Author Archives: brogan

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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? … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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.

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 – … Continue reading →

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.

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →