Blake Morris’s Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium, is an important book on walking as an artistic medium. Based on his PhD thesis, it’s also incredibly expensive and not available in my university’s library, so I had to purchase a very expensive and unpaginated e-book; the lack of pagination explains why the citations in this summary are strange. To cite the book in my exegesis, I might have to buy a physical copy of the book. I hope that’s not going to be the case. Perhaps my institution’s interlibrary loans people will be able to help me. Perhaps not; libraries themselves tend to buy e-books these days.
Morris begins with a walking exercise that relies on the production of a memory palace. He asks his readers to leave all maps behind and walk somewhere: “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” (“Preamble”). That image doesn’t have to be purely visual—could be a sound or a smell (“Preamble”). “Imagine your memory image somewhere in the landscape,” he writes. “Commit the newly transformed area to memory. This is the first addition to your Memory Palace for the Medium of Walking” (“Preamble”).
The memory palace, or “method of loci,” is an ancient Greek memory technique: “To create a memory palace, one chooses a specific place 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” (“Prologue”). Morris’s own art practice involves walking, and he documents his walks through this memory palace technique (“Prologue”). According to Morris, his discovery of the memory palace was not a solitary one; rather, he writes, “a network of friends and collaborators helped me to discover the technique and its application to the artistic medium of walking” (“Prologue”). This emphasis on networks of walkers from a variety of disciplines is, as the title of the book suggests, central to his book’s argument.
Morris has created memory palace walks in New York, San Francisco, Fresno, London, and Wales—not during solo walks, but during walks with participants (“Prologue”). “Each memory palace records a different set of walks, sites, circumstances, and collaborations, activated through walking and imagining together,” he writes. “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” (“Prologue”). The walking exercises interspersed throughout the book ask readers to create a memory palace through walking (“Prologue”). This summary skips over those exercises, even though Morris argues that they are central to his argument.
One of the book’s concerns is defining what constitutes walking as a stand-alone artistic medium. Morris notes that “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.” In contrast, Morris argues “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 to a walk is essential to my argument. The exercises in this book don’t just illustrate my argument; they activate and articulate it” (“Prologue”). The memory palace technique is the form of documentation Morris uses and recommends to his readers. A memory palace is “available for you to access twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as you choose to remember it” (“Prologue”).
In the book’s first chapter, “Walking: A Distinct Artistic Medium,” Morris identifies his primary purpose:“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”’” (Chapter 1).However, “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,” and this focus on other media or theories of practice “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” (Chapter 1).
However, Morris argues that walking is not a process for making art in other disciplines; instead, it is an artistic medium in its own right. “Work within the artistic medium of walking transmits the artwork through the audience’s walking body,” he argues. “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” (Chapter 1). Thus he distinguishes between “works that must be experienced as a walk” and “works that use walking as a process or technique to create art in other media” (Chapter 1). As a medium, “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” (Chapter 1).
Morris suggests that the interaction between walking and other media “necessitates that any consideration of the artistic medium of walking must also consider its use of interdisciplinary techniques” (Chapter 1). However, scholars, artists, and curators haven’t ignored walking as a medium: in the catalogue for Walk-On, curator Cynthia Morrison-Bell distinguishes between “walking as art”—the sculpture of Richard Long, or text work of Hamish Fulton, or video art of Francis Alÿs—and “art walks”—the audio walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, or Fulton’s choreographed group walks (Chapter 1, Section 1.1). For Morris, the works Morrison-Bell calls “art walks” are “works in the specific medium of walking,” and so he is offering “a critical model specific to works that position the walk itself as the art” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1). “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,” he writes. “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1). There are consistent attributes to walking—a slow pace, a fostering of creative and convivial responses—and “the artist’s design, the particular context of the walk, and participants’ previous knowledge and experiences determine how specific walks function as artistic works” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1).
Morris’s intention is “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1). He’s particularly interested in approaches to walking “that stress collaborative, collective, and relational modes of practice” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1). The kind of walker that interests him, then, is not the solo Romantic walker or urban flâneur (Chapter 1, Section 1.1)—or, for that matter, someone using walking to explore a highway by himself, like the walks I made last summer. Who else would want to come along with me on a walk along the shoulder of a busy highway? I don’t think I know anyone who would.
Because Morris is interested in collaborative or relational or collective walking, his focus is on three networks of practitioners that are developing walking as an artistic medium: the Walking Artists Network at the University of East London; the Walking Institute at Deveron Projects in Huntly, Scotland; and the Walk Exchange he co-founded in New York. These organizations “support the artistic medium of walking through varied approaches to its development, and make visible the burgeoning work happening in the field”; they “demonstrate how artists are using the local analogue practice of walking to create global connections through digital tools” (Chapter 1, Section 1.1).
Morris uses Rosalind Krauss’s definition of a medium, taken from her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which argues that postmodernist artistic 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”; Krauss is not interested in the physical substance of the work, but rather its “logic of representation” (Chapter 1, Section 1.2). In her 2011 book, Under Blue Cup, Krauss suggests that a medium is a form of remembering; it is not referential but recursive, looking back on itself through the memory of its development (Chapter 1, Section 1.2). This idea is central to Morris’s argument. He suggests that Krauss “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.2). This framework “offers a way to unify the diverse field to which works in the medium of walking belong”; practitioners of walking art “are drawing on the memories of the medium, the rules and techniques developed by previous guilds of walking practitioners,” and by drawing on that memory, “networks of contemporary artists are developing a new medium” (Chapter 1, Section 1.2).
Richard Long and Hamish Fulton tend to “dominate considerations of walking as an artistic practice” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3): “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Much of their work is in other media, and walking acts as a support to that work (Chapter 1, Section 1.3); the objects they make “are circulated as art rather than the walks themselves” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Therefore their art is representational: it is “a model of artistic walking based on the commodified representation of walks”—and this artistic paradigm “is one of the things this book intends to challenge” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Though Long “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” which “rarely offer a new walk to experience”; instead, “they point to a walk the artist has already experienced” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). For this reason, “walking is not central to the audience’s experience of most of his work” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3).
Fulton, unlike Long, “most forcefully identifies as a walking artist,” adamantly denying that he is a sculptor, claiming that walking is his primary artistic medium, but Morris disagrees (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Instead, Fulton is committed “to representing walking experiences as artworks” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). At the same time, Fulton has talked about the impossibility of conveying the experience of a walk through an artwork in a gallery, and that walking and making physical works of art are separate activities (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). “In this way, the audience for his work does not have access to the experience of the walk, only his suggestion of it,” Morris suggests (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). However, for Morris, the medium of walking (rather than its representation in other media) is “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3).
However, Fulton’s group walks, which he began making in 1994 after working with performance artist Marina Abramovič in Japan, address this issue; in those 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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Those group walks “do not create a saleable object, only the experience of a walk,” and this moves Fulton’s work “from the representation of walking in other media to the medium of walking itself” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Fulton’s shift to group walks coincides with his increased interest in politics, something Morris does not see as a coincidence (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Fulton’s shift“to the medium of walking reflects the radical political memory of the medium”: “the guild of practitioners who establish the memory of the medium, exemplified by the [Lettrist] 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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Only Fulton’s group walking practice—his “slowalks”—save his practice from being, for Morris, merely representational.
Since the 1960s, more attention has been paid to walking as an art practice (Chapter 1, Section 1.4). However, 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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4). This idea, for Morris, is incorrect: “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4). In addition, when the walk itself is positioned as art, it is considered in relation to performance (Chapter 1, Section 1.4). Walking works are often performative, but for Morris, “performance is not the primary location of the artistic experience,” because walking works—the kind he sees as using walking as a medium—don’t depend on the idea of the performer as “‘the expressive locus of the work’” (he is quoting Grant Kester here); instead, “the mode of art making is specific to the experience of going for a walk” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4). Morris cites Allan Kaprow’s call for art to stop 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” (qtd. Chapter 1, Section 1.4.1), noting that “an art where the artist’s vision is realized through the generative power of the audience, who bring the work to fruition through their participation,” is close to his definition of walking as an artistic medium (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.1).
“Artists and scholars looking for a way to articulate their artistic walking works have adopted Kaprow’s term”—that is, “participation”—including Luis Carlos Sotelo and Clare Qualmann (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.1). Morris praises Qualmann (his dissertation supervisor, it seems) for being “explicitly engaged in the exploration of walking as an artistic medium” but criticizes her use of “existing nomenclature that prioritises performance as the location of artistic action rather than the walk itself” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.1). “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 an art form,” he contends (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.1).
Another touchstone in discussions of participatory art, including walking, is Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics, in which social relations between people, generated through interactive aesthetic experiences, are the focus, rather than static art objects (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2). “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,” he explains (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2). “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,” he continues. “These artists take ‘the whole of human relations and their social context’ as practical and theoretical starting points” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2). For many artists, walking is a response to the lack of orientation to the outside that is involved in this notion of a laboratory: “it represents a desire to move beyond the depoliticised laboratory of commodified gallery spaces and into the everyday streets” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2).
Another theory often used to talk about walking art is Grant Kester’s “dialogical aesthetics”: Kester uses this term to talk about art that has a collaborative, rather than specular, relationship to the viewer (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). I have Kester’s book but have yet to read it, and Morris’s discussion of Kester’s ideas encourages me to get to it. Theorists and practitioners who draw on Kester’s work include Deidre Heddon and Cathy Turner, Misha Myers, and Hilary Ramsden. In his 2004 book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Kester argues that“dialogical art engages in an exchange with the audience in which ‘subjectivity is formed through discourse and intersubjective exchange itself’” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). He contends that “dialogical projects are durational and engage their audiences in the overall creation of the artistic work” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). For Kester, an artistic work is seen as “a durational process that occurs in collaboration with its audience, rather than a process of aesthetic absorption, as with a traditional art object,” and in this way the gallery becomes more like a theatre (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). However, unlike relational aesthetics, dialogical art doesn’t involve “a choreographed social exchange,” but rather a cumulative process of exchange and dialogue that goes beyond participating in an aesthetic event(Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). “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,” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3).
Art historian Claire Bishop presents the most sustained critique of participatory, relational, and collaborative aesthetics; she wants to see attention paid to the demonstrable effects of these practices (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4). What criteria address relationality as an aesthetic encounter? she asks (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4). “My interest in the establishment of the distinct medium of walking responds to Bishop’s critique,” Morris states. “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 self0-reflexive criticality” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4). he notes that Bishop “has dismissed walking as one aspect in a predictable formula of participatory and socially engaged art,” but he sees it, instead, “as the centre of an artistic formula rather than a supporting outreach activity” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4). In any case, these theoretical perspectives only take Morris so far: “Though the theories discussed above offer important critical tools for considering artistic walking practices, [centring] 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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4).
What are the attributes of walking? Morris asks. “Artists, writers, and philosophers have anecdotally associated walking with creativity, conviviality, well-being, and increased capacity for intellectual thought, a paradigm perhaps [most] strongly established in the United Kingdom by the walks of the British Romantics,” he writes. “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5).
Rhythm is an essential aspect of the experience of walking; the rhythm of walking “allows for a detailed exploration of the world at an intimate, human-scaled pace” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). Fiona Wilke suggests that pace, or slowness, is what sets walking apart from other forms of mobility (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). Timothy Shortell and Evrick Brown, the editors of Walking in the European City, suggest, however, that while walking’s slow speed yields richness, it sacrifices breadth (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). “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,” Morris states (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). In addition, “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5).
Another defining feature of walking is “the design of the walking route,” which can be done in many different ways; some use “strictly delineated routes,” while “others favour free form explorations and collective decision making” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). Walkers interact with their environment in particular ways, so the place in which the walk occurs is important. Walking is also social (when carried out by more than one person) “and multiple researchers have identified the creative potential of talking-walking methodologies” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). “This is one of the says that artists working with walking link to dialogical and relational aesthetics, through the creation of convivial spaces of intersubjective exchange,” Morris states (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). However, in walking, the real world intrudes into those convivial spaces—through “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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5).
Walking can also be critical of the environment in which the walk takes place: many of the artists Morris discusses “actively interrogate physical and social constructs through their walking works” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5). “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,” he wrotes. “While not inherently radical, walking’s unique attributes contribute to its radical potential” (Chapter 1, Section 1.5).
Morris’s focus in this book is walking within the United Kingdom; he notes that there are precursors in that country, (the Romantics, Long and Fulton) but also influences from elsewhere, such as the Lettrist International and the Situationist International; he thinks that the participatory explorations of various psychogeographical groups are better examples of the influences of the LI and SI than the literary manifestations of psychogeography, such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self (Chapter 1, Section 1.6). (Writing about walking seems to be completely out of fashion at the moment.) Walking in the UK has been linked to radical politics—the Chartists’ protest walks, the mass trespass on Kinder Scout, the marches by women for suffrage (Chapter 1, Section 1.6). For this reason, Morris begins his discussion of walking in the UK with “the memories of the medium”: the Romantics, especially women who walked, and the Situationists (Chapter 1, Section 1.6). Then he turns to the three organizations he has identified as promoting walking as an artistic medium—that discussion is the core of his book (Chapter 1, Section 1.6).
Morris concludes his first chapter with Michel de Certeau’s argument for walking as a “space of enunciation” (qtd. Chapter 1, Section 1.7). Walking, for de Certeau, “requires one to learn a spatial language and act 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” (Chapter 1, Section 1.7). That emphasis on narrative resonates with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” in which Benjamin argues that storytelling privileges experience over information (Chapter 1, Section 1.7). This emphasis on narrative might make Morris’s dismissal of “literary psychogeography” seem strange, but he argues that the narratives produced by walking are “predicated on the participant’s movement into the story of the walk”: for Morris, it is “in the creation rather than the reception of experience that the medium of walking can be found” (Chapter 1, Section 1.7). Going for a walk, as an action, “activates a specific relationship between the artist, audience and the landscape, which distinguishes it from other modes of artistic practice” (Chapter 1, Section 1.7).
Following Krauss’s focus on specific examples, Morris looks at “specific works in the artistic medium of walking” and uses “medium to identify what distinguishes them from works that use walking as a process or technique to create art in other media” (Chapter 1, Section 1.7). He contends that walking is at the core of this book:
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. (Chapter 1, Section 1.7)
The walking exercises included in the book articulate Morris’s arguments, rather than illustrating them, and “through the construction of a memory palace” he looks “to articulate the medium of walking through the practice of walking itself” (Chapter 1, Section 1.7).
Chapter 2, “A Romantic Drift through the History of Walking,” is about the memory of the artistic medium of walking, the practices of its forebearers, and “the practices and techniques developed by a guild of previous walking practitioners” (Chapter 2). While scholars have “started to map a history of walking focused on the relational, dialogic, and social nature of the practice,” nevertheless “considerations of walking remained 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” (Chapter 2). Like Deidre Heddon and Cathy Turner’s discussion of “epic” walking, that word carries a negative jolt: epic walking, in contemporary practice, is considered exclusionary, elitist, and wrong, particularly through the alleged whiteness and maleness of its practitioners. The kind of walking I tend to practice—partly out of necessity rather than choice, since walking can be dangerous and difficult here, and I am reluctant to engage others in a walks that can be risky and uncomfortable, and partly because it’s easier to walk by myself than find others to walk with in a small city, like this one, that has no walking culture—is completely out of fashion. Nobody wants to hear about it—particularly if the experiences of those walks are documented in writing. Walking must be a collective practice, and it must be open to all, or it is without value, according to the current notions of what constitutes walking as an artistic practice. Solo walks don’t count; neither do long walks. Both are aesthetically and politically retrograde. Such arguments, however, ignore the fact that not everywhere is walking as relatively easy or accepted as it is in the UK–and that many of the walkers Morris himself discusses have engaged in so-called “epic” walking.
Instead of looking at a white, male canon of walkers, Morris, examines “marginalized 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” (Chapter 2). He suggests that Deidre Heddon and Cathy Turner are the most forceful proponents of the need for this critical approach, as expressed in their important 2012 article “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility” (Chapter 2). The Romantics and the Naturalists, according to Heddon and Turner, constitute the “single trajectory” of the history of walking, and that trajectory presupposes a “universal walker,” a male figure, physically able, of a particular class and race (Chapter 2). As a result, the “walking canon” is “focused on those perceived to be socially and physically independent, and able to freely traverse both urban and rural spaces” (Chapter 2). Morris’s purpose in this chapter is to centre “marginalised perspectives in its discussion of the enduring historical discourses around walking” (Chapter 2). For that reason, he focuses on Dorothy Wordsworth, not her brother William (Chapter 2), and on Michèle Bernstein’s 1961 book The Night as an example of Lettrist and Situationist anti-art walking practices (Chapter 2) instead of Guy Debord’s theorizing of the dérive, and Abdelhafid Khatib’s attempted drift in Paris, “which illuminates some of the tensions around walking, race and access to public space overlooked in discussions of the SI” (Chapter 2). Morris finishes by looking at the contributions of Dada and Surrealism “to the web of practices that are foundational to the memory of the medium” (Chapter 2).
“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,” Morris continues, but “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Romantic tropes include uniqueness, nature as a cure for a corrupt society, a free imagination, the idea that the truth of our lives is located in our internal subjectivity, the idea that creativity is a quality possessed by individuals rather than groups (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). “These tropes have come to symbolise a certain set of priorities that are represented through the image of the solitary Romantic walker,” typified by Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, “which has come to represent the wild, mythical, sublime creativity and solitude of the Romantic self-made genius” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1).
William Wordsworth the English Romantic poet most closely associated with walking (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Romantic walking is seen a solitary activity, since many of Wordsworth’s walks were solitary ones, in which the walker, “set apart from society, moves into the natural world to discover himself through sublime exploratory journeys” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). However, many of Wordsworth’s walks “were composed in collaboration with his sister, who acted as walking companion, secretary, editor, and wordsmith” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). He also walked with his friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but that fact is left out of Morris’s account. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals were an important influence on his poetry (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Her writings “reveal walking as simultaneously social and solitary”; when she walks alone, “she is often accompanied by memories of those who have walked with her” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Wouldn’t that be true of Wordsworth as well? And aren’t many of the poems he wrote about his walks about encounters with other people during those walks? In any case, Dorothy Wordsworth’s “travel writings offer insight into how she and her brother inhabited solitary spaces together and reveal the relational, networked nature of Romantic walking practices” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Her journals and diaries “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’” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1).
While Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing was not published during her lifetime, it was read by her brother and circulated among her peers (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). Her 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”: other Romantic walking women included Anne Lister, Sarah Stoddart, and Mary Shelley (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). “A new memory of artistic walking must start with” a reconsideration of “the role women played in the construction of the walking sensibilities of the period” and that new memory must recall “the contribution of a variety of social actors to the foundations of cultural walking practices” (Chapter 2, Section 2.1). The point seems to be that the notion of Romantic walking as solitary is incorrect, but any careful study of that practice shows that notion is, at best, only partly right.
