SHELTER FROM THE STORM KING

I went for a walk at the Storm King Art Center, an hour north of New York City, in Cornwall-on-Hudson.  It’s a sort of sculpture park, but since it covers five hundred acres of hills and woods they prefer the term sculpture landscape.  There’s work by Caro, Calder, Moore, Hepworth, and many more, mostly big outdoorsy pieces that can stand up to and react with the weather.

I’d been there a couple of times before, once in the summer when it was so hot and humid that even walking from the parking lot to the first sculpture felt like an ordeal.  And I was once there in winter, when it was very cold and gloomy, much easier for walking but the experience was fairly bleak, not that I’m entirely against bleak experiences.  But all in all I suspect autumn, when the leaves are changing color is the best time to go, and that’s when I was there this year.

It’s an interesting question: do people go to Storm King for the walking or for the art?  Well, both obviously, but certainly they could still do the walking if there was no art there, whereas they couldn’t see the art if they didn’t do any walking, so I suppose the walking “wins.”

Even given that it was a cool autumn day, the place is so big that walking from one exhibit to another can still be quite a hike. And sometimes you’re at the top of a hill and you see a sculpture down at the bottom and you think, “Well yes, I wouldn’t mind going down to have a look at that, but then I’d have to climb all the way up this hill again afterwards.”  And so you decide to give that one a miss.  I’m sure that the true art lover has no such Philistine thoughts. (Yeah, right).

And given the park’s great size, and the broad distribution of the sculptures, you’d think it would be easy enough to avoid other people and find your own space.  But not so.  I was standing, admiring Alice Aycock’s Three-Fold Manifestation (that's it above), when I saw two women a couple of hundred yards away who abruptly changed the direction they were walking, and started powering toward me.  I don’t think it was my own magnetic personality, nor the siren call of the art, I think these two women thought, “That piece over there must be good because that guy’s looking at it.”

I started to edge slowly away, although at the same time I thought that a real art should stand his ground.  The woman leading the charge was a plumpish, pleasant-enough looking middle aged woman, and she was wearing a tie-dye tee-shirt, though frankly she didn’t look like a woman who ordinarily wore tie-dye.  I suspected this was her special day, a chance to let her hair down, and she was wearing it as a special treat.  I started to feel a certain sympathy for the woman.

However when she got within hailing distance, her cell phone went off.  It played “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (really) and she yelled into the phone, “Hey, how ya doin’ Louie?”  I yomped rapidly away.  There was other art to be seen.

There was an exhibition at Storm King of work by Thomas Houseago, an exhibition called “As I Went Out One Morning” – a reference to the Bob Dylan song that I thought nobody liked very much.  I was obviously wrong.  I’ve met young Houseago a few times, he’s a Yorkshireman like myself, though in his case from Leeds (and we folk from Sheffield think they’re a very rum bunch in Leeds).  He’s a loud, cheerful, hairy, argumentative, roaring boy, and he makes the kind of sculpture you might expect; big, rough, muscular, untidy works, many of them figurative though not quite human, looking like half-finished or half-decomposed robots or aliens constructed from junkyard parts.

I like the work a lot and there were two pieces at Storm King I liked especially.  Houseago looks like a man who never simply walks, much less strolls or saunters.  That would be far too gentle, far too undemonstrative.  And it was no great surprise that the two works I liked were, Striding Figure II (Ghost) – that’s it above; and Untitled Striding Figure 1 - that’s it below.

Of course the great thing about any piece of work at Storm King that invokes walking, is that when you look at it you’re pretty much guaranteed also to see some actual people walking as well, sometimes in a rather playful way.  This seems very right, very appropriate, so long as they’re not playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on their cell phone.

You weren’t allowed to touch Houseago’s work, understandable enough, but people were finding it very hard to resist.  Some just walked right up and grabbed it.  Attendants told them to stop, but you felt their hearts weren’t really in it.

And here’s an interesting confluence, or perhaps just a funny thing: lately a friend of mine has been in China, posting the occasional snippet of news on Facebook, and it seems the Chinese have a peculiar attitude towards walking or at least towards the English language.  

They have some rather wonderful signs that say “No Striding.”  Of course it would be tempting to ignore the sign and when challenged say, “I wasn’t striding, I was only meandering.”  But my guess is that this distinction might be lost on the Chinese authorities.  Equally, looking at the stick figure on the sign, maybe they actually mean no running.  Semiotics, isn’t a minefield, innit?

LOST(ISH) IN NEW YORK

I’ve been in New York, the city and the state, doing some walking among other things.  On the first day there I went to my publisher’s office, a place I’d been before and it’s right there in the middle of town, on 18^th Street, and so I had no worries about finding it and getting there on time.  And so, I set off for a meeting, and in due course I got completely and utterly (and inevitably) lost.  I suddenly couldn’t tell whether I should be on east 18^th or west 18th, and in any case I had some kind of brain fade and couldn’t tell east from west anyway, and so I got there late and sweaty and panicky, and feeling like a complete rube, who couldn’t find his way around the big city.  This was not precisely the impression I was trying to convey to my publisher.

Of course, when I’m in my walker/urban explorer mode, I think that being lost in the city is a very good thing, but it’s not nearly so cool when you have to be at a certain place at a certain time.  The ­real problem, I told myself later, is that you never get quite as lost as when you’re certain you know exactly where you’re going.  If I’d had any doubts about where I was going, where the publisher’s office was, I’d have double checked the address, consulted a map, taken the map with me, but I had no such doubts, and in the event my unmerited confidence undid me.

I was staying in the apartment where photographer Dudley Reed and his wife Betty live, and the place was full of photographic books, including Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a book I’d read a very long time ago, and I thought I remembered it pretty well, but it seems not.  Or perhaps it’s that I now have a different set of priorities and obsessions, than I did back then when I first read it, and there seemed something very fresh about a couple of paragraphs from the book.

Sontag writes, “…the earliest surrealist photographs come from the 1850s when photographers went out prowling the streets of London, Paris, New York, looking for their unposed slice of life.”

         Then later, “In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle class flaneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by

 Baudelaire.  The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising, the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”

Interesting and significant, I think, that she doesn’t categorize either the flaneur or the photographer as male, though historically (and with notable exceptions) the majority of both flaneurs and street photographers have been men.

As you wander the streets of New York these days it seems that everybody is taking pictures, women just as much as men.  One or two seem to be “real” photographers, brandishing bulky SLRs, but the majority are using their cell phones.  I don’t know how many of them are looking for the Surrealists’ “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,” but I’m sure they’d take a picture of it if they saw one.

And of course a lot of people are looking at their cell phones, texting rather than taking pictures with them, and of course they walk into others, and others no doubt walk into them, which seems a kind of rough justice. They can’t say they haven’t been warned.  The streets of Manhattan now display posters like the one below, which is actually on the side of a public phone booth.  Does anybody use public phone booths anymore?

As it happened, there were was a Banksy street art exhibition going on all over New York while I was there.  One of the pranks involved some guy on the street selling “real” Banksies for the price of fakes - $60 as opposed to the $15,000 or so they’d cost in a gallery.  Of course $60 does seem a bit steep for fake Banksy. 

But knowing that the man himself was in town and in action meant that as I walked the streets of New York I kept seeing Banksy-esque stenciled graffiti, and asking myself is that a real or a fake.  Only a fool would have claimed to know with any certainty.  But I did spot this on 24^th Street at 6^th Avenue.

Of course I couldn’t have sworn it was the real thing, but I thought it might be, and I definitely thought it was worth a picture; and having got home and done some research it seems that yes, as far as I can tell, I was looking at a REAL Banksy. I walked past it again a couple of days later, and it seemed it was being surrounded by other, much less artful-looking tags and graffiti, which you might think spoiled the effect, though for all I know Banksy might have been doing those too.

WALKING INTO THE FUTURE

Want to hear me talking about the "future of walking"  Well, I mean, it's possible, people have wanted starnger things.  If so you can find me on Andrew Stuck's talkingwalking website, which looks like this:

the link to my ramblings is here:

http://www.talkingwalking.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/GeoffNicholsonForecast1.m4a

Geoff Nicholson – walking 5 years from now

Geoff Nicholson

Best selling author of some dozen and more novels including “Bleeding London” in which one character walks every street in London. In 2008 Geoff turned his hand to writing about his life long passion of walking, publishing the acclaimed “Lost Art of Walking“.  Earlier this month a companion volume, “Walking in Ruins”, treats us to Geoff’s reflections on what makes a ruin and what makes them so attractive to him. “Walking in Ruins” makes beguiling reading.  Sheffield-born and bred, Geoff now lives in Los Angeles, California one of the places where you are least likely to see a pedestrian, but this hasn’t discouraged him from daily walks in and around his local neighbourhood. Geoff’s forecast offers an insight into Californian life and comes with a sting in the tail.

Find more information on Geoff_Nicholson  and listen to an interview with him here.

If you have a prediction for walking in the next 5 years, and you want to have it heard then why not call this number +44 20 8144 9554 and tell us your forecast.

