November 2022
Walking & Process: “If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art,” Fulton explains. “The physical involvement of walking creates a receptiveness to the landscape. I walk on the land to be woven into nature. A road walk can transform the everyday world and give a heightened sense of human history.” - Hamish Fulton
Walking & Process: ‘I’ve drunk from every river on Dartmoor’: land artist Richard Long on changing the face of art
“Long would go on epic walks and come back with nothing more than a photograph of a ring of stones he’d made on a mountain top or the briefest description of where he’d been. That would be the work.”
“I now have a lot of history. I feel as though each time I go on a walk I carry the history of all the other walks I’ve done with me in my rucksack. And why would I not?” he adds in a faintly challenging tone.
“Making art by walking has given me the freedom to work anywhere in the world. But I’ve come to realise that if I’d been confined, for whatever reason, within a 10-mile radius of Bristol, I could still have achieved everything I’ve wanted to do as an artist.”
Process: Mary Kelly’s Revolution Is Ongoing - “The work is divided into six sections, 135 parts, with accompanying essays and footnotes, and like much of Kelly’s output it feels museological, even archaeological.”
Art Parks: Meet the Woman Planning an Underwater Highline - “The ReefLine is a manifestation of all the spheres I care most about,” Ms. Caminos said. “It’s art as a tool for change. It’s sustainable. It’s informed by science and technology. And above all, it’s participatory, free and open to the public.
Walking: The Body on A Long Walk - “The best walkers I’ve seen have been in their 60s and 70s, with few sports or other injuries. A well-cared for body is capable of near indefinite, simple locomotion. Again, this is what got us here.”
Art & Nature: The Optimistic Art of Mary Mattingly: “The project also marked a shift in the orientation of Mattingly’s work — most of her subsequent projects have been in outdoor public spaces, not galleries or museums…”
Art & Media: The Creativity Supply Chain - “Yes, there will always be financial markets built around monetizing the work of top creators. But the reasons why people create are far more universal & fundamental to our common humanity, & these reasons result in a tremendous amount of aggregate value”
Mapping & Art: Peter Gorman [Barely Maps]
Walking: The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life - “My strolls taught me that walking truly is a discipline and an art. The discipline of removing assumption — thinking that something is going to be beautiful does as much damage to a place as thinking it will be ugly. It is an art of attention.”
Mapping and Walking
“Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it. This has as much to do with the space as with our hardwired instincts to determine if it is safe.” - Wilfried Hou Je Bak - page 6
“The psychogeography project project started because I wanted to say something about cities. I had no idea what I would want to say, but that’s what it started as-a systematic process of finding out. Slowly, while doing that, you build up enough understanding to be able to say something.” - Wil fried Hou Je Bak - page 12
“Walking blurs the borders between representing the world and designating oneself as a piece of it, between live art and object-based art. Artists moved from depicting places to pointing them out or demonstrating them, like Andrew Breton quickly walking in and out of local cinema screenings in 1920s Paris. And since the fabled nontour of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, they seem to be intent on taking us with them as well.” - page 13
“Fellow Oulipian, mathematician, scholar and poet Jacques Roubaud “writest with his feet,” using place names and arbitrary concocted walks to help him mentally compose his poems and haibuns. He calls the process “sonnet-walking.” - page 14
“Art is not a career, it is my life.” - Tehching Hsieh
“Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the change, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the friction of an underlying pattern to assert itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin de siecle decadence, a poetic entropy-but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.” - Ian Sinclair, page 25
“For me photography is most alluring when both the person behind the lens and what is being photographed self-consciously manifest their subjectivity. Travelling across ‘Britain to discover America is only one of the many ways in which such subjectivity might remake the world in both photographic and material form….The psychogeographer….knows that the world cannon be recorded, it can only be remade.” - Stewart Home, page 26
Maps and Nature: OF WANDERING ANGELS AND LOST LANDMARKS - “Stories are maps, a string of landmarks that tell us where we’ve been and point the way home. They make the world cohere, but our world has come resolutely unstuck from the bearings we have attempted to set.”
Walking and Nature: To Get Out of Your Head, Get Out of Your House - "The nature walkers had lower anxiety, better mood, and better working memory. They were also much less likely to agree with statements such as “I often reflect on episodes of my life that I should no longer concern myself with.”
Photography and Process: Josef Koudelka
Walking and Process: The Thinking Path - “…even just doing a loop on my neighborhood streets—all those make for wonderful “thinking paths” in my experience. The key is to be physically active but not so active that you have to think about it.”
Process and Health: The Quest by Circadian Medicine to Make the Most of Our Body Clocks - “Circadian researchers generally suggest getting as much sunlight as you can during your day, especially upon waking, dimming the lights before sleep and making your bedroom dark. Front-load your calories earlier in the day.”
Car Culture: What I Mean When I Say 'Ban Cars' - “Quite simply, “the ban cars movement” wants us to reckon with the truth about the automobile’s impacts on society, to weigh the bad against the good.”
Car Culture: Alex Pareene tackles car culture and the rise in pedestrian deaths: "There is no real walking lobby. Biking and mass transit have many vocal advocates, but I think walking, an activity fundamental to human mental and physical health, needs more evangelists"
Process: Storytelling is the key to learning how to be creative: “Kids are super creative because they're always role-playing and telling stories. Could creativity training based less on logical rules and more on storytelling be massively more effective?”
Car Culture and Walk: Alex Wolfe on "Walking America’s car-centric hellscape" in Grist: “I think you get such a limited scope of what these places are [while driving],” he said. “I get a lot of joy out of figuring out why these places are terrible, and more often than not they’re not terrible at all.”
Photography: The Online Photographer Mike Johnstone with a nice essay in the New Yorker about the hidden gems hiding in your phones cameraroll: “Ultimately, specificity is part of photography’s subversiveness; a photograph can never really be allegorical. You’re you, and your pictures are yours, and what you bring to a photograph is not separate from it.”
Photography: In the Washington Post, Kenneth Dickerman tells the story of Rian Dundon's lost photobook 'Changsha:' “But once the books seemed to disappear, it became impossible for many people, including me, to get one and see what the fuss was all about. As things like this often do, “Changsha” became a legendary, unattainable book.”
Nature: Mushrooms are talking to each other, smart fungi, smart, smart fungi: "Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech... spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words"