brogan bunt

Begin with a concern with something.

But this something can only be appreciated with more things. The things come as the something seems to obtain coherence. And in this coming to coherence the something slips away in its simplicity. It comes accompanied by other things.

Thoughts, words, images – these are all other things.

They are not things that fall on one side of an imaginary line. They are not neatly opposed to the something that prompted them. The something and the other things are all things and there is nothing in any of this that can be described as entirely mine.

All these other things manifest my thingness, my inability to fully countenance myself beyond the alienation of things. They also lead me back to the something.

On the typographic shrubbery constituted by the poem along a path that leads neither away from things nor toward the mind, a kind of fruit is formed from an agglomeration of spheres, each filled with a drop of ink.¹

Hardly simply the blackberries themselves. Hardly simply the experience of seeing them. Hardly even the strangeness of writing something of this down. But all and none of these. The poem shapes the shrubbery along a path that leads neither one way or the other – neither toward the simplicity of the blackberries themselves, nor toward the integrity of a mental image. Nonetheless this negative space somehow provides a foundation for ‘a kind of fruit’ to form, gaining its essence precisely through the alienation of writing, in the alienated image of writing, in the blood of writing.

But this is not to say that there is only writing. The blackness is right there, but also points elsewhere and negates every effort to see. The blackberries remain close but there is nothing to see. There is only the instant of the blackberries appearance and disappearance within the poem.

So we have the binary oppositions, present/represented, direct/mediated.

From a Deconstructive persepective, we would then have to demonstrate that the second, apparently secondary, supplementary term is actually primary – presence emerges as an effect of representation and direct experience as an effect of mediation.

Strictly speaking this requires a third term, one that is not simply caught up in the initial binary relations – within the Derridean canon: writing, differance, the trace, the supplement, etc.

This is all very well, but tends to position the first term – presence, direct experience – as the enemy, as something that must be obliterated. Of course this represents a crude and unfair reading of the Deconstructive tradition – in the case of Derrida particularly, one that fails to take account of his intimate concern with the intricacies of being as a complex field and as a space of otherness. But nonetheless the problem remains that experience itself seems infinitely other and distant. The field of writing appears much closer.

The concern now is to permit experience – the complexity of experience – to somehow make a return. This entails recognising a work of mediation within experience without making experience altogether disappear.

She asked the stranger why she was taking photographs. It was obvious to me. There was a large moon beside the lighthouse. There was a photogenic scene. The stranger’s reply confirmed my view. Afterwards we couldn’t help making the commonplace observation that it would be better for the scene just to be seen – that there was no need to photograph it.

Now, however, I am unsure. While I remain sensitive to the issue, the need at times to avoid the apparatus of the camera and the misguided utopia of subsequent, permanent visual possession, I find myself wondering whether there is ever really a simple experience of looking? In recognising a picturesque and ephemeral scene, don’t we instantly project it into the non-time of the iconic and into a future in which it is no longer seen? Aren’t there always motions of displacement within seeing itself? Seeing itself is divided, unable to quite hold on to the particular without an aspect of recognition and projection. The camera simply exacerbates this. It can at times crudely disrupt modes of apparently direct experiential engagement, but it is never fundamentally alien to them. Seeing is never simple. It is complex at the outset. Mediation is implicit within the experience of seeing itself, rather than an external imposition.

Such a long time since I last wrote here. 6 months.

There is more, but it is not public.

So many things cannot be publicly written.

Almost everything.

Two conceptual schemas for making sense of media:

• Through which: transit from A to B via C (media). Distancing, separation, delay, encoding, decoding.
• Supported by: sustaining environment, not so much a line as an enabling space, substance, framework, habitat – for instance, walking can serve as support system for a range of artistic practices, without itself being reducible to a form of art per se.

It would be easy to be a fake walking-based artist in the manner of Richard Long or Hamish Fulton. You wouldn’t have to go on a walk at all. You could just write in bold text:

24 HOURS, BLINDFOLDED, WALKING IN THE DESERT
or
365 DAYS OF PUTTING OUT THE GARBAGE, NOT THINKING

You thus employ a minimal strategy of writing to refer to an ephemeral practice that can never be adequately documented in the gallery setting, that can never literally take shape as an art work. But of course the question remains – was the experience of the walk the actual aesthetic phenomenon or was it the act of representing the walk in a highly restrained, linguistic, poetic fashion? And since language is so often identified with the conceptual, was it the underlying concept that was properly aesthetic, rather than the act of walking itself? Or are these two somehow bound together in ways that are difficult to precisely describe, that perhaps describe the specific nature of the brief title? Whatever, it is quite clear that I could lie about going on the walk and simply provide the title. This is to suggest, rather obviously, the semiotic status of this kind of walking based art project. As Umberto Eco explains, the fundamental nature of the sign is that it permits lying. It depends upon a crucial distance between sign and referent, in which truth is never guaranteed.

In her recent study of walking-based art practice, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (2013), Karen O’Rourke reviews traditions of practice from Baudelaire’s flaneur, through to the Dadaists parodic Paris tours, the Situationist derives, the counter land art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Dutch and British psychogeography, the audio walks of Janet Cardiff and all manner of contemporary walking based locative media projects. Throwing a very broad net she traces links to the modernist avant-garde, conceptualism, performance art, land art, etc. She could actually have thrown a much broader net again, considering the literary and philosophical heritage (Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kierkagaard, etc.), as well the range of disciplinary perspectives that inform traditions of art walking – sociology, ethnography, architecture, psychology, environmentalism, etc. All of this is to indicate the complex weave of practices and associations that inform walking based art and that serve to suggest that there is a good basis for considering walking as diverse and well-constituted artistic medium. Yet my aim here is to argue a contrary position – not so much to argue that walking cannot be a medium as to examine the contradictions inherent in its emerging medial status.

I reside in the middle of Paris. When I leave my home, I long for the countryside and solitude. […] The moment I slip away from the retinue of the wicked is delightful; and as soon as I find myself under the trees and in the midst of the greenery, I believe I am in an earthly paradise and I savour an inner pleasure as intense as if I were the happiest of mortals. (Rousseau, *Reveries of a Solitary Walker*, “Walk 8”)

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absoutely free from all worldly engagements. (Thoreau, *Walking*, para. 6)

Only Art Resulting
From the Experience
Of Individual Walks
A Walk Has a Life of its Own
And Does not Need to Be
Materialised into an Artwork
An Artwork may be Purchased
But a walk cannot be sold
(Hamish Fulton)`

This is not Land Art (Hamish Fulton)

But what does walking mean to me?
I am less concerned to defamiliarise space than to engage with it, to discover and follow existing, sometimes latent paths.

Walking relates to art in a number of ways:

• Walking as the making strange of typically urban social space (the classic form of the derive) – affective inclination and alienating protocols
• Walking as ephemeral practice – issues of documentation and non-objective, non-commodifiable form (Richard Long, Hamish Fulton)
• Walking as a form of socially engaged practice – experiential participation/conversation, exploration of an issue, a social field (SquatSpace, Simon Pope) versus walking as solitary aesthetic mode (Rousseau, Thoreau, etc.)
• Walking in relation to the abstraction of terrain via maps and GPS

Informal means (casual, just walking) versus imposed, artificial schemas (algorithmic psychogeography)

Walking’s relation to the aesthetic as an embodied experience of freedom. There is no need, in this sense, that it take expressive form, that it become an objectified and communicative art form. Rather it short circuits the need for art as such – for any form of mediating artistic agency; the aesthetic is constituted within the experience of walking itself (at least potentially). Walking is less an artistic medium than a medium of aesthetic experience.

For my purposes three different contexts for considering issues of media and mediation are relevant:
1. There is firstly the context of media and communication studies, in which media is linked specifically to the transmission of messages via an intermediary channel or means. Transmission is of course never quite the right word because it is quickly acknowledged that the intermediary plays a more active role. Rather than simply passing some distinct content from A to B, it frames and represents information, as well as describing a social relation in which A and B are fundamentally distant, fundamentally inaccessible to one another, in which information is only obtainable, only takes adequate shape, via the only every apparently compliant medial agency. This notion of media is fundamentally concerned with technical media, with media that acts as a prosthetic – that extends communication spatially and temporally via inhuman means.
2. Then there is the artistic concern with medium and media. Here rather than representing an alien, usurping force, the medium – the single medium – serves as a sensible ground for art making. Within modernity, the medium is a reassuringly material thing. It is an environment opposed to the abstraction and the flux of modernity. It is a place in which human experience can take pure and non-instrumental shape. Within this context, the media is not simply the plural of medium, but represents an antithetical force – a plurality that is confusing, that draws us away from the clarity of simple material constraints (Rosalind Krauss). In this sense, media are associated with precisely the alienated world of communication described in context 1 above.
3. Finally there is the more general sense of mediation that is not restricted to systems of communication or particular sets of material artistic means, but instead is implicit within being generally. This is the sense in which Hegel describes all determinate being as necessarily mediated – it takes coherent shape in terms of what it is not. Actually, we could describe a much longer philosophical history reaching back to at least the Pre-Socratics. Think, for instance, of Parmenides concept of the undivided unity of being and all the consequent dilemmas associated with denying altogether the possibility of non-being. Then of the many prior and subsequent Pre-Socratics who insisted upon a relational conception of being, in which the complexity of the world emerges from the dynamic interaction of simple elements. The problem of mediation has been in this sense vital to philosophy from the outset. This broader conception of mediation extends well beyond the contours of technical media, well beyond the character of art-making. It is a kind of anti-ontology, in which mediation emerges as a primary feature of being rather than a supplementary imposition (Derrida).

We tend to speak of a “medium of communication”. Walking is not a medium of communication – or is not necessarily a medium of communication. Walking does not necessarily serve to transmit some form of signal from point A to point B. Walking is not even necessarily instrumentally concerned with getting from point A to point B. Walking does not primarily represent, it does not primarily imitate, it is not primarily concerned with carrying, storing and delivering some specified content. This affects even the status of walking as performance. A performance is always properly for an audience (even an imaginary one). Walking can certainly be a mode of performance, but it can also be an action in the world that assumes no audience whatsoever. So walking projects something like a more pure ‘in-between’. It is medial in essence without any need to conceive origin or destination. Walking mediates my experience of space and structures a particular experience of time. It places the emphasis on experience rather than communication or representation. It summons others to walk, rather than to watch me walking. Paradoxically, it is in this overall sense of demanding participation and resisting the nature of an ordinary, communicative and commodifiable artistic object, that walking discovers its relevance as an aesthetic medium. If, as Ranciere, argues the aesthetic is always about pushing at the proper limits of art, then walking can appear as a sphere of aesthetic action – specifically in terms of how it disturbs traditional notions of an artistic medium. Walking gains status as an artistic medium by undermining the traditional contours of an artistic medium (solidity, objectification, etc.), but at the same insists upon traditional values of affective human experience that run counter to the logic of more general regimes of communication media. It thus employs one logic to confront art and precisely the opposite logic to confront the wider mediated world. Walking is emblematic of fundamental paradox within contemporary art – the notion of medium is rejected and yet an attachment to local sensibility remains.

Walking is not quite the point.
If the Situationists walked drunkenly through Paris it was not to insist upon the artistic potential of walking, it was to rethink aspects of social space. Walking is just a means of shifting beyond ordinary artistic practices of representation. It eludes conventional artistic formalisation. It is ephemeral.
But now it emerges as a genre of artistic practice. There is a tradition of artistic walking.
Has it actually attained to the status of medium?
But if it has, it is only problematically. Firstly, it is a profoundly egalitarian medium. Anybody can do it, even somebody in a wheelchair. There is no particular skill required. Nor does artistic walking instantly distinguish itself from ordinary walking. Artistic walking lacks not only a specialised skill set but also any particular demand for a sophisticated conceptual schema (artistic conceit). It can simply be walking. Yet this is complex. It both undermines the conventional medium and yet then celebrates similar values of sensible engagement.

Walking as Medium
Walking is not a solid medium. It is a temporal and ephemeral medium. Tracks may remain, but not the act of walking itself which disappears in the process of happening.
Walking as Media The term media is not simply the plural of medium. It actually represents a passage beyond the possibility of mediums per se. It is not concerned with an intimate, focused engagement with some present material space, but rather a disturbing sense of dislocation – an endless relay of distancing and delays, a cacophony that refuses to take any kind of adequate coherent shape. The media are particularly associated with the conditions of modern communication systems and particularly also with their technological aspect (a distancing from human intimacy). Walking does not engage, in this sense, strongly with the notion of media. If anything, it represents a field of activity that is more humanly focused. It sets up rhythms of experience that to some extent run contrary to the rhythms of networked, technically mediated experience (even if the latter are often modeled on aspects of walking, running, etc.)
Walking as Mediation This is to think of mediality in its most general sense – as a form of negotiation, as an active and primary process that affects any aspect of experience and being. In this sense, of course, walking serves as vital means of mediating our relationship to the natural and social world.

I began with an ethical concern – to protect some notion of walking from aesthetic sublation.

Now, however, it seems to me less a matter of protecting life from art or art from life (as though each term were somehow weak and easily led astray) than of noting the energy that emerges from their interaction. Their relationship is constituted less in terms of possibilities of unilateral consumption and colonisation than in terms of mutual and energising parasitism. Art and life feed off one another. In the process both are intimately affected. The tension between them is based not upon an absolute distance, but upon mutual excitement as they interact – as each risks disappearing into the other.

Just for a moment focusing on what art contributes to life. In constructing events, in performing life, art makes the contingency of the lived evident. This can involve strong gestures of defamiliarisation or more subtle mediations and meditations (for instance, Duchamp’s “infrathin”).

I seem to have no patience for the essay. Here I am speaking more as a writer than as reader. As a reader, I quite admire a coherent extended argument, but as a writer I quickly grow bored. Much prefer to write in a less sequentially ambitious manner – to make isolated distinct points; the kinds of things that can be written in a single session. I also like to return to the same idea a number of times, each time trying to tease out new features and possibilities. Rather than a linear argument, I circle around the topic and push it in additional directions. The problem for me with the essay is that it obscures my actual process of thinking, which proceeds in fits and starts, which is deeply iterative, which worries a problem until it reaches sufficient clarity to no longer be interesting. This is why I prefer something like the journal form, which permits these kinds of returns, which employs temporality as a line upon which thought can play.

What is it to write poetry? Why do I resist it? Why do I tend to prefer full sentences and paragraphs? What would it mean to return to the poetic? And how would this take shape precisely? Through phrase fragments? Oblique, tentative and loaded observations? I am curious about returning to a mode of writing that I had imagined no longer available to me – that had gradually slipped away. Why? Because it seems to me that poetry is most oriented towards the strangeness of experience, the weird presence of things and to the terrain of intimate – yet immediately detached – feelings and thoughts.

To be a bit more simple and straightforward:

Art develops a renewed focus on the live. This does not emerge simply in its specific relation to the live, but in terms a of larger cultural context in which the live appears as a counter to the endlessly broadening field of digital social engagement. But once having opened up this relation, once having discovered a relation to specific everyday circumstances – once having insinuated itself within the texture of all manner of live actions – art, itself (?) is intrinsically affected. For a start, all the conventional indicators of art making – of representation, documentation, condensation and displacement – become problematic, insufficient, pained. There is a need to base art within the live, as some kind of structuring of the live, but one that appears not so much as an external structural/formal/conceptual imposition as something that somehow responds to the field of live and is inextricably bound to it. In this manner, art resists its characteristic formal mechanisms and tics. It threatens to theatrically dissolve.

More straightforward again:

Art can provide an excuse for life – a rationale for doing something. My ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE project enabled me to take a number of walks in the escarpment and to discover places that I had not previously visited. It provided a structure for my walks and a means of walking more.

Art can interfere with life. Stupid procedures can wreck the natural rhythm of events (or, more properly, the pleasurable rhythm of events). Yet at other times the imposition of additional elements can enrich the event, can make it more pointedly and intensely experienced. Cutting out car pieces and drawing maps on wadded bits of wet paper provide examples for me.

My original assumption that ordinary life needs to be somehow protected from the depradations (the colonising force) of art is dubious. Art can provide ways of rediscovering the possibility of the everyday, of making it lucidly available.

The notion of multiplexing suggests a reserved relation between art and everyday life. Rather than directly correspond, the two maintain a polite distance even within the texture of a single event. At any time life can be separated from art and art from life. However, I am less keen now to insist upon this conjoined but distinct relation. While I have no wish to blur their relation altogether, scrupulous distance is problematic. For a start, it renders both art and life in caricatured form. Art becomes associated with reflection, performance and representation, while life appears as a terrain of unmediated simplicity. Actually I don’t think this was my intention. My aim was more to avoid dialectical sublation on either side, to preserve, as I say, the dynamic tension between art and life. Yet this tension only takes adequate shape if something is genuinely risked – if the insulation is stripped from each of the concurrent signal fields, allowing them to intermingle, short circuit one another and discover new relations.

Of course, properly speaking, multiplexing does not involve physically insulated separation. Rather than distinct wires running in tandem, there is a single wire – a single signal – that is algorithmically composed and decomposed into multiple distinct signals. Insulation then is managed in terms of the sequencing and timing of information. And it is perhaps the certainty of these operations – their neat and systematic patterns of reading and writing – that becomes problematic. It is less a matter of blurring the signals than of deranging them, of enabling diminutions and amplifications of data, points of entropic loss and weird, excessive concentration.

In short, placing art and life side by side – running them together within specific fields of action – has its consequences. The two signals affect one another. Their interaction is disruptive and has consequences for the algorithms that interpret them, that struggle to disaggregate them into component signals. Multiplexing works ultimately to unsettle its own possibility and to undermine the larger categorical system that envisages distinct, determinable signals. Art and life share a common flesh and are both intimately affected – even if only in terms of disturbing their equilibrium, their sense of distinct integral identity. Here it is less a matter of blurring into one another, of becoming indistinguishable, than of risking everything in gestures of intimacy and distance, recognition and withdrawal, temptation and loss, caressing and scarring.