This is a video work to be watched on a monitor while wearing headphones. Participants hear the artists walking toward the top of a snow-covered hill. We see the ground, the sky, and the couple’s dog. We hear the sounds and occasional talking.
“I will walk in the city over the course of seven days, under the influence of a different drug each day. My trip will be recorded through photographs, notes, or any other media that become relevant.”
“Thus, the experiment conducted by the artist consisted of imbibing the following substances May 5 11 of that year: spirits, hashish, speed, heroin, cocaine, valium, and ecstasy. The process of creating the work involved preserving (ostensibly) a state of intoxication for fourteen hours each day. Alys later displayed a page of text, including diaristic accounts of his experiences (“Awareness of a change of state, but not followed by a visual echo. Auditory acuity enhanced. Appetite gone. Smoking diminished. At night, nausea and thirst.”) and a photographic image of the artist’s walking feet clad in Converse high-tops was used to represent the piece.” [credit]
For an indeterminate period of time, the magnetized metal collector (it looks roughly like a geometric dog on wheels) takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds up a coat mad of any metallic residue lying in its path. This process goes on until the collector is completely covered by its trophies.
Nancy Holt, Trail Markers (1969)
1969
Dartmoor, England
Photo-series of 20 archival inkjet prints from original 126 format slides
18 x 18 in. (46 x 46 cm)
© Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York
Trail Markers was photographed over a short stretch of publicly accessible footpath on the granite upland in the South-West of England known as Dartmoor. The path stretches between Two Bridges and Wistman’s Wood. The painted orange dots were a means to indicate the direction of the path for walkers and hikers. [Fig.1]
It was September 1969, and Holt and Robert Smithson were travelling through England and Wales in search of sites for sculptures—Smithson made several Mirror Displacement works during this trip. Their expedition was occasioned by Smithson’s inclusion in the London iteration of the international exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which opened on August 27, 1969. They were also in search of some of the sources and inspirations of the picturesque (they had been reading William Gilpin’s writings, for example), and were curious about their own origins, as both had English ancestry.1 In the late eighteenth century Gilpin proposed ‘a new object of pursuit; that of examining the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty,’2 which he elaborated in several volumes of his published Observations. These acted as guidebooks in Gilpin’s day, and Holt and Smithson retraced some of his footsteps.
Holt was the driver. The route to Two Bridges was challenging: narrow hilly lanes, in an unfamiliar land, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. Then, less than a mile from the public highway, the signage of the path drew her attention to the rocky terrain. In a conversation with the author in September 2013, Holt said:
It’s very hypnotic these little orange dots, and was interesting because they were very cleverly placed. Every time you got to a place where you might wonder where the next step might be there would be this orange dot. It’s structurally interesting, and gave wonderful continuity to my slides. It was an artwork that evolved, came up, I didn’t know I was going to be seeing it and then was seeing it and thought this was perfect. It was a gift. It was already there. My job was to get the perfect photo.3
Holt’s recollection casts the work as a kind of found sculpture or readymade.
Trail Markers was made in an era when walking had taken on new significance in art and culture. Artists such as Richard Long (b. 1945), a recent acquaintance with whom Holt and Smithson met up briefly on this trip, had made walking into art. And just a few weeks earlier a human walked for the first time on the rocky surface of an extra-terrestrial world in the first Apollo moon landing on July 20, 1969. On Dartmoor Holt encountered a place she found otherworldly but not entirely unfamiliar as it was somewhere she had visited imaginatively in stories from her childhood.
Most of the children’s books we grew up with were British. I would dream of little English towns and moors and wicked woods . . . The English landscape was already familiar, and yet the reality of experiencing those places had a visceral effect that has had a lasting effect on my work and thinking.4
Holt’s progress slowed as she journeyed across the moor with Smithson. They moved from a car drive, to a walk, to stopping in Wistman’s Wood, where the ancient and contorted oaks seem the remnant of a primeval world. In the wood Holt took color images that became the photo work, Wistman’s Wood (1969). The images include close-ups of the twisted oak trees and the boulder-littered environment of the interior of the wood. She also made the first of her buried poems, Buried Poem #1 (for Robert Smithson). In this distinct body of work a poem was interred at a site that evoked a particular person to Holt, to whom she gave a booklet with detailed information about the site and how to find it. This first Buried Poem was more impromptu than the later ones, and intended to be private and personal. Holt and Smithson photographed each other here, as they did at other locations on their trip through England and Wales. They were developing a collaborative vision that would manifest in different forms in the work of each artist.