The Lettrist International and Situationist International also influenced the artistic medium of walking (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Most of the focus has been on Guy Debord as “the dominant figure in considerations of the LI/SI” and “little has been said about the role of Michèle Bernstein, who joined the LI in 1952 and remained part of the SI through 1967, shortly before its official dissolution in 1972 and a few years after the end of her romantic relationship with Debord” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Morris argues that the SI was a collective endeavour, shaped through collaboration (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). On one hand, that seems to be true, given the number of authors who contributed to its publications; on the other hand, Debord determined who could and could not be a member of the SI, so the amount of collaboration involved diminished over time. “Through my focus on Bernstein, I do not intend to diminish the collective nature of the group,” Morris writes; “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2).
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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). These exploratory walks through urban spaces, as described by Debord in “Theory of the Dérive,” were best carried out by small groups of people, because cross-checking their impressions increases the possibility of reaching objective conclusions (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). “Though the solitary dérive is possible, it is fundamentally a group activity designed to actively interrogate and potentially transform the city,” Morris notes (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). The dérive had (or has) two goals: “the discovery and détournement of the city’s ‘psychogeographical’ contours, and ‘engagement in playful-constructive behaviour,’” Morris writes, citing Debord (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). “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,” he points out (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). In addition, the SI promulgated “a theory of interaction, dialogue and ‘total participation’ through the ‘organization of the directly lived moment’” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2).
Bernstein explained that the dérive was intended as a way of life: through practice, the SI would contribute to a social revolution that would create a new world (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). “For Bernstein and the Situationists, the dérive was a foundational practice in the impending revolution,” Morris states (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Morris argues that Bernstein influenced the theoretical foundations of Situationist practice, although she was reticent “to produce work for the consumption of the spectacle”; nevertheless, “her focus on dialogue, interaction and the directly lived moment, in some ways make her an ideal Situationist” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Her two novels, 1960’s All the King’s Horses and 1961’s The Night, led to the publication of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle; Bernstein convinced her publisher, Edmund Buchet, to publish Debord’s text (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Bernstein’s novels, which “détourn different literary styles,” including racy pulp novels and the nouveau roman, “provide insight into key Situationist concepts, such as dérive, d[é]tournement, and psychogeography, as written from Bernstein’s perspective” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). The Night, for instance, includes a fictional account of a dérive (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Of course, that account is fictional, which makes Bernstein’s writing perhaps less useful than the nonfiction writing published by other members of the SI. The Situationists wrote about race as well as gender. “Situationist Abdelhafid Khatib’s ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles’ (1958) identifies social factors that shape and often limit participants’ experiences,” Morris notes, since Khatib’s dérive was incomplete because he was arrested for breaking the curfew imposed on Arabs and North Africans in Paris (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). “Khatib’s text brings attention to the challenges of drifting for a person whose movement is restricted, be this by gender, race, or ability” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2).
Contemporary psychogeographical practices foreground gender and race, along with ability. Morris discusses Sharanya Murali’s discussion of drifting in New Delhi, India, and the limitations on her freedom of movement, mostly because of concerns about her safety (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Psychogeographer Morag Rose has noted that while conducting walking interviews with women for her doctoral research she was often disrupted by men, and that the women she interviewed noted that it’s important to be alert to threats in the street (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Murali “consider’s Khatib’s drift in relation to ‘disability and other forms of marginalisation,” suggesting that “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Morris quotes Steve Graby’s discussion of the ways that walkers with cognitive disabilities have their “wandering behaviour” pathologized, when 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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). These contemporary discussions show how the dérive “continues to influence contemporary practitioners working with walking, and [Lettrist]/Situationist practices form an important base for the memory of the medium” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2). Moreover, the writing of Bernstein and Khatib “highlight the role gender, race, and ability play in walking practices both historical and contemporary” (Chapter 2, Section 2.2).
“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,” including Dada and the Surrealists (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Nevertheless, “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,” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3).
Dada was central in the idea of walking as art: the Dada excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre established the walk as a work of art, or rather of anti-art (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). “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,” Morris writes (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Given the tendency for Dada walks to end in arguments or fisticuffs, though I wonder if “convivial” is the right word. Nevertheless, Morris notes that the Dadaists refused “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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Dada refused the capitalist art market, and this aspect of its legacy, which influenced the SI, “continues to inform the work of artists using walking as an anti-capitalist practice” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3).
The excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre “is an essential part of the memory of the artistic medium of walking; it established precedents and techniques that continue to influence contemporary practitioners” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3):
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. (Chapter 2, Section 2.3)
Dada also to Surrealism. André Breton wrote that 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 walks” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Walking was present throughout the Surrealist project; for instance Breton organized a 1923 excursion with the other Surrealists in the countryside; however, unlike the Dada excursion, “Surrealist walks were rarely public art events; rather, walking formed an important part of their process of art making,” resulting in novels like Breton’s 1928 Nadja and Louis Aragon’s 1926 Le Paysan de Paris (Chapter 2, Section 2.3).
Walking was central to Surrealism, and by walking with companions, the Surrealists “continued the recasting of Romantic walking practices through collective, social behaviour, and further developed walking as a mode of affiliation” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). According to Morris, “the Surrealist project was about tapping into the collective unconscious, and walking through the city together was a primary way to do that” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3). For that reason, “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,” Morris writes. “Though the Surrealists didn’t necessarily frame their walks 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” (Chapter 2, Section 2.3).
All of these precursors were politically radical. Romanticism, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, “was an extremist creed” (qtd. Chapter 2, Section 2.4). “The memory of the artistic medium of walking develops from this radical foundation,” Morris contends (Chapter 2, Section 2.4). Scholars have traced British psychogeography to the Romantic urban walks of William Blake and Thomas de Quincey, for instance; these links connect 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 directly-lived moment, all contribute to a web of radical practices that support the medium of walking. (Chapter 2, Section 2.4)
Nevertheless, Morris notes that it’s worth asking whether walking is as resistant as its proponents claim it to be—to consider whether radical walking is “vulnerable to the recuperation they were originally intended to combat” (Chapter 2, Section 2.4). Walking cannot be considered inherently political merely because it requires participation:
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 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 I have outlined in this chapter, make it uniquely suited to radical practice. (Chapter 2, Section 2.4)
So walking is not inherently critical or politically engaged, but it lends itself to critical or political practices.
Morris notes that he has skipped many important antecedents: the flâneur, because that is a solitary and invariably male form of walking; and artistic uses of walking in the 1960s and 1970s, including Gutai artists in Japan and Fluxus walking scores, which “blurred the lines between art and everyday life, and challenged social, spatial, and artistic structures,” or site-specific walking performances of groups like Wrights & Sites in the UK (Chapter 2, Section 2.4). His genealogy is a response to Heddon and Turner’s call for rethinking the canon of walking beyond “the standard fraternity of white, able-bodied men” (Chapter 2, Section 2.4).
Morris’s third chapter, “Artistic Foundations for Walking Networks,” summarizes the three groups or “networks” he explores in more detail in subsequent chapters. These groups—the Walking Artists Network, Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute, and the Walk Exchange—make visible “the ephemeral practices of artists working with walking, and attests to the breadth and scope of art being made in the medium” (Chapter 3). His focus is on the artists that founded these organizations and how their practices influenced the groups’ development (Chapter 3). Morris is part of that story, since he is one of the founders of Walk Exchange (Chapter 3).
In 2008, a group of 20 people—artists, musicians, writers, urban planners—met at London Metropolitan University to talk about the future of walking art; this was the beginning of the Walking Artists Network (Chapter 3, Section 3.1). “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,” Morris writes. “These artists demonstrate the many ways walking can be used in the creation of artistic works and establishes walking as one medium among many” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1). However, not all of the artists connected to WAN see walking art the way Morris does: many of them represent their walks in various media (paint, sound art, installation work, audio walks); others, working in collaborative art or relational aesthetics, seem closer to the approach to walking as an artistic medium that Morris advocates (Chapter 3, Section 3.1).
“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,” Morris wrotes. “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1). The members of walkwalkwalk were Gail Burton, Serena Korda, and Clare Qualmann. The group formed when they were looking for a way to make art that wouldn’t cost money or require an institutional affiliation (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “Together they created a series of walks that looked at the ‘archaeology of the familiar and forgotten’ in London’s East End” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1): they created a manifesto that “focused on fostering an environment of social exploration and convivial exchange” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). That manifesto situated their work within the history of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). Their interest was “on social engagement and intimate interactions that create moments of exchange with the landscape and the other actors they encounter in it” and in critiquing everyday life “through durational walking practice”—but durational walking practices are almost by definition not socially engaged, since many people don’t enjoy walking long distances (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “Durational” might be the wrong word:
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. (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
Heddon and Turner describe these walks as “a sort of anti-dérive” because of their focus on exploring local spaces (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “Indeed, Qualmann positions their practice in explicit contrast to Debord’s assumption of the pathetically limited movement and narrow lives of urban dwellers,” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
One of walkwalkwalk’s “key outputs” was Nightwalks, a “semi-regular series of walks at night that took place over five years” in which 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’” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). The routes of these walks focused on places that apparently lacked purpose and meaning, a reference to the excursions of the Dadaists and the drifts of the LI and SI, but in order to explore the local environment of participants (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “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,” Morris states. “As they walked together, they temporarily transformed the spaces through which they passed” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). Areas that might make solo walkers, particularly women, anxious or nervous at night were transformed by the experience of a group of walkers, becoming safe or even festive (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “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 be perceived as dangerous or antagonistic” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1); they also opened up areas of the city for participants who would otherwise be afraid to enter them, particularly at night (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). While both men and women participated, the leaders were women, and the documentation and discussion of the project has tended to be by women; in this way, the project brought attention “to how gender affects access to the city,” unlike projects facilitated and commented on by groups of men (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
One walkwalkwalk ritual, which began during their first walk, was heating soup over a fire in an oil drum; that activity’s associations with homelessness caused some members of the group to reflect on the walking group’s privilege; it also recalls the relational aesthetic work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooks and serves food to gallery visitors; however, those experiences “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). “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,” Morris suggests. Nevertheless, 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. (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1)
The routes of walkwalkwalk’s events tended to follow similar routes, “a technique that creates the varied ambiences of the dérive through a local mode of repetition” and helped to create a sense of ritual (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
“Over the five years of the project, walkwalkwalk catalogued the lost and forgotten aspects of the neighbourhood,” Morris writes. “Changes to the neighbourhood were included in maps or their routes” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). The last map the project generated “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). For Morris, these walks “brought active attention to and provided a communal location to discuss the changes and shifts in the neighbourhood” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). Qualmann compares the project to Robert Smithson’s 1967 conceptual work The Monuments of Passaic, partly because ofSmithson’s argument that his work consisted of the experience, rather than the photographs that documented that experience (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
“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,” Morris concludes. “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.’ 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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1). He uses walkwalkwalk’s projects as a way of approaching WAN because they reveal that network’s “formative notions”: the idea that the walk itself is the location of an artistic experience, and questions about what constitutes the medium of walking (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1).
Next, Morris turns to Deveron Projects, a socially engaged art organization, founded in 1995 in Huntly, Scotland. Its focus is on socially engaged or anthropological art that explores the local place and its connections to the wider world. It has no exhibition space, so the town itself is the venue, and work commissioned by DP is presented in spaces like pubs, libraries, and restaurants (Chapter 3, Section 3.2). Deveron Projects facilitates collaborations between visiting artists and the local community (Chapter 3, Section 3.2). “The Walking Institute was inspired by walking artist Hamish Fulton’s residency in Huntly,” Morris writes:
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 (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. (Chapter 3, Section 3.2)
However, Fulton’s project was not the first DP collaboration to address walking; in 2008, the group commissioned South African artist Jacques Coetzer to create a new town motto as part of the project Room to Roam (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1). For that project, Coetzer “engaged intimately with the Huntly community to discover its rich cultural heritage” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1). In 2010, DP co-organized the Huntly Walking Festival in the town, partly to encourage residents “to enjoy the glories of their local landscape” and partly to encourage tourism (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1), and that same year, artist Norma Hunter worked with disabled community members to create Walk This Way, a choreographed wheelchair walk (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1). “Hunter’s piece is one of the few walking projects to address the relationship beteween walking and wheelchairs, and created a space for the discussion and inclusion of an often marginalized group of walkers,” Morris notes (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1).
Fulton’s project was linked to the Huntly Walking Festival: he gave a talk, led a group slowalk, and invited people to walk with him for the first day of 21 Days in the Cairngorms (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). “For Fulton, ‘an artist who walks, not a walker who makes art,’ it is important to contextualize the artistic concepts that animate a walk,” Morris contends. “Crucially, he participated in ‘Can Walking be Art?,’ a free arts breakfast and public discussion with the project’s shadow curator, Mary Jane Jacobs. This gave him an opportunity to position his practice within a longer tradition of walking art, and provide examples of his previous walking work” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). Morris argues that as Fulton “has moved toward the medium of walking, through the advent of group walks, his work has also become more political” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). “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,” he states (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). For 25 years Fulton had been creating solo walks in the Cairngorms; this event was the first day he was accompanied by walkers from the community (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). That group walk was essential to the project, which was intended to activate the “Room to Roam” motto through the town’s geographical links to the Cairngorms, even though the town is not within the boundaries of the national park (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2).
Fulton’s group walking technique was “introduced to him by French choreographer Christine Quoiraud when the collaborated in 2002”; together, they created a series of slow, equally-spaced walks which connect his practice to the history of what Susan Leigh Foster calls “walking dance,” which was developed in New York in the 1960s and 1970s by artists interested in enhancing participants’ perception of their environment (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). “In contrast to his solitary practice, where the rhythm and relation 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,” Morris writes (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). In his 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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2).
The slowalk at the end of Fulton’s walk through the Cairngorms, at the parking lot at Aviemore Station, referred to his previous walks in those mountains, since he always began them at that train station, but in contrast to his usual anonymity, “the group of slowalkers in the car park created a visible public intervention” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). People who ran across the walkers had different experiences than the participants: “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). However, some participants felt they had not been adequately prepared for Fulton’s “strict walking practice,” particularly the clothing and equipment that were necessary and the length and style of the walk (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). The walks didn’t account for “physical variations in how people walk,” either (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). Morris writes:
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. (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2)
However, not everyone was prepared for “cold shivers” or “uncomfortable feet”; that is one of the reasons my walking practice is primarily solitary—I know what to expect, after hundreds of kilometres of walking, but others won’t. In any case, Deveron Projects’ collaboration with Fulton led to more thinking about walking as an art practice and inspired the creation of a walking appreciation initiative (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2). It might also suggest, though, something about the difficulty of designing walking practices that will appeal to absolutely everyone.
Next, Morris turns to Walk Exchange, which he co-founded in 2011 in New York with four other collaborators and grew out of walking projects intended “to create a rigorous critical environment to explore artistic walking practices” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3). The artists involved were shifting to the medium of walking from other disciplines, primarily theatre, performance, and film (Chapter 3, Section 3.3). He is particularly interested in Walk Exchange’s precursors, events and walks made or curated by its co-founders. For instance, co-founder Dillon de Give’s The Coyote Walks (2009-2017) linked the city to the wild through annual walks which commemorated the spirit of Hal, a coyote captured in Central Park who died shortly after being released into the wild (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). “Through walking, he hypothesised possible paths that coyotes might take in and out of the city,” Morris writes (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). The project began as a solo walk but evolved into a durational walk for a small group: “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). The first walk was a 66-mile, three-day trek from the Hallett Sanctuary in Central Park to Westchester, Connecticut where Hal is believed to have come from; at a ceremony the evening before he left, people were invited to bring a small gift or message inspired by Hal, which de Give distributed along his path, forming a temporary, 60-mile monument that was accessible to the public, while the walk itself was not (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). Later, de Give translated the experience of walking into performance art, in which the walk “was presented through a dialogic and durational performance focused on the physical experience of walking and the ongoing consequences to his toes,” one of which remained numb afterwards (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1)
For the second version of the walk, de Give invited others to join him, and Morris participated. A ritual procession with incense and noisemakers and musical instruments was performed before the group set off on their journey; as they walked, they made noise at sites where coyotes have been seen in Manhattan, which “brought the group’s attention to the specific task at hand: the physical tracing of coyote routes” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). The walk wasn’t intended to track coyotes; instead, it articulated a hypothesis about how the city is connected to nature: “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). According to Morris, de Give frames these walks as short walking residencies that encourage “collaborative considerations of a messy entanglement between what we might perceive as the chaos of nature and the rational orderliness of civilization” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1).
However, Morris is more interested in the way de Give works with the corporeal act of walking (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1). His project “creates new paths as it connects islands of green space around and out of NYC,” and through that 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 [emerge] 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. (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.1)
And, of course, it is the specificity of walking as an artistic medium that interests Morris.
In 2008 and 2009, Morris worked on a year-long exploration of walking as an art practice, [untitled] Walk Project, which connected walkers in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). “This was the beginning of my personal exploration of the boundaries of walking as an artistic medium,” he recalls. “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The project took the form of group walks, not solo walks, in New York, but he also invited artists elsewhere to create both kinds of walks (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). “The project’s culminating walk was a three-week journey from Brooklyn to Washington, DC,” Morris writes:
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. 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 encounters on the road pointed back to a digital space that framed the overall project for the people we encountered. (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2)
According to Morris, [untitled] Walk Project “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The variety of international walks meant that no one person could fully experience the project; for Morris, this extended his interest in developing walking networks and creating ways of sharing local walking practices globally (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2).
Morris’s next project, [Robert Moses] Walk Project (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”: Robert Moses, the urban planner who shaped the city for 40 years in the twentieth century (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). Moses oversaw the ascendancy of the automobile in the middle of the twentieth century (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The [Robert Moses] Walk Project “consisted of fifty walks designed to foster discussion and encourage exploration of Moses’s role in the reshaping of NYC. I invited artists to collaborate with me on the development of pedestrian responses to Moses’s public works” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The project’s “collaborative ethos” was an 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,” but that network, in this project, was “resolutely local” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The walks “were generated in response to collective walking explorations and actively encouraged the public to participate in further walks” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). Some of the project’s walks were theatrical, such as The [Gallery] Walks (2011), in which Chloë Bass presented public infrastructure projects overseen by Moses as artworks (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). Others, like Morris’s collaboration with Maya Baldwin, Doc Walks (2011), “considered the relationship between walking and documentation through photography, installations, parties, and public walks”; in Doc Walk 3 (2011), he and Baldwin “invited members of the public to complete one of five solitary walks” and then “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2). The project confirmed for Morris “walking’s generative potential, with walks serving as catalysts for future walking practices,” and it led to the Walk Study Training Course, which developed into Walk Exchange (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.2).
The Walk Study Training Course was a six-week walking course consisting of “reading about walking and walking about reading” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). It was an attempt at an “experimental education technique” for approaching walking art, citing de Give (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). The course’s foundational texts included John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), along with the theories of the Lettrists and Situationists; the course was intended to be “a nonhierarchical environment that prioritised the experience of walking in the city as a method of learning” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). “As a mobile classroom, we expected participants to actively engage with course materials and participate in all the course’s walks,” Morris recalls. “This reflected our desire to build a temporary, but committed, walking ensemble who would participate in a journey together, over time” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). The group that responded to their call for participants “consisted of eight predominantly white, middle-class walkers who had moved to NYC from other places,” mostly women (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). The course syllabus included works by prominent international artists: Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, and Janet Cardiff (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3).The second version of the course focused on walking as a way of understanding the city (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). “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,” Morris writes (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). Participants in WSTC, along with de Give and Morris, established Walk Exchange (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3).
Walk Exchange, the Walking Artists Network and Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute, while “inspired by different artistic practices, which inform their specific approach to the medium of walking,” all “make visible work happening in the medium and provide locations for the sharing of practice and sustained critical attention among practitioners” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). Morris is interested in the way that “networks develop form the memory of specific artistic practices” and how communities develop around creative and critical practices of walking, which “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” (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3). The next three chapters will look at each network and the specific artistic projects they support in detail (Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3).
The book’s next chapter, “The Walking Artists Network: Digital Paths to Analogue Practice,” looks at the Walking Artists Network, “the largest international network focused on the discussion, development, and promotion of art related to walking” (Chapter 4). WAN “offers a location for those interested in critical and creative walking practices to discuss their work and share invitations to walk” (Chapter 4). “It is an open point of access for the pursuit of artistic walking practices from a variety of disciplinary perspectives” (Chapter 4): its 600 members, half in the UK, come from “diverse disciplinary pathways,” including fine arts and performing arts, psychology, biology, criminology, cultural studies, library sciences (Chapter 4). For Morris, it is “an arts-focused network that also reaches out to other disciplines” (Chapter 4) with a nonhierarchical, member-led approach to developing multiple strains of walking practice (Chapter 4).
The Walking Artists Network developed out of a 2008 meeting (Chapter 4). However, because it was unfunded and without institutional support, it depended on volunteers for support, so it took a while to get going; a 2011 grant “formally established the network through institutional support from a university and a major UK funding body” (Chapter 4). A website was developed and activities organized (Chapter 4). Members of the network decided WAN’s focus should be events with walking at their core, rather than events where people talk about walking (Chapter 4). Phil Smith, in Walking’s New Movement, describes WAN is a location that connects walkers together, but that it might need a more rigorous approach to walking practices; Morris suggests that, on the contrary, its loose nature “is a unique feature that supports a multitude of approaches to walking,” instead of “mandating a specific program” (Chapter 4). For Morris, “the network provides a location for members to explore and develop their own methodologies” and thereby “demonstrates how online discussion and activities create and inform offline walking practices” (Chapter 4). The purpose of this chapter to examine “how WAN supports individuals, groups, and organisations to discuss, develop, and promote critical and artistic walking practices” (Chapter 4). First, he looks at the psychogeographical approaches of two members, Morag Rose and Phil Smith (Chapter 4); then, he turns to WALKING WOMEN, the 2016 exhibition curated by Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks, an offline manifestation of the network’s online discussions (Chapter 4). By looking at “practices by network members,” Morris argues “that is is through consideration of the medium that we can best understand how walking communicates as an artistic practice” (Chapter 4).
Morris starts his discussion of psychogeography in the UK with Sam Cooper’s contention that psychogeography has a privileged position in that country: “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” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1). The Loiterers Resistance Movement, founded by Morag Rose in 2006, is “the most consistently active psychogeography group in the United Kingdom,” based in Manchester, meeting 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’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). The LRM’s approach is playful and constructive: “Rose stresses the affirmative aspects of her practice”—she wants walking to be irreverent and active, to find “‘appealing methods to critique the hegemonic view of the city’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1)
The Loiterers Resistance Movement’s approach is based in a belief that the streets are free and belong to everyone (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). It has a fluid membership model, in which people define their own level of commitment: “This noncommercial ethos is embedded in the practice: [LRM] walks are always free to the public” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). In her PhD dissertation,“Women Walking Manchester: Desire Lines Through The Original Modern City” (2017), Rose identifies three strands of contemporary psychogeography—literary, activist, and creative—and her own work falls into the latter two modes (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). “For Rose, the creative walking practices happening ‘beyond the celebrity literary psycho-geographers’ 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,” Morris argues (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1).
Rose finds undercurrents of “‘misogyny and neocolonialism’” in psychogeographical practice and she aims to democraticize the dérive and “‘reclaim it from the occult and and for all classes and genders’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). As a self-described “‘working-class, queer, disabled woman’” she applies an intersectional approach to Situationist and Lettrist concepts (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). The sidewalk, she argues, is one of the few places where casual and embodied encounters with difference are possible (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). Along with contemporary walking practices, she cites the rich history of Mancunian walking as an influence, particularly the Kinder Trespass, the marches of the Suffragettes, and the Manchester Area Psychographic (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). The LRM manifesto guides the group: “The streets belong to everyone and we want to reclaim them for play and revolutionary fun” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). The LRM provides opportunities to enter the sometimes arcane and difficult practice of psychogeography through practice (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). LRM walking tactics include algorithmic walks, transposing maps, throwing dice, concentrating on specific senses (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1).
Responding to the urban landscape is key to the LRM’s practice. Tthe June 2017 walk coincided with a terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. While Rose was advised on the WAN listserv to cancel the walk because of heightened security in the city, others said she should carry on with the walk. In the end, Rose thought that canceling the event would be more disrespectful than walking sensitively through the city, and the walk proceeded as planned: “She was particularly interested in asserting the rights of women to the streets, as the attendees at Grande’s concert were predominantly young women” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). The walk “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’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). Rose suggests that the online community provided by WAN “provides opportunities to exchange locally-based critical and creative practices globally” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1). This is evidence that discussions on WAN enable an international group of practitioners to engage with and contribute to walks happening in specific locations (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.1).
The other psychogeographer Morris discusses is Phil Smith. Smith is a prolific author and artist, theoretician and practitioner, and a founding member of Wrights & Sites, group of four artist-researchers formed in 1997, “who pioneered the use of walking in site-specific performances in the United Kingdom” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). His take on psychogeography, mythogeography, is one of his key innovations: a set of tools intended to emphasize hybridity rather than a finished model (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). “Like psychogeography, it is not created through walking; rather, it is discovered through walking,” Morris writes. “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.’ 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’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). Smith sees literary psychogeography as “‘an obscenity and a privilege,’” and in contrast “mythogeography looks to reclaim the radical gesture of its avant-garde predecessors and avoid the pitfalls of recuperation” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
While Smith argues that walking’s connection to mythogeography is accidental, Morris sees walking as central to the practice, because of its Situationist influences, and its links to Wrights & Sites site-based walking performances” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). Mythogeography “eventually fostered a method that acknowledged the ‘inter-dependency’ of the performance of his body and the performance of the landscape” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). Morris’s experience with Smith’s mythogeographical practice occurred at a workshop in Cornwall conducted as part of WAN’s Footwork research group:
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. (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2)
“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,” Morris continues:
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” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2)
Morris cites, again, de Certeau’s suggestion that walking is like a speech act: “our mythogeographical walk created a spatial and physical conversation that asked us to read what we wrote on the rural landscape” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
After the walk on the beach, the group travelled by bus to Robinson’s Shaft, part of a heritage site about mining in Cornwall, where Smith encouraged the group to engage in 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[.]” It provides a series of “tactics and guiding principles” for use at heritage and tourism sites. 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. (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2)
The day finished 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 heterogenous collective to engage in solitary explorations together; the landscape, the presence of the group, and the walking prompt all came together to create a singular experience” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
For Morris, the experiences of that day “are etched in my memory” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2):
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. (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2)
That day’s workshop ended with the composition of a collective manifesto, which “demonstrates the diversity of approaches to walking”: each walker seems to have included their own perspective on walking, according to Morris, and although on the event web site those contributions are anonymous, he knows which participant wrote which part of the manifesto (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
Morris reads mythogeography through de Certeau’s essay (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2): “Smith’s work does not reduce walks to ‘their graphic trail,’ which de Certeau points out cannot contain the diverse enunciatory options of walking,” he writes. “Instead, Smith focuses on how documentation can generate suggestions, instructions, and provocations for future walks. In this way, [m]ythogeography turns every participant into a teller of tales, privileging storytelling over information in its desire to engage the world” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
The various forms of psychogeography promoted through WAN “focus on how these walking practices can contribute critically to our consideration of our physical and cultural landscapes” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2). WAN “provides a location for those pursuing radical modes of walking to share practices that can contribute to new strategies to overcome capitalist subjectification” (Chapter 4, Section 4.1.2).