And a link to the website homepage is here:

http://www.talkingwalking.net

THEY SPEAK OF ME WELL IN SOUTH AFRICA (APPARENTLY)

Andie Miller, the author of Slow Motion: Stories About Walking  (which is a very good book), sends me the article below from the website of The Times of Johannesburg, which mentions me in passing, and which is a very interesting piece even without that.  I especially like the suggestion that only a man with a heart of stone can fail to laugh at Werner Herzog's lugubriousness.

The part I find especially fascinating is the sentence that reads, “For me walking is like drinking - it makes me happy but I can do it only when I'm happy already.”  I find that completely unlike my own experience.  Walking when I’m happy is good, of course, but it’s not transformative: I tend to stay happy.  Whereas walking when I’m unhappy is the best way I know to get rid of that unhappiness. 

Ah walkers, damn them: no two of them are ever exactly alike.

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Walking for dear life

Darrel Bristow-Bovey | 21 October, 2013 00:30

I received a message this week from a man who doesn't want to be named. He'd read about how much I like walking, and he wanted me to know that his brother is, right now, walking from Durban to Johannesburg.

He isn't necessarily walking in a straight line, and when he gets there he might turn around and walk back. He isn't walking for charity and he isn't dressed in a rhino suit. He won't tweet about it or blog or get interviewed on breakfast television. He doesn't want your attention or your money. He's walking because although he isn't religious or especially superstitious, on some level he believes that if he walks his sister may not die of the illness that is killing her.

I wondered if he had read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce. An old man named Harold Fry learns that a friend is on the last lap of cancer and sets off, unprepared, to walk across England to see her. He isn't sure what he'll say when he gets there, but he wants her to know that he is coming. He hopes, if hope is the word, that his walk will keep her alive.

It's an act of faith but not in anything. It's an action to exert what small influence a man can exert over an indifferent universe, which is to say, no influence at all. He walks because it's all he can do, and something might be better than nothing. It's a lovely book and if it goes on a bit towards the end, well, that's the nature of very long walks.

The unacknowledged urtext for Harold Fry is surely Werner Herzog's Of Walking In Ice. In the icy winter of 1974 Herzog received word that the German film historian Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris. Herzog instantly walked to see her. He was in Munich at the time. He walked for three weeks through conditions so cold and grim you'd have to be Werner Herzog to endure it or deserve it.

It would take a hard Wildean heart to read Herzog's frozen prose and hear his lugubrious Wagnerian voice intoning, "A black morning, gloomy and cold, spread like a pestilence. I curse Creation" , without laughing out loud. Herzog walked for three weeks, on foot except when he accepted lifts, single-minded except when he took a detour to see the birthplace of Joan of Arc. Lotte Eisner lived another eight years.

The writer Geoff Nicholson tells how, inspired by this story, he went on pilgrimage to Herzog's home in Beverly Hills to ask him to blurb The Lost Art of Walking. He walked in the faith that if he walked, Herzog would surely agree. Alas, not all walks have happy endings.

I love walking, but not as an act of faith, or even penance. Nicholson also tells about Old Leatherman, an unusually ambulatory gentleman of the highway who between 1858 and 1889 walked a 500km route around precise points of Connecticut and New York State, dressed all in leather. The circuit took 34 days and he walked every day, wordless, never taking a day or an item off.

The odour of unlaundered leather didn't bother him because he was a Frenchman named Jules Bouglay, who loved a woman and worked a year's apprenticeship in her father's leather business to prove his worthiness. Regrettably, he ruined the company, bankrupted Dad and lost his love. He went to America and spent the next thirty-some years walking to expiate his guilt. I like to think he returned at the end to claim her, although he might have had some difficulty proving what he'd been doing all that time. Maybe he should have tweeted about it after all.

I try to walk between 10km and 15km each day - ambling and mooching and occasionally sauntering (from sainte-terre, or "holy ground", initially used to denote pilgrims who walked to the Holy Land, and then, sarcastically, for people too lazy to walk to the Holy Land). Since I started walking seven years ago, I no longer get depressed.

For me walking is like drinking - it makes me happy but I can do it only when I'm happy already. If I have quarrelled or I'm fretful I often set out to walk all day but I become panicky. I feel exposed on foot in the world if my heart is not at ease, as though something terrible and irreversible is about to happen. I become gripped with the breathless fear I sometimes get descending underwater, and I have to hurry home.

So I couldn't do what the brother of my new friend is doing, but my thoughts are with them both. Thoughts don't change anything. Neither does prayer. Neither does walking, but you have to do something.

You can read it on the website by clicking here:

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2013/10/21/walking-for-dear-life#