The twenty inkjet prints that now constitute the artwork Trail Markers were put together by Holt in 2012. [Fig. 1] Prompted by renewed interest in her work, a major monograph, and several solo exhibitions, this juncture marked a new urgency in Holt’s activity, in relation both to her own work and that of Smithson’s.5 Soon after she would edit her footage of The Making of Amarillo Ramp,6 and combine previously unseen slides of New Jersey taken by Smithson for an exhibition which opened shortly after Holt’s death in February 2014.7 Such returns, where “pieces of past and present mesh”, have repeatedly recurred in Holt’s life.8 They are arrested moments belatedly realized in another time, flashing up as they threaten to disappear irretrievably.9 When Trail Markers was printed in 2012 the distinctive square format of Holt’s 126 format slides seemed prescient of twenty-first-century images posted on social media. But in their deliberateness, these photographs differ radically from many of the images captured today.
Back then, you really studied what you were going to shoot, you looked at it very carefully, you tried framing it this way and that way, you worked it out, and then you shot it. That’s what was happening on that trip, with the orange dots.10
Wistman’s Wood, the destination of the marked path, hardly features at all in the twenty photographs that make up Trail Markers, because the view back down to Two Bridges is the recurring one.11 The order of the images is not chronological, but directs a particular, deliberate, mode of attention. In the Smithson and Holt papers in the Archives of American Art there is a set of black and white photographic prints taken on the same path, most of which show views in the opposite direction towards Wistman’s Wood.12[Figs. 2 and 4] Although either artist could have taken them, the fact that these photographs are identified in the archive in connection with his Mirror Displacement works suggests that they are by Smithson. Smithson does not appear to have made a Mirror Displacement in this location. Rather, a kind of mirroring happens between the two artists’ photographs and in the structure of the walk itself.13 [Figs. 2 and 3, and 4 and 5] It is as if they walked to the wood in black and white and back in color, with some kind of transformative experience happening in the wood itself. With Holt’s Trail Markers we retrace our steps: from ‘a weird place’14 back to the car park.
It is forty years before the images re-emerge as Trail Markers. In these twenty images we see, on a stretch of English upland in 1969, a significant moment in the crystallization of a way of seeing the world.
Joy Sleeman is Professor of Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. She is a writer and curator whose research is focused on the histories of sculpture and landscape, especially 1960s and 1970s Land art. With Nicholas Alfrey and Ben Tufnell, she co-curated the exhibition Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966-1979 (Arts Council Collection and Hayward Touring, London UK: 2013-14). Her publications include ‘Lawrence Alloway, Robert Smithson and Earthworks’, in L. Bradnock, C. J. Martin and R. Peabody (eds), Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles US: Getty Publications, 2015) and Roelof Louw and British Sculpture since the 1960s (London UK: Ridinghouse, 2018).
SLEEMAN, JOY. “NANCY HOLT ‘TRAIL MARKERS’ (1969) OR, THE WALK FROM WISTMAN’S WOOD.” HOLT/SMITHSON FOUNDATION, DECEMBER 2019. //HOLTSMITHSONFOUNDATION.ORG/NANCY-HOLT-TRAIL-MARKERS-1969-OR-WALK-WISTMANS-WOOD.
John Schuerman is a Minneapolis-based artist and curator who took a walk around the Minneapolis 3rd police precinct in mid-July 2020. This was just a few months after the murder of George Floyd. Schuerman posted the following description and images from his walk on Facebook, forming a multi-faceted archive of the experience.
“A few days ago, I set out to walk the perimeter of the 3rd precinct in Minneapolis. After 20+ miles and 24 hrs I arrived back home, maybe wiser. It was a walking meditation on our community’s pain and roiling. I trace for you here a small part of my motional and emotional trip. The text below corresponds to the images in order as they happened.”
The Cauldron, arsonist ashes and ink on paper. The 3rd precinct contains the George Floyd murder site, ground zero for the mass-property destruction (Lake and Minnehaha), the two largest homeless encampments (Powderhorn, Minnehaha) and the soaring crime rates, free food stations, protests, street art, and more.
Map of my walk. (which encircled all my other recent walks)
The Edgelands -Miles and miles of walls, highways and edgeland culture.
My Darkness, arsonist ashes on paper. Anxieties about water -due to COVID all public sources of water are closed, so I had to filter water from lakes and streams. Harshness of my surroundings, unnerving parts of the walk (places where I felt viewed with suspicion). Recalling my concerns and snippets from other walks. The vigilantes: “We don’t need luck, we got guns.” The homeless men: “Did so and so ever make it back?” “NO. he OD’d at the Center”. The Police Officer: “I wish I could help you but I can’t”, rape and gun violence in the encampments… I ask myself, ‘Why am I out here?’ it’s a dark feeling.
Camp, next to Ford Parkway. Former homeless campsite, they probably moved to the Minnehaha encampment I walked through. Careful. Sweaty, Anxious. Fireworks rain through the trees as I turn in. I hear gunshots as I wake at 4:30 am. Pack up, glad to be through the night.
Beauty. The great river bluffs.
The city again. What do we do to one another? Why?
Familiar streets. I ease up. Franklin and 2nd ave. I walk on, pass another memorial. Two weeks ago the police found a man’s body in the street here, multiple gunshot wounds. Booze bottles, candles and trash mark the site.
Almost home. 38th and Chicago
Hope, arsonist ashes on paper. Can we still the violent, smoldering container, and reform to a kinder more equitable society? I hope but don’t feel hopeful. I hope our civic leaders will think hard and find wisdom, and if they do not, we vote them out no matter their politics. I felt like I had to do this walk. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was real. I took some risks to reckon with things. I’m left with many questions. How much safer was I on this walk because I’m male? Because I’m white? Will dis-empowering and demonizing the police lead to more violence in the long run as it has in the short run? Can police reform happen with a corrupt union in place? (a problem not exclusive to the police). Is America capable of working for its collective? or are we bound to a culture of self-interest? Am I?
Melting Glacier, 2005, Archival inkjet print, 17 3/4 × 22 1/4 in. CREDIT: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hamish-fulton-melting-glacier
Like Richard Long, Hamish Fulton is a self-characterized “walking artist” who generates photographs, sketches, and text pieces based on the experience of each walk. During visits to South Dakota and Montana in the 1960s, Fulton decided that art should be about life, not about producing objects. Keenly interested in Native American cultures and Buddhist meditation practices, Fulton has walked in more than 25 countries in the past 30 years, including trips to the tops of Mount Everest and Denali. “If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art,” Fulton explains. “The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.”
Credit below: Tate Britain’s Hamish Fulton: walking Journey
Since the early 1970s Hamish Fulton (born 1946) has been labelled as a sculptor, photographer, Conceptual artist and Land artist. Fulton, however, characterises himself as a ‘walking artist’.
Fulton first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of a number of artists – including Richard Long and Gilbert & George – who were exploring new forms of sculpture and landscape art. A central characteristic of their practice was a direct physical engagement with landscape. Fulton’s time as a student at St. Martin’s College of Art in London (1966-68) and his journeys in South Dakota and Montana in 1969, encouraged him to think that art could be ‘how you view life’, and not tied necessarily to the production of objects. He began to make short walks, and then to make photographic works about the experience of walking.
At this time, and subsequently, his practice was influenced by an unusually broad set of interests including the subject of the environment and the culture of American Indians. In 1973, having walked 1,022 miles in 47 days from Duncansby Head (near John O’Groats) to Lands End, Fulton decided to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.’ Since then the act of walking has remained central to Fulton’s practice. He has stated ‘If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art’ and has summed up this way of thinking in the simple statement of intent: ‘no walk, no work’. Although only Fulton experiences the walk itself, the texts and photographs he presents in exhibitions and books allow us to engage with his experience.
