed while working with Wrights & Sites, is mythogeography, a contemporary rethinking of the legacy of LI/SI practices. Mythogeography is ‘not a finished model,’ but a ‘general approach which

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emphasizes hybridity’ and provides a set of tools to encourage the production of mythogeographies.36 Like psychogeography, it is not created through walking; rather, it is discovered through walking. Smith links it to the radical activism that is embedded in the memory of the medium with ‘equal status given to the subjective and the fanciful as to the public and the political.’37 He seeks to reconnect LI/SI practices with some of their ‘original political edge’ and stresses the importance of protecting their ‘history and revolutionary impulse.’38 For Smith, the literary psychogeography and dérives popularised by authors such as Will Self and Iain Sinclair are ‘an obscenity and a privilege’;39 in contrast, mythogeography looks to reclaim the radical gesture of its avant-garde predecessors and avoid the pitfalls of recuperation. Smith identifies walking’s connection to mythogeography as ‘accidental,’ and his theory is not simply of, for or by walking; rather, it provides tools for a variety of practitioners across disciplines to craft their own mythogeographic pathways.40 The relationship between mythogeography and walking is, of course, more than accidental, given that ‘[m]ythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, psychogeography’ and has clear links to the Situationist walking practice of dérive.41 Furthermore, Smith’s theory is a direct result of his previous engagement with walking through his work with Wrights & Sites. For Smith, the experience of developing ‘the site-based performances of Wrights & Sites, revealed places to be as performed as the performances in them.’42 While he at first considered this a challenge to the theatrical event and ‘a problem to be removed,’ it eventually fostered a method that acknowledged the ‘interdependency’ of the performance of his body and the performance of the landscape.43 My own experience with Smith’s mythogeographical practice was at a workshop in Cornwall. It was conducted as part of WAN’s Footwork research group, which hosted a series of multi-day walking workshops with a group of network stakeholders to ‘extend discussion of walking art as a medium.’44 The day started with the group crawling through the Big Beach House, where most of the delegates were staying. Smith asked us to explore the confines of the house from a baby’s perspective, testing the limits of how we moved before we could walk. This brought our attention to the learned skill of walking that we often take for granted. Smith then led us to the nearby beach and surrounding dunes and asked us to walk along the shore at our own pace to a meeting point near Gwithian. Prior to the workshop, he had given each participant a semi-individualised notebook which contained sets of mythogeographic instructions. Though each book contained similar directions, there were slight variations which created a group of overlapping, but not identical, experiences and directives, and allowed each individual agency in constructing their experience.

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In Smith’s mythogeographic world, bodies do not move through a passive landscape; rather, they interact with a dynamic landscape that they shape and that shapes them. The beach was choked with fog, and in the distance, though we could not see it, was the titular landmark of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf is one of the few women included in the walking canon, a fact that had been given some attention by the group. It was fitting, given the group’s ongoing concerns about the visibility of walking women and their artistic work, that the landmark associated with her was obscured. The fog became an important actor in our walk, one mentioned in nearly every written response to the weekend, and which changed our experience of the landscape and how we interacted with Smith’s instructions. Cathy Turner, Smith’s fellow collaborator in Wrights & Sites, reflected that the fog helped her ‘[w]alk as though you are the last person on Earth.’ Though she is not necessarily inclined to apocalyptic visions, the fog aided her imagination: ‘the deep sea fog, the beach seeming to extend indefinitely, offered the world as a blank.’ For Turner, ‘[i]n all the stimulation of walking and talking, there was a kind of calm there.’45 Artist Katie Etheridge, who began her walk on the dunes, describes watching a ‘bold tiny figure disappear across the vast expanse of beach into white oblivion.’ This image changed her experience of the walk: ‘The next hour is mine,’ she reflected.46 Giulia Fiocca, a member of the Italian walking and architecture collective Stalker, focused on the way that the mist allowed for a dispersal of the group and a sense of individual play within the collective: ‘We start to walk as a flock, to feel ourselves safer in the mist, then on the endless beach everybody starts to disperse searching for her/his own way and looking at her/his own trace left behind, as a dance, a celebration.’47 Or, as participant Bibi Calderaro put it, we walked ‘in a fog together yet alone.’48 As we walked along the shore and the dunes, we inhabited the solitude of the foggy beach together, and embarked on independent but relational explorations. Calderaro asks if ‘our solo walking on sand in fog [is] a communicative act in and of itself, even if rid or void of any post-script, post-thought, posttalk.’49 Her inquiry asks whether walking can communicate without mediation, without something produced after the fact. While it is impossible to give an example of how a walk communicates if rid of any post-walk thought or discussion, the blog posts written by participants do indicate moments when the walk itself was communicative. As mentioned in chapter 1, de Certeau considers walking in relation to ‘the speech act’;50 though de Certeau was concerned specifically with urban spaces, his ideas are also productive in this context. For de Certeau, the walk is ‘a spatial acting-out of the place’ and ‘implies relations among differentiated positions.’51 He particularly stresses the ‘phatic’ aspect of walking, its ability to ‘initiate, maintain, or interrupt

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contact.’52 In contrast to his wandersmanner, ‘whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it,’53 our mythogeographic walk created a spatial and physical conversation that asked us to read what we wrote on the rural landscape. My own encounter with Calderaro serves as a good example. While we walked along the beach, she approached me in silence, a rock pressed into her palms. She passed the rock into my palms and pressed my hands around it, giving it to me. Calderaro’s physical utterance, which transferred the rock to me, was also an extension of the social aspect of our solitary group walk. In her gesture of passing me the rock, Calderaro was bringing attention to the place we were walking, the beach, but also the fact that we were walking on it together, engaged in a mythogeographic exploration.54 Following our walk on the beach, we were taken by bus to Robinson’s Shaft, the ‘last Cornish Engine to work on a Cornish Mine’ and part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site.55 The site has recently undergone a £35 million redevelopment project, the bulk of it through the United Kingdom’s lottery-funded Living Landmarks programme with additional funding from the European Union, Cornwall Council, and the Homes and Community Agency. Since redevelopment, it has been branded as Heartlands, and run by a social enterprise charity, The Heartlands Trust. Smith brought us to the site and gave us a brief introduction to its history before having us split into small groups armed with counter-tourism tactics. Smith developed counter-tourism based partially on his desire to create a more accessible way to engage with mythogeographic ideas. His publication Counter Tourism: The Handbook (2012) ‘emerged as a popular means for addressing the ideological labyrinth of heritage space’56 It provides a series of ‘tactics and guiding principles’ for use at heritage and tourism sites.57 Smith had given each group suggestions from the handbook and we were asked to try out some of them as we freely explored the area. My group, which consisted of me, Deirdre Heddon, Simon Persighetti, and Katie Ethridge, set off to test the boundaries of Heartland’s position as ‘Cornwall’s first free cultural playground.’58 While following Smith’s suggestions, Heddon, Persighetti, Ethridge, and I had an impromptu dance party by a set of rainbow-coloured bicycle racks that Heddon identified as ‘prideful,’ and we took a tour of a show home of new luxury developments being constructed on the site. We finished our day in Camborne, a nearby town where we once again set off in groups to explore based on Smith’s instructions. Smith’s day-long workshop took us on rapid passage through varied ambiences. It created space for a heterogeneous collective to engage in solitary explorations together; the landscape, the presence of the group, and the walking prompt all

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came together to create a singular experience. My notebook from the day is only half-filled, and a number of pages reflect that my pen was running out of ink; the experiences, however, are etched in my memory with no need of notation. The workshop introduced the group to a variety of walking tactics that draw from the memory of the medium and made clear the potential of walking to encourage the active reimagining of already existing spaces. Through the medium of walking, mythogeography promotes new ways of seeing already existing spaces and détourning the social, physical, and cultural structures that support them. The workshop ended with the group composing a manifesto, which was read collectively by the Footwork group at Where To? Steps Towards the Future of Walking Arts, a symposium at the University of Falmouth. The ‘Hayle Manifesto,’ as written by the members of the Walking Artists Network, demonstrates the diversity of approaches to walking. Cathy Turner invites us into the medium through a walking provocation: she suggests we ‘[d]amage a map. Walk the damage.’ Misha Myers declares that ‘[w]alking art is a revolution to power the future, to bring playbour [sic] to the labour of mobility.’ Mark Hunter tells us to ‘Pick up stories, and litter’ and that we shouldn’t ‘walk like [we] own the place,’ while Katie Ethridge offers ‘[e]ight uses for a long pointy stick found on [a] beach.’59 Each walker manifested Smith’s mythogeographic suggestion into a distinct declaration for the future of walking, something that also manifests in the techniques they employ in their work. Mythogeography embraces the ‘unlimited diversity’ of walking’s ‘enunciatory operations,’60 and offers tactics that use walking to challenge the organisation of our cultural and social lives. Stressing the phatic potential of walking, de Certeau writes of its ability to ‘initiate, maintain, or interrupt contact.’61 For de Certeau, this ‘phatic function . . . gambols, goes on all fours, dances, and walks about, with a light or heavy step, like a series of “hellos” in an echoing labyrinth, anterior or parallel to informative speech.’62 Smith’s mythogeographic tactics highlight this aspect of walking: Calderaro’s rock exchange, Ethridge’s disappearing figure, Fiocca’s flock, or our prideful dancing, were aspects of our playful constructive behaviour that used Smith’s mythogeographic suggestions to communicate with each other and the landscape with which we engaged. Importantly, Smith’s work does not reduce walks to ‘their graphic trail,’ which de Certeau points out cannot contain the diverse enunciatory options of walking;63 instead, Smith focuses on how documentation can generate suggestions, instructions, and provocations for future walks. In this way, Mythogeography turns every participant into a teller of tales, privileging storytelling over information in its desire to engage the world.

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Rose and Smith apply Situationist tactics in compatible but distinct ways, with Rose’s methodology, though still applicable to other places, deeply embedded within the specific location from which it has arisen (Manchester), while Smith concentrates on ‘dispersing tactics and theorizations of resistant walking, [and] leaving users and participants to decide on their own forms of organization’ and locations of practice.64 Smith, Rose, and the other strands of psychogeography promoted through the network focus on how these walking practices can contribute critically to our consideration of our physical and cultural landscapes. As cultural theorist Stevphen Shukaitis argues, psychogeographic mapping is ‘a tool for transforming and acting’ under the conditions of spectacular capitalism ‘or, more importantly, for finding a northwest passage out of it.’65 While WAN is not explicitly dedicated to this goal, it provides a location for those pursuing radical modes of walking to share practices that can contribute to new strategies to overcome capitalist subjectification.

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4.2 RECASTING THE CANON: WALKING WOMEN AND THE CIRCULATION OF THEORY AS IMPETUS FOR PRACTICE In 2016, Clare Qualmann and artist Amy Sharrocks curated WALKING WOMEN (2016), a series of walks, talks, and workshops that featured over forty women artists working with walking in a variety of media. There were two iterations of the event: the first was at Somerset House in London as part of UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility; the second was in Edinburgh’s Drill Hall as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in association with Forest Fringe. In addition to artists’ talks, film screenings, and installations of walking work, the exhibition offered multiple opportunities to take part in artists’ walks. As the project’s assistant curator I was present for the planning and execution of both events and had the opportunity to participate in a number of walks, including Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers’s The Walking Library for Women Walking (2015–ongoing), Jennie Savage’s audio walk A Guide to Getting Lost (2014), and Yasmeen Sabri’s Walk a Mile in her Veil (2016). My experience of WALKING WOMEN was undoubtedly influenced by my position as the only male directly involved in the organisation of the exhibition and as one of the few men who attended and participated in the event, something that informs my discussion here. As Qualmann and Sharrocks note, the impetus for WALKING WOMEN was the ‘growing concern that walking is perceived as a male domain of practice.’66 The event’s press release explicitly referenced Heddon and Turner’s

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research, which had been circulated and discussed via the network. It was curated in direct response to the conspicuous ‘invisibility of women in what appears as a canon of walking’ and their inclusion ‘as an “exception” to an unstated norm, represented by a single chapter in a book or even a footnote.’67 The series looked to actively re-write the canon, and ‘re-balance the perception of art, artists, and the use of walking as a creative practice’ in order to imagine a pathway for a ‘future in which gender bias and skewed vision is destroyed.’68 Though Qualmann and Sharrocks have noted a desire to move beyond the need to feature women exclusively, they viewed WALKING WOMEN as a necessary corrective to the unexamined dominance of walking men.69

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4.2.1 Walking Library for Women Walking The Walking Library is an ongoing walking art project by Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers that brings libraries into the landscape through site-specific walks. It draws on the Romantic precedent of walkers carrying books and the playful constructive behaviour of the Letterist/Situationist dérive. Heddon has stressed her interest in art where the walk is the art—in other words, art that is in the specific medium of walking—and in The Walking Library going for a walk is the central logic of representation.70 To create a walking library, Heddon and Myers solicit donations and suggestions from the public for books based on a specific prompt and create a walk in a specific location. Prompts have included, ‘[w]hat book about walking would you recommend for 8–12 year olds?,’71 for the Walking Library for Eigg Primary School (2014), and ‘[w]hat book reveals wildness in the city? What book would you rewild by walking?’ for Walking Library for a Wild City (2018).72 Each donation is accompanied by a record of who donated it and why, something Heddon and Myers refer to as an ‘autobibliography.’73 The collections respond and are specific to the contexts in which they are walked; this includes any organisation with whom they are working, the people who donate books, the people who come on the walks, and the specific landscape in which the walk takes place. While out walking, the collections are transported in a rucksack emblazoned with a black and yellow Walking Library patch. Participants are invited to read passages from texts in the collection at resonant places in the landscape, with each walk’s prompt suggesting different kinds of locations. The project’s development can be explicitly traced to WAN, with conversations on the network’s listserv contributing to the project’s inspiration. After Myers attended a talk by Scottish poet and artist Alec Finlay in which he ‘raised the idea of taking books for walks,’ she sent an email to the WAN listserv and ‘invite[d] the list to share their reading lists of fiction/non-fiction involving walks/walking, walking landscapes, etc.—basically, any book you

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think would be great to take for a walk.’74 In response, Heddon referred the list to Morris Marples’s study of walking, Shank’s Pony (1959), which ‘rather marvellously . . . includes references for “Books carried by walkers”.’75 Heddon, who at the time was reading Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803, goes on to list a series of Romantic walkers who walked with books. This initial conversation developed into a full-fledged concept through participation in Sideways Festival (2012), a peripatetic festival that traversed Belgium. For Sideways, Heddon and Myers asked for donations in response to the question, ‘what books would be good to take on a walk?’76 As librarians, they performed as ‘catalyst rather than bureaucrat.’77 They did not refuse any donations they were offered and consistently catalogued the reason for each donation. The resulting library collection, The Walking Library for Sideways Festival (2012), featured over ninety books suggested or donated by the public, both before the walk and along the route. After the festival, the collection was donated to the festival’s organisers in the hope that they ‘will lend it to other organisations, facilitating the forging of more as-yet-unwritten stories and paths.’78 This established an important precedent for the project, with most collections donated to arts or public organisations for further circulation. In this way, The Walking Library combines the artistic medium of walking with the production of a library collection, which exists as a cohesive work of art that also circulates amongst the public. Since Sideways, Heddon and Myers have expanded the project’s constellation of library collections to include multiple sites throughout the United States and Europe. As a work in the medium of walking, The Walking Library draws explicitly on the memory of Romantic and naturalist walkers who carried books on their journeys. As discussed in chapter 2, Romantic walking practices are commonly associated with epic, solitary walks through remote landscapes; Heddon and Myers refocus this tradition on the social and relational memory of Romantic walking practices through the action of walking with and sharing books. Drawing on the index of Shank’s Pony (1959), they establish a canon of walking readers—John Hucks and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1794), John Keats and Charles Brown (1818), John Muir walking with the poems of Robert Burns, Milton and William Wood (1867)—before adding themselves into the record. As they note, their project ‘reveals both the continuing influence of the Romantic discourse of walking and its disruption.’79 The autobibliography is an essential feature of The Walking Library, and it makes visible the process that brings a collection together. Unlike typical library collections that only highlight the most generous and prolific donors, each book in a Walking Library collection contains a small index card in the

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front, which notes the reason for the donation and the person who donated it. In this way, each collection is also an archive of acquisition and allows for a continuing relationship between future readers of the text and the original donor. Literary theorist and historian Alan Richardson argues that the ‘broadly social function envisioned for’ Romantic literature is due not only to the authors who gained canonical status, such as Coleridge and William Wordsworth, but also Romantic-era editors and anthologists, ‘many of whose names have been forgotten.’80 Through its autobibliographic approach, the project addresses this erasure and emphasises those who compile, as well as that which is compiled; in doing so, it ensures those who contributed to the process are not forgotten. In this way, Heddon and Myers build a Romantic ‘model of affiliation rather than a model of individual achievement.’81 In contrast to the heroic, solitary Romantic walker, The Walking Library makes visible the social process of composition and compilation through the active process of reading and walking together. For WALKING WOMEN, Qualmann and Sharrocks commissioned Heddon and Myers to create Walking Library for Women Walking (WLfWW) and a collection was compiled based on the question, ‘What book would you give to accompany a woman walking?’82 They changed the colour scheme for the project from black and yellow to the suffragette colours, green, purple, and white; this was reflected in the patches and badges given to anyone who donated a text to the library, as well as the banners displayed as part of the library when it was not out being used in a walk (see figure 4.1). The collection’s ultimate destination will be the Glasgow Women’s Library, where it

Figure 4.1.  People browsing the WLfWW collection at Somerset House, London (Source: Blake Morris)

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will actively contribute to the formation of a new canon of walking women as both an art work and part of the library’s circulating collection. The resulting collection contains over one hundred texts covering a wide range of topics. From Romantic-era travelogues to contemporary artists’ books, the collection actively recasts the walking canon to include women as prominent members. My personal donation was The Journals of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 (1970), a text filled with stories of Nin’s walks through Paris and NYC during the interwar period. As I note in my autobibliographic entry, I included it ‘to ensure Nin’s entry into the walking canon.’83 Alice Tarbuck donated Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ (1930), which ‘combines urban exploration, early psychogeography and a sense of women’s bodies in urban spaces.’84 Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977) was suggested by four different contributors to bring attention to the epic walks she took through the Scottish highlands. Artist Louise Anne Wilson donated The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (1897) to represent an iconic walking woman of the Romantic period. Along with her own artists’ books, Claire McDonald also passed on books given to her by other women. ‘Each of the books I donated,’ she writes, ‘was given to me by a woman friend, and so they come to you as used gifts, mementos.’85 Each text includes a description of how it came to her (for example, Holly Hughes left M. F. K. Fisher’s Serve it Forth at her house in 1995); in this way, her contributions extend the network further, pointing to a longer legacy of textual sharing and artists’ networks. Heddon’s donation was Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses (1961), because ‘[t]oo often, the women in the SI are marginalised in historical accounts.’86 Though the library does contain texts by men (mostly in collaboration with women artists), it builds a women-centred history of walking, writing, and reading. In London, the walk followed the route of a 1905 suffragette procession, starting at Somerset House on the embankment and winding its way toward Hyde Park. I was a volunteer librarian for the walk and joined Heddon and Sharrocks in carrying the rucksacks of books selected from the library by participants. Sharrocks, who had served as volunteer librarian at Sideways Festival, commented on the physical labour required for that original walk. Though our walk was short, especially compared to Sideways Festival, the experience brought attention to the physical challenge of walking while carrying a heavy rucksack. We were instructed to keep an eye out for monuments to women, or representations of women in public space, where we would read from texts in the library. Our first walk yielded few results: a golden ballerina visible above the scaffolding that surrounded the Victoria Palace Theatre, a lioness eating a hawk (identified by the group in some desperation), and a statue of Nike, winged goddess of victory, which marked our arrival at Hyde Park.

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The second day’s results were better, though still unsatisfactory. The monumental women we encountered during our walk were sublimated into mythical creatures or reduced to the ornaments of men rather than treated as flesh-and-blood women. We stopped in front of a bust of playwright W. S. Gilbert, best known for his comic operas with Sir Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert’s bust was adorned with two female figures representing tragedy and comedy, who were positioned looking up to the canonical male playwright. Earlier, we had passed a similarly adorned sculpture of Sullivan, and, as a ‘witty riposte to the musical duo,’ the biography that precedes Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart (1997) was read aloud.87 Scholar and artist Roberta Mock donated the book from her the personal collection, because it ‘needed to be discovered and understood through rhythm.’88 Through a focus on the extensive contributions of one of Britain’s most renowned playwrights, the reading offered a public response to the lack of women artists publicly memorialised. The focus of a walk informs its politics, and the WLfWW revealed the need for further public acknowledgment of women’s contributions to cultural life, particularly in periods where their work might be historically marginalised. For one participant, the walk reflected the web of work discussed throughout the weekend. In her feedback for the event, she wrote, ‘[m]arching in suffragettes [sic] footsteps through Westminster just after hearing [Lois] Keidan’s talk about and films of Kubra Khademi was particularly pertinent.’89 The strides made by Romantic women led directly to the suffragette route we were walking, though neither set of women’s contributions were visible through public monuments. It is this contradiction that the project makes clear, and looks to correct, through developing and making public alternative canons of walking practice. Since the inaugural walk in London, it has been walked three other times, with the collection extending and expanding to reflect those different contexts and a wider web of walking women.90 For Heddon and Myers, The Walking Library is based on ‘social capital’ and ‘the movement of books among social networks’ activated by walking.91 They argue that moving library ‘radically mobilizes the aspiration of public access, with the collections travelling to publics rather than functioning as fixed centres to which publics must travel.’92 This allows for a library that shifts and grows as it moves through the landscape, responding to and engaging with a public that might not seek it out. The Walking Library explores ‘the interplay of embodied experiences and social relations involved in walking and in the production of knowledge’ through situating the acts of walking and reading together in a co-constituting relationship.93 Heddon and Myer’s autobibliographic approach foregrounds the social experience of the production, compilation, and dissemination of the library collection; in doing so, it makes visible the network that comprises the project

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and offers an opportunity to engage with the stories that brought the collection together, as well as those that it contains. The resulting collections is both an aesthetic and functional output of the project; it circulates, inscribed with the story of how each book came to be part of the collection, and potentially serves as a point of reference for inspiration for the creation of new walks. Geographer Doreen Massey suggests we ‘could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far,’ a ‘coexisting heterogeneity . . . predicated upon the existence of plurality.’94 Through the library walks, the reading of the texts in the landscape, and the autobibliography that accompanies each collection, The Walking Library works to expand this plurality and make visible the various relations that contribute to the construction of our landscapes.

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4.2.2 Walking the Embankment in a Burqa The second walk I participated in during WALKING WOMEN was Yasmeen Sabri’s Walk a Mile in her Veil (2016). Sabri installed a clothing rail of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas in the gallery space and invited members of the public to try them on and go for a walk, with or without the artist’s accompaniment. Additionally, Sabri had a video work in the exhibition’s screenings; the video cuts between footage of her walks in the United Kingdom while wearing a burqa, and members of the public (all women) trying on a veil. According to the artist, I was the first male to participate in her walk. Through Sabri’s work, I encountered a way of walking specific to Muslim women; however, I also encountered the challenges of creating work that asks participants to walk as or for someone, rather than with them. Her work suggests another strand of the memory of the medium—walking under the veil. Sabri originally created the work for her master’s thesis at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA). The installation was vandalised, however, after a seventy-year-old woman attempted to tear it down, screaming, ‘Saudi Arabia go home’ and ‘we voted to take our country back.’95 Sabri, who is of Jordanian descent and does not wear a covering herself, was ‘shocked and speechless’ and ‘really scared’ by the attack.96 Reports on the incident link it to the increased political tension and incidents of xenophobia following the United Kingdom’s successful referendum to leave the European Union. An article in the London Evening Standard brought the installation to the attention of Qualmann and Sharrocks; they had already commissioned the video version of the work for the event’s screening program and added the walk to the programme as well. The first day of the exhibition at Somerset House coincided with a nearby English Defence League (EDL) rally at Trafalgar Square. The EDL opposes the spread of Islam and the event’s producers had concerns about members

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of the public encountering the rally while out in a hijab or burqa. Ultimately, the walk was limited to the grounds of Somerset House on the exhibition’s first day to avoid this possibility. This restriction was a testament to the metaphorical power of the walk and the potential danger of simply wearing a veil or covering. The following day I participated in Sabri’s work. As Sabri helped me put on a burqa, I was aware of the awkwardness of my physique. I tried to hide my hands, conscious of the size of my knuckles, and was thankful for an Adam’s apple that is not too large. The slightly too-short outfit highlighted my trainers and tatty jeans, and I felt conspicuous as I stepped outside the safe space of Somerset House’s grounds and on to Victoria Embankment. As I walked down the street, I garnered looks from passers-by. One young boy asked his mother, ‘Is that a man?’ Later in the evening, another male would walk the work—his lanky frame made him an even more striking figure on the street and he was reported to security by someone who considered him a suspicious figure. Sabri frames the work as ‘an introspection of Arab identity through the lens of the veil and its user,’ and she invites visitors ‘to try on the veil and understand first-hand the cultural, social, and feminist motives behind it.’97 For me, it highlighted that some experiences cannot be quickly embodied: the garment does not contain its gesture, which is beyond my personal comprehension as an agnostic, Western white male raised in a Christian tradition. Perhaps that is the point—rather than make me understand what it is like to be a woman in a burqa, the work introduced me to how very far that is from my everyday experience (an aspect given extra emphasis through the fact of my cross-dressing). As I walked back to Somerset House to take off the veil, I wondered if I was a burqa tourist—though I walked in a burqa I did not embody it. Regardless of the efficacy of the piece, it forced me to walk while considering the subjective experience of Muslim women. 4.2.3 Getting Lost with Lady Somerset Audio walks are one of the most visible and well-established artistic walking techniques, with works such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999), Graeme Miller’s Linked (2003), and Platform’s And While London Burns (2007) all serving as prominent examples of the form. The third walk I participated in at Somerset House was Jennie Savage’s audio walk A Guide to Getting Lost (2014). Savage’s work is ‘designed with dis-orienteering in mind’ and calls on the memory of SI/LI walking practices.98 It combines audio recordings made while ‘travelling and walking in locations as far flung as Plymouth, Delhi, Copenhagen, Quebec

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and Marrakesh’ with instructions for a guided walk to be done anywhere in the world.99 Savage doesn’t ask the walker to produce or create anything through the walk; rather, she focuses on the experience of walking to make connections between the near and the far, the global and the local.100 Savage began making the guides in 2005, recording walks in different cities she visited. The work recalls a mapping exercise included in Guy Debord’s ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955). Debord describes a friend who ‘wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London’; for Debord, such practices ‘can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences.’101 Originally, each walk featured field recordings from a specific city combined with the artist’s narrated thick descriptions of her experiences. In 2014, she edited the varying walks together into a new version of the piece, A Guide to Getting Lost, in which she prioritised walking instructions over descriptive narration. As part of its release, Savage organised a ‘Fracture Mob’ and asked people from across the world to participate in a simultaneous drift. This new version foregrounds the participant’s current experience of walking, rather than a walk Savage previously completed. Before I walked A Guide to Getting Lost, I overheard participants saying it didn’t quite work in the setting. My experience confirmed this; however, I thought the inability to easily complete her directions added to the work’s feeling of disorientation. Overall, the pace of the walk was fairly rapid, as I attempted to keep up with Savage’s instructions. One essential problem was the length of the streets around Somerset House, which were longer than the assumed length of the streets in the audio walk. I often found myself being asked to turn when no turn was available. Though I could have just paused the track, this would have disrupted the temporal flow of the experience, which was designed to be continuous and of a specific length. This changed the tenor of the walk at certain points, as I sped up to corners to try and follow her instructions or slowed down during long stretches where she instructed that I walk straight ahead. At times, I held multiple instructions in my head, trying to do them in each in turn; other times I abandoned previous instructions and followed Savage’s most current directive. In some ways this felt essential to the artistic experience, as I got lost in the combination of her narration, directions, and the actual streets I was traversing. As I walked, Savage’s soundscape interacted with the environment around me and sometimes overlapped in uncanny ways. For example, when Savage described walking down a set of stairs along the English seaside, I found myself at a set of stairs on the Thames. This paralleled Savage’s location and the live sounds of the urban river overlapped with her beach soundscape. With the

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Thames in view, I was transported to the beach while also firmly grounded in my own experience in London. Sometimes I experienced a disconnect between Savage’s soundscape and the relatively quiet streets around Somerset House. Hearing her recorded footsteps, I would turn and look to make sure no one was behind me. This added a sense of paranoia to the walk, as I alternated between following Savage and feeling like I was being followed. At other times, the walk connected to the wider WALKING WOMEN weekend. While continuously circling through the Victoria Embankment Gardens, I came across a statue of Lady Henry Somerset, president of the Women’s Temperance Society. My awareness of public monuments to women had been heighted through my previous walks with the Walking Library for Women Walking. Somerset’s statue was the first I had encountered over the course of my three walks that memorialised a flesh-and-blood woman. This linked Savage’s walk not only to the area around Somerset House and the global locations to which it transported me, but also to the wider visibility of walking women and the events of the WALKING WOMEN weekend. A Guide to Getting Lost investigates ‘how landscapes are constructed in the imagination’ and how ‘listening to audio whilst walking sets up a conversation between the gaze, the cognition of the walker and the place’ through which the person is walking.102 It provides an opportunity to link local spaces to ‘the sonic & geographic landscape of another place.’103 Savage identifies the work as a ‘playful challenging of place’ that tests what the walker is willing to do and how they respond to the instructions of the artist.104 What choices will they make based on the tensions and conflicts between the landscape, the audio, and what the walker is ‘prepared to do or not do?’105 Though it is constituted through a combination of media, walking is the work’s process of creation and method of dissemination. Of course, one could listen to the work and not do the walk. This, however, would miss the essential artistic gesture: to get lost in your local space through an active reimagining of it. WALKING WOMEN made visible strands of research and practice that had been encouraged, discussed, and developed through WAN. It brought together a community of female artists focused on walking as method and medium. Feedback from participants reflects that the event created a space for women walking artists to come together and share their practices, experiences and ideas, and learn about the diversity of women working in the field. As one participant noted, it was ‘[c]learly a much needed event,’ which, despite her familiarity with walking art, ‘revealed . . . a wealth, range and high standard of work that [she] had previously been unaware of.’106 For another, it provided the opportunity to ‘connect with a community of walkers.’107 In this way, WALKING WOMEN brought together artistic and theoretical strands that had been discussed on the network to form a visible community, if only

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temporarily. In doing so, it actively contributed to making visible the work of walking women artists and serves as an example of how the digital aspects of the network manifest themselves physically.

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4.3 CONCLUSION: WALKING THROUGH DIGITAL SPACES TO CREATE PHYSICAL EXPERIENCES WAN provides a location from which to define walking as something that is distinct from, if entangled with, other artistic practices. The broad approach it supports illuminates the challenges of defining walking as an artistic medium. Members of the network do not necessarily identify as walking artists and work with a variety of artistic media. Indeed, one of the advantages of walking practice is its ability to move beyond, among and between groups, disciplines and media. The role of the network is not to push a specific agenda; rather, it offers a space to discuss and develop artistic practices in relation to walking. As such, it is a fertile ground for artists pioneering the medium of walking art while also welcoming walkers working in a variety of artistic and academic disciplines. My own trajectory as a walking artist and scholar has been deeply influenced by the network, inspiring the location of my studies and serving as one of the core aspects of my research. Additionally, WAN and the network it offers have influenced the development of the Walk Study Training Course and the Walk Exchange. As I discuss in chapter 6, WAN has been key to our exploration of methods for international exchange. One of the things the network offers is an online community with which to take things offline. It brings together a variety of groups, organisations, research centres, and individual artists to think about and discuss walking. It connects local, physical, walking practices amongst global practitioners through online locations. WALKING WOMEN, which brought together a wide variety of network members to create an exhibition that responded to theory circulated on the network, serves as a dramatic example. The network, however, also works in smaller ways to support the work of walking artists, such as the discussion generated around the ethics of the LRM’s first Sunday walk shortly after the bombing in Manchester. These everyday conversations and exchanges are essential to the network’s development and how it serves to support artists and scholars engaged with walking practices. The network’s broad reach ensures that this chapter could have been organised around a number of thematic points of inquiry and I have only discussed a small sample of the network’s practices. In addition to the work discussed in this chapter, both Deveron Projects and the Walk Exchange are active members of the network and work to develop the medium in unique, though

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complementary, ways. I now turn to Deveron Projects, which has worked actively with the network since founding the Walking Institute and look more specifically at how an organisation connected to the network develops and supports the medium of walking.

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NOTES   1.  ‘About,’ Walking Artists Network, last modified 12 March 2011, http://www .walkingartistsnetwork.org/about/.   2.  ‘Members,’ Walking Artists Network, last accessed 16 Sept 2019, http://www .walkingartistsnetwork.org/members-2/.  3. Phil Smith. ‘Psychogeography and Mythogeography: Currents in Radical Walking,’ in Richardson, Tina. Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 170.   4.  Clare Qualmann, ‘A Network Opportunity?,’ email 13 April 2011, https://www .jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1104&L=WAN&F=&S=&P=2438.  5. Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 80.   6.  Walking Artists Network, ‘About.’  7. Sam Cooper, The Situationist International in Britain: Modernism, Surrealism and the Avant-garde (London: Routledge, 2016), 159.   8.  Blake Morris and Morag Rose, ‘Pedestrian Provocations: Manifesting an Accessible Future,’ GPS 2.2, 2019.   9.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 148. 10.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 159. 11.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 148. 12.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 159. 13. Rose, Women Walking Manchester, 34. 14.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 150. 15.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 149. 16.  Morris and Rose, ‘Pedestrian Provocations.’ 17. Morag Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 151. The history of these groups and events have influenced the memory of the medium beyond Rose’s work. The Kinder Mass Trespass on 24 April 1932, saw over four hundred people descend on Kinder Scout, a moorland in northern England. The action was designed to highlight the lack of free access to the UK countryside, and is often credited with the establishment of the national parks system in 1949. For a good account of this, see Benny Rothman, The Battle for Kinder Scout: Including the 1932 Mass Trespass (Timperley, UK: Willow Publishing, 2012). The marches of the suffragettes have been particularly influential on current walking work. In the lead-up to the onehundred-year anniversary of voting rights for women over thirty, a variety of artists have interacted with their legacy in the creation of walking work. See section 5.4.2; also see Borda, ‘The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910–1913.’ Manchester Area Psychogeographic is a ‘semi-defunct’ psychogeography group in Manchester, most

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active from 1995 to 1998. They published nine newsletters and undertook a series of walks and public actions in the Manchester area. See http://www.twentythree.plus. com/MAP/ for more information. 18.  Morag Rose, The Loiterer’s Resistance Movement, 2006, available at http:// thelrm.org/index. 19.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 157. 20.  Morris and Rose, ‘Pedestrian Provocations.’ 21. Morag Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating Our Bounds: Walking A Line Through Manchester,’ Livingmaps Review, 3: 2, 2017. 22.  Morag Rose, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘First Sunday Derive in Manchester,’ 2 June 2017, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1706& L=WAN&F=&S=&P=1645. 23.  Stephen Bottoms, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘Re: First Sunday Derive in Manchester,’ 3 June 2017, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1 706&L=WAN&D=0&P=2429. 24.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 2. 25.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 152. 26.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 3. 27.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 3. 28.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 4. 29.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 3. 30.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 3–4. 31.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 8. 32.  Rose, ‘Buzzing, Bimbling, Beating,’ 10. 33.  Morag Rose, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘Re: First Sunday Derive in Manchester,’ 6 June 2017, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind170 6&L=WAN&F=&S=&P=6372 34.  Rose, ‘Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse,’ 151. 35.  Karen McCoy, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘Re: First Sunday Derive in Manchester,’ 6 June 2017, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind170 6&L=WAN&F=&S=&P=8067. 36.  Phil Smith, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways (Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press, 2010), 116. 37.  Smith, ‘Psychogeography and Mythogeography,’ 167. 38. Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 81. 39. Smith, Mythogeography, 200. 40. Smith, Mythogeography, 198. 41. Phil Smith, ‘Not Psychogeography,’ Mythogeography, 2016, http://www .mythogeography.com/not-psychogeography.html. 42.  Smith, ‘Crab Walking and Mythogeography,’ 82. 43.  Smith, ‘Crab Walking and Mythogeography,’ 82. 44. The Footwork research group met four times from 2012 to 2015 and was facilitated by Qualmann and Hunter. The group focused on ‘walking as a dialogic, investigative and performative mode of art practice’ and looked ‘to build a community of practice’ amongst walkers of all sorts. It brought together an international and

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interdisciplinary group of network stakeholders to participate in multi-day walking workshops. The inaugural Footwork meeting took place at Sideways Festival (2012) in Belgium; the second official meeting took the form of a walk from the University of East London’s Docklands campus to Dartford in Kent (2013); the third meeting took place at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, Wales (2014); the final meeting took place in Cornwall and culminated in Where To? Steps Towards the Future of Walking (2015), a conference at the University of Falmouth convened in association with WAN. AHRC funding allowed WAN to provide room, board, and travel (within Europe) for all participants. This ensured that salaried scholars, graduate students, freelance artists, and unwaged workers could attend regardless of financial ability. For a list of meetings and participants, see https://footworkwalk. wordpress.com/about/. For more details on funding and the group’s focus, see ‘Footwork—The Walking Artists Network as Mobile Community’ (Gateway to Research, 2015), http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH%2FJ013765%2F1. 45. Cathy Turner, ‘Fog, 2015,’ Footwork, 12 June 2015, https://footworkwalk .wordpress.com/2015/06/12/fog-2015/. 46. Katie Etheridge, ‘Katie Etheridge: Seeing/Not Seeing.’ Footwork, 15 July 2015, https://footworkwalk.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/katie-etheridge-seeingnot -seeing/. 47.  Giulia Fiocca, ‘CORN-WAL(K),’ Footwork, 4 January 2016, https://footwork walk.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/corn-walk/. 48.  Calderaro, ‘Passing Thoughts,’ Scribd (blog), 2015, https://www.scribd.com/ doc/271738764/Passing Thoughts. 49.  Calderaro, ‘Passing Thoughts.’ 50.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97 51.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 52.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 53.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 54. For a full account of this exchange, see https://footworkwalk.wordpress .com/2015/04/21/the-rocks-ex-tensions/. 55.  ‘History,’ Heartlands Cornwall, accessed 30 December 2018, http://www.heart landscornwall.com/about-us/history.php. 56.  Phil Smith, ‘Turning Tourists into Performers: Revaluing Agency, Action and Space in Sites of Heritage Tourism,’ Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts 18, no. 2 (2013): 106. DOI: 10.1080/13528165. 2013.807174. 57.  Phil Smith, ‘Introduction,’ in Counter-Tourism: The Handbook (Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press, 2012). 58.  ‘Visitor Info,’ Heartlands Cornwall, accessed 30 December 2018, http://www .heartlandcornwall.com/visitor-info.php 59. Footwork Group, ‘The Hayle Manifesto,’ (Hayle, England: Footwork, 2014), personal archive. Online version available at https://footworkwalk.wordpress .com/2015/08/05/the-hayle-manifesto/. 60.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 61.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 62.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99.

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63.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 64.  Smith, ‘Psychogeography and Mythogeography,’ 175. 65. Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come, 33. 66.  Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide on Women Using Walking in Their Practice’ (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2017), 1, https://www.scribd.com/document/346143517/WALKINGWOMEN-A-Study-Room-Guide-on-women-using-walking-in-their-practice. 67.  Heddon and Turner, ‘Walking Women,’ 225. 68.  Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN,’ Live Art Development Agency, 2016, http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/whats-on/walking-women/. 69.  Clare Qualmann, Amy Sharrocks, Deirdre Heddon, and Cathy Turner. ‘Closing Discussion,’ presented at the WALKING WOMEN, Somerset House, London, 17 July 2016. 70.  Deirdre Heddon, ‘Talking Walking,’ interview by Andrew Stuck, Talking Walking, 9 March 2013, podcast, 18:54, https://www.talkingwalking.net/deirdre-heddon-talk ing-walking/. 71.  Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers, ‘Walking Library for Eigg Primary School 2014,’ The Walking Library, 15 June 2014, https://https://walkinglibraryproject.word press.com/projects/walking-library-for-eigg-primary-school. 72.  Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers, ‘The Walking Library for a Wild City| An Leabharlann Air Ghluasad Airson Fiadh-Bhaile,’ The Walking Library, 15 March 2018, https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/the-walking-libraryfor-a-wild-city/. 73.  Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ Cultural Geographies 21, no. 4: 647. 74.  Misha Myers, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘Re: Summer Walking Reading List,’ 29 July 2011, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1107& L=WAN&P=R522. 75.  Deirdre Heddon, email to Walking Artists Network, ‘Re: Summer Walking Reading List,’ 1 August 2011, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=in d1108&L=WAN&F=&S=&P=526. 76.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 640. 77.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 643. 78.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 653. 79.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 642. 80.  Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 265. 81. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender, 166. 82.  Myers, ‘Walking Library for Women Walking 2016–2018,’ The Walking Library, 29 May 2016, https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/projects/walking-li brary-for-women-walking/. 83.  Qualmann and Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide,’ 63. 84.  Qualmann and Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide,’ 53. 85.  Qualmann and Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide,’ 50.

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86.  Qualmann and Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide,’ 47. 87.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Walking Library for Women Walking 2016–2018.’ 88.  Qualmann and Sharrocks, ‘WALKING WOMEN: A Study Room Guide,’ 53. 89. WALKING WOMEN. ‘WALKING WOMEN Questionnaire,’ unpublished feedback questionnaire (London: University of East London, 2016). In Armor (2015), Afghan artist Kubra Khademi walked through the streets of Kabul wearing a suit of body armour she had commissioned from a local ironsmith. In contrast to traditional Afghan garb, the iron armour accentuated Khademi’s breasts and groin. The street she chose for her public performance was one where she had experienced public harassment; the armour was designed to both highlight her body and protect her from the harassment it might inspire. In a short video, captured on a grainy cellular phone camera, Khademi is seen walking down a crowded road, her head covered in a veil and her clothes bunched awkwardly beneath the armour. As she walks, men throw rocks at her and shout threatening words. In total, the performance lasted only eight minutes before Khademi was ushered into a car by one of her compatriots, a necessity due to the increasing hostility of the crowd and real danger to the performer. Khademi had expected her audience to be shocked, and she initially believed her performance might change or transform opinions; she was unprepared, however, for the ensuing reaction. A fatwa was issued against her and she was inundated with death threats. Unsafe in her town and unwelcome in her family’s home, she fled Afghanistan on foot, carrying with her a few possessions. Khademi currently lives and works in Paris where she often uses walking in the creation of performance art. See Jo Norcup, ‘Clear Spot—(‘Er Outdoors #3),’ Clear Spot—’Er Outdoors (Resonance FM, 14 July 2016), https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/clear-spot-er-outdoors-ep-3-14-july -2016/?play=fb. 90. The WLFWW was walked as part of the WALKING WOMEN events at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the University of Bristol as part of the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s conference, and in Geelong, Australia as the keynote event for ‘Moving Out of Doors,’ a symposium that explored the artistic labour of women. See https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/projects/walking-library -for-women-walking/ for descriptions of the different walks. 91.  Heddon and Myers, ‘The Walking Library: Mobilizing Books, Places, Readers and Reading,’ 33. 92.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 649. 93.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library,’ 641. 94.  Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 9. 95.  Mark Chandler, ‘“You Don’t Belong Here”: London Artist Exhibiting Burka “Abused and Has Artwork Attacked”,’ Evening Standard, 30 June 2016, http://www .standard.co.uk/news/crime/london-artist-exhibiting-burkha-told-you-dont-belong -here-and-has-artwork-attacked-a3285401.html; James Cox, ‘What Drunk Brexit Supporter Screamed as She Destroyed Hijab Sculpture,’ The Sun, 18 July 2016, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1462049/what-drunk-brexit-supporter-screamed-as -she-destroyed-hijab-sculpture/; Robinson Martin, ‘Brexit Supporter Destroyed £6,000 Hijab Sculpture Days after EU Vote,’ Mail Online, 19 July 2016, http://www.daily

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mail.co.uk/news/article-3697092/Drunk-Brexit-supporter-screamed-voted-country -destroyed-Royal-College-Art-hijab-sculpture-days-EU-vote.html.   96.  Chandler, ‘“You Don’t Belong Here”.’   97.  Yasmeen Sabri, ‘Walk a Mile in Her Veil,’ Yasmeen Sabri, 2016, http://yas meensabri.com/home.html.   98.  Jennie Savage, ‘Fracture Mob,’ Livingmaps Review 2, no. Spring (17 February 2017): 1, http://livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/article/view/30.   99.  Jennie Savage, ‘Fracture Mob,’ 2. 100. Jennie Savage, ‘Jennie Savage Talking Walking,’ interview by Andrew Stuck, podcast, August 2014, Talking Walking, http://www.talkingwalking.net/jennie -savage-talking-walking/. 101. Guy Debord, ‘Critique of Urban Geography,’ trans. Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm., emphasis in original. 102.  Savage, ‘Fracture Mob,’ 2. 103. Jennie Savage, ‘Guide to Getting Lost,’ Jennie Savage, 2010, http://www .jenniesavage.co.uk/guidetogettinglost/guide%20to%20getting%20lost.htm. 104.  Savage, ‘talking walking.’ 105.  Savage, ‘talking walking.’ 106.  WALKING WOMEN, ‘WALKING WOMEN Questionnaire.’ 107.  WALKING WOMEN, ‘WALKING WOMEN Questionnaire.’

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Chapter Five

Deveron Projects

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The Walking Institute

In 2013, Deveron Project (DP) founded the Walking Institute to establish a year-round centre of walking excellence.1 Since its foundation, the Institute has supported artists to create works in the medium of walking through residencies, workshops, and events. It ‘encompasses all walking & art practices and aims to map globally the scope of the medium.’2 In doing so, it also expands the remit of their town is the venue methodology to link Huntly both physically and conceptually to areas beyond the town. The Institute frames walking as a creative pursuit with cultural potential, as well as an activity beneficial to individual and social health. This allows them to appeal to people who enjoy walking because it is a relatively low-impact way to achieve positive health outcomes and chat with other community members as well as those more explicitly interested in walking art. Keeping with this, it follows the principle that ‘all walking is great,’3 and it ‘explore[s] and celebrate[s] journeying and the human pace in all its forms.’4 Zeiske has stated that she does not want DP to become the local ‘institute of silly walks,’ and, rather than walks based on ‘some kind of performative action,’ the Institute focuses on how artists can engage the community in the practice of walking.5 This builds on the models of social engagement and community collaboration that inform DP’s structure (see chapter 3). As Zeiske writes in the Institute’s ‘Vision Document,’ its aspiration is to ‘spiral out geographically’ and connect the work done in Huntly, a ‘centre of both action and research,’ to communities beyond Huntly.6 Through the resolutely local act of walking, the Walking Institute works to make visible the relationship between the rural space of Huntly and the larger global landscape. In doing so, it creates new paths in, around, and out of Huntly and expands beyond the confines of the town to create new links, both physical and imaginary, to a broader global community. 107

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5.1 SLOW MARATHON: FROM ARTIST’S WORK TO ANNUAL WALK The Institute’s flagship project is the annual Slow Marathon, a massparticipation walk of twenty-six miles that brings nearly a hundred people to Huntly for a full weekend of walking events. The event, which charges participants £35, is one of the Walking Institute’s most popular and is often sold out. Originally conceived in collaboration with Ethiopian artist Mihret Kebede, it has since become an annual event, with each Slow Marathon created by different artists in residence. In 2013, Slow Marathon served as the official launch of the Walking Institute and, at the time of writing, eight different versions have been walked since Kebede’s original marathon.7 As DP’s largest event, Slow Marathon provides a way to look at the organisation’s overarching strategy as it relates to walking and provides an example of how artistic walking practices can create new relationships to global landscapes.

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5.1.1 From Huntly to Addis and Back Again Kebede’s initial concept for her residency was to walk from her hometown, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Huntly; however, the combination of visa restrictions, harsh desert terrain, and the dangerous landscape destined her journey to remain conceptual. In response, the team at Deveron Projects worked with Kebede to develop Slow Marathon: A 5,850 Miles Walk from Addis to Scotland and Back (2012), an accumulative marathon and shoelace exchange. The project combined the steps of a variety of participants from Huntley, Addis Ababa and other locations throughout the world to walk the 5,850 miles that make up the journey. Miles were accumulated in several ways: through walks with local individuals and community groups, donated remotely by international participants through an online portal, and through two culminating slow marathon walks in Huntly and Addis Ababa. In addition to local townsfolk, ‘people from the wider UK, . . . Ethiopia, Sweden, Taiwan, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.S.A, Australia, China and Turkey all signed up’ and donated miles.8 This was a practical ‘solution to Huntly’s small population,’9 which would have made it challenging to collect all the miles locally, and also expanded Huntly’s boundaries through an invitation for people from anywhere in the world to participate. Ultimately, over five hundred individuals ‘contribute[d] a massive total of 14172.4 miles’—a total of 540 marathons—‘easily ensuring that [Kebede] could undertake her epic journey across continents.’10 The DP’s collaborative community approach meant it was important to create an ‘open access walking event’ that was open to participants ‘of all

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levels of fitness and from all locations’ and treated ‘those new to walking on the same footing as those with more expertise.’11 By allowing participants to contribute any number of miles at their own pace from anywhere in the world, the project was made accessible regardless of physical ability or geographical location. In one instance, over two hundred children from Gordon Primary donated miles through a walk around their school. Kebede identifies this as a standout moment due to the conversations it created with local children. For Kebede, these encounters facilitated the most important aspect of the project: to create intercultural exchange through ‘real conversation[s] with people.12 Though Kebede works in a variety of media, including ‘video art, performance art and photography,’13 she mostly ‘work[s] with shoelaces.’14 She is interested in the stories shoelaces tell, and how they can function as a point of discussion and exchange for personal histories. For Kebede, shoelaces are both an abundant material in Addis Ababa, and a familiar object for her audiences. As part of the project, she attached participants’ passport photographs and email addresses to shoelaces, which were then exchanged between Huntly and Addis Ababa. In this way, the physical experience of walking the marathon was connected through the miles walked (twenty-six) and the shoelaces. Her addition to Huntly’s Town Collection, አመሰግናለሁ (Thank You) (2012), reflects this: it is a shoelace work, and it serves as a permanent reminder of the marathon’s ephemeral exchange. Akin to the objects of relational aesthetics (see chapter 1), the shoelaces functioned as vehicles of relation between participants and created a physical connection between the two sets of walkers. Two full-day marathons in Huntly and Addis Ababa further enhanced this global exchange (see figures 5.1 and 5.2). The long walks through contrasting terrains highlighted the differences and similarities in the walking experience.

Figure 5.1.  Walkers participating in Slow Marathon 2012 in Ethiopia (Source: Deveron Projects)

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Figure 5.2.  Kebede leads Slow Marathon 2012 in Scotland

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(Source: Deveron Projects)

In essays written for the Slow Marathon artists’ book, two participants—one Scottish, one Ethiopian—reflect on their walking experiences and the different resonances of the shoelaces. In Ethiopia, Emebet Mesfin participated in the walk with her two children. She describes reprimanding her son for wearing shoes without laces, which would prevent him from fully participating in the artwork. She forced him to change shoes, which created a less comfortable walking experience for him: her son ‘would stop and take out his shoes and show [her] where he’s hurting.’15 ‘It was my fault insisting he wear shoes which has [sic] shoelaces,’ Mesfin writes, ‘I gave priority to the shoelace [rather] than the kid’s comfort.’16 Aware of the artistic gesture behind the laces, she forced her son to adapt his walking habits and desired level of comfort. Ultimately, she sent her children home early: ‘It was no use forcing them to do what they are not accustomed to.’17 In some ways, this is a fitting result, as it reflects Kebede’s interest in highlighting the treacherous and tedious journey that travelling from Ethiopia to Scotland by foot would require. It also identifies a challenge for participants in artistic walking practices: the walks are not necessarily designed to be pleasant or easily consumed; rather, they often challenge our dominant perceptions and engagements with the landscape through specific artistic interventions. Indeed, as the experience of local Huntly historian Ron Brander demonstrates, works in the artistic medium of walking can have challenging political resonances that create active reconsiderations of social structures.

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A few days after participating in Kebede’s Slow Marathon, Brander travelled to the United States, shoelaces in his pockets. He writes of a newfound awareness of Ethiopia while traveling through New York City and Washington, DC: ‘Never before March 2012 had I encountered or observed anything to do with Ethiopia,’ he writes; however, ‘throughout March and April 2012 the scriptwriter keeps on writing it in.’18 For Brander, Slow Marathon created new links between urban and rural spaces—Washington, D.C., Huntly, Addis Ababa. Six days after Slow Marathon, he saw a newspaper headline: ‘Friday March 23, 2012, . . . “PERILS OF WALKING WHILE BLACK”.’19 The article was about Trayvon Martin, a young black man shot in Florida while walking home. For Brander, ‘[t]he name resonate[d] like the bagpipes which led [the group] out of Huntly square’ and highlighted less privileged ways of walking: ‘Even walking the streets is not necessarily free. But it helps if you’re white. And old maybe.’20 Kebede’s presence as a black Ethiopian woman leading a group of predominately white Scottish walkers called attention to how different bodies are perceived as they walk; this resonated with him as he learned of the death of a boy who had done nothing other than walk while black. For Kebede, the disparity in access to movement is one of the project’s key points. Despite the distance between Africa and Europe being the same in both directions, access is radically disparate, with African citizens experiencing far more travel restrictions than their European counterparts. For Kebede, the project’s ultimate goal was ‘to connect people through art . . . without the usual paper and bureaucracy, but with the free will of the people.’21 It was founded on intercultural exchange and the interrogation of borders and boundaries—physical, bureaucratic, and imagined—through the act of walking. For Slow Marathon, this occurred both physically, through the accumulation of miles from participants worldwide and the slow marathon walks themselves, and digitally, through the online portal used to track the miles and the shoelace-email exchange. The digital sphere linked globallydispersed physical acts and served to facilitate walking experiences for international participants. Kebede’s project highlights the territorial structures that prevent her from making her journey from Addis Ababa to Huntly by foot. At the same time, her work takes advantage of digital structures that allow her to link disparate locations through walking. In doing so, she links global spaces through a new geographical imaginary and highlights the distance, interrelatedness, and differing mobilities of residents within those global populations. It embraces international and intercultural exchange while also bringing attention to the structures that control the conditions of mobility and tensions around freedom of movement. Kebede’s inability to traverse the space between Ethiopia and Scotland contrasts the walking exploits of artists such as Fulton and Long, who make art based on their treks through various international locations without highlighting the bureaucratic process that allows them to complete those walks. In some

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ways, it recalls Francis Alÿs’s The Loop (1997), in which the artist travels from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Alÿs used his exhibition fee to cover the cost of travel through South America, Australia, Asia, and Canada, and while he physically completed the journey, it was accessible to the audience only through postcard documentation. Unlike Alÿs, who highlights his privilege as an international artist and his ability to complete the journey, Kebede asks participants to engage with a journey she does not have the privilege to complete. In this way, Kebede creates a physical exchange that brings attention to the global logic of border-crossing for different communities.

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5.1.2 Lost in the Wilderness of Walking Art: Slow Marathons 2013 and 2014 In 2013, Slow Marathon was adopted as an annual event and served as the official launch of the Walking Institute.22 Kebede’s Slow Marathon was based on the memory of her own practices (her relationship to Ethiopia, her use of shoelaces, her interest in borders, and boundaries) and linked to the contemporary context in which it took place—the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympics. When developed into an annual event, the marathon had to find its own artistic footing that built on, but was distinct from, Kebede’s originary project. The challenges involved in this indicate the importance of the memory of the medium in creating works of walking art. Slow Marathon 2013 consisted of a twenty-six-mile walk from Upper Cabrach to Huntly. The original plan was to link the marathon to the work of resident artist Simone Kenyon, who was engaged in an exploration of the old trade routes which led out of Huntly, known as the Hielan’ Way. The planned link never occurred and instead the walk was devised by Zeiske and organised around John Muir Day as part of the Year of Natural Scotland. Along the route, there were banners displaying John Muir quotes, refreshment stops serving tea and cake, and music by local performers. The Slow Marathon 2013 information pack makes no explicit mention of an artistic frame for the walk, except to note that ‘Slow Marathon was a project instigated in 2012 by Ethiopian artist Mihret Kebede.’23 Instead, it focuses on physical and mental preparedness for the event, foregrounding that ‘walking long distances can be strenuous’ and that participants were responsible for their own safety while walking.24 Likewise, the route guide, which participants carried with them during the walk, was primarily made up of pragmatic walking instructions and fairly straightforward facts about local points of interest, such as the etymology of the Clashmach,25 or the location where a beacon fire was lit for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.26 Project reports for Slow Marathon 2013 reflect a struggle to identify whether this is a work of art, or ‘just another walk?’27 One person at the meeting thought it

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was ‘[g]ood that the event was not obviously connected to art,’ while others found the artistic side lacking and in need of further development.28 Without Kebede’s animating gesture, it became a walk through the countryside, ‘[p] eppered with entertainment and refreshment stops.’29 Rather than being orchestrated by a single artist, Slow Marathon 2014 brought together a variety of artists to create interventions along a route from Glenkindie to Huntly that Zeiske devised. Like Slow Marathon 2013, the walk featured performances, installations, and other interventions designed to enhance participants’ walking experience along the way. These included a musical interlude by Jake Williams, who had previously walked the river Deveron as part of his project Singing the Deveron (2013), and ‘a series of actions/performance’ led by Gill Russell.30 Ugandan artist Sanaa Gateja participated in the marathon ‘while performing a “ritual,” attempting to contact the spirit of missionary Alexander MacKay.’31 Kenyon, whose walks in the Heilan’ Way overlapped with the 2014 route, created a series of instructions ‘to encourage walkers to attend to all their senses’ during the marathon.32 Though not officially part of Slow Marathon, Clare Qualmann hosted ‘Baby Slow Marathon,’ a spin-off event to launch her project, Huntly Perambulator (2014), discussed below. Qualmann invited local parents to walk with their children in prams to the farthest feasible point on the slow marathon route (see figure 5.3). Though Slow Marathon 2014 contained a wider variety of artistic interventions than the 2013 version, the art was complementary to the walking, rather than constituted by it.

Figure 5.3.  Participants in ‘Baby Slow Marathon’ (Source: Clare Qualmann)

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5.1.3 Slow Marathon 2015: Lines Lost, Medium Found My first visit to Huntly coincided with Slow Marathon 2015, which was underway as I arrived at the Brander Building, where the DP office is located. Scottish artist Stuart McAdam developed the fourth version of the walk in relation to his earlier residency, Lines Lost (2013–2014). DP commissioned McAdam to create a work in response to the fifty-year anniversary of ‘The Beeching Report’ (1963), which radically reshaped the UK railway structure and caused many of the area’s railway lines to go out of use. McAdam’s project was an exploration of the area’s lost railway lines and an attempt to write them back into the landscape.33 As literary scholar Anne Wallace points out, it was the transport revolution of the 1800s, and particularly the creation of the railway lines, that made it ‘possible to practise and think about voluntary walking’ and walking as a cultural act on a wide scale.34 The now-defunct railways that facilitated the walking explorations of Romantic poets such as the Wordsworths formed the point of exploration for McAdam’s walks. As Zeiske wrote to me, ‘the systematic destruction of public transport [was] very much to the detriment of tourism today’ and has created continued challenges for regional access.35 For her, walking emerges as an alternative mode of travel, with McAdam’s project creating new relationships to the abandoned lines. For McAdam, working with DP ‘meant that three areas of output were of importance— walking, artwork, and community engagement.’36 Because of this, ‘the outcomes had to be more than [his] own personal artwork,’37 they also had to involve local residents. In response, he designed walks that did not venture too ‘far afield,’ which would have ‘been more likely to be an individual activity’ and ‘possibly [fail] to engage the community.’38 In this way, his collaboration with DP influenced the design of his work and moved him toward the medium of walking rather than representations of his solitary adventures. Lines Lost consisted of repeated walks of the abandoned railway lines around Huntly in a variety of social formations, including solo, one-on-one, and with small and large groups. Art critic Ben Anderson notes that McAdam is not ‘restricted to any particular medium’;39 rather, his use of medium ‘evolves in relation to the nature of the project, producing various outcomes (drawings, collage, three-dimensional objects, film, performance, writing).’40 Though Anderson does not include it in his list, I argue walking is the primary medium of Lines Lost, whose logic lies in getting audiences to walk the lines he uncovered through the project. For Slow Marathon 2015, over ninety people walked one of those lines together in a revisiting of McAdam’s project and a solidifying of the line in the landscape.

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Though many rail lines have been redeveloped into mixed-use paths for pedestrians and cyclists, the lines McAdam followed had not undergone any such reclamation. Unlike the temporary lines made by Richard Long, McAdam’s lines are meant to be walked by others to permanently transform the landscape. For McAdam, ‘what began as something only very lightly marked on the map as a dotted line’ became ‘etched into [his] consciousness as something very real, if faded.’41 Through solitary expeditions via foot and bicycle, walks with local community members and experts, and public events with larger audiences, the walks etched the lines of the railways into the landscape. The resulting artists’ book includes a scale map (in comic form) populated with experiences from the project presented in the pithy format of speech bubbles. The map is not the usual walking guide one might consult. McAdam’s map is suggestive rather than indicative and provides a walking blueprint through stories from the territory. It does not contain detailed instructions of the route, or historical information on heritage sites and points of interest, and he encourages those attempting the walk to consult an ordinance survey before departing. For McAdam, ‘the most authentic way . . . for someone to experience Lines Lost would be to take the map, some friends or family, and go out and see the line.’42 In this way, the resulting text doesn’t simply record his experience of walking the lines with members of the community, it encourages active exploration of the landscape to contribute to its reawakening. Through the invitation to walk the route—with him during the project, or of one’s own volition in its afterlife—McAdam creates opportunities for continued engagement with his artistic interpretation of the terrain. Lines Lost’s logic of representation is not the comic map, but rather the way that map encourages active interventions in the landscape through the action of going for a walk. An individual picking up the map and following the route is walking with McAdam, as well as the stories he tells of the territory; simultaneously, they are creating their own walking story. McAdam’s Slow Marathon solidified this engagement through the repetition of nearly a hundred walking bodies, marking his intimate interactions on a mass scale. Like Kebede, McAdam was interested in barriers and boundaries; however, rather than creating a point of intercultural exchange, he focused on specifically local tensions: the right to roam, land ownership, and the redevelopment of space. For him, ‘the many barriers along the route influenced where [he] walked and what [he] did.’43 In devising Slow Marathon 2015, he embraced barriers as an essential theme. This artistic frame, however, challenged the ease of navigation audiences had come to expect from previous years. Participant responses to the route were mixed, with many noting the poor terrain filled with potholes, mud, and fences that needed to

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be scaled. One participant asserted that more time was spent ‘navigating the route safely rather than enjoying the scenery, atmosphere and company of fellow walkers.’44 McAdam also made artistic choices that highlighted the social tensions of the landscape, and the relationship between DP and the surrounding area. During his original exploration, he came across a classic British telephone booth in the middle of the Scottish landscape. While taking a picture, he and the small group of walkers with him were chased off by the land owner, who questioned their right to photograph his property. McAdam highlighted the spot as a pictorial vista in the Slow Marathon route guide, instructing participants to ‘[m]ake sure to take a photo of the phone box.’45 The result was that over ninety people photographed the booth. As I arrived in Huntly, halfway through the marathon, the phone booth’s owner was becoming increasingly irate as slow marathoners snapped photographs in front of his house. He called the office repeatedly, demanding to speak to the head of the organisation and requiring assurance that the pictures would not be published in the local papers or newsletter. The planned transgression boiled up simmering community tensions: Who is Deveron Projects? Why can they parade past my property? Take pictures of my phone booth? Publish it in their newsletter? The group of art walkers (though not all necessarily “walking as art”) magnified a micro-aggression McAdam had previously discovered but did not contextualise for them. One participant noted, I enjoyed the route although the shenanigans with the phone box owner dampened our spirits. It is hard to believe that he was not consulted in advance, about the photography. I assume that the route planners wanted to annoy the guy and if that was the case, I do not appreciate being part of such a ploy. In my mind the guy seemed quite unstable. I did not enjoy that when I was so tired.46

Another stated, ‘I thought it a pity the artist encouraged us to take photos in Ruthven, when on looking at the booklet he produced he already knew the owner did not want photos taken, and so we unwittingly caused problems for [DP].’47 McAdam did not provide participants with the social and political context of his aesthetic choice. In his position as artist, he exerted power over the participants to foster social tension that served his artistic gesture, possibly at the expense of creating a pleasant walking experience. In this moment, the convivial group atmosphere of the walk pushed against an antagonistic social landscape, highlighted by the mass participation of the marathoners. The version of the route guide currently available online has removed the direction to take a photo of the phone box as well as the picture McAdam

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originally included. It is the only grid of instructions that contains one picture instead of two—a digital erasure of the physical occurrence.48 The tension between the aesthetic goals of the artists and the needs of the community reflect the potential challenge of asking artists to engage a community in which they are a guest. The actions of the artists have ongoing ramifications for DP’s interaction with the community after the artist is no longer in town. As Bishop notes, ethics never entirely retreats from art based on public participation.49 For DP, who claim the town is their venue, this is exacerbated by their dependence on the acceptance and goodwill of the community, who are the primary audience for their projects. Indeed, as one of the few walking works discussed in this book to charge a fee for participation—£35—the relationship between the event and the audience’s pleasure is even more pronounced, as participants want to get value for money. Nevertheless, McAdam’s walk was not designed to create an accessible or pleasant walking experience; rather it was based around an artistic interrogation of the landscape and how we inhabit it.

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5.1.4 Slow Marathon 2018: Digital Connections between Gaza and Huntly In 2018, I was invited to Huntly to participate in the seventh annual Slow Marathon as Deveron Projects’ ‘Thinker in Residence.’ Slow Marathon 2018 was the culmination of Rachel Ashton and May Murad’s year-long collaboration Walking Without Walls (2017–2018). The project coincided with the centenary celebrations of the end of World War I, as well as the British partition of Palestine; it explored peace, friendship, and boundaries through a digital dialogue. Over the course of a year, Ashton, who is local to the Huntly area, and Murad who lives in Gaza, chatted through Skype, WhatsApp, and FaceTime, went on simultaneous walks together (when the connection was strong enough for digital exchange), and painted each other’s landscape, which they captured on screenshots from their phone. Though they never met in person, over time they developed a friendship at a distance and created a small link between the two places. Like Kebede’s original concept, this slow marathon focused on an investigation of global boundaries. For Slow Marathon 2018, Ashton, Murad, and the team at Deveron Projects organised two sets of participants to simultaneously walk twenty-six miles through Huntly and Gaza. The evening before the walk, slow marathon participants and other members of the community gathered in Huntly’s Scout Hall to hear about walking, art, politics, and Palestine. Like the breakfast presentation that accompanied Hamish Fulton’s 21 Days in the Cairngorms, the event contextualised the walk for participants, as well as interested members

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of the Huntly community. I was one of the speakers for the event and my role was to discuss the relationship between walking, politics, and art. Following my talk, Mick Napier provided further context on the situation in Palestine. A long-time activist, Napier spoke passionately about the plight of the Palestinian people and his experience organising and advocating for their rights. His emotionally-charged presentation intertwined his personal experiences with the history of the territory and its residents. He brought a distinctly Scottish perspective to a situation that often feels very distant, and made clear there were things that could be done from our position in Scotland to advocate for this population. The evening ended with a presentation by the artists, who shared how the project, and their process, had developed over their year of collaboration. Through these presentations and conversations, the abstract ideas of the Slow Marathon were made tangible and prepared us conceptually for our experience the next day. My presence in Huntly, the privilege of my American passport and tier-four UK visa,50 contrasted sharply with Murad’s inability to visit. Her distance residency was the result of her birth in an unacknowledged country where freedom of movement is entirely restricted. Even within the boundaries of Gaza, her movement wasn’t free, and up to a few days before the event the team in Palestine were worried they wouldn’t have the necessary permissions for the walk. Though Kebede had designed Slow Marathon to connect people without red tape and bureaucracy, the reality of the geopolitical situation in Gaza made it a requirement. In Huntly, the possibilities for Slow Marathon routes are expansive, with the Right to Roam embedded in Scottish law. The route planners still have to negotiate access through and around private property and navigate the social considerations of marching a large amount of people along a path, but there a wide variety of potential routes. In Gaza, the options are limited, with the strip itself being the exact length of a marathon and tensions in the territory making it untenable to walk the entirety of its length. The map that shows the route in Gaza highlights the fact that ‘since 2007 [the Gaza Strip’s] residents have only been able to exit and enter it in exceptional cases.’51The route the planners chose was primarily along Gaza’s east coast, and several sections are repeated to accumulate the required miles; it avoids the contested border zone entirely. Despite this, it still wasn’t possible to walk the entire route, which had to be broken up by bus journeys through sections they couldn’t walk for one reason or another. As we navigated our way through the Scottish landscape the following day, conversation would turn to our fellow walkers in Gaza. Drones were being used to document both walks, and when I heard the drone buzz overhead I wondered about the different resonance of that sound in

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Palestine. As the Washington Post reported in 2011, drones in Gaza have an association with ‘an imminent blast.’ Put more simply, ‘drones mean death.’52 A month before the Slow Marathon, an Israeli drone was reported to have dropped tear gas on protesters in Gaza; a new technique in crowd control used for the first time.53 The walkers in Gaza had a drone as well, capturing gorgeous footage of their trek along the coast. Whenever I heard it buzzing above me I thought about how I’ve never had a drone drop tear gas on my city, or had its presence make me fear for my family’s lives. The people with whom I walked concurred; their experience of drones was novel, not nefarious. As McAdam’s marathon demonstrated, walking through the Scottish landscape is not free of conflict, and in Huntly we experienced our own borders, boundaries, and barriers to our right to roam. The local farmers didn’t want seventy marathoners walking through their land during lambing season and, as a result, we had to walk on uninviting roads for large stretches of the marathon. Though ostensibly we had the right to walk through the farmers’ land, dictates of neighbourliness required the planners to choose a different route. In other locations, our rights were challenged by signs that read ‘no entry’ or ‘private road,’ psychological barriers to the public access enshrined in law. With a single enforcement officer managing a wide swathe of land, contesting access restrictions can be a long process. Regardless, our barriers were limited and our inconveniences minor in comparison to the challenges facing the walkers in Gaza. In contrast to the news coverage that presents Gaza as a space of continual conflict, my exposure to it during the Slow Marathon was one of jubilation. The film documenting the walk displays an upbeat, vibrant atmosphere.54 The walkers, in matching white t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Never give up on your dreams,’ written in both English and Arabic, are shown singing, clapping, and laughing as they walk together. In Huntly, the experience was equally convivial, as I shared stories in and of the landscape with my fellow walkers. In this way, Slow Marathon 2018 created new links between them and highlighted the distance, interrelatedness, and differing mobilities of their residents. In doing so, it made my experience of Gaza more personal, even if from a distance. Ashton and Murray’s edition of the Slow Marathon explored the boundaries between spaces and asked us to consider our local landscape in relation to global realities. Though Kebede was unable to walk from Addis Ababa to Huntley, she was able to travel to Huntly by other means. Murad’s options were more limited, and her inability to leave Gaza was an essential factor in the development of the work. Her virtual presence in Huntly was a reminder of the impediments to her freedom to roam. In Huntly and

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Gaza, the experiences of boundaries, borders, and access to land resonate differently, and Slow Marathon provided an opportunity to consider them in relation to each other. 5.2 PERAMBULATOR One of the spin-off events of Slow Marathon 2014 was ‘Baby Slow Marathon,’ which launched Clare Qualmann’s Huntly Perambulator (2014). Qualmann brought her children, Ruby and Ernest, to Huntly for a one-month residency and created a work focused on walks with prams. She first created a perambulator walk as part of Chain (2012), a seven-hour series of multi-disciplinary performances at Lewisham Art House curated by Candida Powell Williams. The work originated in a performance-based context, and Qualmann identifies it as a ‘participatory performance project’;55 considering it within the paradigm of walking as an artistic medium, however, highlights the embodied experience of walking together in a more focused way. In this section, I discuss the relationship between performance and walking, and how DP’s focus on community collaboration foregrounds the medium of walking, rather than the ‘performative action’ of the walk.

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5.2.1 Chain: Pram Walking as Performance Experience For Chain, each artist provided a word, object, sound, or image to inspire the artist whose work would follow theirs. Qualmann received an index card from artist Charles Hayward containing the word ‘bell.’ She linked the word to her pram: her son’s favourite toy was a bell attached to his pram, which was a constant companion on their walks through the city. The resulting piece, Perambulator (2012), brought together a small group of walkers to create a one-day perambulator parade through south London. When commissioned for Chain, Qualmann was inclined to turn it down. She was a new mother, and the kind of work she had been making with walkwalkwalk, which required extensive preparation through research trips and exploratory walks, ‘felt entirely unfeasible.’56 In response, she integrated her new baby into her work and designed a walk that did not require extensive route planning and could accommodate her newly-fragmented working process. For Qualmann, the pram’s disruption to her walking habits ‘feels political’: ‘The freedom of easy mobility—a freedom that I hadn’t been aware of before—connects me to a massive group of people (predominately women) in the same position, encumbered by wheels.’57 The routes she explored thoroughly during her walks with walkwalkwalk were ‘rudely disrupted,’ and

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she was forced to create ‘a new relationship with the very physical details of the urban environment.’58 The perambulator parade was a way to make visible the spatial adversity of a group of urban walkers she had previously overlooked. Advertisements and invitations to join the parade stressed that participants would ‘decide on the day where to go and how to get there using a range of tools: from local knowledge to locative media.’59 Qualmann reports that, as they navigated the streets of south London together, ‘walkers with prams chatted about their everyday issues (as well as their sleep deprivation levels) and those without prams helpfully lifted, shifted, jiggled and had a go at pushing.’60 Video documentation for the walk corroborates this: during one section multiple prams struggle over a bump in the path and a participant can be heard stating, ‘[t]his is a prime example of what this walk is about.’61 Other voices echoed this sentiment, noting that struggling together is essential to the artistic experience of the walk. The collective decision making allowed the group to discover together what they had undoubtedly experienced individually. In this way, the parade highlighted the everyday disruptions caused by the neighbourhood’s inhospitable environment for pram walking. In his article ‘Theatrical-Political Possibilities in Contemporary Procession,’ Phil Smith argues for processions as ‘a disruption of the everyday, characterised by a key dramatic quality: there is always something at stake.’62 Here what is at stake is walkers with wheels and their right to smooth passage through the city streets. The private everyday disruptions experienced by people walking with prams are writ large through the perambulator parade. Through a mass processional, Qualmann created a sociable experience that highlighted an antagonistic relationship with the environment and created a space for the discussion of those disruptions. It is this shared experience of walking together that constitutes the artwork. 5.2.2 Huntly Perambulator In 2014, Qualmann brought Perambulator to Huntly for a one-month residency with the Walking Institute. The resulting project, Huntly Perambulator (2014), consisted of a series of walks with Huntly’s community of parents (primarily mothers). The durational residency format and DP’s focus on modes of community collaboration distanced the project from the explicitly performative nature of its previous iteration. It also required Qualmann to expand beyond the perambulator parade and establish other modes of engagement and exploration. The project report notes that Qualmann’s ‘natural need for child-friendly services . . . was an advantage for the project as through these she met the

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parents of the town.’63 Her engagement with the town’s services was facilitated by Catrin Jeans, who served as DP’s Cultural Health Visitor. Qualmann worked with Jeans to develop ‘an interactive workshop structure/handbook’ which Jeans introduced to local parents prior to Qualmann’s arrival in Huntly.64 The workshop encouraged ‘mums and dads to think about walking as an action and to record their daily walks. This groundwork allowed Clare to have an established [pool] of participants from her initial arrival into Huntly.’65 Qualmann launched the project with ‘Baby Slow Marathon,’ for which she invited community members with prams to walk up Clashmach and meet the slow marathoners on their route. In doing so, she opened Slow Marathon to a segment of the community typically left out of the event.66 The project report reflects that for ‘the majority of the participants (including 4 prams, 3 babies, 1 toddler, 6 adults and 1 child) this was the first time they had viewed Huntly from Clashmach.’67 It also served to launch the wider initiative of the work, and she used it to invite others to join her in ‘testing the edges’ walks.68 Following this, Qualmann ‘took a large map into playgroup and asked people to mark awkward spots, narrow pavements, steep steps, slippery surfaces.’69 Similar to the collective decision making established for Chain, the pram routes Qualmann walked in Huntly were ‘devised in collaboration with local participants.’70 The project ended with a ‘Perambulator Parade,’ which, like the version in Lewisham, was created collectively with participants. Key to the design of Qualmann’s walks is participants’ agency and their involvement in the planning process. This can often result in moments where her desires and those of the community with whom she is collaborating conflict. For example, she desired to forgo permits and permission for the perambulator parade and create an intervention in the streets through the mass bodies of pram walkers ‘spilling out into the road, getting in the way, [and] causing a nuisance.’71 This, however, was not comfortable for the participants in her project, and instead the parade followed a popular leisure route that did not disrupt the city streets. In contrast to the ad-hoc planning of Perambulator in London, where the performance and route were created simultaneously by a temporary community, the perambulator parade in Huntly was part of a longer community engagement and required different modes of interaction. Smith argues that processions make possible a mode of ‘collective agency’ that blurs the lines of the theatrical decision-making processes.72 Offstage, where the procession is planned, ‘a chaotic mixing of different elements, is ideologically (but not theatrically) enacted.’73 As Smith points out, in the procession’s public display and movement through the city, there is ‘an embrace of a democratic theatre, and, in its offstage, a denial of it.’74 The original perambulator walk for Chain brought the off-stage on stage, with the par-

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ticipants responding to Qualmann’s provocation without the long-term planning usually associated with processions. In Huntly, however, the durational community engagement and the more extensive consultation and planning process that led up the parade resulted in Qualmann’s need to ‘compromise between [her] desire for a genuine collaboration, and for a genuinely activist performance.’75 The two models for the walk blur the theatrical decision process in different ways, though both rely on the agency of participants to shape the resulting event. Qualmann notes that she originally considered ‘Perambulator Parade’ to be a finale to the project, ‘a performative celebration of pram use’;76 this view, however, would render the work throughout her residency as an off-stage for the final parade performance, rather than as an essential part of the art work itself. Upon further reflection she noted, ‘[p]erhaps it’s helpful not to consider the finale as the main event, or outcome, of the project, but to think about how the smaller, quieter activities’ facilitated the project’s aims.’77 This builds on the memory of the medium she established with walkwalkwalk and the notion that the object, document, or performance is not the location of the artwork—rather, it is in the central gesture of walking. Her primary interest in the project was ‘asking other people to walk with [her] to create a shared space, a social space, a space for conversation and for reflection.’78 Over the course of her residency, she walked with individuals, couples, small groups, and on her own with her children. Similar to Kester’s dialogic aesthetics, Huntly Perambulator set up a convivial space for shared conversation based on the contours of walking. Like McAdam, Qualmann also provided a set of maps to allow people to engage with the project after her residency was completed. Pram Walks (2014) is a fold-out map that contains five routes from the project. It is available for free from DP and offers routes both pragmatic and pleasurable created in collaboration with Huntly residents over the course of the project. Pram Walks limits expository text in favour of the routes to better facilitate an actual walking experience. The book then points back to Qualmann’s Huntly Perambulator blog, which offers a location to explore the project’s entire artistic assemblage.79 In this way, the central gesture of the work is found in walking the paths Qualmann offers, which are supported by her reflections and explorations in other media. In Huntly, the project’s most visible and performative moments, the ‘Baby Slow Marathon’ and ‘Perambulator Parade,’ were not its central output; rather, Qualmann used a variety of techniques to invite people to walk with prams and create new relationships to the landscape. Unlike walks that strictly dictate the style of walking to the participants, such as Fulton’s slow walks, Huntly Perambulator fostered walking in a collaborative mode of

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community engagement. As Qualmann notes, the intimate walks that constitute the project, though less visible, are an essential part of the artwork; I argue that this is what positions it within the medium of walking.

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5.3 BEYOND PERFORMANCE: THE MEDIUM OF WALKING AS A MODE OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT The Walking Institute foregrounds community involvement, and as such, encourages work in the medium of walking rather than works of art that reflect the process of an artist’s walks. As McAdam noted in relation to Lines Lost, the nature of DP made it imperative to integrate the community into the project and not create work that was based on solitary walks. Importantly, the Institute is not based on an ethos of performative walks; rather, it encourages artists to engage the community in the creation of new paths through the landscape. The Institute’s aspiration is to spiral out geographically from Huntly; it physically connects the organisation’s work to places beyond the immediately local and makes visible the 50/50 approach on which DP is based. Though Hamish Fulton’s residency did not create a legible link to the Cairngorms, other projects have resulted in more visible pathways, such as McAdam’s informal reclamation of the rail route or Qualmann’s map of perambulator routes. Rather than a single action on or across the landscape, the works addressed in this chapter demonstrates the walk as web. Each project creates impact through an assemblage of approaches designed to link the community, the individual, and the landscape through the central act of walking. After a walk with McAdam, DP’s Shadow Curator intern Racheal Disbury wondered about the necessity of the term ‘Walking Art.’ ‘It has the same odd taste as “Feminist Art”,’ she writes, ‘where I feel the specification might be unnecessary.’80 For Disbury, walking is ‘another medium, a method in the larger assemblage of an artwork.’81 I would argue, however, that more than just another method in the assemblage of these projects, walking is the central method. In the creation of the Walking Institute, DP creates a space that is focused on developing and supporting walking as an artistic medium. In this way, the Institute’s central gesture mirrors that which I am defining for the medium of walking: the actual experience of going for a walk. NOTES 1.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 2. 2. Claudia Zeiske and Diane Smith, ‘The Walking Institute: A Project for the Human Pace,’ in Selected Essays from the: On-Walking Conference (University of

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Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2013), 350, https://issuu.com/stereographic/docs/ walkonconference?reader3=1.   3.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 2.   4.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 4.   5.  Deveron Arts, ‘Minutes Walking Steering Group 29th Nov 2013,’ Deveron Arts Archive, unpublished internal notes, (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 29 November 2013).   6.  Zeiske, ‘Vision Document,’ 2.   7.  Cate Devine, ‘The Art of the Slow Marathon,’ Herald Scotland, 13 April 2013, http://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/13099997.The_art_of_the_slow_marathon/.   8.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon/Mihret Kebede,’ unpublished internal report (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2012), 6.   9.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon/Mihret Kebede,’ 5. 10.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon/Mihret Kebede,’ 8. 11.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon/Mihret Kebed,’ 5. 12.  Deveron Arts, Huntly Calling: Artist Skype Calls with Claudia Zeiske, (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2016), https://vimeo.com/194955897. 13.  Mihret Kebede, ‘Mihret Kebede: Connecting People through Art, Interview by Kate de Klee,’ video, 2016, http://www.designindaba.com/videos/interviews/mihret -kebede-connecting-people-through-art. 14.  Kebede, ‘Connecting People through Art.’ 15. Mihret Kebede, Slow Marathon (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2012), no pagination. 16. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 17. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 18. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 19. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 20. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 21. Kebede, Slow Marathon, n.p. 22.  Devine, ‘The Art of the Slow Marathon.’ 23.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon Information Pack,’ Deveron Projects, 2013, 1, https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_media/uploads/slow_marathon_info_pack .pdf. 24.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon Information Pack.’ 25.  The Clashmach is a hill in an open ridge just southwest of Huntly. According to the route guide, the name ‘derives from a dip or a furrow, and describes the saddlelike shape when viewed from Huntly,’ Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2013 Route,’ Deveron Projects, 2013, 4, https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_media/uploads/ slow_marathon_2013_route.pdf. 26.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2013 Route,’ 4. 27.  Deveron Arts, ‘Notes from Review Meeting of Slow Marathon,’ unpublished internal notes (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2013). 28.  Deveron Arts, ‘Notes from Review Meeting of Slow Marathon.’ 29.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2013: Cabrach–Huntly,’ Deveron Projects, 2013, https://www.deveron-projects.com/about/slow-marathon-2013-cabrach-huntly/.

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30. Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2014,’ unpublished internal report (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2014), 1. 31.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2014,’ 1. 32.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2014,’ 1. 33.  Stuart McAdam, Lines Lost: Huntly–Portsoy. (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2015). 34. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English, 65. 35.  Zeiske, ‘Tourism Article,’ email to Blake Morrris. 36. McAdam, Lines Lost. 37. McAdam, Lines Lost. 38. McAdam, Lines Lost. 39.  Ben Anderson, ‘Lines Lost,’ Scottish Art News 20, no. Autumn (2013): 36. 40.  Anderson, ’Lines Lost,’ 36. 41.  Stuart McAdam, ‘Lines Lost,’ Knock News 79, no. Sept. (2013): 37. 42. McAdam, Lines Lost. 43. McAdam, Lines Lost. 44.  Survey Monkey, ‘Slow Marathon 2015,’ Deveron Projects, 2015, 3, https:// www.deveron-projects.com/site_media/uploads/slowmarathon2015_survey_redac ted.pdf. 45.  Deveron Arts, ‘Slow Marathon 2015 Route: Portsoy–Huntly,’ handout version of route (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2015), 3. 46.  Survey Monkey, ‘Slow Marathon 2015,’ 4. 47.  Survey Monkey, ‘Slow Marathon 2015,’ 26. 48.  Deveron Projects, ‘Slow Marathon 2015 Route: Portsoy–Huntly,’ online version of route (Deveron Projects, 2015), https://www.deveron-projects.com/site_me dia/uploads/Slow%20Marathon%202015%20route%20lores.pdf. 49. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 39. 50.  A tier-four visa is a student visa that allows an individual to study and perform limited work in the United Kingdom while enrolled in a course at a university. 51. Deveron Projects, Gaza Map, 25 February 2018, photo, https://www.flickr .com/photos/deveron-arts/41785494432/. 52.  Scott Wilson, ‘In Gaza, Lives Shaped by Drones,’ Washington Post, 3 December 2011, web edition, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ in-gaza-lives-shaped-by-drones/2011/11/30/gIQAjaP6OO_story.html. 53.  Ramona Wadi, ‘Drones and Desensitisation in the Palestinian Cause,’ Middle East Monitor, 14 March 2018, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180314drones-and-desensitisation-in-the-palestinian-cause/. 54.  Deveron Projects, Walking Without Walls, video (Huntly, UK: Deveron Projects, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=D2AAbZ58I5U. 55.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 1. 56.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 2. 57.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 3. 58.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 2. 59. Bellenden Belle, ‘Perambulator—A Pram Walk with an Artist,’ The East Dulwich Forum, 22 May 2012, http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php? 29,889849,889849.

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60.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 3 61. CandidaPW, Clare Qualmann, Perambulator, 2012, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=ZcJxb6mUNdI. 62. Phil Smith, ‘Theatrical-Political Possibilities in Contemporary Procession,’ Studies in Theatre and Performance 29, no. 1 (1 January 2009): 19. 63. Deveron Arts, ‘Perambulator/Clare Qualmann Project Report,’ unpublished internal report (Huntly, UK: Deveron Arts, 2014). 64.  Deveron Arts, ‘Perambulator/Clare Qualmann Project Report.’ 65.  Deveron Arts, ‘Perambulator/Clare Qualmann Project Report.’ 66.  One intrepid walker completed Slow Marathon 2014 with her baby strapped to her. 67.  Deveron Arts, ‘Perambulator/Clare Qualmann Project Report.’ 68.  Clare Qualmann, ‘Baby Slow Marathon and Picnic, 10th May,’ Huntly Perambulator, 11 May 2014, https://huntlyperambulator.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/ baby-slow-marathon-and-picnic-10th-may/. 69.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 7. 70.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 8. 71.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 8. 72.  Smith, ‘Theatrical-Political Possibilities in Contemporary Procession,’ 28. 73.  Smith, ‘Theatrical-Political Possibilities in Contemporary Procession,’ 16. 74.  Smith, ‘Theatrical-Political Possibilities in Contemporary Procession,’ 16. 75.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 9. 76.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 9. 77.  Qualmann, ‘Perambulator: An Artist’s Statement,’ 9. 78.  Clare Qualmann, ‘It’s Not Buggy Fit,’ Huntly Perambulator, 27 April 2014, https://huntlyperambulator.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/its-not-buggy-fit/. 79.  See https://huntlyperambulator.wordpress.com/. 80.  ‘Deveron Arts,’ Rachael Disbury, 17 January 2015, https://rachaeldisbury.com/ 2015/01/17/deveron-arts-2/. 81.  Disbury, ‘Deveron Arts.’

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Interlude Walking Exercise #3

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The following set of walking exercises was created in collaboration with Morag Rose.1 1.  Invite someone who walks differently than you to go for a walk. Choose a place to walk together in the future. Pick a date. 2.  Meet your friend at the previously chosen time and place. Walk together and map the technological supports that provide access to your walk. If there are barriers to access, map those as well. 3.  Walk apart from your friend. Look for absences: who is not where you are and why? 4.  Keep an eye out for supports for other users of the city. As you walk are there textures, sounds or visual cues that might help or inhibit you if you were in a different body? 5.  Meet your friend at the location of your memory palace. Create a memory image together that conveys the supports, absences, and textures you encountered over the course of your walks. Use smell, temperature, sound, or other sensory elements if they aid your memory. Show your friend the previous two images while you’re at your memory palace. NOTE 1.  A version of these exercises was first published in Morris and Rose, ‘Pedestrian Provocations.’

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Chapter Six

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Walk, Study, and Exchange

In 2011, Dillon de Give and I co-founded The Walk Exchange with Bess Matassa, Vige Millington, and Moira Williams, following their participation in the Walk Study Training Course (WSTC). de Give and I developed WSTC in order to create a community around artistic walking practices and a critical environment in which to consider them. Matassa, Millington, and Williams shared this desire, and their different disciplinary backgrounds—cultural geography, archiving and library sciences, and visual art—expanded our considerations of how walking could serve as a creative and critical practice (see chapter three). Through a series of different activities, we developed a networked walking practice that invited people to walk with us. In contrast to the onerous six-week commitment of the WSTC (which, as of 2016, has been run six times), other activities allow participants to come on walks that do not require a long-term commitment. One such activity was the Informal Walk Series through which we provided a space to experiment and test ideas around walking in NYC. Viv Corringham, one of the presenters at the Walking Artist Network’s pilot meeting, led a silent walk through Manhattan as part of the series. Another network member, Kansas City-based artist Karen McCoy, led a sound and sight walk, in which she gave listening trumpets to participants that she took for a walk through Central Park. McCoy first learned about the Walk Exchange when she met Williams and me at WAN’s Footwork research meeting in Wales. In this way, the Informal Walk Series extended the web of connection between networks of walking artists. Additionally, we partnered with organisations such as Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, and the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Festival in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to create walks for audiences beyond the specific practitioner base to which WSTC appeals. 131

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Though we had already begun exploring methods for the exchange of walks at a distance, the imperative for this increased when I moved to London, creating a physical distance between the members of the exchange. In response, WSTC 5 explored how local walking practices can create a point of global exchange. The course piloted a distance learning programme that consisted of an exchange of walking exercises between a group in London and independent walkers in New York City. This method puts the action and practice of walking at the centre of a transnational exchange and serves as a model and tool for the critical consideration of creative walking practices. The WSTC 5 explored the role of digital facilitators in relation to walking practices, the disintegration of the binary between solitary and group walking practices, and the ability of the experience of walking to be the primary location of the exchange or transmission of artistic experience. Additionally, it approached these ideas through a focus on international exchange and sharing walks at a distance. This chapter looks specifically at how we expanded our practice internationally and developed a methodology for the distance exchange of walks. I begin with a discussion of the Walk Exchange’s first experiment in distance exchange through a collaboration with Barcelona-based Deriva Mussol. Following this, I look at how a collaboration with Deveron Projects resident artist, Simone Kenyon, introduced distance exchange to the Walk Study Training Course 4. I end with a look at WSTC 5, and the social, physical, and digital landscapes encountered through an exchange between walkers in London and New York City (NYC). Overall, this chapter introduces a critical methodology for the consideration of creative walking practices through international exchange, which focuses on going for a walk as a primary way of producing and articulating knowledge. 6.1 AT A DISTANCE: DEVELOPING A MODEL FOR DISTANCE EXCHANGE Deriva Mussol, led by artists Jordi Lafon and Eva Marichalar-Freixa, is a group known for their night walks. Like the Walk Exchange, they ‘embrace walking practices as a way to explore endless possibilities for creation and learning in contemporary contexts.’1 Through their walks they create shared spaces that are ‘open, permeable and in motion.’2 Our collaboration consisted of simultaneous drifts in NYC and Barcelona, a video call between the groups, and a postal exchange of detritus collected during the walk. In NYC, Matassa and Williams reported the walk to be a bit of a let-down: it was a dreary, cold, rainy day—not terribly conducive to walking. The

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planned video conference was plagued with technical difficulties, which led to a delayed and frustrating start. Additionally, the starting point, Outpost Gallery in Ridgewood Queens, required a lengthy journey from other parts of the city. Ultimately, the walk consisted of Matassa, Williams, and one additional participant, who drifted together through the dreary weather. In contrast, Deriva Mussol were working out of a central space in Barcelona as part of the Nursery Project, an established residency at ACVic’s Centre for Contemporary Arts.3 Their documentation reflects a large group of revellers strolling through the city; this is in stark contrast to the shots of wet pavement collected during the NYC walk, and the solitary and isolating feel communicated by the trio of NYC walkers. After the walk, Marichalar-Freixa commented on the Walk Exchange’s Facebook page about the joyful experience of simultaneous walking: ‘[i]t was sooooo [sic] shiny and sparkling to walk together with u [sic] no matter the time no matter the place! The act of walking led us to share same place and same time :) Lovely pic! You had big rain and big wind. . . . We had some drops and a big magical moon. . . . It’s soooo [sic] inspiring!’4 For her, the fact of the two groups walking simultaneously created a shared moment across international boundaries. For WE, the walk confirmed the challenges of simultaneity; we felt the video chat and postal exchange of objects did not allow us to fully engage the other group’s experience of walking. Despite this, it encouraged us to further develop methods for walking with collaborators at a distance and create ways to exchange walks internationally. For WSTC 4, which ran in conjunction with Earl Miller’s Artists’ Walks: The Persistence of Peripateticism (2013) exhibition at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, we introduced a distant participant for the first time. WSTC 4 looked to ‘develop NEW ways of walking through an examination of the interplay between the individual and the communal,’ and focused on ‘privileges of mobility’ through walking archetypes such as ‘the solitary male, the crusading pilgrim, the streetwalker, the hobo and the angry mob.’5 We posted the call for participation on the WAN listserv, and Simone Kenyon contacted us to enquire about distance participation. At the time, she was an artist-inresidence at Deveron Projects (DP) (see chapter 5) and suggested that she could complete the readings independently and integrate them into the walks she was doing as part of her residency in Huntly. We created an online Google group to facilitate the exchange, and participants were encouraged to engage with the forum as part of an ongoing correspondence between the group in NYC and Kenyon in Scotland. The remote, solitary wilderness of the Scottish landscape through which Kenyon walked was in high contrast to the dense urban environment of the group in NYC. Though this contrast was initially productive, it ultimately

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led to insurmountable challenges and the discontinuation of the exchange. After her first walk, Kenyon posted: I know I walk for 3 hours thinking about you and then I walk another 3 hours thinking about you not walking, whilst im [sic] still walking. Once I leave, after 3 hours I am in the thick of it, in the middle of nowhere that is, so I have to keep going.6

The requirements of her residency consistently led her to the ‘middle of nowhere,’7 and, as the scope of her walking expanded, it was difficult to maintain online communication. In her second and final correspondence to the group, she made this clear:

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I’m on my way now to the Wild West of Scotland-Knoydart. This place has one road and you have to accesss [sic] it by boat. There is no Internet and il [sic] be turning my phone off. I’m not accessible for the next 7 days.8

She later apologised for the typos, the result of typing on an iPhone. Exchange member Matassa replied, ‘[t]he typos are important I think—for me, they reveal the limits of the text, and the possibilities offered by this rupture & rerouting . . .’; she wonders about the physicality of typing: is Kenyon wearing gloves? Are her fingers cold? Is wind blowing her hair, blocking the screen? Or, perhaps, she is writing from the ‘safe & warm’ confines of a train.9 For Millington, ‘[t]o ride and send missives . . . full of thoughts on the way to a place off the grid is to consider modes of communication not even available in previous years.’10 She wonders about the potential for technology to expand the impact of our walks: ‘If some of us think more or better while walking, at what point might our devices allow us to walk and broadcast our insights to others?’11 The tension between the analogue, immediate experience of walking, and the digital technologies we now use to communicate those experiences was highlighted by the course’s engagement with Kenyon. While crafting her online post, Kenyon ‘lost the writing once and had to start again’ and questioned whether ‘written language is the right thing to be using.’12 Her question pointed to something that was missing in the set-up of the distance learning experience: the walk itself. As de Certeau points out, ‘[s]urveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by.’13 He refers to the ‘thick or thin curves’ of a route marked on a map as ‘procedures for forgetting.’14 Like de Certeau’s marks, Kenyon’s correspondence refers only to ‘the absence of what has passed by,’ and while it offers more details than simply lines on a map, it is still missing ‘the act itself of passing by.’15 Our attempt at simultaneity with Deriva Mussol, and our experience of trying to link walks done independently with Kenyon, encouraged us to develop a method for the em-

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bodied exchange of walks at distance. This desire animated the methodology we developed through WSTC 5.6.2 WSTC 5. 6.2 WSTC 5: THE WALK AS A POINT OF EXCHANGE The WSTC 5 brought together two sets of walkers: eight in London (including me) who participated in weekly group walks and four in New York City who engaged in walks independently. The basic structure remained the same as previous courses: ‘[w]e set signposts for texts, we set general routes, we plotted a “course”.’16 The walks remained three hours in length. Anyone was able to participate free of charge in exchange for a commitment to complete the course readings and participate in all the walks. The course was offered in partnership with WAN, and the call for participants was promoted through their listserv, as well as the SCUDD listserv and the WE mailing list.17 Participants were asked to apply with a paragraph in response to the following prompt:

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How is a walk a point of exchange? What kind of knowledge is developed by walking, and can a walk also transmit that knowledge? Can local walking practices translate globally, and what changes in that translation?18

Though the course is ostensibly open to anyone, it is designed for a specialist audience of practitioners interested in walking as a critical and creative practice. The nature of the materials addressed—dense theoretical texts and artistic case studies—and recruitment through the mailing lists of artistic and academic communities, limited the pool of participants. Ultimately, we accepted everyone who applied, two of whom did not end up participating. This resulted in a group of eight in London and four in New York City.19 6.2.1 Participants in Overlapping Networks The individuals who applied to participate in NYC generally expressed an attraction to the idea of their independent walks being part of a group process. Aliza Aufrichtig’s application revealed an interest in moving beyond a solitary walking practice. She described her usual Sunday strolls as, ‘[f]or me, for me, for me’; in contrast, WSTC 5 offered the opportunity ‘to explore the power of what is shared and exchanged with others through walking.’20 She wondered, [d]o the meditative qualities of walking function similarly with a group? Are there different qualities instead? What is fundamentally different about a walk

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shared with others? And when I go on my endless Sunday walks, what am I exchanging with my surroundings even when I’m so internally focused?21

Through her participation, she looked to expand the relationship between her own subjectivity (the me, me, me of her previous walking practice) and the relational aspects of walking, both in terms of the people with whom she walks, as well as the landscape through which she walks. In many ways, her exploration reflects the same movement this book has been charting, from individually-focused walking practices to walking explorations that investigate the social and relational nature of the practice. Aufrichtig was participating in WSTC for the first time; the other NYC applicants had all previously participated. They were part of the community of walkers we had connected with since developing the course. Millington, a founding member of WE, had participated in every version of the course and had been influential in its development from the beginning; Brett Van Aalsburg, who participated in WSTC 3, highlighted his interest in how walking can ‘transmit information over distances’;22 and Francie Scanlon (WSTC 4) was keen to ‘explore how walking is an ex-change [sic]—both material and immaterial . . . interior and exterior.’23 For the London group, the applications reflected a different concept of sociality predicated on weekly meetings with people who shared an interest in walking as a creative and critical pursuit. Emma Shaw, an artist and librarian, identified the walks as a place ‘where [she] can start to work out what it is [she wants her] art to do.’24 She referred to this as a reciprocal process, with the course as a potential space to ‘help someone else along their way too.’ Likewise, Daniel Izquierdo saw the course as a space to continue the discursive activities to which he had become accustomed while an MA student; it was ‘a practical way to share with other people some of the reflections [he] gathered in these last two years of dense intellectual activity.’25 Jenny Simm, a fine art student on a six-month exchange from Sweden, imagined the course as ‘a platform . . . to meet people who are interested in both doing and talking, when exploring the walk.’26 Greg Barnes, an MA student recently introduced to walking as an artistic practice through his course, desired a space to develop an ‘understanding and appreciation for walking from artistic and intellectual perspectives’; he stresses ‘walking as a source of intellectual debate and artistic endeavour.’27 In another example of how walking networks overlap, six of the eight London participants, including me, had attended a walk with The Walking Reading Group (TWRG). Founded in 2013 by artists Lydia Ashman, Ania Bas, and Simone Mair, TWRG explores ‘issues surrounding participation, engagement, collaboration and Social Practice whilst walking.’28 Multiple London walkers mentioned it in their WSTC application. For Shakti Orion, TWRG was ‘a very pleasant and inspiring experience,’ which encouraged

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Walk, Study, and Exchange 137

her to apply for WSTC 5;29 likewise, Izquierdo found that TWRG ‘built an excellent frame for . . . discussion and exchange in a social and open manner,’ something he hoped to continue through WSTC 5.30 Shaw identified TWRG as the thing that introduced her to ‘the idea of walking as an art practice.’31 Many of the participants in London had previously met through the project, and I had also met many of them through the eight TWRG walks in which I participated. The overlap in participants is not entirely surprising, as both practices develop a critical space for discussion and debate through a combination of reading and walking. There are, however, key differences between the two methodologies, which are worth taking a moment to investigate. Like WSTC, TWRG participants are given a set of texts to read prior to the walk. Texts vary depending on the specific walk, and are chosen by Ashman, Bas, and Mair, or artists and curators they commission to work with them. They apply a strict methodology to the design of their walks: participants are organised in pairs, and a long line of partnered walkers are escorted through the city by the artists (one of whom is always at the front of the line and one of whom is always at the back). At the beginning of each walk, participants write ideas, phrases, or key words from the text that they would like to discuss. The organisers refer to these as personal advertisements, which are used to pair partners during the walks. Pairs alternate around every twenty minutes (usually about five times per walk), though the exact timing of this changes in relation to the route. This creates an intimate relationship between walking pairs, while also allowing each individual to experience multiple viewpoints. Whereas WSTC looks to build a committed group of walkers for a durational series of co-produced walks, TWRG builds community through an ongoing and informal drop-in model. While TWRG’s model offers access to a wider set of people, it also requires a more strictly delineated style of walking in order to accommodate large groups walking together for the first time. The participation of the majority of London’s WSTC 5 participants in TWRG activities, and their acknowledgement of that in their applications, testifies to the networked nature of walking practices. This interconnection between different walking networks is also confirmed by Andrew Stuck, a WAN member who participated in both TWRG and WSTC 5. Stuck runs the London-based Museum of Walking and his application mentioned his ongoing interest in collaboration and developing a community of walkers.32 In this way, WSTC 5 can be seen as a microcosm of a larger network of walkers brought together through the Walk Exchange, WAN, and TWRG. 6.2.2 Walking Landscapes: Digital, Physical, Social Though the creation of walks has always been core to the WSTC methodology, the continual exchange of walking exercises between international participants

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was a new approach developed specifically for WSTC 5. The NYC walkers integrated a single walking exercise created by the London group during their individual walks, while each NYC participant sent a ten-minute walking exercise, all of which were integrated into the London walks. In London, I read the exercises aloud at the beginning of the walk and we engaged in a collective discussion about how to integrate them. In NYC, each walker manifested the instruction provided by the London group differently, based on their location and personal interpretation of the walking instructions. In our previous distance exchange experiments, the documents typically shared an already experienced walk. In contrast, WSTC 5 used documentation to contextualise a further invitation to walk. This parallels the logic of representation central to the artistic medium of walking—the act of going on a walk—which may (or may not) be contextualised through an assemblage of content in other media. As with McAdam’s Lines Lost or Savage’s A Guide to Getting Lost, the best way to understand WSTC 5 is to engage in the walks the project has generated. Rather than attempt an exhaustive analysis of the walks and exercises created by course participants, which is beyond the scope of this book, I focus on three thematic areas that cross all the walks and are pertinent to the artistic medium of walking as it is developing: the digital, physical, and social landscapes.

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The Digital Landscape An immediate challenge was how to facilitate the exchange of walking exercises between participants. The original design asked each individual NYC walker to send me his or her weekly exercise via email, which I would verbally communicate to the group in London. In the same vein, I was to be responsible for sending a weekly email informing the NYC walkers of the exercises generated for the London walk. There was no mechanism designed to link the independent NYC walkers to each other, or to put them in direct communication with the London group. After meeting the other walkers at an advisory meeting with de Give, Aufrichtig expressed a desire to maintain a connection to the other NYC walkers and volunteered to create a Google site to house the exercises and reflections of the participants (see figure 6.1). Aufrichtig’s initiative established a core point of contact between course participants and facilitated an exchange of exercises in which participants were not dependent on the mediation of the researcher (though some participants chose to email me content rather than upload it themselves). The resulting digital site houses reflections of the walks through photographs, texts, and first-person narratives, and, importantly, the walking exercises generated for the course. The site was most used by the NYC walkers, who actively

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Figure 6.1.  Screenshot of Walk Study Training Course 5 Homepage

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(Source: Walk Exchange)

uploaded photos, narratives, and recordings as part of their weekly communication. In London, participant use of the site varied, with Orion reporting that she hardly accessed it at all,33 and Simm noting that she commented frequently.34 After the course, Millington reflected the site was a ‘stable repository for . . . reflections and instructions’ that established a more consistent way to communicate than the listservs and Google groups on which the Walk Exchange had previously relied.35 Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider identifies a shift in archival documents ‘toward the possibility of a future re-enactment as much as toward the event they apparently recorded.’36 For Schneider, [w]hen we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of re-appearance and “reparticipation” . . . we are almost immediately forced to admit that remains do not have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh.37

She resituates ‘the site of any knowing of history as body-to-body transmission,’ whether this interaction is mediated through a document in a library (which has to be acquired, filed, read, and activated through the body) or more directly, such as learning and performing a dance.38 She suggests that ‘gestic acts (re)enacted live’ can be considered ‘material traces’ and provide access to radically different ways of accessing and creating new knowledge.39 Her vision allows us to consider how the archive and the repertoire are entangled. Rather than separate the embodied practices of

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the repertoire from the contextualisation of the archive, or bodily memory from historical documentation, WSTC reveals that, in terms of walking, they might be best understood together. In this instance, the exercises of the repertoire function as an embodied archive with the potential to generate new practices through the contextualisation of the course website. The model proposed here views documentation not as a stable authority that represents the experience of a walk, but as an invitation to go for a walk. The course’s digital landscape facilitated the exchange of walking exercises and allowed the course participants’ walking practices to intersect. During the course, the website served as a location of active exchange, with participants generating a cycle of walking exercises. It centred the walking exercises that course participants developed, with documentation in other media contextualising those exercises. In WSTC 5, the documentation served the act of walking. It demonstrates how documents can serve as invitations to walk, rather than stand-ins that ask someone to simply imagine a walk that has already been completed. This is a key aspect of the artistic medium of walking, which utilises a variety of media in service of the central logic of going for a walk. In this case, digital media houses walking exercises, potentially providing access for future users. Similar to a memory palace, part of the efficacy of which rests in having to think about and create the symbolic world in which your memory rests, the process of creating an instruction for a walk forces the participant to synthesise their experience into a provocation or suggestion that can translate into a new walking experience. This is a more involved mode of digital engagement than simply uploading your pictures to a social media site; rather it requires participants to fully engage with their walking experience, and how they might translate that into a walk for someone else. After the course, new exercises are no longer being generated for the site, but it still houses invitations to walk to those who encounter it. The further translation of the exercises and other documents to the main Walk Exchange website provides another location for the regeneration of the walking exercises, in an arguably more public (or at least searchable) location.40 Though it is likely that many of the people who encounter the online archives by happenstance do not engage in the walks, I argue that it is through walking that the archive is activated and that the work is fully encountered. The Physical Landscape A walk happens in a specific landscape, and the relationship between the walking body and the space through which it walks changes the nature of the work. For Williams, NYC is ‘dense in visual culture, textures, sounds and scents that percolate throughout the five boroughs to generate innumerable

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Walk, Study, and Exchange 141

experiences and conditions.’41 She identifies this density as vital to the broad and active approach of the Walk Exchange. In WSTC 5, the landscape of NYC and Stratford in London’s East End provided contrasting landscapes in which to explore the same textual materials. The dynamics of each city were fundamental to our experiences and how we translated them into walking exercises. Through WSTC 5, one can see how the particularities of place combine with the dynamics of the individual walker, alone or as part of a larger group, to create singular experiences in specific localities. Stratford is the centre of a massive regeneration scheme developed for the 2012 London Olympics; as such, it provided varied ambiences that demonstrate the results of contemporary strategies of urban redevelopment.42 Each week, the London group met in the atrium of University Square Stratford (USS), a building purpose-built for the University of East London as part of the area’s Olympic redevelopment. Our walks took place primarily in the surrounding area. Adjacent to USS is the Stratford Centre, a pre-Olympic mall development that has now been supplanted by Westfield Stratford City, the ‘largest urban shopping and leisure destination in Europe,’ which also functions as the entryway to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.43 During the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, then-mayor Boris Johnson identified Westfield Stratford City as at ‘the heart of [a] brand new district in the capital’ and ‘critical to the success of London’s 2012 legacy.’44 This legacy shaped our experience of walking through Stratford as we interacted with sites that had been built as part of the Olympic development as well as those that had yet to be demolished or developed. During our first walk in London, the group participated in a collectively led exploration of the area surrounding USS. Participants had been asked to read an overview of Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers’s Walking Library project,45 and to bring a book that reflected their relationship to walking. In this way, we built a walking library that also allowed us to share something about ourselves and why we were participating in the course. I explained that we would be leading the walk in turns, and each participant would guide us to a spot resonant with their reading. The group’s knowledge of the area varied, which resulted in different approaches to leading the walk. For example, Orion and Stuck were relatively familiar with the area and took us to locations they knew well, while Simm had never been to Stratford before. For Barnes, the walk provided an odd sense of deja vu: a week prior he had explored the area’s public art and infrastructure as part of his MA course.46 Participants drew on the cultural and social cartographies that constructed the landscape and their interactions with them—be these public maps, personal experiences, or visible attractions of the terrain—as well as the topography and architecture of the landscape. Simm, whose unfamiliarity with the

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area dictated her choice of location, volunteered to lead us to the first spot, a dead-end road she had seen on a public map (installed as part of the Olympic redevelopment) that she found intriguing. She led the group across a relatively busy road to the narrow and quiet street of Mantle Avenue. It was a dead end, and we gravitated to the sole streetlight at the end of the road. The search for brightly lit spaces was an evening refrain created by necessity: the ability to read our texts at night. In contrast to Simm’s map-based decision, other participants led us to destinations to which they had already existing relationships: Barnes led us to two large and well-lit listening sculptures he recalled from his visit the week before; Orion read to us under dim lights at a shut-down immigration centre whose services she had used; Stuck, who had previously worked as an urban consultant for National Health Service (NHS) East, led us to a closed NHS building in the Carpenter’s Estate. Though his consultancy with NHS East was ostensibly the logic behind the choice of his location, Stuck later revealed an ulterior motive: he was cold and desired to move away from the windy banks of the canal. The choices of the group dictated how we explored the area and what kind of spaces we saw. Our collectively guided exploration led us from personal places where participants had resonant memories to random spaces identified on a map or by site. Additionally, requirements of the walking design—the necessity to read aloud from books—required us to seek out spaces that were well lit. At the end of the walk, we sat down together and constructed an exercise to share with the New York City walkers: Every time you come across a [Aliza: vacant Space; Brett: well Lit Space; Francie: Redundant Space; Vige: An Edge], a dead end, or a cul-de-sac, reflect or respond in whatever way you want (be this a photograph, a dance, writing, reading, singing a song, a moment of silence, etc., etc., etc’).47

The exercise was semi-individualised to help us differentiate the individual walkers as we got to know them. It reflected the varying spaces we had come across over the course of our journey, and our shared interest in walking as a generator of creative expression. The NYC participants’ responses to the materials reflect the different spaces through which they walked. In contrast to other participants, Aufrichtig walked in a non-urban environment in upstate New York. Her exercise, ‘Library Categorising,’ drew on her experience of wandering through an ‘enormous Ithaca book sale to benefit the local library, in a warehouse with 250,000 books.’ As she perused the book sale, ‘for lack of the Dewey Decimal System, [she] had to think hard about how things would be categorized’; this task extended to the rest of her walk, which she spent contemplating the

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categorisation of the wild landscape. In her blog post she includes a large picture of a mushroom and asks, ‘[w]ould it best be categorized in the plant life section? In a book about fungi or a book about trees? Perhaps in the fantasy section? Art section? Drug-related books? A children’s book about colors [sic]?’ This combination of narrative and image, along with the walking exercise, provided a robust contextualisation of Aufrichtig’s experience for the group in London.48 The following week, the group in London tried out her exercise during a walk through Westfield Stratford City. As I reflect in my field notes:

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[Aufrichtig’s] exercise forced us to focus in on the mundane, and though Aliza had intended to highlight the different ways individuals categorised things, what quickly became apparent was a kind of group brain-storming that defied our obvious categorisations. Each object turned into a riff, with the group building on the possibilities previously identified.49

Our choice of things to categorise revealed the type of space we were walking through: a window display of bridal gowns (religious symbols; fashion; wedding planning; self-help; performance; class; feminism; catalogue), a planter box with white fairy lights (botany; ritual, religion; street design; astronomy; landscape gardening; DIY electronics; philosophy, organic textures; wabi sabi, Japanese aesthetics), or the red and white lights underneath a seating bench (sex industry; art history; cabaret; sociology; tourism; colour analysis; branding; urban public design). Though our exploration was primarily collective, participants’ identification of categories and things to categorise revealed individual personalities and differences in approach. This was made most explicit through Stuck’s choice of the security guards and workers in a clothing store as our objects of categorisation. The group identified anthropology, psychology, and cryptozoology as possible categories for the guards. Orion made sure to bring to our attention the ethical implications of such an endeavour. What happens when we distance ourselves from our subjects of observation? Is it problematic to turn them into objects of study without their consent? Though Stuck made clear his categorisations (human zoo, cryptozoology) were tongue in cheek, the exercise also highlighted the dangers of walking as a voyeuristic mode that stands apart from the street, rather than engaging with it. In contrast, Van Aalsburg’s exercise reflected a completely different experience and response to the course materials. Walking in Brooklyn, Van Aalsburg used voice-to-text software to record the different words he saw written on the city’s streets. For his exercise, he asked each walker to choose one of five texts that he had created on his walk, and read it aloud at ‘whatever the correct pace is for you while walking.’50 The London group completed

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his exercise in the underground car park at Westfield Stratford City (a location into which we descended to escape the battering winds of the tail end of Hurricane Gonzalo). In the car park, our overlapping voices echoed off the concrete architecture, and a jumble of accents spoke of ‘epicurean delights,’ ‘realty bed bugs,’ ‘hot bagels,’ and ‘quality delis.’51 I intoned the names of American comic book characters: ‘ultimate Hulk Michelangelo Raphael Donatello Leonardo Splinter Sonic the Hedgehog Smurfs Pokémon Super Mario Sonic the Black Knight Super Hero mashers simple style heroic action supposed.’52 In this way, his urban text linked our experience of the British car park to the streets of Brooklyn. While we experienced Van Aalsburg’s exercise together, our interpretations varied due to our different relationships to the Brooklyn streets through which he walked. The multitude of textual inputs created a portrait of a hectic environment dominated by advertisements. Even though Van Aalsburg was on a solitary stroll at night, Stuck found it ‘hardly relaxing,’53 and commented on the frantic pace of the texts Van Aalsburg compiled. My reading of Van Aalsburg’s text triggered a longing for home. We had lived together in Brooklyn for four years and he was a core participant in the [untitled] Walk Project (see chapter three); this made it easy to imagine him on streets we had previously walked together. Participant Georgia Muenster also moved to London from NYC and expressed similar sentiments of nostalgia, despite her lack of a personal relationship with Van Aalsburg. Mobilities scholar Didem Özkul has argued that ‘[m]obile communication increases our chances to attach to new places, while helping us maintain old attachments.’54 For Muenster and me, the exercise created a new experience in London and connected us to our previous relationship to New York City. Our engagement with Van Aalsburg wasn’t facilitated through the instant mobile exchange Özkul discusses; however, our online exchange of walking exercises positioned the digital sphere as a location that facilitated deep engagement with different people and places. The second part of his exercise asked us to create our own text based on the environment around us. We discovered a textual motif in the command to ‘wash and wax relax . . . shop and relax wash and wax,’55 an indication of our position next to a car wash in a large shopping mall. The resulting text’s references to car parks and John Lewis, a large department store that only exists in the United Kingdom, contrasted with the specifically American words Van Aalsburg provided. In this way, Van Aalsburg documented his walk in NYC through the generation of a site-specific text, which served as the catalyst for a walk in London that inspired the creation of a new text based on our specific walking experience in Stratford. This feedback loop allowed for both the London group and Van Aalsburg to experience something of the other’s

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walk. In the final advisory meeting with de Give, Van Aalsburg reflected that this visible ‘projection of influence’ amongst international participants was something he had thought about since he was a child.56 This connection, facilitated by the exchange of walks and walking instructions, was key to his experience of engaging with us at a distance. Additional exercises from the NYC walkers saw us dance through Westfield to Dionne Warwick’s version of ‘Walk on By’ (1964) and follow our senses one at a time through a sensory activation exercise designed by Millington (fittingly, we all ended up in the perfumery during our exploration of scent). Our final exercise was Millington’s ‘Memory Activation,’ in which she asked us to re-enact the performance of our body ‘in a landscape very different’ from the one in which we were walking.57 For this exercise, the group walked through the mall imagining river walks, dog walks, and in one memorable moment, Stuck jumping on imaginary river rocks through the mall and into the street. We were not there to shop, nor relax; rather, we were exploring the mall through a variety of walking viewpoints that offered new perspectives on the space. As geographer Jon Goss notes, the shopping centre ‘announces itself through its location and its conventional form as a p(a)lace of consumption.’58 This was apparent from the beginning of our exploration. Van Aalsburg’s exercise established the specificity of our location in a car park in a shopping centre in the United Kingdom—John Lewis being the most specific identification of space—while also revealing aspects of the global development of shopping spaces that could be identified in a variety of cities internationally. This was further solidified through the rest of our walk, as we passed an Ikea, H & M, the Disney Store, and other brands one could find in any number of global, Western-style shopping centres. Goss, applying the categories of de Certeau, identifies the mall as ‘a strategic space, owned and controlled by an institutional power’ whose ‘designers seek to deny the possibility of tactics, an oppositional occupation by everyday practices.’59 Likewise, Mike Davis, in his seminal discussion of urban development in Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1992), argues that in malls ‘public activity is sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation is internalised in corridors under the gaze of private police.’60 The execution of our distance walker’s exercises in this environment tested the boundaries of this functionalism. Ultimately, we were not approached or questioned for our behaviour—we did not push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour far enough to be asked to stop or leave—but we did engage in a kind of playful reclaiming of Westfield that went beyond the intended use for the space. Goss argues that mall design offers ‘no spaces that might be claimed by uninvited gestures or unprescribed “pedestrian utterances”’;61 regardless, he calls for

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the ‘construction of situations’ that turn the mall into a carnival and subvert the ‘cultural codes that are strategically deployed.’62 Though our interventions were small, they point to the possibility of engaging with this space in unexpected, noncommercial ways, at least for limited periods of time. The following week, we would read ‘Market versus Mall’ by Doung Jahangeer. In it, Jahangeeer, an artist and architect, describes the plans in Durban, South Africa to replace a market on a heritage site with a ‘westernstyle privately owned shopping mall.’63 The mall was being constructed in advance of the 2010 World Cup, ostensibly ‘with rational motives—easing traffic congestion in the precinct.’64 Jahangeer describes a process similar to the Olympic regeneration in London: top-down planning with little public consultation in advance of a global event.65 His text connected our ongoing exploration of mall spaces to global forces of redevelopment occurring in similar but different ways in London, New York City, and Durban. After reflecting on our walk, we developed the following exercise for the NYC walkers:

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Go to the top of the Red Staircase in Times Square (at the TKTS ticket booth). Stand there until you feel the wind. Find something else red and walk to it. Repeat the process for 20 minutes Find a blank wall. Walk along it until it ends. Find something green and walk to it. Stand there until you feel the wind. Find something else green and walk to it. Repeat the process for 20 minutes.66

Our first motivation was to send the NYC walkers to a single iconic location with which we were all familiar and that reflected a similar urban regeneration to Stratford. We decided on Times Square, which has also undergone a corporate regeneration that has transformed it from an area once associated primarily with sex shops, drugs, prostitution, and crime, to one known for its abundance of tourists and corporate flagship retail locations.67 In addition to locational specificity, the exercise highlighted the other dominant aspect of our walk: walking into (and attempting to avoid) the wind. One particularly striking moment saw us fight our way through a road median filled with small trees and bushes. Double-decker buses passed us closely and quickly, flashes of red amongst the wind-whipped branches of the trees that filled the median. We integrated the red and green flashes into our walking exercise while also highlighting our experience of the wind and the type of landscape through which we were walking. One of the ways in which the group in London and the individual walkers in NYC were connected was through their exploration of the wind. In both

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environments, weather events originating in other global locations created windier conditions than are typical: in London the wind was caused by Hurricane Gonazalo, which directly struck the island of Bermuda, while NYC was in the midst of an extreme cold wave instigated by Super Typhoon Nuri in the northern Pacific Ocean, which sent a jet stream of cold air across the North American continent. Scanlon embraced the ‘wind as walking companion’ and its ‘non-adversarial role—whether in one’s face and/or at one’s back.’ For her, the wind tunnels of New York City’s skyscrapers provided ‘intense atmospheric’ stimulation.68 For Millington, the walk was ‘windy and cold,’ closer to the experience of the London walkers.69 Though they were products of different global weather events, both events originated in relatively distant physical locations, Bermuda and the Bering Sea, and resulted in extreme conditions in London and NYC that inflected the experience of our walks. Muenster recalled Times Square being a particularly daunting place to send a New Yorker, as it is a location usually avoided by locals. Responses from NYC participants reflect this.70 Aufrichtig wrote she was ‘dreading’ the trip, and to mitigate her dread she brought along a friend who ‘recently moved to New York City and was excited by the prospect of Times Square.’71 For Millington, this was the exercise she thought she would ‘dislike the most.’72 She reflects on feeling ‘frustrated with the London walkers’ and their decision to send the New Yorkers to ‘such a dismal, tourist-filled, space.’73 Through this exercise, the NYC walkers were forced to engage creatively in a place they usually avoided, explore it from a new viewpoint and reconfigure, if only momentarily, their relationship to it. As with our walks through Westfield, Van Aalsburg’s drift through Times Square encouraged him to consider commercial space in a way that wasn’t focused on consumption. On his way there he encountered of a sculpture display in Madison Square Park: Tony Cragg’s Walks of Life (2014). Cragg’s work inspired him ‘to take a good look at the creative expressions of people from all walks of life’ that are behind the production of advertising images.74 While Van Aalsburg is ‘[u]nnerved by the consumption of Manhattan’ and ‘generally avoids viewing advertising,’ the exercise encouraged him to look beyond the commodity for sale to the moment of human creative expression that it represents. Our third week’s walk was inspired by Walk and Squawk’s The Walking Project (2006), a series of walks created by Hilary Ramsden and Erika Block that connected Detroit and South Africa through an investigation of desire lines (i.e., ‘paths made by people who walk’).75 As we wandered through Westfield into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park we were struck by the challenges of finding desire lines. The park, newly built in an area previously

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dominated by marshlands and industry, erased old desire lines and new ones had yet to spring up in their place. On our walks in the Olympic Park, we discussed the space’s prevalent surveillance and reflected on how our position as a group of middle-class, predominately white, adults changed our relationship to security and the policing of space. As Phil Cohen has pointed out, discussing the estates surrounding the park, the ‘eyes on the street’ in the area of Olympic redevelopment aren’t those of locals, rather they belong ‘to those who are employed by a special public/private partnership to establish ground control.’76 This analysis can be extended to the Olympic Park itself, which follows the same logic in relation to policing public behaviour. Though ostensibly public space (it is officially a royal park), much of the interior of the park is privately operated, including the security forces. At one point, we stopped by Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, which dominates the skyline of the East End. Under Kapoor’s sculpture we attempted Van Aalsburg’s exercise: to walk slowly for twelve minutes and concentrate intently on a project. Security approached us as we walked slowly across the grounds, assessed our behaviour, and did not intervene. Our exploration of the NYC walker’s exercises in these highly policed spaces didn’t push the boundaries of security enough to require intervention. Later, however, we saw a set of security guards move along a group of teens roller skating in a playground—an invisible boundary revealed for a group of black adolescents who were unacceptably loitering. Our final walk in London took us beyond the confines of Stratford for the first time. In response to our instruction to walk to Times Square—or perhaps as an act of retribution—Scanlon sent us to London Bridge. For Scanlon, London Bridge was both iconic to London and contrasted the claustrophobic nature of Times Square, with its dense crowds and tall buildings. Her exercise asks, [c]an the London Group—for example—do circumference walks round and round LONDON BRIDGE—without it falling down—and then rev up and then de/excellerate [sic] the pace en route to another near-by London-based iconic perimeter space / tracks / all with a significant expanse of either low lying structures and/or very few towering structures within the overall backdrop of the given area.77

Walking to London Bridge also covered Aufrichtig’s exercise: ‘walk in the direction of water.’78 The pouring rain prevented us from completing the full exercise, however, and we finished the walk underground, taking the tube from Bow Road to London Bridge. While there, we engaged in Van Aalsburg’s exercise, ‘Creative Expression,’ which asked us to look for commercial images and ‘divorce the branding from aesthetics’ in order to identify

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‘the human hands and hearts on view.’79 We explored advertisements and graffiti, the design of the trains, and the staircases of the underground. Ultimately, we failed to circle the bridge, though we did manage to cross it. We quickly escaped the battering weather for a few drinks in a pub and a moment to reflect together on our experience. Through this variety of exercises and exchanges, the course revealed specific things about the space we walked through as a group in London, and the landscape of the individual New York City walkers. The exercises generated by participants attempted to communicate the specificity of their walk. They revealed the myriad ways individuals inhabit and respond to those spaces, and the way the medium of walking acts to transform a participant’s experience of the landscape.

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The Social Landscape The applications for the course reflected participants’ interest in the social space of the walk. There was a consistent interest in sharing and exchanging walking practices with a like-minded group, both in person and at a distance. The contrasting configuration of a group walk in London and solo walks in New York City introduced the walkers to different kinds of social landscapes. The interaction between these configurations created a robust social landscape between the two sets of walkers in which the different spaces overlapped and communicated. For our first walk, in addition to Heddon and Myers’s Walking Library, we looked at Luis Sotelo’s ‘Looking Backward to Walk Forward’ (2010). Sotelo argues for aesthetic group walks as a location in which participants can ‘produce spatial auto-bio-graphical narratives by which they position the self and others,’80 and the walking libraries we constructed served as a way for WSTC participants to introduce themselves to each other and provide some context for their participation in the course. This happened through the group walk in London, as well as through the online repository, where the NYC walkers uploaded reflections, anecdotes, and pictures from their walk, as well as the required walking exercises. To begin, I led the group to the local Stratford Library, where I read a proposal written by Peter Liversidge as the preface to David Evans’s The Art of Walking (2012): ‘I propose that you put down this book and go outside.’81 Liversidge’s instruction allowed me to introduce the group to my emphasis on engaging in walks as part of my creative and critical practice. Simm had picked her book from her flatmate’s shelves: Bashō’s Haikus. Newly arrived, she had no books of her own, but she was aware that Bashō was a prolific walker—his haibun ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ (1694) is a seminal poetic depiction of walking. She read from the beginning and ending passage because

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she likes the sense of things being bookended. Throughout the rest of our first walk together, participants led, read, and reflected on themselves, the group, and the text they had chosen. Each walker’s choices revealed something about themselves and the places through which we walked. For example, Orion read from Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World (1991) in front of a recently defunct HM Revenue and Customs office. The office was where she first experienced British bureaucracy in relation to her immigration status. When it closed, the only way to receive assistance was through a call centre, which she identified as resolutely unhelpful. Rather than choosing a passage, Stuck read the underlines of a secondhand copy of Simon Armitage’s Walking Home (2014), channelling a distant reader none of us had met. This demonstrated his interest in the experience of the people he encounters and observes, as well as the extension of walking networks. Shaw’s choice to not bring a book or lead a section of the walk reflected her desire for observation rather than explicit performance. For me, Barnes’s reading on slow thinking from Matthew Goulish’s 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (2000) was particularly resonant. He linked the act of slowly walking to the act of slowly thinking and discussed sometimes feeling pressure to articulate things quickly. As a facilitator, I was worried that Barnes’s quiet manner indicated a lack of engagement. His interest in slow thinking, and his explanation about the pressure to articulate, contextualised his quiet mode of participation. In London, the democratic leadership of the walk established a precedent for a space of agency, in which participants co-designed the route, and worked together to interpret the space, exercises, and assigned readings. Heddon and Myers argue there is a ‘sociability afforded by shared readings, of reading aloud to one another’ that is enhanced by the convivial activity of walking together.82 The practice of reading books to each other out loud invited participants to share aspects of themselves to the group. Additionally, the readings were sited in a specific part of the landscape identified by the participants. The framing of the walk, provided by Heddon and Myers, facilitated the sharing of Sotelo’s ‘spatial auto-bio-graphical narratives.’83 Through sharing and reading books together in the landscape, we were able to explore the area, connect it to our personal stories and memories, and create new memories together. For the NYC walkers, the presentation of the self was mediated by the digital. Aside from the fact that they were compelled to interact with the digital landscape to communicate their walking exercises, the fact that they designed their routes individually resulted in very different experiences, depending on when, where, how, and with whom they walked. Though I originally envisioned the NYC walkers completing the walks individually,

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Aufrichtig included a rotating coterie of friends on her walks. This reflected the desire expressed in her application to move beyond her usual solitary Sunday strolls. Her first WSTC walk ‘couldn’t have been further from [her] typical solitary, flat urban wandering,’ as she walked with friends through the gorges of Ithaca.84 For her final walk, Aufrichtig organised an epic all-day birthday walk down Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue. Simm was visiting NYC from London and joined her for the walk, as did fellow NYC participant Millington (see figure 6.2) and a large group of Aufrichtig’s friends and family. Since this walk, Simm has become good friends with Aufrichtig’s brother, further extending the walk’s social web.85 On a separate day, Simm had the opportunity to walk with Van Aalsburg, and this incidental overlap between the two groups added a further level of physical and social connection. For Millington, participating in Aufrichtig’s walk and the ‘opportunity to spend time in conversation over the course of many hours . . . reminded [her] of the central tenet behind the start of the Walk Study Training Course, namely, that the world on foot can be a site for learning, and for unexpected

Figure 6.2.  Simm, Millington, and Aufrichtig (left to right) in NYC (Source: Aliza Aufrichtig)

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consonance if only we take the time to make it so.’86 While previous courses focused on the group walking together in NYC (Millington is the only person to have participated in every version of the course), WSTC 5 helped her realise that ‘a network and site of congruence can be formed around the promulgation of ideas and not be bound by physical landscapes.’87 The walk, however, also reminded her of her desire for the physical experience of walking together. She found the ‘solitary aspect of this WSTC . . . revelatory,’ however, Aufrichtig’s walk reminded her that the most ‘gratifying’ aspect of the course is ‘the community formed . . . and the shared sense of purpose.’88 For Millington, the act of a group walking together in the same space at the same time allowed her to more fully interrogate the relationship between the texts, the walk, and the landscape. In her final reflection on the course, Aufrichtig notes the difference between the solitary walks she expected to take as part of the course, and the incredibly social and active ones she ended up completing. For her, ‘the new more social version of [her] life [was] a result of some of these walks’ and created a ‘new normal.’89 Likewise, for Simm, the course was a good introduction to a new city and provided a way to explore with other people, something that has resulted in lasting relationships.90 The potential for members of a community to come together and share a walk is part of walking’s power as a convivial social activity. Millington reflects that, as a member of the Walk Exchange, she has ‘valued and benefited from the long, slow development of a collaborative group that learned how to make decisions, plan, and collaborate on shared goals and language.’91 For her, the network of participants that has evolved over time is one of the core outputs of the project. Building communities through the practice of critically and creatively walking together is ultimately the crux of the Walk Exchange. Indeed, in many ways it is the crux of the medium of walking art, which emerges from a history of radical, collective practices and the desire to transform society through the action of walking together. 6.3 CONCLUSION: LOCAL ANALOGUE WALKING THROUGH GLOBAL DIGITAL EXCHANGE Not explicitly an art practice, WSTC supports the artistic medium of walking by providing a location for practitioners to engage in the exchange of critical and creative walks. Through the WSTC model, WE have developed a method of exchange among an ever-growing community of course participants, past, present, and future. Millington has noted that ‘the ever-increasing group of Walk Exchange “alumni” [is] a valuable and connected network of practitioners with

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the capacity to increase understanding of walking as a way of learning—and to also expand the notion and definition of what it means to learn through walking.’92 In this way, one of the major contributions of the WSTC model is the continued development of a network of walkers and additional methods for the international exchange of walking practices. As the course continues to develop, we hope to expand existing conversations regarding walking practices, and add more opportunities for the local and international exchange of walks. Importantly, the methodology for distance exchange articulated here is not predicated on co-presence. Rather, the experience of walking together is created through an iterative loop of walks that grow on and respond to each other. This alleviates a number of challenges of simultaneity, including the technical capacities of different walking participants, different time zones, and differing weather conditions. Furthermore, it reduces the necessity of engaging with a digital interface while walking, something made more prevalent by smartphone technology. While smartphones make possible almost instantaneous digital exchange, and there are a number of possibilities to be explored in regard to the use of digital realms to facilitate real-time walking exchanges, the WSTC methodology does not depend on it. Walking and the walking arts hold the potential to bridge the local, analogue world, and the global, digitally connected world, through the exchange of shared walking practices rooted in local experiences. The WSTC methodology provides a space to critically engage the artistic medium of walking through the practice of walking itself and demonstrates how walking practices can illuminate the particularities of local space and facilitate international exchange. Additionally, it offers a model for the critical exchange of walking practices among practitioners in different locations. The walking exercises produced by participants in London and NYC attest to the myriad ways walking can facilitate the exchange of ideas and the creation of new ways of thinking through the body. As online and digital educational strategies continue to gain prevalence, there is potential for this research to provide a model for exchange that could benefit distance learning programs and address locations of inquiry beyond walking, such as climate change or urban redevelopment strategies. The WSTC methodology demonstrates the potential of walking to produce, articulate and exchange new knowledge, rather than simply illustrate already existing knowledge. NOTES 1.  Deriva Mussol ‘Qui Som / Quiénes Somos / About Us,’ Deriva Mussol, 2016, http://derivamussol.net/qui-som-quienes-somos-about-us/. 2.  Deriva Mussol, ‘Qui Som.’

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  3.  ACVic is a contemporary arts centre in Catalonia that ‘promotes the creation, production and exhibition of proposals in the visual arts, as well as in other contemporary artistic disciplines.’ See https://www.acvic.org/en/mission.   4.  Marichalar-Freixa, ‘I Would Love. . . ,’ Facebook comment (Facebook, 27 May 2013), https://www.facebook.com/WalkExchange/photos/a.273458629420303. 44258.273258329440333/374465629319602/?type=3&theater.   5.  ‘WSTC 4,’ Walk Exchange, last modified 10 June 2013, http://walkexchange .org/970/.   6.  Simone Kenyon, ‘Walk Exchange Week 1,’ Google group post, 21 October 2013.   7.  Kenyon, ‘Walk Exchange Week 1.’   8.  Simone Kenyon, ‘Correspondence Week 2,’ Google group post, 28 October 2013.  9. Bess Matassa, ‘Correspondence Week 2,’ Google group post, 31 October 2013. 10.  Vige Millington, ‘Correspondence Week 2,’ Google group post, 11 February 2013. 11.  Millington, ‘Correspondence Week 2.’ 12.  Kenyon, ‘Correspondence Week 2.’ 13.  de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 14.  de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 15.  de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 16.  de Give, ‘WSTC—Why a “Course”,’ e-mail. 17. The WAN listserv has over six hundred subscribers based primarily in the UK; SCUDD, the Standing Course of University Drama Departments, has a mailing list of over two thousand subscribers for relevant discussions in the realm of drama, theatre, and performing arts in UK higher education. The mailing list of NYC-based subscribers includes over four hundred people who have expressed interest in Walk Exchange walks. 18.  ‘WSTC #5,’ Walk Exchange, 27 April 2014, http://walkexchange.org/wstc-5/. 19.  We also received one application from a walker in Detroit, but we were only working with walkers in London and NYC for this particular course. 20.  Aliza Aufrichtig, ‘Walk Study Training Course V,’ email to Walk Exchange, 6 October 2014. 21.  Aufrichtig, ‘Walk Study Training Course V.’ 22.  Brett Van Aalsburg, ‘WSTC 5!,’ email to Walk Exchange, 3 October 2014. 23. Francie Scanlon, ‘WALK STUDY TRAINING COURSE,’ email to Walk Exchange, 16 September 2014. 24.  Emma Shaw, ‘WSTC 5,’ email to Walk Exchange, 9 October 2014. 25.  Daniel Izquierdo, ‘Walk Study Training,’ email to Walk Exchange, 7 October 2014. 26.  Jenny Simm, ‘Enthusiastic Application for the Walk Study Training Course,’ email to Walk Exchange, 9 October 2014. 27.  Greg Barnes, ‘Walk Study Training Course V,’ email to Walk Exchange, 4 October 2014.

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28. Lydia Ashman, Ania Bas, and Simone Mair, The Walking Reading Group (London: Walking Reading Group, 2014), 3. 29.  Shakti Orion, ‘Walk Study Training Course V,’ Email to Walk Exchange, 2 October 2014. 30.  Izquierdo, ‘Walk Study Training.’ 31.  Shaw, ‘WSTC 5.’ 32.  Andrew Stuck, ‘Walk Study Training Course V-London and New York,’ email to Walk Exchange, 15 September 2014. 33.  Shakti Orion, interview with Blake Morris, 23 April 2017. 34.  Jenny Simm, interview with Blake Morris, 26 April 2017. 35. Millington, ‘Walk Exchange Response,’ unpublished response to questionnaire by Blake Morris, 21 June 2017. 36.  Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment: On Performing Remains (New York: Routledge, 2011), 28. 37. Schneider, Performing Remains, 101, emphasis in original. Schneider is citing Peggy Phelan’s oft-quoted dictum that ‘[p]erformance’s being . . . becomes itself through disappearance.’ See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 38. Schneider, Performing Remains, 104. 39. Schneider, Performing Remains, 39. 40.  See http://walkexchange.org/wstc-5/ for the public facing archive of WSTC 5 walks. 41.  Earl Miller, ‘The Walk Exchange: Pedagogy and Pedestrianism, An Interview with Moira Williams,’ C Magazine Spring, no. 121 (2014): 30. 42.  Paul Watt, ‘“It’s Not for Us”,’ City 17, no. 1 (1 February 2013): 99–118; Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, and Dick Hobbs, Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City: Reconfiguring London for 2012 and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2016). 43. ‘Tourism at Westfield Stratford City,’ Westfield, 2016, https://uk.westfield. com/stratfordcity/tourism/westfield-stratford-city. 44.  Cited in Christopher Finlay, ‘Beyond the Blue Fence: Inequalities and Spatial Segregation in the Development of the London 2012 Olympic Media Event,’ in Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 5 no. 2 (2014): 205. 45.  Heddon and Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library.’ 46.  Blake Morris, ‘Walk Study Training Course 5 Field Notes,’ unpublished field notes (London: University of East London, 14 October 2014). 47.  Walk Exchange, ‘Week 2—October 20–26,’ Walk Study Training Course V, 2014, https://sites.google.com/site/walkstudytrainingcoursev/week-2. 48.  Aliza Aufrichtig, ‘Aliza—A Walk in Ithaca,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/aliza-a-walk-in-ithaca/. 49.  Morris, ‘Walk Study Training Course 5 Field Notes.’ 50. Brett Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Voice to Text,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/brett-walking-score/. 51.  Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Voice to Text.’ 52.  Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Voice to Text.’ 53.  Morris, ‘Walk Study Training Course 5 Field Notes.’

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54. Didem Özkul, ‘Location as a Sense of Place: Everyday Life, Mobile, and Spatial Practices in Urban Spaces,’ in Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, eds. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller (London: Routledge, 2015), 103. 55. Walk Exchange, ‘Comment,’ Walk Study Training Course V, 22 October 2014, https://sites.google.com/site/walkstudytrainingcoursev/week-1/ brett?disco=AAAAALkjKxQ., 56. Dillon de Give, ‘Participant Feedback WSTC 5,’ unpublished notes (New York City: Walk Exchange, 2015). 57. Virginia Millington, ‘Virginia—Activation,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/vige-activation/. 58. Jon Goss, ‘The “Magic of the Mall”: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning,’ in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 1 (1993), 36. 59.  Jon Goss, ‘The “Magic of the Mall”,’35. 60.  Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Random House Books, 1992), 226. 61.  Goss, ‘The “Magic of the Mall”,’ 35. 62.  Goss, ‘The “Magic of the Mall”,’ 43. 63. Doung Anwar Jahangeer, ‘Market Versus Mall: Catalysing Public Debate through New Media Technologies,’ Glocal Times, no. 13 (November 2009): 1. 64.  Doung Anwar Jahangeer, ‘Market versus Mall,’ 3. 65.  Finlay, ‘Beyond the Blue Fence’; Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (London: Penguin, 2012); Alex RhysTaylor, ‘Westfield Stratford City: A Walk Through Millennial Urbanism,’ in Walking Through Social Practice, eds. Charolette Bates and Alex Rhys-Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2017). 66.  Walk Exchange, ‘21 October 2014–Stratford, London,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/21-october-2014-stratford-london/. 67. For an interesting perspective on Times Square before regeneration, see Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999); for a post-regeneration perspective see Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011). 68.  Francie Scanlon, ‘Francie- Round and Round,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/francie-round-and-round/. 69. Virginia Millington, ‘Barriers,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkex change.org/27414/. 70.  Georgia Muenster, interview with Blake Morris, 28 April 2017. 71.  Aliza Aufrichtig, ‘Aliza—Water,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walk exchange.org/aliza-water/. 72.  Millington, ‘Walk Exchange Response.’ 73.  Millington, ‘Walk Exchange Response.’ 74. Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Creative Expression,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/brett-creative-expression/.

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75.  ‘About the Walking Project,’ Walk & Squawk, 2006, http://walksquawk.blogs .com/about_the_walking_project/. 76.  Phil Cohen, ‘A Place Beyond Belief: Hysterical Materialism and the Making of East 20,’ in London 2012 and the Post-Olympics City: A Hollow Legacy?, eds. Phil Cohen and Paul Watt (Baisingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 152. 77.  Scanlon, ‘Francie—Round and Round.’ 78.  Aufrichtig, ‘Aliza—Water.’ 79.  Van Aalsburg, ‘Brett—Creative Expression.’ 80.  Sotelo, ‘Looking Backwards to Walk Forward,’ 58. 81.  David Evans, The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), 4. 82.  Heddon and Myers, ‘The Walking Library: Mobilizing Books,’ 39. 83.  Sotelo, ‘Looking Backwards to Walk Forward,’ 58. 84.  Aufrichtig, ‘Aliza—A Walk in Ithaca.’ 85.  Simm, ‘Interview.’ 86.  Millington, ‘Virginia—Shadows,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkex change.org/27450/. 87.  Millington, ‘Virginia—Shadows.’ 88.  Millington, ‘Virginia—Shadows.’ 89.  Aliza Aufrichtig, ‘Aliza—Walks with Friends,’ Walk Exchange, 3 July 2015, http://walkexchange.org/aliza-walks-with-friends/. 90.  Simm, ‘Interview.’ 91.  Millington, ‘Walk Exchange Response.’ 92.  Millington, ‘Walk Exchange Response.’

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Finale Walking Exercise #4

The following exercises were created for WSTC 5. Please choose a walking exercise (or combine multiple exercises) and go for a walk. At the end of your walk, add a memory image to your memory palace; be sure to walk through the palace (at least in your mind) and peruse the previous memory images you have created. Option A, by the London walkers:

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Every time you come across a [choose one of the following: a vacant space, a well-lit space, a redundant space, or an edge], a dead end, or a cul-de-sac, reflect or respond in whatever way you want (be this a photograph, a dance, writing, reading, singing a song, a moment of silence, etc., etc., etc).

Option B, by Aliza Aufrichtig: [W]alk in the direction of water.

Option C, by Virginia Millington: Any city is filled with barriers that complicate movement. Some barriers are porous and easily surmounted, and others represent true impediments to movement. During your walk, find a porous barrier and pass through it. Next, find a barrier that cannot be overcome and explore what makes it so, and how the barrier itself becomes a conduit for new pathways. If you can, circumvent the barrier.

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Option D, by Francie Scanlon: I request that you either accompany a bow-wow and/or any other type of fourlegged creature that can hit the London trails, with a view toward discovering whether: a) individuals are inclined to be more social when you are out walking the dog; b) individuals tend to shy away from you when you are walking the dog; or c) individuals appear neither to coalesce around you and/or your furry companion whether you are out walking together or otherwise. Perhaps you wish to cue up WALKING THE DOG in many of its variations, starting with Rufus Thomas’ version in 1963.

Option E, by Brett Van Aalsburg:

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Choose a street with a wide variety of creative expression, and walk it. Try to divorce the branding from aesthetics, and look for the human hands and hearts on view. Don’t be too judgmental, and try to feel empathy for all the creative souls seeking to express themselves as best they can, working with what they’ve got.

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Chapter Seven

Conclusion

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The Medium is the Memory (Palace)

At the centre of work in the artistic medium of walking is the actual experience of a walk. Despite the broad memory of the medium and its emergence from different traditions, its common feature is the engagement of the body in a process of walking through a landscape based on a specific artistic design. The proliferation of artists working with walking, and the development of networks to support them, evidences the necessity for a specific critical language focused on the way artists frame going for a walk as an aesthetic experience. Use of the term medium in relation to artistic walking has been ambiguous, referring both to walking as a process or technique for making art, and ‘art walks,’1 where the action of going for a walk is the art. Though there has been an increase in scholarship on walking across disciplines, including cultural geography, mobilities studies, and the performing arts, there has not been a sustained examination of walking as an artistic medium. This has led scholars, curators, programmers, and artists who discuss the artistic medium of walking to depend on critical tools developed for other disciplines. This book offers a definition for the artistic medium of walking in which an artwork’s logic of representation is the act of going for a walk. Works in the artistic medium of walking are distinct from those that use walking as a process or technique for the creation of work in other media, in that they require the audience to go on a walk in order to experience the work of art. Artists design a specific experience that creates an exchange between the walking body, the landscape, and the other bodies it encounters there (both incidentally and by design). Whether we walk alone with an artist’s work to guide us in a one-to-one walk or with a small or large group, we are participating in a specific artistic experience that positions our walking body in relation to the landscape and the people with whom we inhabit it. 161

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Artists working in the medium of walking come from various disciplinary backgrounds and draw on a variety of techniques in the design of their walks. Just as there are many ways a painter can apply paint to a canvas, artists approach the medium of walking through multiple disciplinary pathways and integrate various media into their work. Walking is not a stand-alone medium; it requires interaction with other media, such as the textual instructions of the walking interludes in this book, to communicate the specific design that structures the walk. Though artists often provide these instructions verbally, or by participating in the walk, other works in the medium of walking rely on written guides, audio instructions, and locative media. Building on the theoretical work of Krauss, and drawing on precedents established by Bourriaud, Kester, and Kaprow, I have identified the central logic of representation of works in the medium of walking as the action of going for a walk and discussed how other media supports or facilitate that central logic.

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7.1 THE MEMORY OF THE MEDIUM: A NETWORK OF KNIGHTS LEAVE THE WHITE CUBE In contrast to Krauss’s focus on individual artists who are the ‘defenders of specificity,’2 I argue the medium of walking is being invented through a network of practitioners. They are walking, thinking, and creating together, both through digital interfaces and physically shared experiences. This contemporary guild of practitioners is supported by the memories of the medium, which reach across disciplines to create new modes of practice engaged with the (mostly) universal act of walking. The Walk Exchange and WAN were both formed by artists looking to create specific communities around the walking arts, while the work of Hamish Fulton, one of the essential figures in the memory of the medium, specifically inspired DP’s Walking Institute. These networks develop out of a need to make visible the artistic medium of walking and create pathways for its development. Though I draw on Krauss, I turn her defence of the gallery space, or, white-cube, on its head. The artists she highlights ‘are challenging the postmedium insistence about the end of the space specific to art’s autonomy’; instead, ‘they rely on the resistance of [the gallery’s] walls to penetration’ from the outside world;3 in contrast, artists working in the medium of walking are combining digital spaces and the world beyond the gallery, museum, or exhibition space. This reflects artists’ desires to create experiences that are in contact with the everyday world beyond cloistered artistic spaces, and their use of online spaces to make the work accessible to a global audience.

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Of course, simply taking your relational art on the road—or posting it online—does not necessarily negate its status as an enclosed space, and walking works are not immune to replicating these closed spaces (especially in works that charge a fee or require specialist preparation such as the reading of theoretical texts). Indeed, studies have shown that access to walking generally remains limited to certain demographics. As Sarah Hanson, Cornelia Guell, and Andy Jones note in their discussion of walking groups in socioeconomically deprived areas,

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while research shows that walking appears to be a popular form of physical activity across all socioeconomic groups in England, those more highly situated are nearly twice as likely to partake in recreational walking compared to those who are less well situated (46% compared with 25%). . . . In walking interventions, uptake seems to be mainly by white, well-educated, middle aged women.4

Similar to the initial audiences for Happenings, whose participants Kaprow describes as ‘mainly art-conscious ones’ who were ‘co-religionists before they ever arrived at a performance,’5 the public that forms the core audience for artistic walks remains insular. Walking, however, is an attempt to move from the closed laboratory of the gallery, to the more open laboratory of the street, and artists working with walking often show a concerted attempt to engage the broader social landscape. In establishing walking as an artistic medium, I focus on what specific works of art are doing rather than the question of walking’s position as art in general. For Krauss, the Dadaists, exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s ‘inaugural gesture—the entry of ordinary components into the context of some form of aesthetic institution,’ established ‘the general question—“What makes this art?”—rather than the specific one of medium.’6 In artistic walking practices, the Dadaists are foundational to the memory of the medium, and contribute to the guild of walkers who form the support for contemporary practitioners. In the 1921 excursion to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, the Dadaists left the realms of shadows and moved on to solid ground;7 in doing so, they established the walk as a way to create art that is an experience, rather than an object or idea. Though Breton did not continue to make walks for public audiences, his work with the Surrealists offered walking as a new way to tap into the collective unconscious of the city. The Letterist and Situationist Internationals combined these two strands to create a walking practice that refused the production of artworks entirely, in favour of the directly lived moment and the active reimagining of the city itself. Running through all of these practices are the foundational walks of the British Romantics, who established the movement toward walking as a cultural practice.

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These avant-garde traditions establish a memory of radical practice that critiques the dominant capitalist paradigm, interrogates our use of the landscape, and offers new social models. From the network of Romantic walkers who rethought our relationship to the walking body and the landscape, to the activist anti-capitalist politics of the Surrealists and the Situationist International, this praxis is embedded in walking’s memory, which involves a shift in strategic orientation from the gallery or theatre to the street.8 The passports to walking offered through the mythologised walks of these practitioners form the base for the memory of the medium, and support contemporary artists working in the field. While the memory of the artistic medium of walking is based in radical, oppositional traditions, it is not inherently radical. Works in the artistic medium of walking do not guarantee access to society— or equal exchange within it. As gender studies scholar Annie Menzel rightly points out, an ‘anarchist feminist politics of walking . . . must share a horizon with the flight of the refugee, the military march, and the pacing prisoner; and with the coffle as well as the fugitive in its many forms.’9 This expanded horizon, Menzel argues, ‘offers a far richer archive of what walking as a politics has meant and could mean.’10 The artistic medium of walking can bring new perspectives to these various forms of walking; if the medium is to live up to its radical potential, however, it must make access and intersectionality a priority, and expand the demographics of both artists and participants.

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7.2 THE CONTOURS OF WALKING: CONVIVIAL GROUP, ANTAGONISTIC LANDSCAPE, SLOW TEMPO In arguing for walking as an artistic medium, I also argue for a focus on how the specific attributes of walking create an aesthetic experience. The slow, convivial, and creative attributes of the act of walking define the contours of the medium and provide a unique way for an artist to create work. Regardless of the context in which an artist is working, or what media supports their work, artistic walks are based on the specific behaviour and generative power of the walking body. Heddon notes, ‘walking is always a convivial activity, if you’re not doing it on your own,’11 a concept that harkens back to the memory of goodwill amongst participants in the first Dada excursion.12 Work in the artistic medium of walking brings people together to walk and requires that they keep walking to create the work. This fosters an environment in which artists must maintain the goodwill of their audiences to ensure continued participation in the walk they have designed. Even when participants walk alone, they walk

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in a space designed by an artist that encourages them to continue walking. Though artists such as McAdam sometimes challenge the conviviality of the walking space through direct provocations of the social landscape, walking works tend to foster good relations between the people walking. Importantly, walking requires presence in the landscape; it is a slow and immediate way of engaging the body in space. While walking’s ‘slower speed’ may come ‘at the cost of breadth,’13 artists often make up for this through the creation of works that unfold over time or through repetition. Artists may use the same technique in different locations (such as Savage’s A Guide to Getting Lost, or Heddon and Myers’s walking libraries), or through the slow exploration of the same space (McAdam’s Lines Lost, or the work of walkwalkwalk, for example). While works of walking generally set up a convivial relationship between participants, they often engage critically with the environment of the walk. Morag Rose’s concerns with access to the streets and the right to public space, Kebede’s critique of global border controls, and Sabri’s Walk a Mile in her Veil all push against the social constructions of the landscape and look to interrogate those constructions. It is important that the antagonism is directed toward the social structures of the landscape, rather than the group experience, inasmuch as this stresses the importance of working collectively and cooperatively to critique and transform the systems that construct our experience. When designing a work in the artistic medium of walking, artists call on the specific attributes of walking and the relationship it creates between the physical and social landscapes. The contours of walking as a practice—its slow speed, the fact that it is embodied and embedded in the landscape, and the creative and convivial relationships it produces—combine with the memory of a collective guild of walking practitioners to form a specific artistic medium. The physical experience of going for a walk, and the way that walking acts on the body, create a unique aesthetic experience with the potential to transform our relationships to each other and the spaces we traverse. 7.3 WALKING AS A GENERATIVE PRACTICE In Ways to Wander (2015), a book of walking instructions created by members of the Walking Artists Network, artist and scholar Carl Lavery frames the walk ‘in terms of the creative process of ruination,’ each step erasing that which came before. For Lavery, this is not a ‘melancholic reminder of what was,’ but a celebration of the potential of ‘perpetual and incessant ruination.’ In this way, the ruin is regenerative, and brings focus to ‘what is ahead, in affirming, that is, the future.’14 This brings to mind a quote by avant-garde

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playwright Alfred Jarry, who suggests through the character of Père Ubu that ‘[w]e shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way . . . of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.’15 Following this, I suggest we consider the walk in terms of regeneration, each walk generating the potential for new walks. In the medium of walking, the critical stance of the artist is combined with the generative potential of the walk; this potential doesn’t disappear into ruins, rather it continually produces new ideas, experiences, relationships and, potentially, future walks. This book presents walking as a primary method of research and mode of dissemination in an attempt to create a walking praxis. The exercises that frame this book provides a tangible example of techniques in the artistic medium of walking. The WSTC 5 methodology provides a way to exchange creative walking practices across local boundaries. It used digital techniques to a facilitate the transnational exchange of walking and the development of a living archive that is regenerated through a feedback loop of walking exercises. Used in this way, the digital sphere can facilitate transnational walking exchanges in a way that does not simply document or represent the experience of a walk but instead encourages the generation of future walks. This book serves as another way for the exercises generated through the course to encourage future walks, and many of the exercises included in the book were developed by WSTC 5 participants. Through the inclusion of these exercises, I ask the reader to engage in the arguments of this research through the generative act of walking. To read this book without participating in the exercises it presents misses a vital aspect of the argument: the importance of walking is in going for a walk. 7.4 FUTURE PATHWAYS I have attempted to outline a web of practice that reflects the varied work of contemporary practitioners in the United Kingdom and the relationship of those practices to the guild of walkers that preceded them. Through a focus on walking women, local walking practices, and social, relational, and participatory modes of walking, this book points to a web of walking wider than the oft-discussed traditions of solitary men walking through wild landscapes, or male-dominated explorations of urban spaces. As the medium gains recognition, it will be imperative for scholars and practitioners to continue to weave a wide web of walking that includes marginalised and overlooked practices. The ubiquity of walking throughout global cultures makes this a fertile, though perhaps endless, endeavour, and it will take a collective and concerted

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Conclusion 167

effort to add a variety of voices and viewpoints to our cultural understanding of walking. Crucially, the memory of the medium I have discussed focuses on walking in relation to Western artistic paradigms, and most of the case studies in this book focus on able-bodied white artists, many of whom are institutionally supported. While I have attempted to bring attention to marginalised historical viewpoints, such as the walking practices of Dorothy Wordsworth and Michèle Bernstein (see chapter 2), or the work of contemporary women walking artists (see chapter 4), this represents a limited aspect of the wider global web of walking’s memory. May Murad and Rachel Ashton’s Slow Marathon and Yasmeen Sabri’s Walk a Mile in her Veil point to the need for further exploration into questions of walking and Arab identity, while Morag Rose’s work raises important questions around walking, disability, and class. Additionally, other networks connect practitioners beyond Europe such as the Venezuelan-based Global Performance Art Walks.16 A future history of walking must take an intersectional approach,17 and further work is necessary to broaden awareness of the medium beyond a small and relatively homogenous sector of artists and identify a wider demographic of artists working in this way. The low-cost nature of walking and its practical accessibility to most of the population means that it could be an artistic practice created and disseminated by artists regardless of their geographic location or financial ability. One of the ways in which artists connect the local practice of walking to global communities is through digital means. While the artistic medium of walking is a low-cost way to create work, the use of digital tool raises another set of access issues, particularly in rural areas and the developing world, where internet access is not ubiquitous. Additionally, further research needs to be done around how the digital realm can encourage the embodied, localised, everyday practice of walking. In For Space, Doreen Massey considers reduced walking a potential pitfall of technologically-facilitated long-distance communication. For Massey, this might reduce the ‘happenstance juxtaposition of previously unrelated trajectories, that business of walking round a corner and bumping into alterity,’ which is ‘one of the truly productive characteristics of material spatiality.’18 By using digital methods to encourage walking practices, there is potential to mitigate that danger through the combination of digital and physical experiences that increase these happenstance moments. Indeed, the medium of walking is based on the happenstance experiences and unexpected intrusions that result from how the artist asks participants to move through the real world. Though I have addressed how the medium of walking is supported by its memory, the nascent field of memory studies offers another way to consider

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the relationship between memory and walking art. Memory studies focus on how memory shapes sociocultural contexts and offers potential for considering memory in a different way: how the act of walking creates memories.19 This line of inquiry is suggested by the notion of the memory palace, which uses walking as a way of creating and retrieving memories, and there is potential to use this method to explore how the memories of walking form a core part of the aesthetic experience. This could deepen critical understanding of the relationship between memory and specific works in the medium of walking.

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7.5 FINAL THOUGHTS Artists have moved to walking for a multitude of reasons, and any broad statement that ascribes intention could be combatted. That being said, the central gesture of the artistic medium of walking is the walk itself, and the desire to create direct connections between the walking body, the social and physical landscapes it traverses, and the other actors that inhabit those landscapes. The movement to walking is part of a larger movement of slow, participatory practices that reject the speed of the digitally connected global art market in favour of practices of engagement. Walking asks artists and audiences to move more slowly and works in the artistic medium of walking often unfold over time; in contrast, the digital world is one of speed and immediate global transmission. The increased interest in walking coincides with an increased digitisation, and as I have discussed, walking artists are embracing digital interfaces to support and document their work and generate future walks. Practices such as Mihret Kebede’s Slow Marathon, Jennie Savage’s Fracture Mob, or the Walk Study Training Course look to harness digital interfaces to create walking experiences in the physical world. These works combine the potential of digital speed and transmission with the resolutely local and analogue practice of walking to connect local walking practices to global audiences. The walking practices I have discussed don’t simply bring together communities; they form them through ongoing opportunities for individuals to walk together and online locations for global practitioners to connect. This happens in short-term, temporary ways, such as the silent masses of Fulton’s slowalks, Heddon and Myers walking librarians, or the international cohort of Walk Study Training Course 5. They also build and bring together communities over longer periods of time such as the Loiterer’s Resistance Movement or the repeat patrons of Deveron Project’s annual Slow Marathon. Other events, such as WALKING WOMEN, bring together online communities for offline interaction.

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Conclusion 169

Though the unification of walking art into a specific medium might seem to separate walking from other disciplines, the goal here is to create a specific category founded on its cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary nature. The multitude of disciplinary pathways that contribute to walking practices and their ability to create new communities suggest that the artistic medium of walking could foster cross-disciplinary action that might result in cooperation and social transformation. Walking is made up of many movements, and a focus on medium allows for a flexible approach that can respond to the continued growth and changes of the medium. This allows critics, scholars, and practitioners to focus on how specific works of art are activated through the audience’s walking body while still retaining their own critical languages. In defining walking as a medium, my goal is to bring focus to its essential logic: the act of going for a walk. Only through the identification of walking’s distinct contributions to art can we continue to develop the form and engage wider audiences. As this book demonstrates, walking is a varied and dynamic field that contributes to research across disciplines. Increased funding for walking, such as the AHRC Research Network grant received by WAN and DP’s Creative Scotland funding, makes it imperative to analyse what this work is doing, the kinds of output it is creating, and the history from which it emerges. Increased institutional support also brings about challenges in regard to maintaining the radical memory of the form. It provides greater opportunities for the funded development of the work, but potentially recuperates the radical gesture of walking as simply another technique within the experience economy.20 Additionally, it threatens to transform the work into ‘leisure walks plus,’21 something Phil Smith identifies in relation to WAN. The benefits of support, however, likely outweigh the dangers of recuperation, through its ability to make the medium visible and provide more opportunities for public engagement with artistic walks. Walking’s potential as an artistic medium is in the opportunities it provides to creatively imagine the world through slow, detailed engagement with the contours of the landscape and the people with whom we inhabit it. Artists working in the medium of walking invite participants to move through the real world based on a specific design; they engage audiences in the practice of walking rather than just the consideration of an artist’s walking experience. In this way, works in the artistic medium of walking provide an experience for the walker and transforms them into a teller of tales, who receives the full counsel of the work through the walking body. With that in mind, the last walking exercise asks you to share your memory palace with someone else and extend the feedback loop. Once it is completed, you will have created your Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking, which will

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Chapter Seven

be available to you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as you can imagine it.

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NOTES   1.  Morrison-Bell, ‘Foreword,’ 1.  2. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 32.  3. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 25.   4.  Sarah Hanson, Cornelia Guell, and Andy Jones, ‘Walking Groups in Socioeconomically Deprived Communities: A Qualitative Study Using Photo Elicitation,’ Health & Place 39 (May 2016): 26.  5. Kaprow, Essays, 184.  6. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 32. She is referring here to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, a type of art in which pre-manufactured materials are presented as works of art. They are works in which ‘an ordinary article of life’ is placed ‘so that its useful significance disappear[s] under the new title and point of view’ that frames it as a work of art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a urinal Duchamp signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and submitted for exhibition at New York City’s Society of Independent Artists. Duchamp resigned from the society after the board of directors refused to display the work, despite a policy to display the art of all members who had paid the required six-dollar fee.   7.  Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 139.   8.  Notable exceptions exist, such as Hamish Fulton’s Slowalk (For Ai Weiwei) (2011); however, this work still brings attention to the walking body of the participant in relationship to the space they traverse; in this case, the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern during the installation of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010).   9.  Annie Menzel, ‘Minor Perambulations, Political Horizons: Comment on Kathy Ferguson’s “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”,’ Political Research Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1 December 2017): 732. 10.  Menzel, ‘Minor Perambulations, Political Horizons,’ 733. 11.  Heddon, ‘An Interview to: The Walking Library.’ 12.  Breton, ‘Artificial Hells,’ 139. 13.  Shortell and Brown, Walking in the European City, 10. 14.  Carl Lavery, ‘Interruption . . .Walking and Ruination—or What It Means to Keep a Secret,’ in Ways to Wander, eds. Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind (Axminster: Triarchy Press Ltd, 2015), n.p. 15.  See the preface to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Enchained, in The Ubu Plays, trans. Cyril Connelly and Simon Watson-Taylor (Grove Press: New York, 1969). 16.  See globalperformanceartwalks.tumblr.com. 17.  I use this term in reference to Kimberle Crenshaw, who introduced it in her paper ‘Demarginializing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989), 139–67.

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Conclusion 171

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18. Massey, For Space, 94. 19.  The Memory Studies Association was formally inaugurated on 26 June 2017 in Amsterdam and is the first professional association for scholars working in Memory Studies. See http://www.memorystudiesassociation.org. 20.  Anja Haelg Bieri has discussed the relationship of aesthetic walking to the neoliberal experience economy and urban regeneration schemes centred on walkability in her doctoral thesis, ‘Walking in Late Capitalism—Dialectic of Aestheticization and Commodification’ (PhD diss., Virginia Tech University, 2015). Likewise, scholar Jen Harvie has discussed audio walks in relation to the neo-liberal economy and ‘worker exploitation . . . where audiences are increasingly regularly called on to participate in, contribute to and at least co-create the performance also for free and sometimes, more precisely, at the cost of a fee.’ In audio walks, she asserts, ‘the listener becomes the performer of the walk, the ‘real’ actors long gone.’ Though many audio walks remain free of charge—more specifically the ones Harvie mentions, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999), Graeme Miller’s Linked (2003), and Platform’s And While London Burns (2006)—walking is susceptible to recuperation and it remains essential to identify, discuss, and maintain the radical memory of the medium. See Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 28. 21. Smith, Walking’s New Movement, 81.

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Epilogue Walking Exercise #5

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There is only one step left in the creation of your memory palace. Take someone along with you for a walk—a friend, a family member, a lover, a beloved pet, an imaginary companion—and show them your memory palace. Walk them to the palace, describe the images, and share your stories. End the walk by creating a new image together.

Figure 07.1.  Diagram created by a participant after a walk for The Bureau of Self Recognition (2011–2013)

173

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Index

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Abramović, Marina, 6, 8 Activism, 13, 54, 81, 85, 89, 118, 123, 164 Alÿs, Francis, 2, 7, 70, 112 anti-art, 6–7, 13, 24, 34–37 Ashton, Rachel, 117–21, 167 audio-walk, 2, 50, 96–99 avant-garde: collective walking, 36; influence on Situationists, 34; radical memory, 85, 164; theories of arts, 1, 163; walking canon, 23, 35 Bäss, Chloe, 67 Barriers, 33, 115, 119, 129, 159 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 36 Bernstein, Michele: on dérive, 29, 31; All The King’s Horses (1960), 30–31, 93; The Night (1961), 24, 30–32, 34 Beuys, Joseph, 8, 63 Breton, André, 34–36, 163 Bishop, Claire, 11, 117 Bliss, Melissa, 49–50 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 9–10, 52, 162 borders, 111–12, 119–20 Cardiff, Janet, 2, 70, 96, 171 de Certeau, Michel: city as urban text, 71; mapping, 134; tactics and

strategies, 145; walking as a speech act, 15–16, 86–88 Coetzer, Jacques, 55–57 collaboration: and criticism, 10; between artists, 26, 29, 71, 117–23, 132–33; with community, 15, 50, 54–58, 107–8, 114–17; commodity, 2, 5–7, 9–10, 35, 147 community, 120–24, 136–37, 152; development of, 52, 71–72, 84, 98–99; working with. See collaboration, with community Corringham, Viv, 49–50, 131 Dada, 14, 24, 33, 51, 72, 164; 1921 excursion, 34–36, 67, 163 dance, 38, 59–60 Debord, Guy, 28–32, 51, 97; Society of the Spectacle (1967), 30 derive: contemporary examples, 51–52, 64, 82–83, 90, 97; definition of, 29, 77n84; recuperation of, 13; restrictions to, 32–33 detournement, 29, 31, 66, 88 Deveron Projects: 50/50 Approach, 54, 124; The Town is the Venue, 55, 107, 109; walking as medium, 2–3, 7–8, 162 Deriva Mussol, 132–34 185

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Dewey, John, 68 dialogical aesthetics: and convivial spaces, 10; as theory to approach walking art, 1, 13, 55; relationship to performance, 8 disability, 33, 57, 75, 82, 129, 167 documentation: as art object, 7–8, 67–68, 112; as invitation, 2, 5, 36, 88, 139–40; sale of. See commodity; on video, 118–19, 121–23 drones, 118–19 Ethiopia, 108–12, 119, 168 ethics, 11, 83, 116–17, 143 flâneur, 3, 38 Freire, Paulo, 68 Fulton, Hamish: 21 Days in the Cairngorms (2010), 55, 57–61, 117; France on the Horizon (1975), 6; movement to the medium of walking, 2, 7, 72, 162; slowalks, 8, 10, 12, 55, 57–61, 168

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Gilbert, Jeremy, 9–10, 24 de Give, Dillon, 15, 61, 68, 72, 131, 138, 145 Greenberg, Clement, 4 guided tour, 35, 67 Heddon, Deirdre, 12–14, 23, 27, 31, 51, 87–99, 141, 150, 164–65 Hobsbawm, Eric, 37 immigration, 118–19, 142, 150 invitation, 57, 64, 69, 81, 88, 95–96, 122–23, 135 Kaprow, Allan: Happenings, 8, 38, 69, 163; participation performance, 1, 8–9, 120 Kebede, Mihret, 108–12, 115, 118, 168 Kenyon, Simone, 112–13, 132–34 Kester, Grant, 8, 10, 123, 162

Khatib, Abdelhafid, 24, 32–33 Krauss, Rosalind: expanded field, 4; medium, knights of, 4, 162–63; medium specificity, 16, 162 Letterist International. See Situationist International Lippard, Lucy, 5, 8 Loiterers Resistance Movement, 14, 81–84 London, 49–54, 92–98, 120–21, 135–37, 144, 149; Olympics (2012), 112–13, 141, 146; Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 141, 147–48 London Psychogeographical Society. See Rumney, Ralph Long, Richard, 2, 6, 13, 35, 63, 70; A Line Made by Walking (1967), 5 Lorimer, Hayden, 1, 5, 13 Manchester, 81–84, 99 Manifesto, 29, 36, 50, 82, 88 maps, mapping, 53, 64, 83, 115, 122– 23, 129, 141 Martin, Trayvon, 111 Massey, Doreen, 95, 167 McAdam, Stuart, 114–17, 119, 123–24, 138, 165 McLuhan, Marshall, 4 Meditation, 59–60, 135 memory palace, 16, 47, 129, 140, 159– 60, 168–70 Moses, Robert, 66–68, 71 Murad, May, 117–21, 167 Myers, Misha, 88, 90–99, 141, 149–50, 165 mythogeography, 84–89 New York City, 62–73, 131–38, 140, 142–49 Palestine, 117–20 parade, 8, 62–64, 70, 120–23 performance, 10, 62, 85, 121, 123–24

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Index 187

politics, 7, 10, 13–14, 30, 37, 58, 85, 94, 118, 120–22, 163–64 procession. See parade psychogeography, 13–14, 28–33, 51, 81–89, 93 Qualmann, Clare, 9, 50–54, 80, 89–90, 95, 113, 120–24; Baby Slow Marathon (2015), 113, 122 Quoiraud, Christine, 59–60

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rail travel, 114–15, 134 recuperation, 37–38, 44, 169 relational aesthetics, 1, 9–10, 13, 52, 109, 163 rhythm, 3, 12, 28, 59, 94 Romantics, 3, 13–14, 23–28, 34, 37, 91–94, 114, 163 Rose, Morag, 33, 81–84, 88–89, 91, 165, 167 Rumney, Ralph, 28–30 Sabri, Yasmeen, 89, 95–96, 165 Savage, Jennie, 12, 96–99, 138, 165, 168 Scotland, 26–27, 54–61, 107–24, 133–34 Sculpture, 4–8, 35, 62, 94, 142, 147–48 Sharrocks, Amy, 80, 89–90, 93–95 Shopping, 51, 82, 141, 144–46 Situationist International, 13, 28–33, 37, 40, 81, 84–85, 90, 163–64 slowness, 12, 38, 47, 59, 148, 150, 165, 168 Smith, Phil, 2, 5, 37, 79–80, 84–89, 121–22, 169 Smithson, Robert, 53 Solnit, Rebecca, 5–8, 38

solitary, solitude, 23–28, 31, 36, 58–59, 62, 86, 91–92, 115, 135, 152 Sotelo, Luis, 9, 149–50 storytelling, 16, 88, 115 Surrealism, 24, 33–36, 163–64 suffrage, suffragettes, 14, 82, 92–95 Tiravanija, Rirkit, 52 tourism, 58, 87, 114, 146–48 Turner, Cathy, 14, 23, 27, 31, 51, 63, 84, 86, 88–90 Walk Exchange: distance exchange, 132, 134, 138; formation of, 61, 73, 162; Walk Study Training Course, 68–73, 131–32, 159–60, 166 Walking Artists Network: e-mail listserv, 79–80, 83–84, 90–91; formation of, 49–50, 54, 79–80; funding of, 80, 102n41, 169; multidisciplinary nature, 15, 79 The Walking Library, 12, 89–95, 98, 141–44, 149 The Walking Reading Group, 136–37 WALKING WOMEN, 89–99 walkwalkwalk, 49–54, 120, 123, 165 weather: rain, 34, 132–34, 149; sunshine, 27; wind, 144, 146–47 Wilkie, Fiona, 12, 38 Williams, Raymond, 24 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 14, 24–28, 91, 93, 114, 167 Wordsworth, William, 26–28, 39–40n20, 92, 114 Woolf, Virginia, 86, 93 Wrights & Sites, 38, 84–86 Zeiske, Claudia, 54–61, 107, 112–13

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About the Author

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Blake Morris is a walking artist and researcher based in the United Kingdom. Originally from the United States, he received his doctorate in Drama, Applied Theatre, and Performance at the University of East London. His work has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Global Performance Studies, the International Journal of Tourism Cities, and through the Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre; additionally, his artistic works have been shown at Ovalhouse Theatre (London), Bogart Salon (New York City) and Superfront Gallery (Los Angeles, Detroit, New York City). He is a founding member of the Walk Exchange, a cross-disciplinary walking group based in New York City. Morris co-manages the Walking Artists Network with Clare Qualmann, with whom he co-edits ‘Lines of Desire’ for the critical cartography journal Livingmaps Review.

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