Michelangelo Pistoletto, Walking Sculpture (1967)
Pistoletto (1933-) rolls a ball made of newspaper down the streets, beckoning the participation of the whole community. This work is considered part of the Art Povera movement.
From Wanderlust catalog, Kaprow states “Any avant-garde art is primarily a philosophical quest and a finding of truths, rather than purely an aesthetic activity.”
pulling a shoe on a string through the city
examining the shoe from time to time, to see if it’s worn out
wrapping your own shoe, after each examination, with layers of bandage or tape, in the amount you think the shoe on the string is worn out
repeating, adding to your shoe more layers of bandage or tape, until, at the end of the walk, the shoe you are pulling appears completely worn out
Like the mazes of office cubicles in so many of the buildings that surround Bryant Park, Walk the Walk comes to life over the course of a working day.
From Monday to Friday, Kate Gilmore’s performance-installation creates a spectacle of color, movement and sound from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Gilmore (b.1975, Washington, D.C.) presents a cubic structure, open on all sides, with a flat roof that functions as a podium. Working in shifts, groups of women take to the roof where they perform an improvisational choreography of everyday movement, such as walking, shuffling, and stomping. Neither professional dancers nor theatrical performers, Gilmore’s participants resemble a random sample of female office workers. They vary in age, race, and body type. Free to perform their artist-assigned task as they choose, they must nevertheless conform to a strict uniform of yellow dresses and beige shoes.
Members of the public are invited to observe the piece from the surrounding Fountain Terrace, but also to enter the open structure. The yellow theme of the women’s dresses continues on both the exterior and interior walls of the structure. Once inside, visitors may hear the reverberating sounds of the movement overhead. In this eccentric concerto of irregular footfalls, the physicality of Gilmore’s performance is experienced anew.
Kate Gilmore is best known for her physically demanding performance videos in which she is typically the sole protagonist. Walk the Walk is Gilmore’s first live public project and also her first to deploy other participants. Her interest in striking and often incongruous images continues in this piece, with its unexpected transformation of architecture, figures, actions, and location. In this way, the artist makes us aware of our assumptions about the codes of appropriate behavior and the limits of self expression. How do the attributes of gender, age, and appearance shape our perception of both social roles and personal desires? In Walk the Walk, Gilmore literally and metaphorically turns the inside out, inviting us into a world at once all too familiar and strangely provocative.
[credit]
Single Channel Digital Video
Duration: 3 min
Filmed in Grizedale, Cumbria, UK
Camera and sound: Miranda Whall
, Produced by Grizedale Arts
Here Coates attempts to become Stoat, a member of the weasel family. We see him stumbling along a rural stoney track, wearing home made ‘stoat stilts’. A section of 2×4 inch wood strapped to each of his feet with multiple elastic bands are the basis for each shoe, below this though are the two sections of small circular dowling protruding from each which Coates is intent on balancing on. Eventualy, after some ankle turning falls manages to find a way of striding sideways in them. The stilts, replicating the stoat’s paw print dimensions and spacing, create a physical limitation on his body which inadvertently makes his walk not dissimilar to that of a bounding stoat. The stitls are an unconscious mechanism for him to “become’ stoat and move from humanness
HD video (silent), 5min 2011
Going Nowhere 2 presents a walk through a landscape at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea.
A figure dressed in jeans and a white shirt walks purposefully away from the camera and steps laboriously through a landscape of fish, rocks and watery light until he disappears into the murky distance. A series of shots capture the figure travelling on his journey through this parallel universe – how is he able to walk 10 meters beneath the surface of the sea or where he is going is not clear, but he seems to have an objective or path that he is following.
Super8 transferred to SD video (silent), 51min
The film 0º00 Navigation Part I: A Journey Across England shows an obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.
Always seen from behind, a figure first swims out of the seawater where the meridian hits the south-coast of Britain at Peacehaven in Sussex. The solitary person emerges out of the water carrying a hand held GPS device and using this implement he proceeds to walk directly north along the 0º00’00” line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via nearest windows, streams waded, hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London, the Midlands and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The figure then slowly swims away into the North Sea heading ever further north.
In 0º00 Navigation the hypothetical, geographic construct that is the zero line of longitude is treated as if it were a real phenomenon – a path mapped out to follow. The Greenwich meridian bisects southern England because it was here that it was once fabricated out of treaties, maps and the mechanics of naval power.
Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967)
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
These photographs of staged boots were printed as 51 postcards. Viewers can read these works knowing they were influenced by the Vietnam War and ideas of protesting, parading, trespassing, and communing with nature. The images start and California and end as the boots march into the Museum of Modern Art.
“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]
“The Ministry of Silly Walks” is a sketch from the Monty Python comedy troupe’s television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, series 2, episode 1, which is entitled “Face the Press”. The episode first aired on 15 September 1970. A shortened version of the sketch was performed for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
A satire on bureaucratic inefficiency, the sketch involves John Cleese as a bowler-hatted civil servant in a fictitious British government ministry responsible for developing silly walks through grants. Cleese, throughout the sketch, walks in a variety of silly ways. It is these various silly walks, more than the dialogue, that have earned the sketch its popularity. Cleese has cited the physical comedy of Max Wall, probably in character as Professor Wallofski, as important to its conception.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, “Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg.”[1]
