Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Walkscape Notes 2

The Walkscape Scroll on the Oval was brought to a somewhat earlier than expected close today. At about 3pm the wind picked up, and started to blow the scroll, like a sail on a sandbar, out into the pathway. It promptly tore, scattering at least some of the pages we had clipped to the scroll. Time to roll it on up.

A number of lessons to take from the first Walkscape. An experience is, first of all, an experiment, a trial or essay, from which we learn. Walkscape is an experiment, a net cast widely to see how much we could gather. The idea is simplicity itself--walk, experience, document, contribute--and we pitched it in explicitly inclusive terms, without long art-historical or cultural-theoretical pedigrees (for which see Careri; Solnit; Ingold). The pitch may have been a bit too vague, a bit too everyday, a bit too feel-good, a bit too "it's all good," to have quite the impact we, as organizers, imagined. Surrealists and Situationists surrounded their walks with the cultic ferocity of the avant-garde: small groups, critical agenda, theoretical armor, myths of transgression. In the US, we're more pop (join 'em if you can't beat 'em), laissez-faire populists: the critical gesture often goes unrecognized. "Walking is something people do every day...."

That said, we can identify several different phases or dimensions to the project, each of which may have had a distinct value. There was a show at Hopkins; there was the first wave of publicity, which produced several inquiries; there is this blog (part document, part archive, part observatory, part intersection); there was today's Scroll. Although we received fewer contributions than we might have hoped, we probably raised awareness a little. It was (is) a good idea, even if not as transformative as we might have hoped.

What probably needs a little more stress is the collaborative or contributory aspect of the project. With the distant example of East Asian scroll painting in the background (Solnit cites Hiroshige's Fifty-three views), we imagined the Scroll as a site gathering together a variety of expressive reactions to walking, where distinct visions or insights might produce a mosaic or collage image of the campus-as-walked. Getting out is great; finding a way to document--for the experience to leave a trace--is perhaps no less important. I'd hoped that folks in Art and English might rise to the occasion, recognize the value of adding a trace of their own into a larger picture. That message seems not to have gotten out; despite our "Instructions," it seems that the spectatorial assumption--that Walkscape was an object independent of our involvement--seems to have prevailed.

Another lesson--predictable, but hard to learn--is that displacing habits is harder than it looks ("Poetry is made of words, not of ideas," Mallarmé told Degas, and the same holds of any art-practice). Without the apparatus and authority of Art to move people, the initiative folds back into the usual patterns: the idea might sound appealing, but lines of practice are deeply embedded.

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