Walking and Art

There is no need to add art to walking. Walking already contains its own dimension of poetry. Practices such as the Situationst derive and psychogeography, for all their continuing charm, tend to suggest that just plain walking is not enough – that walking, in its ordinary, prosaic incarnation, lacks the capacity to offer anything but the empty after-image of a relentlessly alienated existence. But this is not true. Walking, as I say, already contains an aspect of art; it is just that it contains nothing of the art institution. It has no need whatsoever of galleries, biennales, curatorial essays, etc. Its dimension of art is very much linked to its elusiveness, to its refusal to attain proper shape, to appear as anything more than a break in the day, a diversion, a chance to get outside for a while. So my aim is not to drag walking within the accepted field of art, but rather to find oblique means to acknowledge a space of difference and affinity. My aim is to place art beside walking – not within it, but beside it. In this manner, if only through gestures of ellipsis, something of the poetry and alterity of walking may get picked up within art.