WALK Seminar And Exhibition Seminar and exhibition to launch WALK 3 March 2011 - 17 March 2011
Contents
Tim Brennan: W.A.L.K. From Nomad to Monad
Mike Collier presentation forW.A.L.K
Dave Harvey: Mycerniusto Chephren
John Kefla Kerr: W.A.L.K. SYNOPSIS
Alex Lockwood: WALKresearch
Sally Madge: shelter 2002 – 2010 Brian Thompson: W.A.L.K Statement
Tim Brennan W.A.L.K. From Nomad to Monad Over the past 2 decades my practice has centered upon the ‘walk ofintention’. This hasinvolved the development of a methodology based on the guided walk-form that I refer to asthe manoeuvre. The work exists between traditions of performance art, loco-description, history and journeying and surfaces as a radicalmode of antiquarianism. Each walk-work is built entirely from quotationsthat have been drawn from diverse sources and scored along a route ofmy own pre-design.Whilst walking with small groups of between 12-15 participants, each text isread aloud at key ‘stations’ en route (West, 1778). At times walkers are invited to take up the presentation of the readings. In this way, I and the participants are implicated in a ‘doing of history’, the performativity of which focuses human experiencewithin lived and perceived historical horizons(historicity): ‘The sociality ofspace, which makesit a ‘place’, isjust the ‘trace’ of human intentionality.’ (Brennan, 2001) I have produced around forty of these walkssince 1993 through urban and rural areas, museums, archives and otherinterior and exteriorspaces. Sixguidebooks/itineraries have also emerged from the practice. The publishing of guidebooks offers a further dimension in which the relationship between historical‘trace’(performance registration) and potential activity (instrumental instruction) are brought togetherin a single textual work. The manoeuvre as both discursive performance and printed score may then be seen as a body of highly structured ‘poetry’ that approachesthe ‘world’ as‘language’; a built environment of text. My role within this contextshiftsform ‘guide’ to that of ‘grammarian’.Both the performance and printed itinerary elements of the manoeuvre are subject (like anything else) to shiftsin context and environment - architectural space isin constant negotiation and frequent change which makesthe notion of ‘fixing’ and plotting itineraries a matter of contingency. I amcurrently exploring the politics of the manoeuvre, one underpinned by an essential tension between the concepts of ‘nomadism’, (Hesse, 1920;Chatwin, 1996; White, 2004) and ‘monadism’(Dee, 1564, Leibniz, 1714,Benjamin, 1928) whereby, what appears at first hand to be a process of liberated ‘itinerancy’ revealsitself, aftercloser criticalreflection, to exist as aesthetic objecthood (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). This materiality when ‘talked’ to and ‘walked with’invokes older pre-modern secular and non-secular practices of antiquarianism and theological wayfaring (via dolorosa). Tim Brennan April 2011
Mike Collier
Presentation for W.A.L.K. My work explores the interrelated nature of ecological and cultural ideas through a detailed study of local environments and (through walking) our embodied engagement with ‘landscape’.” For example, 24 Birds of Fisherman’s Path recalls a series of walks I did as in the early 1960’s from Freshfield Station along Fisherman’s Path on the Sefton Coast, through the pinewoods, slacks, saltmarsh and sand. It is based on memory and many of the names of the birds are historically local to Lancashire. Craw (Rook), Woofell (Blackbird), Doney (Dunnock), Mawp (Bullfinch), Fell Peggy (Willow Warbler), Bodkin (Reed Bunting), Stanechaker (Wheatear), Chitty (Meadow Pipit), Swat (Redshank), Learock (Skylark), Doup (Carrion Crow), Throstle (Song Thrush), Ullet, (Tawny Owl), Spadger (House Sparrow), Deviling (Swift), Purres (Dunlin), Haggister (Magpie), Snent (Sanderling), Cruchet (Woodpigeon), Whaup (Curlew), Youlring (Yellow Hammer), Crakle (Mistle Thrush), Tewit (Lapwing), Gowk (Cuckoo). These names are a poetic reminder that an understanding and feeling for the natural environment was not just the preserve of the wealthy and landed gentry. They are what local people called the birds – and they reflect more closely than current nomenclature either the look, sound or action of the bird in its environment. My use of text, therefore, hasits roots in the very essence of our local use of language – how our use of language – local language – developed from our embodied experience of the world; the relationship between oursense of the world and the way, through language, we communicate this sense, suggesting that (early) language is not separate from, but very much embedded in, our environment – our sensual experience of the world around us. The act of walking through the environment is central to my work. The experience of walking is arguably one of the most egalitarian ways in which we can perceive and interact with the richness of the world in all its natural,social and political complexity. Urban walkers from the northern industrial cities were amongst the first groups of people in the 19th Century to challenge the view that the rights of property in the countryside were absolute. Victorian ‘ramblers’ tore down illegal obstructions on footpaths and the most famous‘direct action’ for accessto the countryside in the 20th Century wasthe masstrespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District. These new works reflect a twenty first century perspective on the relationship between contemporary society and the routes from which our understanding of natural processes comes from; a relationship based more on our direct experience of the environment than on hierarchies of class and ownership.
Dave Harvey Mycerniusto Chephron My work exploresthe relationship between the walk, the land and the process of charting this action. Using handmade camerasthat enable the exposure of an entire length offilmin a single image, I amable to record a journey in its entirety. I aminterested in the visible scarsfound in landscapes – the product of ancient walkways and paths, the invisible political boundariesthat demark territories, and the concepts around the charting and surveying processesthat are used to map these. Transporting the camera through the land, the rhythm of the walk, the undulation of the terrain, and climatic changes are all transformed into photographic trace. This work isthe result of a walk between two of the great pyramids, Mycernius and Chephren, in Giza, Egypt . I work on a large scale, often producingC-type prints 30 feet in length ormore, requiring the viewer to become involved in theirreinterpretation of the journey asthey walk the length of the work. A major part of my work involvesthe designing and construction of handmade camerasto enable the production highly specific forms ofimagery. These cameras are often tailored to individual projects. The process of designing these camerasis an attempt to move away from the constraints of the photographic image, capturing only a fraction of a second, to map out the temporal nature ofthewalk into a new form of photographic trace. Drawing from the language of maps and cartographic processes, the entire length of a journey is mapped out into a single, panoramic, photographic image. Presentation of the work is often minimal in an attempt to get the viewer to connect with the photograph as a physical object rather than an image, bringing us back to the language of the map as artifact.
John Kefla Kerr W.A.L.K. SYNOPSIS I began my W.A.L.K. presentation by outlining an important ‘enabling condition’ for my work as a composer, namely that music and sound are always already subjectively immersive, omnipresent and interpenetrative. In attending to such aspects of music’s ontology (what Caroline Abbate calls its “drastic ineffability”) I look for ways of eliding distinctions between sacred and secular, thereby positing questions about the nature and status of the everyday. My method involves engineering encounters (performances etc.) that attempt to shed light upon such questions. I presented two brief extracts at the seminar. The first was from Triptych Antwerp, a multimedia installation created in response to several walks I took in the city of Antwerp. The piece adopts the 17th century, triple meter form of the Passacaglia (literally “street walk”)—a ‘genre’ that formalises the idea of the urban-walk-as-music. Triptych Antwerp’s musical component presents a derivative of a ground bass, with ‘variations’ in the form of surround-sound location recordings. A question I ask in the piece is ‘to what extent might the Passacaglia yield to or accommodate the contemporary experience of city-centre walking?’ The second extract was from my Sports Centre Opera, Passion, in which a walking audience traverses the five-a-side football pitches of a large sports hall, encountering en route a variety of musically/sonically-inflected scenes derived from observations I made during a two-year artist residency I undertook in Cumbria in the aftermath of the foot and mouth crisis. Much of Passion is concerned with bringing the outdoorsinside. Salient features of the rural and urban environment (from cars and sheep to bells and low flying aircraft) are visited upon the promenading audience. Musical representations of walking and the transcendent/spiritual inflection brought to bear upon them by means of a certain handling of audio materials evokes the idea of walking as a sacramental or devotional act—a kind of pilgrimage.
Alex lockwood W.A.L.K. Research My research interests are formed around the experiences of affect in the making of public and private worlds. I work from the position ofseparating out affect, emotion and feeling into the categories of: “feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal” (Shouse, 2005: 1). However, I am particularly interest in affect as theorized by scholars such as Ann Cvetkovich, Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant, who have put into circulation the concept of public feelings to “challenge the idea that feelings, emotions, or affects properly and only belong to the domain of private life and to the intimacies of family, love, and friendship” (Cvetkovich & Pellegrini 1). For public feelings scholars, a critical programme is one that destabilizes a worldview of politics as the only/proper mechanism for managing and privatising public feelings. The mediation of public feelings when concerned with environmental politics is a vital component of my research, accumulated into an ‘archive of green feeling’. Most recently, my work has focused on the emotional textures of the Save Our Forests campaign enacted through Twitter and other digital and traditional media, a campaign important for the way it mediates a public feelings culture impacting on British political and ecological life. An understanding of the affects in circulation around the protests offers an insight into how affect, emotions and feelings are pivotal to the possibilities of forging environmentallyresponsible public cultures: how a love of walking in the woods can be connected through informed spacesto mobilise as politicalforce: in the 12 months to February 2010, the English adult population made 2.86 billion visits to the natural environment, nearly half of which (48 percent) involved walking (mainly accompanied by a dog). This phenomenal accumulation of affective experiencesinfoldsinto a politics and economy of walking.1 What I’m trying to get at is an understanding of the role played by different affective environments, including forests and online spaces, which in turn provide an effectivity for environmental stewardship, including channelling public feelings into a mobilized political force to halt harmful legislation. Walking in the woods then becomes an act of everyday citizenship that can be mobilized into an agency of public feeling. Walkers move into the sylvan landscape, generally accompanied by non-humans, if at all. And this question of everyday citizenship, for Lauren Berlant, “is a status whose definitions are always in process. It is continually being produced out of a political, rhetorical, and economic struggle over who will count as‘the people’ and how social membership will be measured and valued”
1 Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment, p.6
(Berlant 1997: 20). This question of citizenship remains central to the next stage of my research.
References Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America goes to Washington City. Durham and London: Duke U.P. Cvetkovich, Ann & Ann Pellegrini. 2003. ‘Public Sentiments’ in The Feminist Scholar Online, 2:1. Shouse, Eric. 2005. Feeling, Emotion, Affect. Media/Culture Journal, 8(6). Accessed 12 th March 2011, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php
Sally Madge shelter 2002 – 2010 Presentation forW.A.L.KResearch seminar In the autumn of 2002 I constructed a small drystone shelter on the rocky northern shore of Lindisfarne, a tidal island accessible via a causeway from the Northumberland mainland. The sheltersurvived eight years of winterstorms and spring tides and gained status among locals and visitors as a public artwork,site specific installation, museum and/orspace forreverie, play, pilgrimage, parties,sleeping and bird-watching. Most people came acrossthe building quite by chance while walking around the island orjust exploring off the beaten track, although as word of mouth (and Web)spread many also followed recommendations. In both casesthe shelter would become a favoured waymarker and destination, with visitors often then graduating to fully-fledged active participation in its development. And, over time the interiorfilled with a bricolage of flotsam, found objects, handmade artefacts and personal mementos, including comments in a book left there. Originally an anonymous, playful, unofficial artwork, the shelter gradually became a collaborative venture with all those taking part assuming an integralrole in its development. The boundaries between artist/maker and visitor/spectator became not only blurred but interchangeable. Iregularly tidied, edited and rearranged the contents – and so did others, often not to my liking. The shelter became a locusfor an ongoing symbolic engagement between strangers(sometimes humorous, frequently poignant, occasionally unpleasant), and Ifound myself disoriented as well asintrigued by the fact that ownership and provenance had become such amoveable feast. In October 2010 I heard froma contact on the island thatsomeone had destroyed the shelter. Having rescued some of the contents, I made safe remaining walls, piled up the roof timbers nearby and left the site open for furtherintervention. Thinking about the project’slife and demise, itsinformal,spontaneous and unmediated exchanges ofideas and practicesseemespecially significant and worth recording for posterity. While wishing to remain true to such an ethos, I would also like to continue this discussion as a more structured collaboration. I have now embarked upon a process of archiving, exhibiting and presentingmaterial concerning various aspects of the shelter’s history. In addition, there are plansforit to be rebuilt, which will inevitably entail a rather different approach, Thus, in parallel with the shelter’s physical existence, I aim to explore some of the questionsthrown up by its shifting significance and statusthrough an active research process which gatherstogether layers of commentary emanating froma range of sources.
Prof. Brian Thompson W.A.L.K. Statement February 2011 My research is based within Fine Art/ Craft practice and seeksto give new insights and approaches into the use ofsculpture in giving the geniusloci or a sense of chosen places. My work is topographical in nature and is part of a personalresearch project drawing togetherinterestsin a physical engagement with landscape through walking and related approachesto mapping with the developments of new craft approachesinmaking sculpture. I aminterested in how journeys explore landscapes, man-made or otherwise; how paths get worn, compress and build up over many generations. These journeysshow the topography of the world, revealsomething ofits history and give insightsinto how we come to know and navigate. These ‘walks’ actual orimaginary – are recorded through tracingsfrommaps or aerial photographs and become the traced images used to make precision digital templatesfrom which layers ofsheet materials are cut each layer becoming a template for the succeeding layer. Through small increments ofsize, introduced by the process, the sculptures evolve tapering downward from top to base;marking, layer upon layer, in geologicalfashion, the time of theirmaking. A significant part of the development of the sculptural work isthe approach to formand the considered use ofmaterials and associated processes. Sometimesthese become ‘patterns’ for casting or constructionsin materialsrelevant to the location;such as wood, iron, glass,stone orlead. The sculpturesserve asrecords, memories,souvenirs or trophies, The Underground Railroad series are based on the “safe routes” to freedom taken by slavesin the USA from a 19thC map. The pieces were cast into Iron in Indiana and are now part of the permanent collection of the Outdoor Sculpture Museum in Solsberry Indiana. Other work relevant to WALK and using the same methodology, working frommaps, GPS and aerial photographs of journeys and cast into a variety of materials are: 1. Walkstaken by me in the UK and overseas- artist astourist in the manner of the Grand Tour 2. Walks with artists 3. HistoricalJourneys; Artists, Poets or otherwise
Brian Thompson March 2011