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”).