Walking (not a medium)

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.