It is a contemporary truism that the embodied practice of walking, deliberately undertaken, can be a mode of thinking as well as doing. In the context of hypercapitalism walking is for the most part a signal of deprivation, but it can also be a mode of resistance—whether to the speed of capital and the logics of the imperium that are responsible for that deprivation, or to gravity and time, or simply to the rushed pace and sheer business of contemporary life. Walking can be individuated or collective, voluntary or forced, ontological or particular—tracking the elusive snow leopard, following the Trail of Tears, or gambolling on the Moon.1 In art, walking can be motivated as a deliberate passage from one marked site to another or as “aimless” as a dérive interrupting thoughtless transit from a to b—as spectacular and collective as, for example, ASCO’s (Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Patssi Valdez and Willie Herrón) Christmas Eve 1972 Walking Mural through the streets of LA or, at its most minimal, as in Alan Kaprow’s “just doing” practice of the 1980s, limning the thin borders between art and everyday life.2 Even in the grim trudge of the convict’s yard, walking can be, to borrow from the great Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, an “experimental exercise of freedom.”3
This cluster on walking as art emerged from a panel at the College Art Association annual conference held in New York in 2023. It brings together interviews, portfolio surveys, and critical assessments of a range of contemporary artistic projects engaged with walking. Ellen Y. Chang interviews Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang about his “Walker” series; Maria Lanko talks with Ukrainian artist Vova Vorotniov about his walk-based geographical transfers; Stacey Moran and Angela Ellsworth discuss the Museum Of Walking (MOW); and Thyrza Goodeve takes a walk with artist Ernesto Pujol. Joseph DeLappe reviews a number of his projects engaged with ambulation; Kathryn Barush considers the work of Gisela Insuaste in relation to traditional pilgrimage; Ellen Chang presents an audiowalk transposition of Taiwan to the Northwest Coast; Mary McGuire discusses the urban ‘scape of Carmen Argote; Anne Swartz considers disability aesthetics and walking; Adair Rounthwaite considers the liminal exhibition practice of Zagreb’s Group of Six; and Judith Rodenbeck provides some notes on walking.
What all these footsteps share is our species mastery of an astounding feat of balance, coordination, cognition, and proprioception. For walking is an ontological fact of human being, and while nearly every living creature with which we share this planet walks, bipedalism occurs in relatively few species and achieving it, for humans at least, is a developmental milestone as important as acquiring language. Indeed, the modesty of walking belies the very fact that bipedalism is a defining feature of our Pleistocene ancestors, homo erectus. I want to believe that the contemporary explosion in art-walking in the context of global hypermodernity is not atavistic or neo-Romantic, but rather is a sophisticated collective and political, ecological, even ethological practice.
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In his well-known and much-quoted essay “Notes on Gesture,” the philosopher Giorgio Agamben provides a brief excursus on walking.4 While conducting research on gesture at the Warburg Institute, Agamben had come across Georges Gilles de La Tourette’s 1886 Études cliniques et physiologiques sur la Marche, [Clinical and physiological studies of walking] in which he locates the first fully scientific physiological account of the mechanics of walking.5 The 1886 Études was the inaugural volume of new iconographic studies devoted to “walking in maladies of the nervous system studied by the method of prints” and presented a thesis using new graphic techniques. Empirical laboratory observation was aided by an indexical record of the walker’s footprints, printed by feet dipped in iron oxide, on a scroll of paper. The first part of the volume details these techniques as well as basic normative findings among a cohort of adult subjects; the second part turned to dysfunctional walking. For de La Tourette, walking was subject to an essentially mechanical description. Agamben quotes it:
While the left leg acts as the fulcrum, the right foot is raised from the ground with a coiling motion that starts at the heel and reaches the tip of the toes, which leave the ground last; the whole leg is now brought forward and the foot touches the ground with the heel. At this very instant, the left foot—having ended its revolution and leaning only on the tip of the toes—leaves the ground; the left leg is brought forward, gets closer to and then passes the right leg, and the left foot touches the ground with the heel, while the right foot ends its own revolution. (50)
Many pages show the printed scrolls as sidebars and a comparative table of scrolls appears at the end of the book. If the resulting print was not visually resonant of Chinese “walking” scrolls the regularity of the recorded footprints did resemble the indexical punctures in piano rolls or, more pointedly, sprocket holes in film stock. Agamben’s concern is “with the fate of a human body caught between a biopolitical dispossession and an aesthetic redemption,” writes media scholar Deborah Levitt.6 This is a drama contiguous with the history of silent cinema, and Levitt notes its partial repetition in the conjunction of the advent of sound films with the dialectically entwined cinematic projects of neurological documentary and of Busby Berkeley’s feminized choreographic mass ornaments. Thus, “de la Tourette employed a gaze that is already a prophecy of what cinematography would later become.” (50) For, as Agamben notes, de La Tourette’s clinical description of normative bipedal movement—and, importantly, his study’s illustrations—appear historically and epistemologically alongside the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, the emergence of the cinema, the incipience of Taylorization, and the disappearance of walking as an everyday practice.7
De la Tourette had identified the syndrome that bears his name one year before the walking study, and Agamben provides an account of its “equivalent…in the sphere of walking”; yet when contrasted to his characterization of the “generalized [gestural] catastrophe” of Tourette’s syndrome Agamben’s citation of the walking study presumes a relatively unimpeded functionality to the human body.8 His discussion, in its haste to address the tics and agitations of the syndrome, scrolls smoothly past details of de La Tourette’s walking project that bear directly upon the question of the very ambulatory subject invoked in its opening paragraph. In fact, embedded in and even subtending the functionalist analyses provided by de la Tourette are accounts of dysfunction, disability, even cognitive mis-mapping.
Two years after the 1886 Études, a follow-up volume, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière Clinique des Maladies du Systeme Nerveux, made a strong claim for this graphic method “of having patients walk with feet soaked in pigment across a long sheet of paper” (1) as a useful diagnostic.9 The first chapter focused on two case studies of hysterical hemiplegia—subjects who were paralyzed on one side of the body for reasons that were not fully organic. (Thankfully, the term for their affliction seems to have gone out of use, having had a spike in diagnoses in the fin de siècle and then apparently vanished after World War One.)10 Organic hemiplegia, it was argued, yields a gait in which the healthy part of the trunk leads while a swinging motion is used to arc the paralyzed foot and leg forward; hysterical hemiplegia, by contrast, presents as a paralysis of the limb that is so absolute, so total, that the dragging of the foot and leg register as “a piece of inanimate matter.” (11)11 That is, the affected (hysterically paralyzed but organically sound) leg, which is like a chunk of meat, has the capacity to quite suddenly come back to life. Conclusion: it is the leg that is more paralyzed which has the greater chance of restoration.
Two cases were presented. The first of these, a Monsieur Albert, was photographed by Albert Londe in 1887 at La Salpêtrière at age 47. This patient had taken part in an infamous ill-fated colonialist bubble scheme, described this way in the case file:
Working professionally as a botanist, from 1871 to 1879 he [Albert] made multiple voyages to Australia gathering scientific collections. In 1879, he took part in the famous expedition of the Marquis de Rays and embarked for the imaginary colony of Port-Breton [which had been marketed to the erstwhile investor-colonists as the bustling capitol of the “Kingdom of New France,” an imaginary Oceanic empire]. That is when a series of almost extraordinary adventures began. Stripped of assets, he escaped with several unfortunate traveling companions [a large number perished] from this cursed island and, climbing into a rickety canoe, landed in New Guinea. There he received a blow from a club on the left side of his head, lost consciousness, and awoke paralyzed of feeling and of movement on the right side. He finally returned to Europe and his paralysis, which had improved, was definitively healed after a trepanation at Saint Thomas Hospital.12
However, his nape continued to exhibit an exquisite hyperesthesia (near where his skull had been drilled). Strong pressure would produce a sensation of aura and, if the pressure was sustained, yield “a real hysterical attack.”13
The second case was that of a Monsieur Noël, 21 years old and a highly skilled mason-plasterer. He had a fall about 12 feet when some scaffolding broke, landing on his back on some stone steps. When he tried to stand his feet collapsed under him. He was taken to a pharmacist who rubbed him with arnica, which made him lose consciousness. Three days later, when he tried to get out of bed “his limbs refused to work (tout service), at the same time he experienced sensations of aura that would occur before ensuing crises.” After some months, M. Noël had improved enough to return to work. “He could occupy himself at his boss with various jobs, but after ten days, having tried to lift a very heavy load, within a few hours he felt the sensation of aura without losing consciousness and fell without being able to get up. He was taken to Necker Hospital (14 July).”14
It is not my interest or capacity here to comment on these as neurological case studies; however, I find these two narratives strikingly allegorical. The traumatic loss of actual physical capacity and sensation juxtaposed with the hyperaesthesia of “aura” practically calls out for a Benjaminian analysis such as the one Agamben derives from Tourette’s syndrome. More pointedly, though, the narrative juxtaposition of these two particular cases—1) the hysterical denouement of an episode of late colonial European adventurism worthy of Jules Verne and 2) the disabling of skilled artisanal labor resulting in the refusal of the body to work on Bastille Day—with a visually- and indexically-driven cultural project that is part and parcel of the mechanization of the human body’s capacities leads to the inference that the movement image or gestural sequence (per Agamben) is not just a record and reclamation of a kinesthetic repertoire but a record, too, of its very fragmentation under the pressures exerted by a dying European colonialism, by financial and industrial capital, and by the deskilling of physical labor and the disabling of the working class.15 Walking, a species capacity under enormous pressure “between a biopolitical dispossession and an aesthetic redemption,” indexes this complex.
