Walking Timeline – PDF

Walkers throughout history:

Wandering mystics/monks, philosophers, medieval craftspeople, scholars, romantic poets, seekers of support/truth (ideas/skills/words/causes), traveling doctors, itinerant musicians, contemporary journalists

Artist/writers/thinkers have, for centuries, championed walking and travel as both physically/emotionally rewarding

BROAD TIMELINE

• 1702
  • Matsuo Bashō publishes Oku-no-hosomichi [Narrow Road to the Deep North] – a travelogue of poetry and prose reflecting on 5-month walking journey around Japan
• 1780s-1850s
  • Romantic colonial long walks (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau
• Mid to late 1800’s
  
  • The terms of flânerie date to the 16th or 17th century, denoting strolling, idling, often with the connotation of wasting time. But it was in the 19th century that a rich set of meanings and definitions surrounding the flâneur took shape.
• 1920s
  
  • Dada/Surrealists were planning excursions and walks
• 1950s
  
  • Situationists develop the dérive (drift)
  • Performative action in contemporary artistic practice stems from postwar art-making (there was a dramatic shift in the 1950s).
    
• 1958
  
  • Allan Kaprow establishes the idea of the happening (a call/invitation for artists to abandon object-based practices for limitless investigation of relationships between ideas/acts/everyday life)
• Mid-1960s
  
  • Photo/Video allowed capturing of these events
• 1960s-70s
  
  • experimental practices (conceptual performance, land art, process art, readymades, found materials, joining of art and life)
  • Examples: 
    • >>> Fluxus – street theatre, tours, impromptu performances (George Maciunas, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, Nam June Paik)
    • >>> Art Povera in Italy – use of humble materials to free oneself from conventions of art market and corporatization of art – disavow singular maker.
    • >>> Land Art – developed out of Minimalism in 1966-67
• 1970s-today
  • > Several exhibitions have been staged with a focus on walking as artistic practice
  • > Examples:
    • >>> Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967 – 2017
    • >>> Walking Sculpture 1967-2015 
    • >>> Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff — 40 Years of Art Walking (2013)
    • >>> Artists’ Walks: The Persistence of Peripateticism (2013)
    • >>> Walking and Thinking and Walking (1996)
    • >>> Walk Ways (2002)