Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art
Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art
ed. Tom Jeffreys
(Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press)
I was becoming frustrated with this book, a collection of reflections on walking by artists, or appreciations inflected through the art of others, when I arrived at an extract from Jacques Derrida from his ‘And Say the Animal Responded’ in which he suggests that “it is as difficult to assign a frontier between pretence and pretence of pretence, to have an invisible line pass through the middle of a feigned feint, as it is to situate one between inscription and erasure of the trace”. My frustrations were perhaps more meaningful than grumpiness, then? The struggles I was having with wrestling the various essay parts and confessional accounts towards any embodied sense were symptoms of a body itself. In its motion, and in my discomforting attempts to stop it in the architecture of words and make it mean, was my reading.
Derrida’s acerbic fragment eats away at everything that comes before and after it, pulling the rug of closely woven ideas and descriptions from under the feet of pedestrian writers, “asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man.... what he refuses the animal”. Yet the holes Derrida tears are the eyes of this collection.
What is immediately absented here is any of that “mystic fusion” of walkers and ‘Presence’ that Frédéric Gros made briefly popular in his ‘philosophy of walking’. That welcome gap is almost entirely filled by the human here; this is a profoundly humanist collection. There are only a few herds, flocks or blooms. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in this last hurrah for the anthropocentric walker. At its best, it is the richness of cultural trajectories and the sharpness of delineations of abiding colonialised landscapes. Jason Allen-Paisant on concrete, Steffani Jemison’s “experiment in the plural body” and Dwayne Donald’s explication of Cree “bent-over walking” – the “crooked good” – are all revelatory; they exemplify Donald’s utopian hope for “the emergence of a new story.... facilitated through the life practice of walking”.
Maybe none of the author/commentators here quite delivers a vision or a prescription for realising such high ambitions, but there are clues and hints here and there throughout the book, from Myriam Lefkowitz’s immersion in a fiction with “a kind of psychedelic potential”, in cities where “nothing about the symphony.... can be controlled”, even in the horrors of an elastic border explained by Harsha Walia, in the limits of empathy described by Tom Jeffreys, or in the ambiguity of an “act of care or a temporary branding” with which Iman Tajik interrupts his group walk to Dungavel House Immigration Removal Centre.
Perhaps what has aged least well here is conceptual art; Antje von Graevenitz’s lengthy and uncritical account of Stanley Brouwn’s work seems to miss the morbid drift from the material to “the forms of projection”, the unconvincing “‘scientific’ aspect of his work” and the artist’s collection of small parcels of land, marking their boundaries with posts (in harsh contrast with Walia and Tajik’s articulation of space and place). What the Derrida extract does is munch away at any such drying out of a body practice, at artworks that are “constituted by the accrual of information” or writing about writing about walking (as here in Kathleen Jamie’s A Lone Enraptured Male).
Where this book bursts into embodied life and practice is in its last third with visits to District Six in Cape Town in the counter-surveying company of Siddique Motala and Vivienne Bozalek, with the Tentative Collective’s “telling stories of a city;/of many cities within cities” in Karachi , and with the Kongo Astronauts walking in Kinshasa searching for the toppled statue of a colonial explorer while wearing suits made from minerals extracted from Katanga, shipped to China, and returning to the Congo as e-waste (“to see Kinshasa.... as if they were looking at outer space”); this hyper-sensitization to the matters and politics of specific places, to the “indigenous civilisation [that] undergirds today’s infrastructure” (JeeYeun Lee) and to “what lies beneath the soil, a virtual slaughterhouse” (Annalee Davis), drives the final part of this anthology. The art here is much more about things than concepts; like the “hundreds of 1970s plantation ledger pages” found by Davis in a ruined building on the plantation where she grew up; in Michael Marder’s busting apart of the false binary of “human mobility and vegetal immobility”, or in dancer Myriam Lefkowitz’s focus on the skin as “the centre of attention”.
(A couple of grouses: Guy Debord did not coin the term ‘psychogeography’ [in Debord’s own words it was “suggested by an illiterate Kabyle”], Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming [as in “becoming animal” or “becoming other”] has nothing to do with imitating the other, and Steve Graby’s otherwise excellent piece on autism and ‘wandering’ might have benefitted by a nod to the spidery works of Fernand Deligny.)
Editor Tom Jeffreys has constructed here a complex and demanding landscape for the reader; like any good walk there are moments when the aspiring pilgrim is lost and assailed and feels hopeless, infuriated with the signage and the obscurity, but Derrida’s scepticism is a good guide, and the landscape, for those prepared to keep going, then opens up in the wake of its own deconstruction into a mattering of plants and of recovered and détourned pages, into resistance and to the specificities of wounded places and skins. Critical writing on walking has not always embraced difficulty – in its admirable aspiration to be accessible – but the occasional discomforts and mind-wrenchings of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art are welcome; perhaps less as an introduction to a range of practices and more the drawing of an illuminating line beneath a phase of anthropocentric walking, in reparation and preparation for posthuman walks.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
ed. Tom Jeffreys
(Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press)
I was becoming frustrated with this book, a collection of reflections on walking by artists, or appreciations inflected through the art of others, when I arrived at an extract from Jacques Derrida from his ‘And Say the Animal Responded’ in which he suggests that “it is as difficult to assign a frontier between pretence and pretence of pretence, to have an invisible line pass through the middle of a feigned feint, as it is to situate one between inscription and erasure of the trace”. My frustrations were perhaps more meaningful than grumpiness, then? The struggles I was having with wrestling the various essay parts and confessional accounts towards any embodied sense were symptoms of a body itself. In its motion, and in my discomforting attempts to stop it in the architecture of words and make it mean, was my reading.
Derrida’s acerbic fragment eats away at everything that comes before and after it, pulling the rug of closely woven ideas and descriptions from under the feet of pedestrian writers, “asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man.... what he refuses the animal”. Yet the holes Derrida tears are the eyes of this collection.
What is immediately absented here is any of that “mystic fusion” of walkers and ‘Presence’ that Frédéric Gros made briefly popular in his ‘philosophy of walking’. That welcome gap is almost entirely filled by the human here; this is a profoundly humanist collection. There are only a few herds, flocks or blooms. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in this last hurrah for the anthropocentric walker. At its best, it is the richness of cultural trajectories and the sharpness of delineations of abiding colonialised landscapes. Jason Allen-Paisant on concrete, Steffani Jemison’s “experiment in the plural body” and Dwayne Donald’s explication of Cree “bent-over walking” – the “crooked good” – are all revelatory; they exemplify Donald’s utopian hope for “the emergence of a new story.... facilitated through the life practice of walking”.
Maybe none of the author/commentators here quite delivers a vision or a prescription for realising such high ambitions, but there are clues and hints here and there throughout the book, from Myriam Lefkowitz’s immersion in a fiction with “a kind of psychedelic potential”, in cities where “nothing about the symphony.... can be controlled”, even in the horrors of an elastic border explained by Harsha Walia, in the limits of empathy described by Tom Jeffreys, or in the ambiguity of an “act of care or a temporary branding” with which Iman Tajik interrupts his group walk to Dungavel House Immigration Removal Centre.
Perhaps what has aged least well here is conceptual art; Antje von Graevenitz’s lengthy and uncritical account of Stanley Brouwn’s work seems to miss the morbid drift from the material to “the forms of projection”, the unconvincing “‘scientific’ aspect of his work” and the artist’s collection of small parcels of land, marking their boundaries with posts (in harsh contrast with Walia and Tajik’s articulation of space and place). What the Derrida extract does is munch away at any such drying out of a body practice, at artworks that are “constituted by the accrual of information” or writing about writing about walking (as here in Kathleen Jamie’s A Lone Enraptured Male).
Where this book bursts into embodied life and practice is in its last third with visits to District Six in Cape Town in the counter-surveying company of Siddique Motala and Vivienne Bozalek, with the Tentative Collective’s “telling stories of a city;/of many cities within cities” in Karachi , and with the Kongo Astronauts walking in Kinshasa searching for the toppled statue of a colonial explorer while wearing suits made from minerals extracted from Katanga, shipped to China, and returning to the Congo as e-waste (“to see Kinshasa.... as if they were looking at outer space”); this hyper-sensitization to the matters and politics of specific places, to the “indigenous civilisation [that] undergirds today’s infrastructure” (JeeYeun Lee) and to “what lies beneath the soil, a virtual slaughterhouse” (Annalee Davis), drives the final part of this anthology. The art here is much more about things than concepts; like the “hundreds of 1970s plantation ledger pages” found by Davis in a ruined building on the plantation where she grew up; in Michael Marder’s busting apart of the false binary of “human mobility and vegetal immobility”, or in dancer Myriam Lefkowitz’s focus on the skin as “the centre of attention”.
(A couple of grouses: Guy Debord did not coin the term ‘psychogeography’ [in Debord’s own words it was “suggested by an illiterate Kabyle”], Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming [as in “becoming animal” or “becoming other”] has nothing to do with imitating the other, and Steve Graby’s otherwise excellent piece on autism and ‘wandering’ might have benefitted by a nod to the spidery works of Fernand Deligny.)
Editor Tom Jeffreys has constructed here a complex and demanding landscape for the reader; like any good walk there are moments when the aspiring pilgrim is lost and assailed and feels hopeless, infuriated with the signage and the obscurity, but Derrida’s scepticism is a good guide, and the landscape, for those prepared to keep going, then opens up in the wake of its own deconstruction into a mattering of plants and of recovered and détourned pages, into resistance and to the specificities of wounded places and skins. Critical writing on walking has not always embraced difficulty – in its admirable aspiration to be accessible – but the occasional discomforts and mind-wrenchings of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art are welcome; perhaps less as an introduction to a range of practices and more the drawing of an illuminating line beneath a phase of anthropocentric walking, in reparation and preparation for posthuman walks.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews