The critical/philosophical questions that must be settled first is this: what is the walk or what is walking?
We can return to how the word walking is used by artists.
- It could refer to the ongoing action or biological/physical process: one foot after the other. When viewed this way, walking stops when movement stops. So, walking and stoppage in this sense is binaristic.
- But some artists would refer to a walk as the entire thing that transpired within a certain period. This is true even if there were stoppages during the walk. Sometimes, there are more stoppages than walking, yet it is still called a walk.
- Some artists who do multi-day walks would refer to the series of walks done during that day as “the walk.”
My idea: When we move beyond thinking of walking as more than a biological/physical process and think of it as a social or even aesthetic process, then stoppage ends to be seen as the opposite of walking and becomes a necessary part of a walk.
But even when we transcend a purely biological/physical understanding of walking, the relationship between the moving component of a walk (the physical walking) and stoppage (whatever its form) remains a point of contention.
Examples:
After the walk
- In traditional works of arts born from walking (and literary works are notoriously part of this category), the processing of experience after the walk takes most of the time.
- Writing about the walk
- Creating poems or essays about the walk
- Creating a book about the walk
- Production: The great stoppage is necessary to produce a work of art in a whatever medium.
During the walk
- The walking method is different from the fieldwork. The fieldwork necessitates long stoppages and immersion. Obviously, walking could be part of the immersion and there is some anthropological research that finds walking as an effective destroyer of barriers.
- A walker may intend to purposefully spend brief time at a location to maintain a transitory view of the landscape. Purposeful shallowness.
- In the walking method, movement is more important that depth. Depth is achieved not through stopping but through repetition—repeated walking of a place.
- Of course, each walker is different. Some stop more to process than others.
- There is a danger to this: Remember, there is a reason why walking arts have been more popular in the West rather than in the East. And why some of the oldest travelogues that include walks co occur within colonial projects (e.g. Fedor Jagor’s Travels in the Philippines which involved lots of walking) or why cities like Baguio and Manila were designed for the flaneur. Because walking is transitory in nature, a walker could pass through all these foreign geographies and the people who live there, extracting resources or cultural capital, taking photographs, writing, and creating works of art about these foreign places and people and profiting from them without thinking about how those communities were damaged or bettered by one’s passing by. So in other words: less stoppages, fast moving through a place so I could move to the large stopping (producing the work of art about the walk) as fast as I can
- Modern walking arts have contended with this old exploitative way of using walks:
- removing the necessity of a work of art born from the walk (anti-art derive), so walking as a social, critical, radical act rather than an aesthetic act
- more modern walking artists turn the walk into the medium itself, facilitating walks sometimes in collaboration with others, therefore removing the necessity of an artistic product
- another goal of these newer walks is rather than to create artifacts to be consumed passively, create artifacts that intend to born new walks. This is done through maps or audio recordings of past walks that other walkers could then follow. New technologies have arisen to explore many kinds of these artifacts.
As a writer, the more I explore the relational aspect of walking, the more I question the need to write about the walk. Or if I need to write about it what would that form look like.
I still stand on my suggestion to be content with producing drafts or draft-like works from one’s walks, because the draft puts lets emphasis on the finished product, which has been questioned by radical walking since the 20th century. The draft is like the compromise. I will still write about my walk but in ephemeral notes that I won’t necessarily turn into a book. I’ll just publish these notes as is. And this collection of my notes is my body of work.
And maybe, publish a collection of such drafts once in a while.
This might help me focus more on the walk itself and its relational possibilities. Facilitating walks for others and using the walk as the medium of art itself rather than a means to a production end (the great stoppage).