The Art of Walking

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller include the viewer in their walks, Richard Long marks the space, while Vito Acconci prefers to follow other people's paths

This was translated from my column at the Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico. Here.

Walking helps unravel ideas and untangle knots in our thoughts. The way we walk says a lot about us. One of my favorite books, by Frédéric Gros, is called A Philosophy of Walking. In the book, the author suggests that each philosopher’s walking habits affect their way of thinking. He also says that “walking is the right speed to understand.” The city where I live is famous for its “walkability” — with comfortable shoes and a certain amount of energy, you can go anywhere on foot.

And I take full advantage of this possibility — crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, where I live, very often. The figure of the flâneur, the passionate spectator of urban life, first appears in Paris, in an essay by Charles Baudelaire, from 1863. In James Joyce’s imagination, in Ulysses, the character Leopold Bloom walks through the city of Dublin for an entire day, in what became one of the most iconic books of the 20th century. But there are also in literature walkers who prefer nature. The other day I read a poem called “I wonder if I shall miss the moss”. In it, the American author Jane Mead seems to take us for a walk with her. An excerpt:

I wonder if I will miss the moss
after I fly off as much as I miss it now
just thinking about leaving.

There were stones of many colors.
There were sticks holding both
lichen and moss.
There were red gates with old
hand-forged hardware.
There were fields of dry grass
smelling of first rain
then of new mud. There was mud,
and there was the walking,
all the beautiful walking,
and it alone filled me—
the smells, the scratchy grass heads.

In the visual arts, many artists have explored the idea of ​​wandering around. One of the first works of Walking Art is by the English artist Richard Long. On a trip to St Martin, he walked repeatedly – ​​back and forth along the same path – until the grass flattened out and formed a line. The photo we see in museums records the result of his intervention in the landscape. The artist's presence appears only as a suggestion.

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967

The American Vito Acconci played stalker. He would choose someone at random on the streets of New York and follow that person until they entered a building. In some cases, the saga lasted minutes, in others, hours. The artist passed through the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. His routes are shown on the map that became a work of art, as seen in the image below. By handing his fate over to a stranger, Acconci believed that “I was almost no longer an ‘I’; I put myself at the service of this scheme.”

Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969

The duo of Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, explored the idea of ​​the art walk by including the viewer in their pre-recorded tour. The first experience was in 1991 and, since then, the two have created numerous audio and video walks around the world.

To experience the work, each viewer receives a device and headphones where they listen to an audio guide narrating events that will happen along the way. There is also a layer of sound effects that transforms the experience into a real trip! In the video walks, the viewers are given a video screen on which they watch a video previously recorded in the same place where they are.

Only those who have the device see those scenes that make past and present, fiction and reality, begin to mix. As the artists themselves explain: “the film perfectly combines the reality of architecture with that of the body in motion. The perceptive confusion is deepened by the dreamlike narrative elements that occur in the pre-recorded film.”

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, 2012

The list of walking artists goes on, but I'll stop here. How about we get up and go for a walk?