For me, art is multiplexed. It is incorporated in my non-art activities – in walking, running, climbing, etc. While it may be possible to position these activities wholly within art – pointing, for instance, to the tradition of the 19th century flaneur, Surrealist ambulation, Situationist strategies of the derive and psychogeography, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton’s walk based art, etc. – this is honestly not how I perceive things myself. Or certainly not entirely. These activities are equally, if not more, related to traditions of leisure, sport, wilderness encounter, etc. My aim is not to strip these other conceptions away in order to distill a properly pure aesthetic essence. Rather it is to acknowledge the impurity of my activities – the admixture of dimensions, the grafting of art within non-art, the piggybacking of aesthetic interests upon other interests.
Equally, however, when I speak of art’s multiplexed relation to non-art, it is not to insist upon a fundamental, absolute distinction between art and non-art. I am well aware that my walking, running and climbing, even without any thinking of art per se, contains an aesthetic aspect. It draws upon a cultural imaginary shaped by notions of the sublime and the beautiful, the picturesque, etc., as well upon an aesthetically imbued conception of embodied experience, but this only indicates how muddy the categories are at the very outset. The grafting is not between two genetically pure conceptual organisms, but between two already grafted ones.