The Shape of a Walk

I was given the reading The Shape of a Walk from the book Wanderlust. I found a few interesting points to include in this post.

According to the reading, since the late eighteenth century walking has been in resistance to the mainstream because it was a conscious choice to do it. I believe this is true, especially when we are so focused on going from point A to point B as fast as possible. Resisting technology and speed of the mainstream makes the walk more about the journey from each place than getting to the desired location. I think this is especially relevant in today's society where speed is so important.

The reading includes a quote from art historian Kristine Stiles. "Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representational objects to presentational modes of action." (p. 269) I think an important point within this quote is the emphasis on the process since a walk is all about the experience and the process of doing it. This idea about the process being important is an element of a few statements made later in the reading.

"The experience cannot be reduced to a place name and a length, but even this scant information is enough to start the imagination going." and "A walk expressed space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone, and that is another space too." (p. 271) While there is a process involved in a work based on a walk, there is some sort of representation of this walk. It is not the same as actually experiencing the walk, but it is enough. Imagination is where the viewer comes in.

Some work leaves "most of the journey up to the viewer's imagination" because it asks them to do "a great deal of work, to interpret the ambiguous, imagine the unseen." (p. 271) The viewer has to do some work to interpret whatever is in front of them and relate it to the walk that someone else (the artist) has taken. The viewer is only shown a part or parts of someone's experience of a walk. What is seen in front of them "gives us not a walk nor even a representation of a walk, only the idea of a walk and an evocation of its location (the map) or one of its views (the photograph). (p. 271)

The last few sentences of the reading not only summarize the chapter, but the effect walking has on the people and world around us. "Walking as art calls attention to the simplest aspects of the act: the way rural walking measures the body and the earth against each other, the way urban walking elicits unpredictable social encounters. And to the most complex: the rich potential relations between thinking and the body; the way one person's act can be an invitation to another's imagination; the way every gesture can be imagined as a brief and invisible sculpture; the way walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it; the way each act reflects and reinvents the culture in which it takes place." (p. 276)