Category Archives: Indigenous or Aboriginal

Teri Rueb, Times Beach (2017)

Teri Rueb, Times Beach (2017)

“Times Beach Nature Preserve is located in the Buffalo Outer Harbor, near the mouth of the Buffalo River. Times Beach responds to the varied histories and futures of this unusual site, from its broad link to the ecosystem of the Great Lakes, to the role of these waters as a vital resource for Native Americans who have lived along the shores of Lake Erie and the Niagara River for thousands of years. With waves of European settlement, the harbor became built up and eventually what was once open water became an urban beach. Irish and Portuguese immigrants created a shantytown on “The Beach” in the mid-19^th Century, but residents were ultimately evicted in the early years of the twentieth century due to increasing industry. With the rise of the Parks movement and demand for public spaces for leisure, “Times Beach” was designated a recreational beach in 1931 and named after the newspaper that promoted this new use. However, the beach was soon closed due to industrial contamination. Through the mid-twentieth century the site was used as a contained disposal facility for river and harbor dredge. Today it has been restored as a nature preserve that supports a remarkable number of migrating birds and butterflies, as well as wild urban plants and animals. Times Beach is a sound walk that weaves together sonic traces of these different moments, building a palimpsest of voices, field recordings and resonances that evoke the various temporalities and textures of the site. Delivered as a free downloadable app for iPhone and Android devices, visitors are invited to wear headphones and discover an aural overlay that responds to their movement as they wander the boardwalks, seawalls and blinds of the preserve.”

Mahatma Gandhi, “Salt March” (1930)

[CREDIT]

The Salt March, which took place from March to April 1930 in India, was an act of civil disobedience led by Mohandas Gandhi to protest British rule in India. During the march, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from his religious retreat near Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea coast, a distance of some 240 miles. The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself. India finally was granted its independence in 1947.

Salt Tax

Britain’s Salt Act of 1882 prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in their diet.

Indian citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from their British rulers, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also charged a heavy salt tax. Although India’s poor suffered most under the tax, all Indians required salt.

Mohandas Gandhi and Satyagraha

After living for two decades in South Africa, where Mohandas Gandhi fought for the civil rights of Indians residing there, Gandhi returned to his native country in 1915 and soon began working for India’s independence from Great Britain.

Defying the Salt Act, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently.

Gandhi declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of “satyagraha,” or mass civil disobedience.

Salt March Begins

First, Gandhi sent a letter on March 2, 1930 to inform the Viceroy Lord Irwin that he and the others would begin breaking the Salt Laws in 10 days. Then, on March 12, 1930, Gandhi set out from his ashram, or religious retreat, at Sabermanti near Ahmedabad with several dozen followers on a trek of some 240 miles to the coastal town of Dandi on the Arabian Sea.

Hamish Fulton, Melting Glacier (2005)

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 above]

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.