Category Archives: Rituals

Menhirs

Large menhir located between Millstreet and Ballinagree, County Cork, Ireland

Walking as an artistic practice has a long history. Scholars such as Francesco Careri trace this history back to early nomads and wanders. Careri calls out large stone markers called menhirs, erected in the Neolithic landscape throughout Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Western Europe. The menhirs have widely debated possible purposes connected to walking, such as “sacred paths, initiations, processions, games, contests, dances, theatrical and musical performances.” Careri specifically calls out menhirs as early architectural objects used by nomadic hunters and shepherds – people who relied heavily on walking. Art historians can spot material and scale-related connections between these rocky menhirs and Land Art walking practices of the 20th century.

SOURCE: Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Culicidae Architectural Press: 2017.

Danica Phelps, Walking 9-5 Series

Graphite on folded paper, 30.625 x 20.5 inches; CREDIT: //www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Walking-9-5–Graz/D328CC010A678FB5

“Walking 9-5, March 21, 2001, Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Riverdale, Bronx, NYC” (2001), Pencil, watercolor and collage on paper, 30 × 22 1/4 in; CREDIT

: 116 small-sized drawings (2002)

: 116 small-sized drawings (2002)

The earliest work in the exhibition is Walking Amsterdam 9-5 , a sprawling installation of 116 small-sized drawings. Danica created this work in 2002 for the Amsterdam gallery Annet Gelink. She spent three weeks in the city, and 13 days walking through it, for exactly 8 hours every day. Point of departure for these excursions was always the central station, and every one of them proceeded in as straight a line as possible in all directions, 20° off the direction taken the previous day. At 5pm she would look for the nearest means of public transport in order to return to the city centre. One of her 8-hour hikes took her to a suburb of Utrecht, another all the way to Zanfort. The individual drawings on this wall are clustered by days. One lists all the day’s activities, the others represent situations and objects on which Phelps spent money. Every red stripe stands for a Dollar spent, and green stripe for a Dollar earned. The price of each drawing (from 30 to 800 Euros) depends on how much the artist likes the drawing. As she believes that the determination of the price is the final aesthetic decision, the price becomes part of the work itself – and is noted, in US$, on the drawing itself. If a certain drawing finds a buyer, Phelps creates a copy of it on tracing paper, which then replaces the sold drawing in the series. On this ‘second-generation’ drawing she paints a number of green stripes that corresponds to the price fetched by the original, the name of the collector, the gallery and the date of the sale. This in turn renders the copy unique again – and means that it is itself now up for sale. The presentation at Nolan Judin Berlin is the first chance since their exhibition in Amsterdam in 2002 to buy these drawings. [credit]

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away (2011)

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many photos of a person running around his house

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away

The artist ran around his house in Finland for 12 hours (65 miles).

From the Wanderlust catalog: “The artist notes in a statement about the work that, ‘Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within twelve hours of less.’ Instead, he spends half a day going nowhere, his running is a futile act.”

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“Public collections:
– De Hallen, Haarlem
– Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Running in circles 1. Lit. to run in a circular path. The horses ran in circles around the corral for their daily exercise. The children ran in circles around the tree.
2. and run around in circles. Fig. to waste one’s time in aimless activity.

Guido van der Werve: a Dutch artist who started long distance running in 2007. Soon after, he got addicted to running. Guido van der Werve ran his first marathon in Helsinki in 2009, and has been running two or three marathon a years ever since. Currently his personal best was achieved at the Berlin Marathon in September 2013, which he ran in 2.57.06.
In 2010, Guido van der Werve ran his first ultra marathon running from P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York, to Rachmaninoff’s grave in Valhalla, New York. On the 8th of June 2011, he ran approximately two and a half marathons around his house in Finland in exactly twelve hours. In the summer of 2011 he finished his first triathlon.

Emotional poverty: suggests a depletion of emotional resources, an absence of emotional health and well-being, a state of lack rather than abundance. Emotional poverty is a state in which a person finds him/herself when he/she lacks the ability to deal with specific emotional circumstances or life in general, without totally breaking down into severe depression. Everyone struggles to deal with difficulties in life, but some simply cannot emotionally cope with difficult circumstances. They turn to escapes, or they may just shut down altogether. When a person finds him/herself in a difficult time, but is not able to process the difficulties and live life, he/she may very well be dealing with emotional poverty. It is defined by a limited range or depth of feelings; interpersonal coldness in spite of signs of open gregariousness.

Half a day: equals twelve hours. The 12-hour clock can be traced back as far as the cultures of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt: both an Egyptian sundial for daytime use and an Egyptian water clock for night time use were found in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep I. Dating back to approx. 1500 BC, these clocks divided their respective times of use into 12 hours each. Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within 12 hours or less.
A day is a unit of time, commonly defined as an interval of 24 hours. It can also be used to describe that portion of the full day during which a location is illuminated by the light of the sun. The period of time measured from local noon to the following local noon is called a solar day.” [credit]

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) [1997]

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“Paradox of Praxis 1 (1997) is the record of an action carried out under the rubric of “sometimes making something leads to nothing.” For more than nine hours, Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melted. And so for hour after hour he struggled with the quintessentially Minimal rectangular block until finally it was reduced to no more than an ice cube suitable for a whisky on the rocks, so small that he could casually kick it along the street.”

Mary Mattingly, House and Universe (2013)

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Mary Mattingly, Pull, 2013

“Based on philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book Poetics of Space with a chapter by the same name, House and Universe describes duality and interdependency within local and nonlocal space. House and Universe is an allegorical series of photographs that combined living systems like floating geodesic capsules with bundles of personal objects I had collected and carried with me. When I was making this work in 2013, I had bundled almost everything in my possession into seven large boulder-like forms that could be rolled or pushed.

One photograph shows a place I lived in between a series of storms when the houses were covered in whatever scrap was available. A bundle sculpture is in front of the homes, symbolically connecting climate disasters with consumption.

That title alludes to the story of Sisyphus (the trickster who was tricked in the end) which stuck with me throughout the series, as I dragged these bundles from one place to another, across towns where I was invited to recreate performances, and back into and out of exhibitions and studio spaces.

Another image shows a naked body of a person in my life from behind, with a large boulder of things provocatively titled Life of Objects.

Own it.us was made at the same time: an online library that catalogs the things I bundled and illustrates the pathways of these objects, and how they came into my life. I’ve spent considerable time living in and within ecosystems or shelters I’ve co-built, some pictured in House and Universe, those experiences have asked me to reconsider my surroundings, to vision how collections can function as monuments to consumption, and how, as an inhabitant of NYC, I help make the collective monument called a landfill.

In absurd performances, I would pull the bundles through NYC, Really to emphasize the weight of these objects.

The sculptures’ wrappings are inextricably intertwined like cycles of production – through a chain of formal and informal exchanges, an object is mined, made, distributed, bought, exchanged, eventually thrown away, where it becomes something else. The photographs of these things echo the cobbled together things themselves: pieced together with images of disparate place, time, and space. Like time capsules, they function as obstructions and proposals. They block, interfere, and frame an encounter.”

Allan Kaprow, Taking a Shoe for a Walk (1989)

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people dragging shoes

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.”

Score for Taking a Shoe for a Walk (1989)

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

Janine Antoni, “Touch” (2002)

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a woman walking on a tight rope aligned with the horizon

Janine Antoni, Touch

“The idea of Touch derives from Moor (2001), a work in which the artist created a rope out of her and her friends’ belongings; the artist has said that while she intends to walk it, she also questions the impulse. Touch depicts a literal balancing act in order to suggest the state of perfection that many people strive for, including herself. Antoni has said, “Touch is about that moment or that desire to walk on the horizon,” a location that represents hope and the future. She explained that she wants to walk in “this impossible place, a place that cannot be pinpointed … on the line of my vision, or along the edge of my imagination.” Since the viewer’s involvement is a crucial element in her work, Antoni asks us to imagine ourselves in her situation and contemplate the meaning of the horizon when she is absent from the scene. As the artist teeters but never falls, she accepts and almost embraces a state of imbalance.”

Nasca Culture, “Pampas de Jumana” (200 BCE – 500 CE)

CC BY-SA 4.0
File:Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015

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“The lines are found in a region of Peru just over 200 miles southeast of Lima, near the modern town of Nasca. In total, there are over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and 70 animal and plant designs, also called biomorphs. Some of the straight lines run up to 30 miles, while the biomorphs range from 50 to 1200 feet in length (as large as the Empire State Building).”

What Are the Lines?

The lines are known as geoglyphs – drawings on the ground made by removing rocks and earth to create a “negative” image. The rocks which cover the desert have oxidized and weathered to a deep rust color, and when the top 12-15 inches of rock is removed, a light-colored, high contrasting sand is exposed. Because there’s so little rain, wind and erosion, the exposed designs have stayed largely intact for 500 to 2000 years.

Scientists believe that the majority of lines were made by the Nasca people, who flourished from around A.D. 1 to 700.

Certain areas of the pampa look like a well-used chalk board, with lines overlapping other lines, and designs cut through with straight lines of both ancient and more modern origin.

The Theories

The Kosok-Reiche astronomy theories held true until the 1970s when a group of American researchers arrived in Peru to study the glyphs. This new wave of research started to poke holes in the archeo-astronomy view of the lines (not to mention the radical theories in the ‘60s relating to aliens and ancient astronauts).

Johan Reinhard, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, brought a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of the lines: “Look at the large ecological system, what’s around Nasca, where were the Nasca people located.” In a region that receives only about 20 minutes of rain per year, water was clearly an important factor.

“It seems likely that most of the lines did not point at anything on the geographical or celestial horizon, but rather led to places where rituals were performed to obtain water and fertility of crops,” wrote Reinhard in his book The Nasca Lines: A New Perspective on their Origin and Meanings.

Anthony Aveni, a former National Geographic grantee, agrees, “Our discoveries clearly showed that the straight lines and trapezoids are related to water … but not used to find water, but rather used in connection with rituals.”

“The trapezoids are big wide spaces where people can come in and out,” says Aveni. “The rituals were likely involved with the ancient need to propitiate or pay a debt to the gods…probably to plead for water.”

Reinhard points out that spiral designs and themes have also been found at other ancient Peruvian sites. Animal symbolism is common throughout the Andes and are found in the biomorphs drawn upon the Nasca plain: spiders are believed to be a sign of rain, hummingbirds are associated with fertility, and monkeys are found in the Amazon—an area with an abundance of water.

“No single evaluation proves a theory about the lines, but the combination of archeology, ethnohistory, and anthropology builds a solid case,” says Reinhard. Add new technological research to the mix, and there’s no doubt that the world’s understanding of the Nasca lines will continue to evolve.

Maya Lin, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial” (1982)

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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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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