Next, Morris turns his attention to WALKING WOMEN, created by Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks in 2016: it was a series of walks, talks, and workshops that featured over forty women artists working with walking in a variety of women; two iterations of the event, one in London and the other in Edinburgh (Chapter 4, Section 4.2). Morris was the project’s assistant curator, and so he was able to participate in many of the walks involved; he was the only man involved in organizing the exhibition and one of the few men who attended and participated (Chapter 4, Section 4.2). “As Qualmann and Sharrocks note, the impetus for WALKING WOMEN was the ‘growing concern that walking is perceived as a male domain of practice”; the event “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’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2). So the event was intended “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’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2). Indeed, Qualmann and Sharrocks “viewed WALKING WOMEN as a necessary corrective to the unexamined dominance of walking men” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2).
Examples of projects featured in WALKING WOMEN included The Walking Library, an ongoing walking art project by Deidre Heddon and Misha Myers “that brings libraries into the landscape through site-specific walks,” drawing on the Romantic precedent of walkers carrying books and “the playful constructive behaviour” of the Lettrist and Situationist dérive (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). In this project, books are donated by community members responding to prompts and they are carried “in a rucksack emblazoned with a black and yellow Walking Library patch” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). “Participants are invited to read passages from texts in the collection as resonant places in the landscape, with each walk’s prompt suggesting different kinds of locations,” Morris writes (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). The development of the project came out of conversations on WAN’s listserv, which helped to inspire it (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). It became “a full-fledged concept” during the 2012 Sideways Festival, which traversed Belgium; Heddon and Myers collected books in response to the question, “what books would be good to take on a walk?” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). They ended up with 90 books either suggested or donated by the public, before the walk or along its route; after the festival, the collection was donated to the festival’s organizers in hopes that they would lend it to other organizations (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). “This established an important precedent for the project, with most collections donated to arts or public organisations for further circulation,” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). There are now multiple collections in sites in the United States and Europe (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1).
“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”; although those journeys were usually lengthy or “epic” and solitary, Heddon and Myers refocus the tradition “on the social and relational memory of Romantic walking practices through the action of walking with and sharing books” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). (Heddon hates epic, solitary walking.) “For WALKING WOMEN, Qualmann and Sharrocks commissioned Heddon and Myers to create Walking Library for Women Walking”; a collection of books was put together in response to the question, “What book would you give to accompany a woman walking?” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). “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,” Morris suggests (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1).
The London walk followed the route of a 1905 suffragist procession (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). That walk “revealed the need for further public acknowledgment of women’s contributions to cultural life, particularly in periods where their work might be historically marginalised” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). For Morris, “Heddon and Myers’s autobibliographic approach foregrounds the social experience of the production, compliation, and dissemination of the library collection; in doing so, it makes visible the network that comprises the project and offers and opportunity to engage with the stories that brought the collection together, as well as those that it contains” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). The project reflects geographer Doreen Massey’s contention that space is “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1). “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,” he concludes (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1).
The second walk Morris participated in as part of WOMEN WALKING was Yasmeen Sabri’s Walk a Mile in her Veil, which invited members of the public to try on hijabs, niqabs, or burqas and go for a walk, with or without the artist accompanying them; Morris was the first man to participate (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). “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,” he suggests (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). The work was originally created for Sabri’s master’s thesis at London’s Royal College of Art (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). 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.’” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). For Morris, “it highlighted that some experiences cannot be quickly embodied; the garment does not contain its gesture, which is beyond my personal comprehension” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). “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),” Morris writes (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2). The work clearly made him uncomfortable, though; he found himself wondering if he was “a burqa tourist” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2).
The third walk Morris participated in during WALKING WOMEN was Jennie Savage’s 2014 audio walk A Guide to Getting Lost, which combines audio recordings made in a number of different places, including Plymouth, Delhi, Copenhagen, Quebec, and Marrakesh “with instructions for a guided walk to be done anywhere in the world” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). “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,” Morris states (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). Savage started making audio guides in 2003 and edited the various guides together in 2014; A Guide to Getting Lost “prioritised walking instructions over descriptive narration” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). The project borrowed from the Situationist tactic of using a map of one city to navigate through another, a tactic which, according to Debord, would rupture habitual influences on walking (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). Morris thought the walk didn’t quite work, but that “the inability to easily complete her directions added to the work’s feeling of disorientation” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). “I got lost in the combination of her narration, directions, and the actual streets I was traversing,” he confesses (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). Nevertheless, he continues, “As I walked, Savage’s soundscape interacted with the environment around me and sometimes overlapped in uncanny ways”; at other times, though, he experienced “a disconnect” between that soundscape and the streets where he was walking—for instance, hearing recorded footsteps, he would turn to make sure nobody was following him: “This added a sense of paranoia to the walk, as I alternated between following Savage and feeling like I was being followed. (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3).
“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,” Morris writes (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). It created a temporary yet visible community, and as it did 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” (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.3). “WAN provides a location from which to define walking as something that is distinct from, if entangled with, other artistic practices,” Morris writes:
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. (Chapter 4, Section 4.3)
Morris suggests that WAN has deeply influenced his trajectory as a walking artist and scholar (Chapter 4, Section 4.3), and suggests that the online community it offers connects people and organizations internationally (Chapter 4, Section 4.3). Indeed, I subscribe to its listserv, although I’m not sure whether that means I’m a member or not, and it’s interesting to see what kinds of walking projects people are working on—although most of those projects happen in places that are friendlier to walking than the city (and, indeed the province) I live in.
Chapter 5, “Deveron Projects: The Walking Institute,” looks at another network. In 2013, Deveron Projects established the Walking Institute, “a year-round centre of walking excellence,” which “has supported artists to create works in the medium of walking through residencies, workshops, and events” (Chapter 5). The Walking Institute “expands the remit of their town is the venue methodology to link Huntly both physically and conceptually to areas beyond the town” (Chapter 5). “The Institute frames walking as a creative pursuit with cultural potential, as well as an activity beneficial to individual and social health,” Morris continues. “This allows them to appeal to people who enjoy walking because it is a relatively low-priced way to achieve positive health outcomes and chat with other community members as well as those more explicitly interested in walking art” (Chapter 5). Its principle is simple: “all walking is great” (Chapter 5). The Walking Institute is more interested in engaging community in the practice of walking than walking as a mode of performance: “This builds on the models of social engagement and community collaboration that inform DP’s structure” (Chapter 5). “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,” Morris states. “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 local community” (Chapter 5).
The annual Slow Marathon is the Walking Institute’s “flagship project” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1). It is “a mass-participation walk of twenty-six miles that brings nearly a hundred people for a full weekend of walking events”; it is very popular and often sold out (Chapter 5, Section 5.1). “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,” Morris suggests (Chapter 5, Section 5.1). The Slow Marathon began as a collaboration with Ethiopian artist Mihret Kebede, whose initial idea for her residency was to walk from her hometown, Addis Ababa, to Huntly; however, “the combination of visa restrictions, harsh desert terrain, and the dangerous landscape” meant that her journey remained conceptual (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). Indeed, the danger of walking through Egypt, Israel, and Syria would make such a project impossible. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). The project ended up combining the steps of participants together into a virtual walk (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1):“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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). People from around the world participated, so the project functioned as an expansion of Huntly’s boundaries (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1).
“The DP’s collaborative community approach meant it was important to create an ‘open access walking event’ that was available to participants ‘of all levels of fitness and from all locations’ and treated ‘those new to walking on the same footing as those with more expertise,’” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). I’m always surprised by the use of the word “expertise” in relation to walking, though. Is it really an activity that involves expertise? Perhaps. Developing walking prompts and exercises takes skill and experience and creativity, but I’m not sure that walking for 45 minutes necessarily requires “expertise.” Maybe I’m wrong about that. I’m also not sure that expertise is necessarily a bad thing, but that’s another argument, I suppose.
Kebede works in video, performance art, and photography, but she mostly works with shoelaces: “She is interested in the stories shoelaces tell, and how they can function as a point of discussion and exchange” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). For instance, she attached participants’ passport photographs and email addresses to shoelaces and exchanged them 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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). Like the objects used in relational aesthetics, “the shoelaces functioned as vehicles of relation between participants and created a physical connection between the two sets of walkers” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1).
The full-day marathons in Huntly and Addis Ababa enhanced this global exchange: “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). One challenge for participants in artistic walking practices is that “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). For Kebede, the goal of the project was connecting people through art:
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 globally dispersed 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. (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1)
“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,” Morris argues (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1). “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1).
In 2013, Slow Marathon adopted as an annual event; it marked the official launch of the Walking Institute (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.2). It “had to find its own artistic footing that built on, but was distinct from, Kebede’s originary project” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.2). The 2013 iteration was a 26-mile walk. The plan was to link it to the work of resident artist Simone Kenyon, but that connection didn’t happen; instead, the event was organized around John Muir Day as part of the Year of Natural Scotland (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.2). The information pack for the event downplayed its artistic framework and instead warned participants of the strenuousness and difficulty of the walk; some participants felt the artistic side of the event needed further development (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.2). For that reason, the 2014 Slow Marathon “brought together a variety of artists to create interventions” along the route: performances, installations, “and other interventions designed to enhance participants’ walking experience along the way” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.2).
Morris’s first experience of the event was its 2015 iteration, developed by Scots artist Stuart McAdam in relation to his earlier residency, Lines Lost (2013-2014) (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). That project “was an exploration of the area’s lost railway lines and an attempt to write them back into the landscape” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). During that project, McAdam worried about the length of walks, feeling that longer walks would fail to engage the community (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3)—an assumption that is no doubt correct. McAdam’s Slow Marathon “focused on specifically local tensions: the right to roam, land ownership, and the redevelopment of space,” but the artistic frame he used for the event “challenged the ease of navigation audiences had come to expect from previous years,” and participants complained about potholes, mud, and fences that had to be climbed over (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). Duration wasn’t the only problem with the 2014 Slow Marathon. The focus on the right of participants to access the land, although it is the law in Scotland, was also a problem. One landowner was enraged at the number of walkers photographing and old telephone booth on his property; while that helped expose “simmering community tensions,” his anger also upset participants, who felt the landowner should have been consulted before the route was chosen (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3).
“McAdam did not provide participants with the social and political context of his aesthetic choice,” Morris contends. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). Indeed, the version of the route guide currently available online removes the instruction to photograph the phone booth and the pictures McAdam originally included (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). The project revealed the potential for “tension between the aesthetic goals of the artists and the needs of the community,” which reflects “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). This is an ethical issue, according to Claire Bishop (cited in Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3). “For DP, who claim the town is their venue,” the problem
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 participants—£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. (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.3)
The problem of balancing community involvement and, indeed, enjoyment with an artist’s vision is one of the reasons my walks tend to be solitary. Perhaps that’s a cop-out on my part, but I know how difficult it is to walk from the city to a nearby village, and I know few people who would be interested in engaging in walks of that difficulty. Yet those are the walks I feel compelled to make. The demand for group of “convivial” walks is very much dependent on the context of walking in the United Kingdom, where rambling is an accepted leisure practice and urban tours are commonplace. Where I live, the context of walking is very different.
In 2018, Morris was invited to participate in the seventh annual Slow Marathon as Deveron Projects’ “Thinker in Residence” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4). That walk
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,” which included conversations between Huntly and Gaza and simultaneous walks; the two artists involved never met in person. (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4)
For 2018’s Slow Marathon, two sets of participants were organized to walk simultaneously in Huntly and Gaza; before the walk, community members and participants gathered in Huntly to hear about walking, art, politics, and Palestine, which helped to contextualize the event (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4). Morris was one of the speakers (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4):
My presence in Huntly, the privilege of my American passport and tier-four UK visa, 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. (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4)
How different from Scotland, where the Right of Responsible Access is embedded in law—although 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 [are] a wide variety of potential routes”—from Gaza, where “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4).
In Gaza, the walking route was along the coast, avoiding the contested border region; it was not possible to walk the entire route, and journeys by bus carried participants through sections where, for one reason or another, walking was not possible (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4). Drones documented both walks, and Morris wondered about how that sound might resonate differently in Gaza (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4). “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,” he notes:
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. . . . Regardless, our barriers were limited and our inconveniences minor in comparison to the challenges facing the walkers in Gaza. (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4)
Nevertheless, Morris’s mediated experience of Gaza during the event was “one of jubilation,” in contrast to news coverage that presents it as a place of conflict (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4). The walk there was convivial, as it was in Huntly: “In this way, Slow Marathon 2018 created new links” between the two places “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.1.4).
“One of the spin-off events of Slow Marathon 2014 was ‘Baby Slow Marathon,’ which launched Clare Qualmann’s Huntly Perambulator (2014),” Morris continues (Chapter 5, Section 5.2). Qualmann brought her children to Huntly for a month-long residency, and created work focused on walks with prams, something she had been doing for several years (Chapter 5, Section 5.2). Her first perambulator walk was part of Chain (2012), a seven-hour series of multi-disciplinary performances, but Qualmann considered it participatory, and for Morris, “considering it within the paradigm of walking as an artistic medium,” the walk “highlights the embodied experience of walking together in a more focused way,” foregrounding the medium of walking rather than walking as a “performative action” (Chapter 5, Section 5.2). “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,” he explains. “The resulting piece, Perambulator (2012), brought together a small group of walkers to create a one-day perambulator parade through south London” (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1).
The effect on her mobility of the perambulator she used to take her son on walks felt political, to Qualmann: many women experience similar limitations (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1). “The perambulator parade was a way to make visible the spatial adversity of a group of urban walkers she had previously overlooked,” Morris states (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1). Participants chatted about their everyday issues and those without prams helped those with (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1). The line of perambulators was not unlike a procession. “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,’” Morris writes:
Here what is at stake is walkers with wheels and their right to smooth passage through the city streets. . . .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 art work. (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1)
In 2014, Qualmann brought Perambulator to Huntly; she developed “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” while also requiring “Qualmann to expand beyond the perambulator parade and establish other modes of engagement and exploration” (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2).
The result was Baby Slow Marathon, in which Qualmann invited community members with prams to meet the slow marathoners on their route, thereby opening Slow Marathon to a segment of the community usually excluded from the event (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2). “Key to the design of Qualmann’s walks is participants’ agency and their involvement in the planning process,” Morris writes. “This can often result in moments where her desires and those of the community with whom she is collaborating conflict.” For instance, “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,’” but her participants were not comfortable with that idea, and instead “the parade followed a popular leisure route that did not disrupt the city streets” (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2). “Similar to Kester’s dialogic aesthetics, Huntly Perambulator set up a convivial space for shared conversation based on the contours of walking,” Morris suggests (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2). Qualmann’s Pram Walks (2014) is a foldout map that identifies five routes form the project that are “both pragmatic and pleasurable” and that were created in collaboration with town residents (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2). “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 community engagement,” he concludes. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.2)
“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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.3). Integrating the community into the project is imperative; shifting from solitary or performance-oriented walks “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 organization’s work to places beyond the immediately local and makes visible the 50/50 approach on which DP is based” (Chapter 5, Section 5.3). “Rather than a single action on or across the landscape, the works addressed in this chapter [demonstrate] the walk as a web,” Morris contends. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.3). “In the creation of the Walking Institute, DP creates a space that is focused on developing and supporting walking as an artistic medium,” he concludes. “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” (Chapter 5, Section 5.3).
Chapter 6, “Walk, Study, and Exchange,” examines two interrelated projects: the Walk Study Training Course, and The Walk Exchange. Morris and de Give co-founded The Walk Exchange in 2011, with Bess Matassa, Vige Millington, and Moira Williams, following their participation in the Walk Study Training Course, which de Give and Morris developed “in order to create a community around artistic walking practices and a critical environment in which to consider them” (Chapter 6). The members’ different disciplinary backgrounds—cultural geography, library sciences, visual art—“expanded our considerations of how walking could serve as a creative and critical practice” (Chapter 6). “Through a series of different activities, we developed a networked walking practice that invited people to walk with us,” Morris writes, noting that no long-term commitment required for participants, unlike the Walk Study Training Course (Chapter 6). “One such activity was the Informal Walk Series through which we provided a space to experiment and text ideas around walking in NYC,” but the group also organized silent walks and sight and sound walks (Chapter 6). In this way, they helped connect networks of walking artists and partnered with organizations “to create walks beyond the specific practitioner base to which WSTC appeals” (Chapter 6).
When Morris moved to London to pursue his PhD, the need to create walks at a distance became more important (Chapter 6). He developed an interest in how local walking practices can create points of global exchange; focus of WSTC 5 (Chapter 6). “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,” he writes. “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” (Chapter 6). The use 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” became the project’s focus (Chapter 6). “This chapter looks specifically at how we expanded our practice internationally and developed a methodology for the distance exchange of walks” and “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” (Chapter 6).
Next, Morris introduces Deriva Mussol, based in Barcelona and led by artists Jordi Lafon and Eva Marichalar-Freixa. The group is known for night walks, for seeing walking practices as ways to create and learn, for creating shared spaces that are “open, permeable, and in motion” (Chapter 6, Section 6.1). The collaboration between Deriva Mussol and Walk Experience involved “simultaneous drifts in NYC and Barcelona, a video call between the groups, and a postal exchange of detritus collected during the walk” (Chapter 6, Section 6.1). However, bad weather in New York, and technical difficulties with the video call, got in the way of the collaboration. Nevertheless, the event was inspiring to the participants; it produced “a shared moment across international boundaries” and also a confirmation of “the challenges of simultaneity,” since neither the video call nor the exchange of material allowed each group to fully engage with the other’s walking (Chapter 6, Section 6.1).
WSTC 4 included a distant participant for the first time: Simone Kenyon, then artist-in-residence at Deveron Projects (Chapter 6, Section 6.1). The contrast between walking in rural Scotland and New York “was initially productive” but “it ultimately led to insurmountable challenges and the discontinuation of the exchange” (Chapter 6, Section 6.1). “The tension between the analogue, immediate experience of walking, and the digital technologies we now use to communicate those experience was highlighted by the course’s engagement with Kenyon”: the walk itself was lost in the process (Chapter 6, Section 6.1).
These attempts encouraged Walk Experience to develop a method for “the embodied exchange of walks at a distance” (Chapter 6, Section 6.1). For that reason, WSTC 5 brought together eight walkers in London, including Morris, and four in New York; the group in London walked together, the group in New York walked independently (Chapter 6, Section 6.2). “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,” Morris recalls. “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2). The participants in New York “generally expressed an attraction to the idea of their independent walks being part of a group process,” to moving beyond solitary walking practices (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1). The London participants, on the other hand, were interested in “a different concept of sociality predicated on weekly meetings with people who shared an interest in walking as a creative and critical pursuit” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1).
Most of the London participants had previously addended a walk with The Walking Reading Group, which also brings together walking and theoretical and critical reading about walking (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1): “Like WSTC, TWRG participants are given a set of texts to read prior to the walk. Texts vary depending on the specific walk” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1). TWRG’s walks are designed according to a strict methodology:
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), through 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. (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1)
The goals and methods of WSTC and TWRG are quite different: “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1). Nevertheless, the overlap between participation in WSTC 5 and TWRG “testifies to the networked nature of walking practices” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1).
During WSTC 5, walking exercises were exchanged between the London and New York participants (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). However, reading about these walks is secondary to the walks themselves: “the best way to understand WSTC 5 is to engage in the walks the project has generated” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). Walking exercises were exchanged by e-mail; the New York participants were connected by a Google site, which housed photographs, texts, first-person narratives, and the walking exercises generated for the course (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). Some of the London participants used that site as well (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The documentation of the walks was intended to enable the walks to be re-performed as a repertoire, as well as being an archive of what happened in the past (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). According to Morris, that documentation is not “a stable authority that represents the experience of a walk,” but is instead “an invitation to go for a walk” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2).
The “digital landscape” of WSTC 5 “facilitated the exchange of walking exercises and allowed the course participants’ walking practices to intersect” through active exchange of walking exercises developed by the participants and documentation of those exercises (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). “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,” he contends. “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 uses” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). However, those exercises do not seem to be available online for others to look at, because the Walk Exchange’s server unfortunately no longer seems to exist. Nevertheless, Morris emphasizes their importance: “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2).
“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,” Morris continues (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The contrast between New York and the community of Stratford in London’s East End, an area redeveloped for the 2012 London Olympics, gave the participants different “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The London participants engaged in a collectively guided exploration of Stratford, moving between places the participants knew or remembered to other places identified on a map (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The New York participants, on the other hand, walked in different spaces, individually, both in the city and in rural areas upstate (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The exercises developed by the participants in the two groups reflected these different landscapes (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). Participants were interested “in sharing and exchanging walking practices with a like-minded group, both in person and at a distance. The contrasting configurations of a group walk in London and solo walks in New York City introduced the walkers to different kinds of social landscapes,” Morris suggests. “The interaction between these configurations created a robust social landscape between the two sets of walkers in which the different spaces overlapped and communicated” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). The New York participants compared their solitary walks to social ones: “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2).
“Building communities through the practice of critically and creatively walking together is ultimately the crux of the Walk Exchange,” Morris writes. “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.2). For its part, while 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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.3). For Morris, “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” (Chapter 6, Section 6.3).
The methodology of “distance exchange” developed through these projects is not, Morris states, “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. (Chapter 6, Section 6.3)
“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,” Morris continues:
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. (Chapter 6, Section 6.3)
Morris concludes that the “WSTC methodology demonstrates the potential of walking to produce, articulate and exchange new knowledge, rather than simply illustrate existing knowledge” (Chapter 6, Section 6.3).
The final chapter is entitled “Conclusion: The Medium is the Memory (Palace).” “At the centre of work in the artistic medium of walking is the actual experience of a walk,” Morris begins:
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,’ 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. (Chapter 7)
“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,” he continues (Chapter 7). “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” (Chapter 7): in works of art in the medium of walking, artists design walking experiences that create exchanges between walking bodies, landscapes and other bodies encountered in that landscape, both accidentally and deliberately (Chapter 7). “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,” he states (Chapter 7).
Artists working in the medium of walking come from differing disciplinary backgrounds and use different techniques to design their walks (Chapter 7). Walking, Morris argues, “is not a stand-alone medium; it requires interaction with other media, such as textual instructions of the walking interludes in this book, to communicate the specific design that structures the walk” (Chapter 7). In a way, Morris’s distance-walking methodology has arrived at Fluxus-style scripts as a way of communicating walk designs. However, some of those instructions are communicated verbally, while others are expressed through written guides, audio instructions, or “locative media” (Chapter 7).
Morris argues that “the medium of walking is being invented through a network of practitioners” who walk, think, and create together, “both through digital interfaces and physically shared experiences” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). “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,” he states (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). Walk Exchange and WAN were both “formed by artists looking to create specific communities around the walking arts,” while Hamish Fulton’s work inspired Deveron Projects’ Walking Institute: “These networks develop out of a need to make visible the artistic medium of walking and create pathways for its development” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1).
Morris argues that walking needs to happen outside of gallery or studio spaces; it must be “in contact with the everyday world beyond cloistered artistic spaces,” and online spaces can “make the work accessible to a global audience” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). He argues that “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). Indeed, he contends that “the public that forms the core audience for artistic walks remains insular,” even though walking artists “often show a concerted attempt to engage the broader social landscape” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1).
Morris acknowledges that his focus has been on specific works of walking art, rather than the question of how walking can be art: he suggests that the example of the Dadaists and the excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre “established the walk as a way to create art that is an experience, rather than an object or idea” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). The Surrealists “offered walking as a new way to tap into the collective unconscious of the city,” while the Lettrists and Situationists combined these two notions, creating 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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). “Running through all of these practices are the foundational walks of the British Romantics, who established the movement toward walking as a cultural practice,” he notes (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). “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. 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. (Chapter 7, Section 7.1)
Nevertheless, walking is not necessarily radical, despite its artistic history: “Works in the artistic medium of walking do not guarantee access to society—or equal exchange within it” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1). After all, refugees walk, prisoners pace, soldiers march, slaves move in coffles, and fugitives cautiously proceed on foot, listening for the sound of their pursuers: “The artistic medium of walking an 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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.1).
“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,” Morris continues. “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 the artist is working, or what media supports their work, artistic walks are based on the specific vehaviour and generative power of the walking body” (Chapter 7, Section 7.2). Walking with other people is always convivial, he contends:
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 in a space designed by an artist that encourages them to keep walking. (Chapter 7, Section 7.2)
In addition, “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,’ artists often make up for this through the creation of works that unfold over time or through repetition” (Chapter 7, Section 7.2).
Walking art, while it creates convivial relationships between participants, often engages critically with the environment of the walk (Chapter 7, Section 7.2): “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.2). So, when they design a work of walking art, “artists call on the specific attributes of walking and the relationship it creates between the physical and social landscapes” (Chapter 7, Section 7.2). “The contours of walking as a practice,” along with “the memory of a collective guild of walking practitioners,” come together “to form a specific artistic medium” that generates “a unique aesthetic experience with the potential to transform our relationships to each other and the spaces we traverse” (Chapter 7, Section 7.2).
Morris suggests that each walk generates “the potential for new walks” (Chapter 7, Section 7.3). “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,” he suggests (Chapter 7, Section 7.3). For Morris, walking is “a primary mode of research and mode of dissemination”; his goal is “to create a walking praxis” (Chapter 7, Section 7.3). The exercises he includes are tangible examples of walking as an artistic medium; the methodology used in WSSTC 5 “provides a way to exchange creative walking practices across local boundaries” by using digital techniques to encourage the development of future walks, not merely to document past walks (Chapter 7, Section 7.3). Those examples “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.3)
“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,” Morris states, but he wants to expand that web beyond “the oft-discussed traditions of solitary men walking through wild landscapes, or male-dominate explorations of urban spaces” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4): “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4). However, there are limitations to the practices he has managed to include: “most of the case studies in this book focus on able-bodied white artists,” which “represents a limited aspect of the wider global web of walking’s memory” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4). Networks of walkers exist outside Europe: Global Performance Art Walks in Venezuela, for instance (Chapter 7, Section 7.4). “A future history of walking must take an intersectional approach, 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,” Morris argues. “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4).
Digital technologies can link local practices of walking to global communities, although those technologies raise other access issues, particularly in rural areas and the developing world, where internet access may not always exist (Chapter 7, Section 7.4). “Additionally, further research needs to be done around how the digital realm can encourage the embodied, localised, everyday practice of walking” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4): combining digital and physical experiences might counteract the potential that digital technology might discourage surprises, happenstance moments, serendipity (Chapter 7, Section 7.4). Morris returns to the notion of the memory palace as a form of documentation, suggesting “there is potential to use this method to explore how the memories of walking form a core part of the aesthetic experience” (Chapter 7, Section 7.4).
In the last section of the chapter, Morris arrives at his final thoughts. He writes,
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. (Chapter 7, Section 7.5)
The interest in walking is a reaction against digital technology, even though artists use digital technology to support and document their work, and to connect people walking in different parts of the world (Chapter 7, Section 7.5).
Next, he turns to his desire to define the medium of walking art:
Though the unification of walking art into a specific medium might seem to separate walking from other artistic 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. (Chapter 7, Section 7.5)
There is a tension in his argument, though between a multiplicity of “disciplinary pathways” and a desire to define, even prescribe, an appropriate form of walking art. His definition of the medium of walking art, for instance, excludes solo practices. The most important thing, though, is walking: “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.5).
As walking as an artistic medium receives increased institutional support, it becomes important to analyze what constitutes walking art. That support also creates challenges “in regard to maintaining the radical memory of the form” because that funding “potentially recuperates the radical gesture of walking as simply another technique within the experience economy” (Chapter 7, Section 7.5). “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,” he concludes. “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” (Chapter 7, Section 7.5).
Morris’s argument makes me reconsider the walking project I’ve been working on for the past two years, but at the same time, the demand that all walking be performed by groups ignores specific walking contexts, like the one in which my walks take place. Perhaps that’s not surprising; every argument has its blind spots. But it’s important for me to read discussions like Morris’s, because they force me to defend—if only to myself—what I’m doing. His bibliography is also a gold mine of information. This book is important, and I’ll return to Morris’s definition of walking as an artistic medium—and the conflict between practices that fit that definition and practices that do not—in my exegesis and, I hope, in the course on walking I will have an opportunity to teach down the road.
Work Cited
Morris, Blake. Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020.
