Walking as an art form

Associated media

‘The Art of Walking: A Field Guide

Edited by David Evans

The Art of Walking: A Field Guide is what might be called ‘a generative grammar of the legs’ and is an engaging and timely publication, but, if one will excuse the pun, turns out to be slightly more pedestrian than expected. So, what did I expect and what does the book have to offer?

It opens with an invitation to artist Peter Liversidge to make a series of proposal statements addressed to the reader, and which echo earlier conceptual pieces by other artists, not necessarily related to walking.

The book is divided into seven sections, called ‘walks’. These are ‘Footprints and Lines’, ‘Writers and Philosophers’, ‘Marches and Processions’, Aliens, Dandies and Drifters’, ‘Slapstick’, Studios, Museums and Biennales’, and finally, ‘Dog Walkers’.

Inevitably, there will be other walking related categories such as ‘pilgrimage’ or ‘fitness’ that do not feature and indeed many of the artists in each category could appear in another, and one or two actually do. The categories seem to determine how we read the work, and I’m not sure it is helpful to be told that ‘slapstick’ is there almost as light relief from heavier categories such as ‘Writers and Philosophers’, as walking is not quite like that. One of the reasons for what might be seen as an arbitrary grouping of work is that of the publication itself being an example of dérive (an unplanned journey), or drifting, through its subject, yet is not able to fully abandon itself to this approach in the way that a walker might wander or indeed as a reader might.

The publication refers to itself as a ‘field guide’, but it does not fully achieve this quality, in many ways it is more like a compendium, despite the headings with numbered walks. There is an attempt by the designers to make it feel like a guide the reader could fit into their back-pack but this does not really work, in particular the inclusion of blank pages for notes, as in a map or log book, uses an inappropriate glossy finished paper on which ink smudges, and it’s not pocketbook size. Peter Liversidge’s introductory artists proposals, while interesting, do not sit easily with the aims of the rest of the book. In other contexts perhaps these criticisms would not be appropriate, but it was clearly one of the aims of this publication to create this association with a walker’s guide.

The book is to be applauded for bringing together, perhaps for the first time, a wide range of interesting artists whose work is related to ‘walking’. These are mostly quite well known, from the likes of Francis Alys to Richard Long, but I wonder how much time was spent researching those less well-known artists working in the ‘field’, and there are many I think.

Despite these criticisms, this book makes for a stimulating and very useful introduction to the genre of walking as an art form in itself, or as integral to art practice. The material here could feature in a more deeply researched publication that is able to place the artwork in more coherent, social, historical and cultural contexts but on the other hand I feel the extensive use of visual images and lack of blocks of dense text do make this book accessible to someone new to the genre and would encourage them to look further.

The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, edited by David Evans, is published by Black Dog Publishing. 192 pp., 170 colour and mono illus.  ISBN 978-1-907317-87-3 (pbk)