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Featured New 5 Feb, 2025

A history of walking art

The Surrealists meet the Situationists on the streets of Paris.

Next Tuesday, February 11, we have Lori Waxman as a guest in our next Walking Writers Salon, where Lori and I discuss her book Keep Walking Intently, on the ambulatory art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus.
To whet your appetite, and to prepare you for our discussion, here’s an overview of Lori’s excellent book.

Waxman gives a great overview of the evolution of ‘walking art’ throughout the 20th century, and I’m curious where this lineage has taken us in the present.

Waxman solidly puts the initiation of walking as a means of discovery with the Surrealists. A spread in the first issue of Minotaure, the Surrealist magazine published from 1933 to 1939, reveals the capacity for walking to give access to the extraordinary, and they often used the term “flânerie” to describe their practice.

Conversing when strolling was key to the rhythm of a developing Surrealism, as was the pursuit of chance encounters, and the dreamy sort of straying where the reality of the streetscape morphed into a hallucinatory landscape, with that pushing back against the regulation, logic, and efficiency of modern urban life, which they saw as deadening the spirit, while pretending to stand for progress and civilisation. The Surrealists needed lived experience and this needed the street.

The concept of the dérive took another few decades to be named as such, but its spirit was cooking in the 1920s. The poet and writer André Breton talked about “objective chance”, a term he borrowed from Hegel and used to recognise the magical power of what might otherwise seem like mere happenstance. 
Moving through the city became a means of accessing the self, as the mind and body together are able to rewrite a traversed territory according to desires, histories, connections, and recollections, with each of the Surrealists walking to discover themselves.

Like the Situationists, the Surrealists were obviously anti-capitalist, identifying that capitalism can be resisted not just by exposing outmoded objects and places but by re-enchanting them.
But, the Situationists went further: Détournement, and the dérive, is a method for taking preexisting cultural products and transforming them into something superior.

But, although the Surrealists were perhaps big on self-discovery, it required the Situationists to use walking to achieve something beyond the individual.

In a way, the bridge between Surrealists and Situationists were several movements that included political action next to artistic expression. The Lettrist International theorised and practiced an updated version of the Surrealist goal, one that also sought to radically change everyday life, while not so much relying on chance, the unconscious, or the marvellous. They focused resolutely on the present, concerned less with themselves than with the city they lived in and the lives lived there.
But also CoBrA and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus were operating in the same space, at that time.

With the Situationists, it was Debord who infused the revolutionary zeal in the movement; “What alters the way we see the streets is more important than what alters the way we see painting.”
Debord realised that the average person exerts no control over his or her everyday life, living it passively and under various kinds of unquestioned, utilitarian obligations: to work and to consume foremost among them. Meanwhile life was growing increasingly atomized and privatized. So, to be aware of the inferiority and narrowness of everyday life must, the Situationists argued, lead to a critique of society and, eventually revolution.
Then, the need, and right, to change the city in which one lives, could be compared to artistic practice itself, the ability to construct life out of one’s own desires, as artists have always done with art.

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Walking, especially in the form of the dérive, forced one intimately into contact with the city as it was being lived and as it could be lived, and so, the dérive has two overlapping goals: “emotional disorientation” via ambulatory play, and “studying a terrain” in terms of its psychological influence.
For the Situationists, going back to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, ‘play’ was essential. But, the playfulness of drifting was of the utmost seriousness, important enough for Debord to describe the dérive as the “application of [the] will to playful creation”.

But, this was serious stuff. The Situationists saw how opportunities for uprisings or meaningful encounters were being eliminated via the combination of isolating modernist housing units, streets given over to motorized traffic, and constant surveillance, seeing the dystopian, totalizing reality that had resulted from the promise of the machine, though it wasn’t motorised transport per se which the Lettrists and the Situationists revolted against, but rather its role in the streamlining and compartmentalization of urban life.

According to the Situationists, the general public needed to be nudged to realise their exploitation by the Spectacle. One way in which they tried to achieve this was through painting slogans on the city walls. 
They defended their use of graffiti as “add[ing] to the intrinsic significance of those streets—when they have one to start with. These inscriptions,” they explained, “[were] meant to make a whole range of impressions, from psychogeographical insinuation to plain and simple subversion.”

Waxman identifies this need to change the world as also the reason for Lettrists and Situationists persistent production of maps, testifying to a desire to transmit their knowledge and beliefs about the city to others. The Surrealists after all, never mapped.
In Debord’s famous maps, mapping only neglected sites (as psychographic centers) was to protest against their deliberate usurpation and devaluation by the urban planners of the day.
These maps, based on psychogeographic findings, drew up “maps of influence” revealing not the basic facts of the urban environment, but their effect.

Notably, both the Surrealists and the Situationists were often intoxicated. The existing accounts of dérives, in novels, artists’ books, collages, maps, reports, and memoirs, are in great part records of extreme intoxication. Building on that, the writer Will Self has suggested that walking is, for him, akin to drug taking, offering, just like a drug, respite from the dullness of standard living.
For Self, this sounds like escapism, but the comparison is interesting.

The last section of Waxman’s book, on Fluxus, shows a departure in the artistic practice from the previous two generations of artistic practice. It’s as if, after the Situationist heyday of 1968, the movement’s heritage went back to artists, like Yoko Ono, creating experiences, often through ‘walking scores’, that nudged the participant into thinking more about themself, their surroundings, and the people around them, often more on a philosophical level, not so much on a revolutionary one. 
Waxman does point out that Fluxus saw importance in knowledge formation, and Maciunas, the ‘big boss’ of Fluxus, did argue that the kind of art practiced by Fluxus, because of its rejection of hierarchies, artificiality, and abstraction, could serve as an art for the masses in a Marxist-Leninist sense, which could hint at a kind of revolutionary angle.
Maciunas was born in what is now Lithuania, so that might have also helped with this vision of his.

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Dick Higgins defined nine criteria for Fluxworks, Fluxus art, in 1982 and Ken Friedman updated them to twelve in 1989. They include globalism, unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism (that is, providing, or setting, an example), specificity, presence in time, and musicality.
I can almost hear Fluxus moving into the practice of creating socially relevant sound walks, also underscored (ha!) by Fluxus heavily leaning on the work of John Cage.

However, Fluxus departure from the trajectory of the Surrealists and Situationists is also shown by a kind of inversion of the Surrealist strategy, where, instead of finding the marvellous in everyday life, they typically attempted to make it strange.
Still, Fluxus’ anti-capitalist leanings are betrayed by their criticism of what we now call overtourism, taking issue with the typical touristic approach to the city, where only important monuments and beautiful places are visited, and visited by all tourists, thereby ignoring more quotidian or problematic sights, providing deeper and more complex insights. Instead of wandering the galleries and soaking up the artistic atmosphere, Fluxus tours were all about the places and perspectives otherwise ignored.

Debord must have been proud.


Next Tuesday, February 11, join Lori Waxman and myself in discussing her book in our next Walking Writers Salon.

APA style reference

Fakhamzadeh, B. (2025). A history of walking art. walk · listen · create. https://walklistencreate.org/2025/02/05/a-history-of-walking-art/

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Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture. Keep

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Keep Walking Intently

Meet the authors who are writing about walking and the landscapes through which we walk, at Walking Writers Salons. We are delighted to welcome art critic and historian Lori Waxman who will be talking with Babak Fakhamzadeh about her book Keep Walking Intently, a seminal history of walking art in the Twentieth century. Lead art critic


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zig-zag walking

A kind of attitudinal or intentional walk in which one chooses a zig-zag pathway, choosing a feature in the environment to walk towards and changing chosen feature and direction at will. A way to subvert prescribed directionality, and view, of built urban pathways.

Added by James Cunningham
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