WALKING AND WEEPING

I hear that Yayoi Kusama has an exhibition titled Cosmic Nature, in the New York Botanical Garden, a place I won’t be walking in the forseeable future, given the current state of Covid rules, which is a damned shame. Some of it looks like this:

I’ve always thought Kusama’s work was cosmic though not exactly natural, though there are days when I have trouble knowing what either of those words means. The art looks fun and colourful and playful and it has primary colours and polka dots, which is enough for me, and more than that the NYBG website says, ’Her artistic concepts of obliteration, infinity, and eternity are inspired by her intimate engagement with the colors, patterns, and life cycles of plants and flowers.’ So OK, everybody wins.

In general I do think there are few things more fun than walking through a garden and being smacked in the eye with a startling piece of art, like this one in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: ‘Spoonbridge and Cherry’ by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

In 1966 Yayoi Kusama created a performance titled Walking Piece which was recorded in a series of eighteen color slides, which doesn’t seem quite enough. Kusama walked the streets of New York City wearing a kimono and carrying a customized parasol, and from time to time, she wept without reason, though frankly who needs a reason?

The images still look good over 35 years later and might make you question received ideas of otherness and exoticism, although it seems to me these are ideas that have served Kasuma very well over the years.

It might not have meant so much in Tokyo.

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs.

Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already.

Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house:

But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you.

Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case:

And this in Lynell’s case:

In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this:

Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.

WALKING WITH WINDOWS

 And speaking of flaneuses, I see that Deborah Moggach is back in the news: new book and newly single.  

 

I remember a time when her Who’s Who entry listed one of her recreations as ‘walking around London looking in people’s windows.’  This sounds so much more fun that just ‘walking.’  This is as close as I can get to a picture of her walking:

 

I did once walk with her for several hundred yards, maybe half a mile, around central London, near Oxford Circus, as we looked for a place to have lunch.  We didn’t look in any people’s windows, and at the time I didn’t know this was one of her recreations, but I certainly would have given half a chance.

PARISIAN WALKWAYS

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I was reading about Paris Hilton, who has a cooking show on Youtube, despite apparently not being much of a cook.  Good for her.  The show sounds like an unmissable car crash, though in fact when you watch it, it's just slow and dull.   But I did see a quote from Paris  that I’d never seen before, ‘I don’t think, I just walk.’

 

The woman is a flaneuse!!  And possibly a bit Zen. This is her walking:

GARDEN WALKS, GOGH WALKS, GOD WALKS

Back in the day I had a girlfriend with a flat in Brighton, so on many a weekend I’d go down 

there from London. I liked the sea and the Volks Railway, but mostly I liked the secondhand book and record shops.

         And one weekend the girlfriend said ‘Let’s go on a day trip to Sheffield Park and Gardens,’ which is less than 20 miles from Brighton. ‘And what will we do there?’ I asked, and she said ‘You know, walk around.’  At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse.  Walking in gardens seemed so middle-aged and boring.  I didn’t say no and I didn’t complain once we got there, and although I don’t remember much about it, I'm sure I didn't enjoy myself much.  Though I do vaguely remember this bridge.

 

Now, of course, I find that walking in gardens is a perfectly good way to spend time.  This is Westbury Court in Gloucestershire where I was last month:

 

And it so happens I’ve been reading Lesley Chamberlain’s book A Shoe Story about Van Gogh and Heidegger.  The latter is likely to remain a closed book, but Vincent is OK by me, even though I had no idea he was much of a walker.  How ignorant I was.  Here is Chamberlain on van Gogh: ‘early in his life van Gogh associated walking very closely with his artistic practice …. He believed in nature as both his moral and artistic authority and to walk was to put himself physically in touch with that wisdom’ and she quotes van Gogh as saying in one of his many letters to Theo, ‘Our goal is “Walking with God.’’' Rather an overambitious goal I’d say, though this is not my area of expertise.

 

And I was lead to this picture which I’d never seen before, titled A Woman Walking in a Garden.  It’s all over the internet, though no two reproductions show it with the same colours.

 

Life being as it is, I spent last Sunday walking around the Secret Gardens of Mistley.  They weren’t as secret as all that – there was a map and everything. Most of the gardens were small and domestic and not at all grand, which is OK with me.  

 

And in one of them, the one shown above, there was a table full of used books for sale.  What a haul – Beckett, Pynchon and Shrigley for a total of 3 quid.  It’s the kind of thing that makes walking in gardens worthwhile.

 

Here’s Beckett: ‘For as I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.’

 

Here’s Pynchon: ‘Death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning.’

 

I can’t find any specific utterance by Shrigley about walking, so here's this picture, which does show a stick figure walking: