[Written swiftly on a sleepless night in the small NZ coastal town of Whakatane, prior to leaving at 3:30am to drive back to Auckland. It belongs in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE only in as much as it provides a general context for my current actions. I will not, however, place it specifically within the numbered set of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE entries.]
Before I learnt programming or thought about walking
I used to build fences and simple farm sheds
– really just animal shelters.
Both of these involved a concern with lines.
Lines of wire from one spot to another.
Posts lined up straight via a crow bar.
Lines of uprights.
Lines of corrugated iron.
All material – I can particularly remember the heat and flies and
At other times the coldness, the numbness.
But also abstract – notional geometries, notional divisions, notional structures,
Entirely temporary, endlessly in need of maintenance.
So two things – the lived line and the abstract line.
The play back and forth.
I spent close to twenty years as a programmer.
In the end I could write a workable 3d engine from scratch.
But I have abandoned all that. Too old to spend time programming.
Too old to want stare at screens.
Too old to believe the elusive promise of “hello world!”.
But it was through programming that I found a way back to walking.
Although I have no idea what walking represents.
How so?
Leaving aside the meaning of walking, the multiple investments in this practice,
Programming led me to the problem of the iterative subdivision of simple shapes.
This led me in turn to recognise the aesthetic potential of mechanical iteration.
Art does not have to be exclusively conceptual or critical.
Art does not have to defamiliarise or deconstruct.
Art can simply perform.
Art can simply repeat.
Or, more precisely, art cannot escape these operations.
They are not the other of art.
Indeed art exists in this tension between knowledge and skill and
Performance – repetitive enactment,
Which always confirms and undermines repetition,
Which is strangely, despite all the manifest constraints,
And with no effort at deliberate resistance,
Also a space of freedom.
Of a freedom that happens within the interstices of
Determination.
So I no longer wished to have a neatly conceptual relation
To these processes,
So I wished myself to become iterative,
Which is to say open to the possibility of the event (Badiou).
So I returned to walking.
I followed the pattern of walking.
My aim once again is not to defamiliarise,
Not to estrange walking and the experience of space,
But to acknowledge within walking its own staging of freedom.
I know we need artists.
I know we wish to be stirred,
But I also want to acknowledge a field of experience
That requires no lofty justification,
That need not employ the term “art”
That is constitutionally aesthetic,
If not putatively.
And it may be that walking absolutely cannot be positioned as art,
Not absolutely.
This may just be an interim stage – a stage of reflection.
Because walking undermines not just the notion of a material work,
But much more radically,
The notion of an audience for the work.
Of a division between artist and consumer.
Just as walking is an ephemeral act,
Just as it signs an essential contract with disappearance
(The walker should never leave any trace),
It also does not require an observer.
Something happens but it disappears and does not need to be seen.
In this way, walking suggests a new amateurism.
Or an art without art.