Category Archives: Spectacle

Rebecca Horn: Scratching Both Walls at Once, 1974-75

«Berlin Exercises in Nine Pieces» Exercise 1: Scratching Both Walls at Once, 1974 – 1975

Rebecca Horn (1944-) uses the «Finger Gloves» object to measure the dimensions of an interior space. The scratching of the body extensions is audible.

“Between 1968 and 1972, German artist Rebecca Horn created a series of performances titled “Personal Art.” Not unlike Joseph Beuys, an artist with whom she readily claims affinity, Horn ascribes the genesis of this work to a single near-death experience. As a young sculptor in the 1960s, Horn, like many artists of her generation, worked with fiberglass and polyester. Unaware of the toxicity of these materials, the artist suffered severe lung damage followed by a long period of convalescence. Limited to drawing in her hospital bed, Horn sketched images of the human body and designs for wearable sculptures, or “body extensions.” She then sewed and constructed these, tailoring them to exactly fit her measurements and those of her friends and collaborators. Made of cloth, wood, bandages, belts, feathers, and found objects, Horn’s masks and extensions contain, constrain, and/or elongate the bodies of their wearers. To this day, Horn can be said to continually build upon this oeuvre. She is known to return to earlier objects and performances by citing or even reworking them. “My works are stations in a transformative process,” she has said. A “development that is never really finished.”¹

…

Conceived as dialogues between Horn’s body and the space, Berlin-Exercises revisits themes explored in “Performances II.” In Scratching Both Walls at Once the dimensions of Horn’s Finger Gloves are extended further. Keyed to the width of her studio, Horn slowly scratches the tips of these even longer gloves along the walls to either side.” [credit]

Fabric, wood and metal Object, each: 70 × 1735 × 45 mm; Credit

Richard Fleischner, Chain Link Maze (1978-79)

Chain Link Maze, 1978-79 (destroyed), Galvanized chain link fencing, 8′ x 61′ x 61′, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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“Adjacent to the University of Massachusetts football stadium in Amherst stands an 8-foot-tall chain-link fence encompassing an area some 60 feet square [by Richard Fleischner (1944-)]. …

The work sits, as do most of Fleischner’s projects, delicately on its terrain—it does not so much structure the natural, open site as it asserts itself discreetly, sensitively on the slightly rolling topography as a neat, geometrically concise object. Once through the corner entryway, we are confronted with a long corridor, the beginning of a path that winds, multicursal, toward a central inner chamber. Decisions must be made, and confusion is possible as we look through the wire grid at spaces beyond our reach. Both entry and path are ample, affording no sense of claustrophobia. One is struck instead by the open, hospitable feeling of the first corridors as they trace the perimeter. Comfortable strides are possible within the labyrinth; one can even turn or stop easily. It is not long before one of several decision points is reached—several paths can be taken but no great mistake can be made. It is as if the artist wants to coax us gently through this experience. There is no threat here but instead a fuller, more rewarding task of finding one’s own way. We are separated spatially but never visually from the outdoor environment as we can almost always see shimmering details through the various layers of mesh.

As one traverses the walkway, patterns of light reflect off the metallic walls, sometimes creating moiré-like surfaces, at others seeming almost flat and mat-colored. Fleischner has given us a visual labyrinth as well as a participatory maze. In no other maze are almost all the parts visible even as we are confined to a specific track. Depending on how many layers of chain link we gaze through (and this can vary from one to almost a dozen), details of the environment and other figures in the maze fade in and out of our sight. This seems then the perfect visual accompaniment to the fugitive spatial experiences we all undergo within a labyrinth.

In Chain Link Maze, Fleischner uses intuition to achieve his means—physical, optical and psychological experiences that depend on carefully measured spaces. In a broader context, a work like this directly engages some of the notions, particularly American, of the unbounded, natural environment. Fleischner works directly in the landscape, sometimes using concepts from rarified historical traditions. He has reasserted his ability visually to grasp the given landscape in a particularly American fashion, while simultaneously structuring situations within that landscape derived from conventions of garden design, architectural history and spatial perception. —Ronald J. Onorato ” [credit]

Raquel Meseguer Zafe, A Crash Course in Cloudspotting (the subversive act of horizontality) (2020-)

While laying down might feel like the antithesis of walking, this is an important project highlighting the need for rest and disability awareness for participants struggling with chronic illness and fatigue.

“A Crash Course in Cloudspotting is an intimate audio journey exploring the depths of human connection and the subversive act of lying down.

Over the past four years Raquel Meseguer Zafe has collected over 250 stories from people living with invisible disabilities and chronic illnesses around the country. This immersive audio installation invites you into the heart of these personal experiences by weaving together some of the stories and voices. In this delicate and beautiful space, Coventry residents and participants from across the UK and Europe, will illuminate your horizontal journey with a gentle choreography of lights, activated in the space by patterns of rest we so rarely see.

“A Crash Course in Cloudspotting is about finding, making, and acknowledging the connections between people….the show lets us imagine ourselves as part of a web reaching out across the world.” Exeunt Magazine.

This installation & live performance project, includes Relaxed performances, Audio Description and Touch Tours. The Cloudspotting Digital Archive is available online.

Raquel Meseguer Zafe is a UK based dance theatre practitioner. She acknowledges ‘crip’ as a tool in her artistic process, and ‘rest’ as a creative impulse. Raquel is the artistic director of Unchartered Collective, a Lost Dog Associate Artist, and a Pervasive Media Studios Resident. Her work is supported by Unlimited and MAYK.

Conceived by Raquel Meseguer Zafe. Devised in collaboration with Artist & Theatre Designer Sophia Clist, Composer & Sound Artist Jamie McCarthy, Associate Artist Laura Dannequin, Artist & Designer Tom Metcalfe, Sound Designer Charles Webber. Software Developers David Haylock & Joseph Horton.” [credit]

Moira Williams, Fissures, Holes, Limbs: Breathing Dislocated Scales (2019)

person with large had and group walking outdoors

Credit: http://www.moira670.com/#/fissures-holes-limbs/

“Fissures, Holes, Limbs: breathing dislocated scales is an eco somatic sound walk centering disability.

I-Park Kicks off Seventh Art Biennale in East Haddam

BY CATE HEWITT, SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 ART & DESIGN

EAST HADDAM — At night, animals, birds, flowers, and even mushroom spores become active, moving about, making sounds and leaving traces, mostly unbeknownst to humans.

Participants in artist Moira Williams’ sound walk called “Fissures, Holes, Limbs: breathing dislocated scales,” were invited Sunday to shift from “daylight to moonlight” and experience night sounds and images she had recorded onsite at I-Park, an international artist-in-residence program founded in 2001.

Williams, a New-York-City-based artist, is one of nine artists in I-Park’s seventh Site-Responsive Art Biennale who spent three weeks on the program’s 450-acre campus “creating ephemeral artworks that respond to the property’s natural and built environments,” according to the program notes. The artists’ works can “take the form of environmental sculptures, videos, aural experiences or performance pieces.”

At the beginning of Williams’ sound walk, participants were asked to choose a stick from a number of precut tree branches, mostly about five or six feet in length. These branches were used as “limbs,” extensions of the human body, to explore holes and fissures in the path, as well as rocks and lichen.

After the band of sound walkers set off along a path, Williams stopped the group at a field and played a recording she had made while camping onsite of an owl hooting.

“Think of how the owl moves so quietly throughout the night and what it disturbs and what it accentuates, think of the different way our breath moves and accentuates as well, think of the spores and the seeds that we never see that we move,” she said.

She asked the group to face the field and to lift up their shoulders and think about them as wings, with the limb as an extension of sorts.

“Think about how they feel in the air and what you can move and what you can share and extend,” she said. “If you have a limb, an extra limb with you, please raise your limb in any way that you like, and think of your shoulders and your extra limb, think of the breeze going through your shoulders and your extra limb.”

Dressed in a white hazmat-type suit embellished with bright neon stripes made from tape, Williams carried a roll of black wire on one shoulder, like a techie epaulet, and a small speaker and projector connected to her mobile phone in a pouch around her waist. On her head was a wide “hat,” made from a piece of flat white painted cardboard with a space cut out for the top of her head, and long neon green streamers attached at each end that trailed behind her when she walked.

As the group proceeded down the path, Williams removed her hat and projected a tiny video of a fox she had recorded at night, letting the walkers experience the sight and sound as they hiked past.

She asked everyone with “an extra limb” to use it to touch the rocks, holes and lichen along the path, as a way to experience the site.

Soon the group came upon a field where Williams had created a labyrinth.

“Choose a path and walk to where you can find a white stump,” she instructed. “We’re under a full moon in the middle of the night, it’s an extraordinary full moon.”

Soon the group gathered around a white stump that had holes drilled in it about the size of the limb walking sticks. She asked those who had limbs to share them with those who were without.

“Those who haven’t had an extra limb, think of the limb that they now have and how the previous person used that limb and what that means to them not to have it now,” she said. “And think about whether the bark is smooth and whether there’s holes or fissures or lichen or even insects on your limb.”

Williams invited everyone holding a limb to place it in one of the holes in the stump, which created a kind of tree sculpture. The new tree symbolized connection, she said, and could forge a new identity for everyone who took part.

Credit: http://www.moira670.com/#/fissures-holes-limbs/

“If you walked with an extra limb and want to think about if you have a new name, you can say your new name out loud if you do have one, or if you can think of a new name that might incorporate an extended limb,” she told the group. “My new name would be Lichen.”

Of the 20 participants, names like Woody, Meadow, Shaggy, Hiawatha and Tripod emerged.

Then Williams directed the walkers’ attention to the far side of the meadow where a large tree with bare branches reached to the sky, a living reflection of the group’s tree made from limbs.

“Look at the tree in front of us and think about the tree behind us and the juncture of all of us connecting all of us,” she said.

Williams next led the group to a boardwalk that snaked through a marshy area with numerous streams flowing along the ground.

At one point she stepped out of the path and projected a video of mushrooms sporing onto a series of white vertical boards that were set in the marsh.

“This is an image of sporing mushrooms that only spore at night and these are things we seldom get to see,” she said. “They’re just ghostlike spores that we’re gathering on our own bodies and sharing with the rest of the world.”

Williams, who holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, a graduate certificate in “Spatial Politics,” and an MFA from Stony Brook University, said her underlying interest is about “making the environment accessible to all people, especially people with disabilities.

“It’s about thinking in ways that are not about independence but more about connectedness with the environment and one another,” she said. “It’s connectedness as a holistic ecosystem, we’re not just this very big myth about how we’re independent.”

She explained that her white outfit reflects a philosophy of healthcare — “the idea of nursing and empathy and being a caregiver.”

“I think of myself as a steward caregiver. I love wearing the white suit because I’m in the lead and I want people to see me,” she said. “The hat is a device to say, hey, here I am, come and join me, but it’s also the width of walkways that need to be for people that need a wheelchair.”

By walking through the marsh and the woods, participants will carry traces of the environment to new places, she said.

Near the end of the path, Williams crouched down, removed her hat and projected a time-lapse video of a lotus flower opening and closing at night on the pond at I-Park, a film she made while floating on the water.

The tour was over and she bade the group good-bye by saying, “Good morning everybody.””

Apollo 11 Moonwalk (1969)

Footage from the Apollo 11 moonwalk that was partially restored in 2009.

[credit] “July 1969. It’s a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.

Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong working at an equipment storage area on the lunar module. This is one of the few photos that show Armstrong during the moonwalk. Click image to enlarge.

Credits: NASA

Smoke and flames signal the opening of a historic journey as the Saturn V clears the launch pad. Click image to enlarge.

Credits: NASA

Buzz Aldrin climbs down the Eagle’s ladder to the surface. Click image to enlarge.

Credits: NASA

Crater 308 stands out in sharp relief in this photo from lunar orbit. Click image to enlarge.

Credits: NASA

It is only seven months since NASA’s made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket.

Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit. (› Play Audio)

After one and a half orbits, Apollo 11 gets a “go” for what mission controllers call “Translunar Injection” – in other words, it’s time to head for the moon. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. A day after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command module Columbia.

Collins later writes that Eagle is “the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky,” but it will prove its worth.

When it comes time to set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong improvises, manually piloting the ship past an area littered with boulders. During the final seconds of descent, Eagle’s computer is sounding alarms.

It turns out to be a simple case of the computer trying to do too many things at once, but as Aldrin will later point out, “unfortunately it came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular problems.”

When the lunar module lands at 4:17 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. Armstrong radios “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we’re breathing again.” (› Play Audio)

Armstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying “the unknowns were rampant,” and “there were just a thousand things to worry about.”

At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” (› Play Audio)

Aldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description of the lunar surface: “magnificent desolation.” They explore the surface for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photographs.

They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of Eagle’s legs. It reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Armstrong and Aldrin blast off and dock with Collins in Columbia. Collins later says that “for the first time,” he “really felt that we were going to carry this thing off.”

The crew splashes down off Hawaii on July 24. Kennedy’s challenge has been met. Men from Earth have walked on the moon and returned safely home.

In an interview years later, Armstrong praises the “hundreds of thousands” of people behind the project. “Every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault.'” (› Read 2001 Interview, 172 Kb PDF)

In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong calls the flight “a beginning of a new age,” while Collins talks about future journeys to Mars.

Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their footsteps. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the lunar surface with these words: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.” “

Michèle Magema, Element (2005)

ELEMENT from Michèle Magema on Vimeo.

“The artistic work of Michèle Magema is erected in an intermediate zone, a mental space, a produced border, an interstice located between the double Western and African projections.
The plurality of his affiliations allows him to question his history and that of a nation, a continent and more broadly of the World. The relationship she maintains with stories and History allows her to invent a critical posture.

Michèle stages herself, and reveals both her questioning and her discernment through her photos and video installations imbued with an intimate femininity, while addressing fundamental points in the history of humanity.

In Element, the artist tries to put into images universal exotic projections that are implied. A humming voice, sensual feet, shod in white accompanies a hand that picks cotton on the asphalt. A head, fragment, advances in profile, balancing a basin. The same chained ankle feet move slowly, in high heels. The three images coexist, carried by a long tracking shot that allows us to follow this woman, like the watermark of an evocation of the female condition in general.
Again, Michèle Magema tells and retells History in images. Drawing from the archives, restoring a balance in a rickety reality, she pursues her singular quest linked to her own cultural diversity as well as to her feminine gender.” [credit]

The Loiterers Resistance Movement (2006-), Manchester, England

[credit]

“The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement) is a Manchester based collective of artists, activists and urban wanderers interested in psychogeography, public space and the hidden stories of the city.

We can’t agree on what psychogeography means but we all like plants growing out of the side of buildings, looking at things from new angles, radical history, drinking tea and getting lost; having fun and feeling like a tourist in your home town. Gentrification, advertising and blandness make us sad. We believe there is magick in the mancunian rain.

Our city is wonderful and made for more than shopping. The streets belong to everyone and we want to reclaim them for play and revolutionary fun….

The LRM embark on psychogeographical drifts to decode the palimpsest of the streets, uncover hidden histories and discover the extraordinary in the mundane. We aim to nurture an awareness of everyday space, (re)engaging with, (re)mapping and (re)enchanting the city.

On the first Sunday of every month we go for a wander of some sort and we also organise occasional festivals, exhibitions, shows, spectacles, silliness and other random shenanigans. These range from giant cake maps to games of CCTV Bingo. Information on forthcoming events is here. We were founded in 2006 by Morag Rose and 2016 we celebrated 10 years of creative mischief with Loitering With Intent: The Art and Politics of Walking at The Peoples History Museum.

Please walk with us, everyone is welcome. Our events are free and open to all: these are our streets and they are yours too.”

Rozalinda Borcila, Center for Getting Ugly – Kara Holland’s Walk to the Beach (2006)

“In a city built around the logic of automobility, a small group documents several attempts to walk to Tampa’s last remaining public beach. We rely on instructions from passers-by who struggle to conform their mental map of the city to the possibilities of walking.” [credit]

From the original invite: ”

Kara Holland invites participants on a walk from the Westshore Palms neighborhood to the beach located directly west, less than 1 mile away. This public beach is one of the last few remaining in the city of Tampa. We will try to get to the beach on foot, navigating terrain that, not unlike much of the city, is hostile to walking. The walk will explore the ways in which otherwise “benign” structures (a corporate park, a mall, the highway and so forth) are aggressive to bodies not trapped in cars and effectively colonize public space. Participants will pause to mark especially hostile boundaries, using materials found on site. We will share a picnic upon arriving at the beach, or wherever we can no longer travel on foot. Recording devices for documenting the walk are welcome and encouraged (cell phone, cell phone camera, digital camera, video camera, audio recorder, etc). This walk is a collaboration with The Center For Getting Ugly as part of the “Walk, Talk, Eat, Talk Some More” project.

Date: April 15, 4:30 pm
Meeting place: Kara’s apartment, 4601 Gray St. Tampa FL, 33609
Duration: 2 hours (??)” [credit]

“Center for Getting Ugly – dedicated to the research, practice and sustained experimentation with conflict as essential political activity. the Center seeks to develop individual and collective capabilities for the production of radical politics. must embrace conflict as an essential, productive aspect of collaboration. must be perpetually dissatisfied with, and suspicious of, existing aesthetic or semantic strategies.

…

The Center for Getting Ugly is dedicated to the research, practice and sustained experimentation of social conflict, with the goal of encephalizing collective organs and social technologies for the production of radical politics. In other words, the Center operates on the premise that, given sufficient practice, we can develop collective revolutionary organs. The Center is not a group, a project or a place, but an open infrastructure. Its various subdivisions target specific practices or arenas for the production of critical deviance, with collective activity as its main underlying principle.

The Center for Getting Ugly launches invitations, provocations. it facilitates collaboration between multiple practitioners. it imagines, invents and sometimes even deploys probing devices. currently, its subdivisions are:

Can’t we all just get along? Counter-Cartographies of Playing Nice – invited or self-appointed Special Fellows conduct research on dominant modes of subjectivation in various concrete situations. though not all maps take the form of two dimensional representations, the desire is to produce interpretive works which may be used to incite, illuminate or facilitate intervention.

Walking and not Walking – develops extended skill-sharing, experimental workshops specifically focused on walking practices – and, given the ways in which mobility is structured around consumption and other forms of subjectivation, on practices of not walking: standing, stopping, pausing, staying and occasionally lying down.

A Synchronized Swimming – Different collectives are invited to design an un-resolvable conflict equation based on their own, unique working methods. These equations are passed on to another collective, who develop interpretive extensions/models for the sustension of conflict. A Synchronized Swimming then dives into the Pool: an exhibition/symposium/forum for incorporating these models into action.”

SOURCES:

Archived “Common Places” blog and Flickr stream

Hamish Fulton, A Walk Around the Block (2010)

This work utilizes equal spacing between each walker – a concept Fulton explored in “Walk dance art co” created by Christine Quoiraud & Hamish Fulton, at Chamarande in 2002 (with 23 other artists).

“At the corner of Bogie Street and Church Street, we get our instructions for today’s choreographed walk. For the next two hours, about 30 of us will walk repeatedly around the same block. We will walk in single file, maintaining a two-metre distance from the person in front. We will not talk.

So the focus of my attention for the next two hours are the heels of Allan Watson, course leader in sculpture at Gray’s School of Art. He’s taller than me, and there are moments when I have to jog to keep two metres between us. Passers-by stop to stare or snigger at this kenspeckle procession. By the fifth circuit, my calf muscles are screaming.

But by the tenth, something strange has happened. My legs don’t hurt anymore. My mind has relaxed. Time feels as if it is liquefying. Has it been ten laps, or 50? It doesn’t matter. I have no demands on my time, nothing is required of me but simply to walk. I wonder, briefly, if this is what it’s like to be Hamish Fulton.

Fulton is the artist who walks. For 40 years, he has made works of art exclusively relating to his walks. He has walked for thousands of miles in five continents. He has walked without sleep, got frostbite, climbed to 8,000m (26,246ft) without oxygen. He has got lost, been caught in storms, fallen down a crevasse (his rucksack wedged, allowing him to climb back out).

More recently, he has begun to choreograph walks involving groups of people, the idea of repetition inspired by the “Marathon Monks” of Mount Hiei in Japan, whose spiritual discipline involves running 40km (25 miles) a day on a repetitive circuit of the mountain. Focusing on the feet ahead of you becomes a secular meditation, a stilling of the mind. “It is a vehicle for a change of mind, a shift in where the mind’s located,” he says, carefully. “I think our minds go round and round and round in the same furrows, and possibly, when you do a walk like this, you go to another part of your mind. It sets in motion a variety of perceptions.

Fulton is in Huntly at the invitation of Deveron Arts, which invites world-class artists to run socially engaged projects in the town. The next day, some of the same walkers joined him on the first day of a 21-day walk in the Cairngorms. Over half a pint of lager in the Huntly Hotel, Fulton reflects that, of all the obstacles he has had to overcome in a lifetime of walking, he has never before been marooned by a cloud of volcanic ash (he eventually arrived by train after his flight to Scotland was cancelled). “It’s incredible, isn’t it? I know it’s costing so much loss of income for lots of people, so I’m sorry for that, but there is something… inspiring about it.

“We see the world in terms of us being able to build everything and make everything. But there are these other things, like volcanos, that we didn’t build. In these times, it’s pretty strange there is this other force, because we’re so used to pushing buttons and Googling data about something.”

Fulton was a contemporary of Richard Long and Gilbert & George at Central St Martins College of Art in the 1960s. He grew up in Newcastle, and his formative experiences of walking were on family holidays to Arran. He was profoundly influenced by a visit to the United States in 1969, when he walked at the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana and read the work of Native American Luther Standing Bear, who wrote in the 1930s about the Sioux relationship with the Earth. In terms of art, it was an era of exploding potential: art happened outside museums; art was experience; art could be a walk.

The ideas which crystallised at that time have remained consistently central to Fulton’s work. Unlike Richard Long or an artist such as Andy Goldsworthy, he makes no work in the landscape and takes nothing away. The work he makes afterwards – often using photography and graphic text – reflects the walk but cannot reproduce it. The walk and the work are separate creative acts. His work is evocative, but minimalist; Japanese haiku poetry is a key influence. A walk in Wyoming’s Wind River range became just two words: CLOUDS STONES. A road walk across Spain and Portugal is WARM DEAD BIRD. Seven days in the Pyrenees is simply RAIN.

By the time you read this, Fulton will have been in the Cairngorms for four days, carrying his tent, food and fuel. He has no plan, other than to arrive at Glenmore Lodge exactly 21 days after he set out. He will not film or webcast his trip. What happens in the mountains is a mystery, though prosaic details do slip out: one of the most important tools for a serial walker is his nail-clippers. Short toenails are essential for comfort.

“The Cairngorms are like a person, I’m very fond of them. And, of course, anywhere like that is always threatened. So much of the world is either factory, agriculture, roads or housing, as time goes by these spaces are more and more unusual.

“I make the plan up as the days go by, which is extremely luxurious when everything in life has to be so controlled and planned. And then you have loss of control – someone sends you an e-mail, and you have to reply immediately, and then you realise that they sent their e-mail late. All this absurd behaviour that we just slip into.” Stepping into the unknown is a key component. “That’s the difference between making a geometric painting, where you’re fulfilling the plan, and something like this where you’re casting off, and you genuinely don’t know what the outcome can be. It could be a fall, or a wonderful sunrise; you don’t know.”

Fulton is not shy of being political. He is concerned about climate change, but speaks of the need for a profound shift in our relationship with the Earth, rather than simply incorporating a “green economy” into a money-driven system.

Last year, he organised a protest – a walk, of course – for Tibetan freedom, attended by Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan monk imprisoned by the Chinese for 33 years. A recent wall painting bears the words: “GOOGLE PALDEN GYATSO”. Those who do will find a story of torture and endurance. But in China, the link is blocked.

Last May, at the age of 62, Fulton reached the summit of Everest. An artist’s book about his journey will be published this summer. After a lifetime of walking, he was on top of the world.

“It is doing something which is unbelievable. We want a lot of things we want to be unbelievable but they’re not really. In this case, this completely fulfils the objective of doing something that feels unbelievable. The reality doesn’t hit you until five days later.” With that behind him, a forecast of snow in the Cairngorms is hardly a concern. The walking philosopher just shrugs, smiles and heads off into the unknown, one step at a time.” [credit]

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A (1978)

Yvonne Rainer, “Trio A” 1978. Video (black and white, sound), 10:21 min

“Yvonne Rainer—regarded as a foundational force in American contemporary art, film, and postmodern dance—began her career in New York in 1956. After a false start in acting, she entered the Martha Graham School, a dance school and associated company named for its founder, who is largely credited with revolutionizing modern dance. There, Rainer discovered a passion for this art form. She was trained in a style of movement characterized by expressiveness and virtuosity and in narrative choreography filled with drama and psychological intensity. But Rainer grew dissatisfied with the conventions of modern dance and the traditional relationship between dancer and audience. As she has explained: “Early on, I began to question the pleasure I took in being looked at, this dual voyeuristic, exhibitionistic relation of dancer to audience.”¹ Fueled by such questioning, and her opposition to the tenets of classical and modern dance, she created Trio A.

Rainer choreographed Trio A in 1966, and performed it for the camera in 1978. Written for a solo performer, it incorporates no music and features a seamless flow of everyday movements like toe tapping, walking, and kneeling. “[It] would be about a kind of pacing where a pose is never struck,” the artist once described. “There would be no dramatic changes, like leaps. There was a kind of folky step that had a rhythm to it, and I worked a long time to get the syncopation out of it.”² Trio A positioned Rainer as a leader among the dancers, composers, and visual artists who were involved in the Judson Dance Theater (which she co-founded in 1962), an avant-garde collaborative that ushered in an era of contemporary dance through stripped-down choreography and casual and spontaneous performances.

Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto”
A year before creating Trio A, Yvonne Rainer wrote her “No Manifesto” (1965). Through it, she declared her opposition to the dominant forms of dance of the period—typified by Martha Graham—and outlined the tenets of her radical new approach:

No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.³

Early Recognition—a Double-Edged Sword?
Sometimes, artists find that groundbreaking work produced early in their career may overshadow the rest of their output. This was the case for Rainer with Trio A and “No Manifesto.” In her words: “It’s a little unfortunate, because it eclipses everything else I’ve done. [It’s] the most out-there, visible signature of my career. That and the ‘No Manifesto.’”⁴ In the 1970s, she stopped dancing altogether and turned her attention fully to filmmaking, producing films including Lives of Performers (1972), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), and Privilege (1990). It was not until the 2000s that Rainer would return to choreography.” [credit]