WALKING AND LEANING

One of the smaller regrets in my life is that when I was unemployed in Sheffield in the 1980s I turned down the chance to become an apprentice dry stone waller.  How very different life might have been.   Maybe – and I realize this is very, very unlikely – I could have ended up as land artist in the mold of Andy Goldsworthy.

There’s a new documentary about him, titled Leaning Into the Wind, and in the trailer he says, “There are two ways of looking at the world.  You can walk down the path, or you can walk through the hedge.”

Does anybody still use that phrase “dragged through a hedge backwards”?  My mother used to say it about me when I was looking particularly disheveled, but as I used to point out, if you’re pulled through a hedge backwards you’re going to look rather better than if you’re pulled through it forwards.

Andy Goldsworthy has something in common with walking artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t really use walking as part of his practice.  However, since he’s usually working outdoors, making site specific sculptures, then I suppose he must do a certain amount of walking to get to and from the sites.  The piece below at Storm King, titled Storm King Wall is a length of dry stone walling that runs to 2,278 feet, so a certain amount of walking is required just to get from one end of it to the other.

Actually it’s not even that simple – the wall disappears, as it were, into water and emerges on the other side, so unless you can walk on water a detour is involved.

I’ve also walked around a Goldsworthy in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, this one, called Hanging Trees:  

I know I also saw his Garden of Stones at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but as far as I can remember, at the time I went there you weren’t allowed to walk in it.  

The image below on the museum website suggests you can walk there now, though obviously not very far.

As far as I can see, there's an absence both of paths and hedges.

SCRUTABLE

One way or another I've been walking past this building on Franklin Avenue for the best part of 15 years, and it still intrigues me, and moves me in some quiet way.  Things around it change -  a brand new urban park has just been built nearby, and it's close enough to the Hollywood Freeway that a homeless tent city has grown up nearby but it remains square and solid and inscrutable, essentially unchanged, even if it's a bit frayed at the edges.



I guess it's the inscrutability that's the appeal. It looks like a bit of old Hollywood.  It's not stylish enough to be celebrated as a classic and yet there is something basic and elegant about it, something modernist and formal - form following function.  I like that in a building that I walk past.

It used to look like this:

And this:

WOKE WALKING

Meanwhile, down on Hollywood Boulevard, some folks still seem more woke than others.

DON'T GO THERE

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

SAINTLY WALKING

I was in Bristol, in England, and I walked from the station to a place called the Paintworks – a new “creative quarter” if the website is to be believed. 

Not much of a walk, scarcely more than a mile, though it was cold and damp, and I did walk the same route back again, but long enough to get shouted at by a bicyclist – true I was walking in a cycle lane -  and to see some ruin in the distance:

And some more ruin close up – I do have a bit of a thing for obelisks, ruined or otherwise. (This is one of the few, though possibly not the only way in which I resemble Athanasius Kircher):

And especially there was time to see a couple of quirky depictions of walkers painted on the ground – the saintly fellow at the top of this post and this one carrying a ladder:

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make you think you’ve had a decent walk.