Richard Wentworth
Wentworth works with photography as an archive for walking.
For this piece he published a number of his walking photos to a broadsheet/folded-poster, “To Walk,” for the English towns of Charleston, Ramsgate, and Rochester to encourage the public to take a fresh look at their urban and rural landscapes.
(credit: Walk Ways catalog)
Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842
The ‘Flâneur’/‘Flâneuse’ (‘roamer’ or ‘wanderer’) is a person who strolls the city in order to experience it, as a detached, gently cynical observer. (credit) There is an idleness attached to flânerie. The flâneur is a passive figure, they observe the dynamics of the city from a disengaged point of view. While the idea originated with Charles Baudelaire, it was Walter Benjamin who popularized it and connected it to the idea of escaping capitalist control. Benjamin helped define the flâneur as an observant solitary man perusing the city of Paris. Sometimes also referred to as a “dandy.” According to Merlin Coverley, the flâneur “is more playful for a start, it is also purely aesthetic, there is nothing revolutionary in its design, it doesn’t take itself too seriously in the sense of a political agenda.” [credit]
The Surrealist version of the flâneur was to devise experiments involving randomness and chance in order to experience the city without being blinded by mundanity. (credit) For example, follow interesting strangers across the city, or visit a city while guiding oneself using the map of another city, or draw a circle on a map and try to walk as accurately as possible along the circumference.
Similar in some ways to Guy Debord’s dérive later on, both flânerie and the dérive describe a figure seeking new experience and insight by defying the commercial logic of the modern city. (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012). However the flâneur privileges the street over the studio, and treats walking as an aid to achieving the avant-garde dream of merging art and everyday life. (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012) Debord explicitly takes position against letting chance take a too important role in a dérive, because ‘the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable to our purposes.’ (credit)
Blog post comparing flânerie to dérive
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.
Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969)
For 23 days he chose random people on the street to follow. He did so until they entered a private residence or office. He typed accounts of the pursuits and sent them to different arts people around town.
Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969) Mixed media, 30 inches x 40 inches
This piece has many critics due to the problematic nature of following a person without their consent.
Bruce Nauman
choreographed by Meredith Monk
In his black-and-white film, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, Bruce Nauman does just that. Placing one foot in front of the other, he walks forwards and backwards, with a pronounced swinging of his hips, around the edge of a square of masking tape affixed to his studio’s concrete floor. The silence of his studio is broken only by the rapid clicking sound made by the rolling film, which calls attention to the camera itself. Rather than ensuring that it follows his movements, the artist leaves the camera fixed in one place. As a result, he sometimes disappears off-screen as he treads the parts of the perimeter outside of the camera’s frame.
Nauman made Walking early in his career and at a time when the notion of turning the camera exclusively onto oneself was still relatively new. During this period, he and many other artists were increasingly broadening the definition of art by incorporating themselves and the activities and materials of daily life into their work. While the film may seem simple on its surface, with it, Nauman broke with the conventions of film, television, and art making itself. It offers little narrative or illusion; what’s more, it takes viewers into a space they would not typically see: the private realm of the artist’s studio. Walking is based on a premise Nauman developed shortly after completing his MFA, in 1966, which underscores all of his work: “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”1
Giacometti is known for his tall thin bronze figures. Simply search his name online, and you will find many images of these sculptures. MoMA owns “City Square.”
Medium: Bronze
Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 25 3/8 x 17 1/4″ (21.6 x 64.5 x 43.8 cm)
Muybridge studied many figures walking and doing a variety of other tasks. The use of the camera was instrumental in understanding these complex movements.
Medium: collotype
Dimensions: image: 16.8 x 41.8 cm (6 5/8 x 16 7/16 in.); sheet: 48.5 x 61.2 cm (19 1/8 x 24 1/8 in.)
Credit Line: Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Accession Number: 1995.36.105
Artists / Makers: Eadweard Muybridge (artist) American, born England, 1830 – 1904
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.
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.
A daily ritual of walking, dog walking is familiar to a wide swath of people who often do not have artistic backgrounds. It can be a time of deep thought and reflection.
