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Walking
Walking surveys the proliferation of pedestrian practices across contemporary art, taking an avowedly political stance on where and how the three practices of art, walking, and writing intersect.
Across the world, walking is a vital way to assert one’s presence in public space and discourse. Walking maps the terrain of contemporary walking practices, foregrounding work by Black artists, Indigenous artists and artists of colour, working-class artists, LGBTQI+ artists, disabled artists and neurodiverse artists, as well as many more who are frequently denied the right to take their places in public space, not only in the street or the countryside, but also in art discourse. This anthology contends that, as a relational practice, walking inevitably touches upon questions of access, public space, land ownership, and use. Walking is, therefore, always a political act.
Artists surveyed include
Stanley Brouwn, Laura Grace Ford, Regina Jose Galindo, Emily Hesse, Tehching Hsieh, Kongo Astronauts, Myriam Lefkowitz, Sharon Kivland, Andre Komatsu, Steve McQueen, Jade Montserrat, Sara Morawetz, Paulo Nazareth, Carmen Papalia, Ingrid Pollard, Issa Samb, Sop, Iman Tajik, Tentative Collective, Anna Zvyagintseva.
Writers include
Jason Allen-Paisant, Tanya Barson, André Brasil, Amanda Cachia, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Annie Dillard, Jacques Derrida, Dwayne Donald, Darby English, Édouard Glissant, Steve Graby, Antje von Graevenitz, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Kathleen Jamie, Carl Lavery, JeeYeun Lee, Michael Marder, Gabriella Nugent, Isobel Parker Philip, Rebecca Solnit.
Across the world, walking is a vital way to assert one’s presence in public space and discourse. Walking maps the terrain of contemporary walking practices, foregrounding work by Black artists, Indigenous artists and artists of colour, working-class artists, LGBTQI+ artists, disabled artists and neurodiverse artists, as well as many more who are frequently denied the right to take their places in public space, not only in the street or the countryside, but also in art discourse. This anthology contends that, as a relational practice, walking inevitably touches upon questions of access, public space, land ownership, and use. Walking is, therefore, always a political act.
Artists surveyed include
Stanley Brouwn, Laura Grace Ford, Regina Jose Galindo, Emily Hesse, Tehching Hsieh, Kongo Astronauts, Myriam Lefkowitz, Sharon Kivland, Andre Komatsu, Steve McQueen, Jade Montserrat, Sara Morawetz, Paulo Nazareth, Carmen Papalia, Ingrid Pollard, Issa Samb, Sop, Iman Tajik, Tentative Collective, Anna Zvyagintseva.
Writers include
Jason Allen-Paisant, Tanya Barson, André Brasil, Amanda Cachia, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Annie Dillard, Jacques Derrida, Dwayne Donald, Darby English, Édouard Glissant, Steve Graby, Antje von Graevenitz, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Kathleen Jamie, Carl Lavery, JeeYeun Lee, Michael Marder, Gabriella Nugent, Isobel Parker Philip, Rebecca Solnit.
- GenresWalking
240 pages, Paperback
Published August 6, 2024
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 2, 2025
'Ableism says: you cannot walk. Racism says: you cannot walk here. Patriarchy says: you must not walk like that. Capitalism says: no walking unless it generates profits for us. And to cap it all, the Western art world comes along to say: you may be walking, and you may have been walking for centuries, but it is not art because we say so and either we will appropriate the bits we currently find useful or we will ignore you completely. Each of these structures contributes to the exclusion of a specific configuration of intersecting ‘you's. And if each of these exclusionary mechanisms is allowed to do its work, all that's left would be white men walking.'
'At all costs we wanted to imitate the motion we felt everywhere else, by synthesising, agitating; and speeding everything up (noise, speech, things to eat and drink, zouc, automobiles). Forgetting ourselves any way possible in any kind of speed.
Then, in this circularity I haunt, I turned my efforts toward seeing the beach's backwash into the nearby eddying void as the equivalent of the circling of this man completely withdrawn into his motor forces; tried to relate them, and myself as well, to this rhythm of the world that we consent to without being able to measure or control its course. I thought how everywhere, and in how many different modes, it is the same necessity to fit into the chaotic drive of totality that is at work, despite being subjected to the exaltations or numbing effects of specific existences. I thought about these modes that are just so many commonplaces: the fear, the wasting away, the tortured extinction, the obstinate means of resistance, the naive belief, the famines that go unmentioned, the trepidation, the stubborn determination to learn, the imprisonments, the hopeless struggles, the withdrawal and isolation; the arrogant powers, the blind wealth, the maintenance of the status quo, the numbness, the hidden ideologies, the flaunted ideologies, the crime, the whole mess, the ways of being racist, the slums, the sophisticated techniques, the simple games, the subtle games, the desertions and betrayals, the unshrinking lives, the schools that work, the schools in ruin, the power plots, the prizes for excellence, the children they shoot, the computers, the classrooms with neither paper nor pencils, the exacerbated starvation, the tracking of quarry, the strokes of luck, the ghettos, the assimilations, the immigrations, the Earth's illnesses, the religions, the mind's illnesses, the musics of passion, the rages of what we so simply call libido, the pleasures of our urges and athletic pleasures, and so many other infinite variations of life and death. That these commonplaces, whose quantities are both countless and precise, in fact produced this Roar; in which we could still hear intoned every language in the world.
Chaos has no language but gives rise to quantifiable myriads of them. We puzzle out the cycle of their confluences, the tempo of their momentums, the similarities of their diversions.'
'The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. Thus the body, a recreational rather than utilitarian entity, doesn't work, but works out. The barbell is only abstracted and quantified materiality to shift around – what used to be a sack of onions or a barrel of beer is now a metal ingot – and the weight machine makes simpler the act of resisting gravity in various directions for the sake of health, beauty, and relaxation. The most perverse of all the devices in the gym is the treadmill (and its steeper cousin, the Stairmaster).
Perverse, because I can understand simulating farm labour, since the activities of rural life are not often available – but simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared. That is, the weights simulate the objects of work, but the treadmill and Stairmaster simulate the surfaces on which walking takes place. That bodily labour, real or simulated, should be dull and repetitive is one thing; that the multifaceted experience of moving through the world should be made so is another. I remember evenings strolling by Manhattan's many glass-walled second-floor gyms full of rows of treadmillers looking as though they were trying to leap through the glass to their destruction, saved only by the Sisyphean contraption that keeps them from going anywhere at all – though probably they didn't see the plummet before them, only their own reflection in the glass.
The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the automobilised and suburbanised mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors. The treadmill seems to be one of many devices that accommodate a retreat from the world, and I fear that such accommodation disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all. On the treadmill, walking is no longer contemplating, courting, or exploring. Walking is the alternate movement of the lower limbs. Unlike the prison treadmills, of the 1820s, the modern treadmill does not produce mechanical power but consumes it.'
'It's hard to know what we institute when we don't institute but we do know what it feels like.
Total value and its violence not only never went away, but as Silva says, they are the foundation of the present as time, the condition of time, of the world as a time-space logic founded on the first horrible logistics of sale, the first mass movement of total access. Now continuous improvement drives us toward total value, makes all work incomplete, makes us move to produce, compels us to get online. We are liberated from work in order to work more, to work harder. We are violently invited to exercise our right to connect, our right to free speech, our right to choose, our right to evaluate, our right to right individuality in order that we may improve the production line running through our liberal dreams. Freedom through work was never the slave's cry but we hear it all around us today.
Continuous improvement is the metric and metronomic metre of uplift. Those who won't improve, those who won't collectivise and individuate with the correct neurotic correctness, those who do the same thing again, those who revise, those who tell the joke you've heard and cook the food you've had and take the walk you've walked, those who plan to stay and keep on moving, those who keep on moving wrong – those are the ones who hold everybody back, fucking up the production line that's supposed to improve us all. They like being incomplete. They like being incomplete and incompleting one another. Their incompleteness is said to be a dependency, a bad habit. They're said to be partial, patchy, sketchy. They lack coordinates. They're collectively uncoordinated in total rhythm. They're in(self)sufficient.
We're told to raise our buzz because we're all fucked up. But in our defence, we love that we are complete only in a plained incompletion, which they would have undone, finished, owned, and sent on down the line. We do mind working because we do mind dying.'
'It was an experiment in the plural body, which we saw as necessary research for understanding the possibilities of the collective body […], or at least for understanding the limits of the physical individual. It seemed so clear that skin was porous and not a limit. Our physical selves had so many holes for a reason. They were not intended to be impenetrable. Hard as I was, mean as I was, I was not made of marble. Flesh was less solid than it seemed.
''The way we propped each other, were props for one another’, she said. ‘I didn't mind at all.’'
'At all costs we wanted to imitate the motion we felt everywhere else, by synthesising, agitating; and speeding everything up (noise, speech, things to eat and drink, zouc, automobiles). Forgetting ourselves any way possible in any kind of speed.
Then, in this circularity I haunt, I turned my efforts toward seeing the beach's backwash into the nearby eddying void as the equivalent of the circling of this man completely withdrawn into his motor forces; tried to relate them, and myself as well, to this rhythm of the world that we consent to without being able to measure or control its course. I thought how everywhere, and in how many different modes, it is the same necessity to fit into the chaotic drive of totality that is at work, despite being subjected to the exaltations or numbing effects of specific existences. I thought about these modes that are just so many commonplaces: the fear, the wasting away, the tortured extinction, the obstinate means of resistance, the naive belief, the famines that go unmentioned, the trepidation, the stubborn determination to learn, the imprisonments, the hopeless struggles, the withdrawal and isolation; the arrogant powers, the blind wealth, the maintenance of the status quo, the numbness, the hidden ideologies, the flaunted ideologies, the crime, the whole mess, the ways of being racist, the slums, the sophisticated techniques, the simple games, the subtle games, the desertions and betrayals, the unshrinking lives, the schools that work, the schools in ruin, the power plots, the prizes for excellence, the children they shoot, the computers, the classrooms with neither paper nor pencils, the exacerbated starvation, the tracking of quarry, the strokes of luck, the ghettos, the assimilations, the immigrations, the Earth's illnesses, the religions, the mind's illnesses, the musics of passion, the rages of what we so simply call libido, the pleasures of our urges and athletic pleasures, and so many other infinite variations of life and death. That these commonplaces, whose quantities are both countless and precise, in fact produced this Roar; in which we could still hear intoned every language in the world.
Chaos has no language but gives rise to quantifiable myriads of them. We puzzle out the cycle of their confluences, the tempo of their momentums, the similarities of their diversions.'
'The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. Thus the body, a recreational rather than utilitarian entity, doesn't work, but works out. The barbell is only abstracted and quantified materiality to shift around – what used to be a sack of onions or a barrel of beer is now a metal ingot – and the weight machine makes simpler the act of resisting gravity in various directions for the sake of health, beauty, and relaxation. The most perverse of all the devices in the gym is the treadmill (and its steeper cousin, the Stairmaster).
Perverse, because I can understand simulating farm labour, since the activities of rural life are not often available – but simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared. That is, the weights simulate the objects of work, but the treadmill and Stairmaster simulate the surfaces on which walking takes place. That bodily labour, real or simulated, should be dull and repetitive is one thing; that the multifaceted experience of moving through the world should be made so is another. I remember evenings strolling by Manhattan's many glass-walled second-floor gyms full of rows of treadmillers looking as though they were trying to leap through the glass to their destruction, saved only by the Sisyphean contraption that keeps them from going anywhere at all – though probably they didn't see the plummet before them, only their own reflection in the glass.
The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the automobilised and suburbanised mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors. The treadmill seems to be one of many devices that accommodate a retreat from the world, and I fear that such accommodation disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all. On the treadmill, walking is no longer contemplating, courting, or exploring. Walking is the alternate movement of the lower limbs. Unlike the prison treadmills, of the 1820s, the modern treadmill does not produce mechanical power but consumes it.'
'It's hard to know what we institute when we don't institute but we do know what it feels like.
Total value and its violence not only never went away, but as Silva says, they are the foundation of the present as time, the condition of time, of the world as a time-space logic founded on the first horrible logistics of sale, the first mass movement of total access. Now continuous improvement drives us toward total value, makes all work incomplete, makes us move to produce, compels us to get online. We are liberated from work in order to work more, to work harder. We are violently invited to exercise our right to connect, our right to free speech, our right to choose, our right to evaluate, our right to right individuality in order that we may improve the production line running through our liberal dreams. Freedom through work was never the slave's cry but we hear it all around us today.
Continuous improvement is the metric and metronomic metre of uplift. Those who won't improve, those who won't collectivise and individuate with the correct neurotic correctness, those who do the same thing again, those who revise, those who tell the joke you've heard and cook the food you've had and take the walk you've walked, those who plan to stay and keep on moving, those who keep on moving wrong – those are the ones who hold everybody back, fucking up the production line that's supposed to improve us all. They like being incomplete. They like being incomplete and incompleting one another. Their incompleteness is said to be a dependency, a bad habit. They're said to be partial, patchy, sketchy. They lack coordinates. They're collectively uncoordinated in total rhythm. They're in(self)sufficient.
We're told to raise our buzz because we're all fucked up. But in our defence, we love that we are complete only in a plained incompletion, which they would have undone, finished, owned, and sent on down the line. We do mind working because we do mind dying.'
'It was an experiment in the plural body, which we saw as necessary research for understanding the possibilities of the collective body […], or at least for understanding the limits of the physical individual. It seemed so clear that skin was porous and not a limit. Our physical selves had so many holes for a reason. They were not intended to be impenetrable. Hard as I was, mean as I was, I was not made of marble. Flesh was less solid than it seemed.
''The way we propped each other, were props for one another’, she said. ‘I didn't mind at all.’'
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