So much written on walking…

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.