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Recently, artist Bibi Calderaro has proposed a practice of intentional walking as “an ontological shifter,” walking in which intentional movement is “the practice of expanding the tensility of our physical and metaphysical boundaries to meet provisionally with other subjectivities in their vulnerable capacities of being, tending to a non-dualistic, non-reductive, non-essentialist onto-epistemology.”16 It’s a useful rubric, even a provocation. As we confront the collapse of our own earthly habitat, arguments about the causal specificities—colonial exploitation, the abstract imperatives of capital towards continual growth, the totality of human de-skilling—seem moot, even as we may wish off-worlding billionaires good riddance and something less than a bon voyage. I want very briefly to consider one perhaps somewhat counter-intuitive case of such ontological entanglement.
Pierre Huyghe’s 7-minute video, One Million Kingdoms (2001), opens with a computer-generated circle center-screen. A small triangular shape sits at the top of the circle at cardinal North and a narrow ribbon attaches to the circle at cardinal West; the ensemble presents the uncanny gestalt of a human cranium on an operating table. Text scrolls at the bottom of the screen: “The journey to the center of the earth by Jules Verne begins in Iceland,” we read. On the left side of the circle, the ear is labeled “expedition departure” while above the nose-like triangle we read “Iceland.” The scrolling text informs us that “The conquest of space starts there on that same desert of lava [in Iceland]. The first images of Neil Armstrong hopping in his space suit in the middle of a desolated landscape were first shot there. This is an expedition through territories topologically similar.”17 The diagram fades.
A desultory young figure, just an outline, really, stands, leans forward, and then walks unsteadily, jerkily, hesitant but resolute, into an increasingly foreboding mountainous landscape. Having started out, dazed, on a blank plain, she slowly swings her body—the movement signaled by the sway of her long hair—across and through this terrain vague. When she ducks her head to commence, this nod seems to authorize the first grey spikes of topography that grow in front of her. A voice—whose?—says “It’s a lie,” and while we see the simple animation of her lips moving along to the words, the voice is male, sampled from transmissions of the American astronaut Neil Armstrong during the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing; like the imagery here, the voice is computer-generated. And as she speaks, continuing with a monologue that mashes up astronaut chatter with details from Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, a jagged topography is generated around her, the audio waveform of the sampled voice and its ambient crackle transposed from sound to image, the sound taking on homeomorphic visual dimension, crags and peaks. “Before anyone walked on the moon, these pictures foreshadowed us what we would discover later on,” she says.
The figure, AnnLee, is a tertiary anime, “a translucent outline, an empty cipher for creative interpretation,” as the Guggenheim puts it; she is what Georges Didi-Huberman might call an “extra.”18 Nomenclature, long hair, and disempowerment serve as gender markers. But here, in Pierre Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms (2001), she is also, “literally the author of her own environment.”19 Tom McDonough has argued that the animated figure “heralds no joy, proffers no ‘promesse de bonheur,’ but merely confronts us with its radical autonomy: a deviant sign.”20 For McDonough, One Million Kingdoms presents us with a world “divested of any properly human significance, the voice separated from its speaker and transformed into a frozen panorama.”21 Yet the skill in taking baby steps, in worlding through vocal and kinesthetic conjury, are indicative of species-belonging as well as autonomy. Indeed, the resonances of the opening diagram with a cranium—suggestively neurological—followed by the eerie invocation/discovery of a “desolated landscape” by a factory-generated animation “extra” are homeomorphic to de la Tourette’s case studies. This is a topological history, then, rather than a straightforwardly dialectical one. If we take AnnLee as a human(oid) schematic, an impression reinforced not just by gestalt but by language acquisition and bipedalism, the very fact that “voice” plus the pulse of pixillated bipedalism generates the “moonscape” on which she walks makes the entire scene “properly human,” all too human, even if it is a post-apocalyptic world bodied forth step after careful step, to borrow from Levitt, “between the tics, tremors and torsions of gestural disorder and the compensatory drama of the girl machine.”22
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Let me end with this ellipsis, a stanza written 100 years before our “walking” panel in New York: the last stanza of Modernist poet Mina Loy’s 1923 poem Lunar Baedecker:
And ‘Immortality’
mildews…
in the museums of the moon
‘Nocturnal cyclops’
‘Crystal concubine’
———————
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies