Category Archives: Archiving

Maya Lin, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial” (1982)

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Vietnam memorial ariel shot

Maya Lin, Vietnam Memorial

“Lin’s design called for the names of nearly 58,000 American servicemen, listed in chronological order of their loss, to be etched in a V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunken into the ground. … When Lin first visited the proposed location for the memorial, she wrote, “I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal.” Her memorial proved to be a pilgrimage site for those who served in the war and those who had loved ones who fought in Vietnam. It became a sacred place of healing and reverence as she intended.”

Richard Long, “A Line Made by Walking” (1967)

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a line walking into the grass

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967)

  • Left a trace
  • Art made by walking
  • it was a fundamental interruption of art history: anticipates a widespread interest in the performative

This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.

Gallery label, May 2007

“Thus walking—as art—provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.” − Richard Long

Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Alien Staff” (1993-94)

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In the Alien Staff project, alien means a state of being and ‘becoming’ both political and metaphysical, nomadic and migrant – a sort of psychological encampment in the space and time of today’s displaced and estranged world.

No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal and illegal immigrants have voting rights, nor any sufficient voice nor image of their own in official “public space”. When given a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or to state their opinions, demands and needs, immigrants find themselves framed and silenced.

The Alien Staff is a form of portable public address equipment and cultural network for individuals and groups of immigrants. It is an instrument that gives the individual immigrant a chance to “address” directly anyone in the city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment and the character of the “broadcasted” program.

The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd’s rod. It is equipped with a high-tech mini-monitor and a small loud-speaker. The central part of the rod, the ‘Xenolog section’ is made up of interchangeable cylindrical containers for the preservation and display of precious relics related to the various phases of the owners history. A small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come very close to the monitor and therefore to the operator’s face, the usual distance from the immigrant, the stranger, decreases.

Upon closer examination, it will become clear that the image on the screen and the actual face of the person are of the same immigrant. The double presence in ‘media’ and in ‘life’ invites a new perception of the stranger as ‘imagined’ (a character on the screen) or as ‘experienced’ (an actor off-stage – a real life person). Since both the imagination and the experience of the viewer are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself reveals unexpected aspects of the actor’s experience, the presence of the immigrant becomes both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger.

As the identities of these persons are not only unstable but also often in antagonistic relation to each other, the only common ground they share is their resistance against any imposed (even self-imposed) uniform or generalised notion of a so-called immigrant identity.

The first model of the Alien Staff was built and tested in Barcelona in June 1993, following the first comprehensive exhibition of Wodiczko’s work in Europe in 1992, entitled Instruments, Projections, Vehicles, at the Fondació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona. A second model was built and its design further transformed in Brooklyn during the summer, fall and the winter 1992-93. The Alien Staff was used by many immigrants in New York, Paris, Houston, Marseille, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw.

In Rotterdam, before and during Next 5 Minutes (1996), local operators walked through the city with Krzysztof Wodiczko projects Alien Staff and Mouth Piece. Aided by electronic walking sticks and mouth-size monitors they demonstrated how to communicate in an unfamiliar cultural environment and language.

Simon Pope, “The Memorial Walks” (2007)

SOURCE: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide

several portrait photographs

Simon Pope (1966-)

  1. The Memorial Walks was a series of 17 walks, each with a guest walker, many of whom write about landscape, memory or the environment. These walks were made in the vicinity of Norwich and Lincoln in the east of the UK and were commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella for the group exhibition, Waterlog, 2007. Each walker was asked to spend time with a painting of a local landscape, taking into memory the detail of a tree, often depicted as the central motif in the painting. On accompanying me on a walk out into the farmland and fenlands of East Anglia, each writer would perform a recollection, from memory, of the tree. In doing so, I had hoped that they might repopulate the countryside with images, summoned-up and made to live through the sheer force of a spoken-word description, as an act of defiance against forgetting.

    a gold framed painting with a curtain

    Simon Pope

  2. The Memorial Walks was made as a homage to WG Sebald, drawing on his use of walking and the stubborn insistence that the past would not fade from memory. In The Rings ofSaturn, a rough photocopied image of trees, which had been ravaged by the storms of 1987, form part of a description of the destruction of those things which seem permanent or destined to outlive us as human beings. In December 2006, on the fifth anniversary of Sebald’s tragic death, I walked with Nicholas Thornton, one of the curators of the exhibition committing to memory the image of the fallen, broken trees and walking into the fenland outside of Norwich. Here, we each recalled what we could remember of the image, casting out a partial, spoken­ word description into the prevailing wind. This became a rehearsal of sorts for the work that was to follow: a summoning-up of a series of tree-images as a metaphor for human frailty in the face, not only of nature, but also of economics, politics and so on.
  3. Walking with others became the focus of my work following The Memorial Walks,
    exploring how walking together can be a model for dialogue. I often continued to use spoken-word descriptions of things shared during a walk, such as the negotiation of the route itself in A Common Third, 2010. In Memory Marathon, 2010, I used a ‘walking and talking’ method to elicit descriptions from 104 walkers in a relay over the course of a day. This emphasis on the social modalities of walking led me towards a wider interest in how land can become an interlocutor in human dialogue and how other non-human things can be brought into the realm of dialogic art practice.

You can buy a copy of the Memorial Walks.

Akira Kanayama “Ashiato (Footprints)” [1956]

person with footprints on paper through park

Akira Kanayama “Ashiato (Footprints)” [1956]

Akira Kanayama (1924-2006) was part of the Gutai Group in 1950s Japan. The installation created by Kanayam, was part of the 1956 show that fellow Gutai artists Yoshihara Jiro and Shimamoto Shozo participated in. A major theme for this outdoor exhibit was audience interaction with both the environment and the artwork. (credit)

“His use of plastic inflatables and footsteps on vinyl sheets in other works also suggest his positive interest in new materials and mediated representation of body.” [credit]

Further Reading:

Tiampo, Ming. Gutai: Decentering Modernism. (The University of Chicago Press: 2010)

Richard Wentworth “To Walk” (2001)

photos of a printed brochure

Richard Wentworth

Wentworth works with photography as an archive for walking.

For this piece he published a number of his walking photos to a broadsheet/folded-poster, “To Walk,” for the English towns of Charleston, Ramsgate, and Rochester to encourage the public to take a fresh look at their urban and rural landscapes.

(credit: Walk Ways catalog)

François Morelli “Transatlantic Walk” (1985)

man with sculptural backpack

François Morelli

This walk commemorated the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The artist carried a hollow fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a charred human torso on his back as he traveled from Berlin to Cologne to Amsterdam to Paris to New York to Philadelphi.

He archived the walk with photos, drawings, and writing. He engaged in many conversations.

He ritualistically filled the sculpture with water or air at various times symbolizing keeping his companion alive.

Further reading:

  • “Walk Ways” exhibition catalog. Essay by Stuart Horodner. Foreword by Judith Richards. (also credit for the above information)