Walking Art Practice
Walking Art Practice
Ernesto Pujol
Triarchy Press
While his emphasis on Oneness may not be everyone’s cup of tea – and is far from, maybe even at odds with, my own interest in multiplicity – Ernesto Pujol’s book is so jam-packed with brilliant observations that anyone interested in walking will find it worthwhile hoovering up its ambulatory treasures.
Pujol’s Walking Art Practice is specifically addressing performance-walking as a “site-specific embodiment of urgent social issues”. For him, walking “eliminates the myth of achieving something original”, but its history is “contaminated by the pale, masculine virus of colonialism”; he worries at how “mapping technologies are increasingly producing a new generation of white walkers.... mapping while walking coastlines, waterfronts, boundaries”. He rejects those walkers “who turn territories into spectacular stages” and prefers “privately heroic practices”.
Despite his favouring of the Oneness of the walker and the natural world, he recognises that “one path is really two paths... Do not just walk along a path. Talk with a path”. Then he gets deeper: “walking is psychic editing”, a weaving of “the landscape outside of us, and the landscape inside of us”, engaged by learning a “seeing without memory... without perpetual self-reference” and another seeing, a seeing “without having eyes”. He grasps that “all become performers during the walk”, that we can experience “without consuming or collecting”, that we are best when walking as “vulnerable bodies willing to enter the unknown without weapons”; never as the “raw material” for someone else’s art, but always as collaborators.
Pujol values “walking for no reason”, movement informed by stillness and a walking that “may surprise us with what does not exist in our brains”, by repetition and by revisiting myths... I could go on piling the wheelbarrow even higher, but there is greater pleasure, and far more to be learned, by reading Pujol in extended passages as he allows one idea to unfold from another, like being with a good companion on a richly heightened walk in the everyday.
CrabMan
Ernesto Pujol
Triarchy Press
While his emphasis on Oneness may not be everyone’s cup of tea – and is far from, maybe even at odds with, my own interest in multiplicity – Ernesto Pujol’s book is so jam-packed with brilliant observations that anyone interested in walking will find it worthwhile hoovering up its ambulatory treasures.
Pujol’s Walking Art Practice is specifically addressing performance-walking as a “site-specific embodiment of urgent social issues”. For him, walking “eliminates the myth of achieving something original”, but its history is “contaminated by the pale, masculine virus of colonialism”; he worries at how “mapping technologies are increasingly producing a new generation of white walkers.... mapping while walking coastlines, waterfronts, boundaries”. He rejects those walkers “who turn territories into spectacular stages” and prefers “privately heroic practices”.
Despite his favouring of the Oneness of the walker and the natural world, he recognises that “one path is really two paths... Do not just walk along a path. Talk with a path”. Then he gets deeper: “walking is psychic editing”, a weaving of “the landscape outside of us, and the landscape inside of us”, engaged by learning a “seeing without memory... without perpetual self-reference” and another seeing, a seeing “without having eyes”. He grasps that “all become performers during the walk”, that we can experience “without consuming or collecting”, that we are best when walking as “vulnerable bodies willing to enter the unknown without weapons”; never as the “raw material” for someone else’s art, but always as collaborators.
Pujol values “walking for no reason”, movement informed by stillness and a walking that “may surprise us with what does not exist in our brains”, by repetition and by revisiting myths... I could go on piling the wheelbarrow even higher, but there is greater pleasure, and far more to be learned, by reading Pujol in extended passages as he allows one idea to unfold from another, like being with a good companion on a richly heightened walk in the everyday.
CrabMan