SPRUNG

 There is, evidently, some crossover between walking and scavenging.

 

When I walk I often pick up objects I happen to see.  Depending on where and when I’m walking these may be interesting rocks, the very occasional bird skull, a discarded shopping list or two, even bits of mechanical hardware.

 

The items end up in my shed which one day, I promise, will turn into the Nicholsonian Wunderkammer.  Visits strictly by appointment.

 

This is not exactly what the American conceptual artist Mark Dion gets up to but I like to think it shares of some of the same impulses.  Dion’s enterprise, I think we can say, is to question the whole nature of collecting, curating, organizing, hierarchies, and so on, and also the change in status that comes about when  an object is put in a cabinet or under a bell jar, or in a museum:

 

This kind of thing:

I don’t claim Dion as a soul brother or even fellow traveler – I’m really just a fan, but by definition I do reclassify, reorganize and recontextualize the objects I find.

 

So when I was doing my now legendary A10 walk for the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, the route started in this rather unpromising though intriguing bit of territory: 

And I picked up this spring as a souvenir.

 

I wouldn’t claim it’s the most wonderful or significant find but I didn’t have time for a full archeological survey.  It's now in the collection:

Obviously Mark Dion doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but blow me down, on his Instagram feed a couple of days ago there was this image.

 

Coincidence?

 

Is there any such thing?

BUT IT'S OK

 You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper.  For every cracking song like 

‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’

 

But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’  I can see his point, the words are  all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.

 

The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah

 

They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield.  And an awful lot had changed.

 

For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time.  I assume I was being filmed.

 

Other changes: some art in the car park:

 

And they even have a school mini bus:

 

Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.

 

It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say,  ‘Good morning.’  But it was OK.

The Beatles version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE

And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw

"WALK TALL, KICK ASS, LEARN TO SPEAK ARABIC"

 It was the 3rd of June, a not especially sleepy dusty delta day.  All over Britain people were 

celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and I was participating in a project titled A-10 

Live presented by the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

 

The plan was that in crew of artists (of all kinds) and indeed flaneurs, covered the territory from London to Cambridge via the A10, which the Website says, describes as 'a 110 mile celebration of the UK's most multicultural road.' My section was from the M25 to Hoddesdon, much of it along the New River Path.

 

In preparation I’d been rereading parts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and my eye had 

fallen, hardly for the first time, on the section that reads, 'Every now and then when your 

life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on 

heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas’

 

Substitute walking for driving, substitute M25 for Hollywood and Hoddeson for Las Vegas, define ‘heinous chemicals’ as Ibuprofen and Buscopan, and you can see how this might work.

 

It was a grand day out in the company of Dr. Pete Gomes, Simon Poulter and Caroline Gannon.

 

Nicholson-Gomes-Poulter

Parts of the walk were intensely bucolic with ducks and trees and water and sky but I must say I enjoyed it best when these elements rubbed up against other more inscrutable features:

 

Waterside structures that looked like sculpture:

Improbably-placed no trespassing signs

 

Suburban exuberance, including Cheshunt, where Cliff Richard once lived (though not in this bungalow).

And of course there was the M25. This was where the walk started, under a concrete flyover, with the traffic yowling by just a few feet away. This was a liminal space or an edgeland or absolutely nowhere, depending on your point of view.

 

And, damn it, I made some ecological “wild” art.

 

I noticed were snail trails under the bridge – the gardeners’ nightmare - and I discovered a surprising number of snails, small but very varied in colour – and all of them dead as far as I could see.  This seemed a sad thing.

 

I didn’t give them a decent burial but I arranged them on a bit of rusted metal pipe.  I think the queen would have approved.

He’s some footage of what we did:

https://www.a10-live.co.uk/day-five.html

 

Incidentally I'm not quite sure who was responsible for which of the above images.  Most are by Caroline Gannon who was generally too busy taking photographs to be photographed herself.  But here she is on a different walk:

 

 

ART LOVERS WALKING

 

People go the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a variety reasons, and looking at art seems to 

be just one of them. Many people seem to be there to have a picnic or look at the sheep, 

and a surprising number seem to be there just for a walk.  I saw small armies of people 

trudging dourly across the landscape, and yes their eye may have been caught by the 

occasional work of art – a Damien Hirst is hard to ignore - but a long joyless walk seemed to 

be their real reason for being there.

I realize that I’ve been going to the YSP for rather a long time, since it was known as plain old Bretton Hall.  Over the years the amount of land has expanded – it’s now over 500 acres - and although the amount of art has increased too, it seems to me that the land to art ratio is weighted very much in favour of the land, so that if you want to see any art at all you have to do a fair amount of walking.  Of course, if you’re a walker, you may well think this is a good thing.

 

If the walkers find a Damien Hirst hard to ignore, they definitely don’t react the same way to an Andy Goldsworthy.  

The piece above is called Shadow Stone Fold which I looked at, admired, and indeed walked around inside.  Nobody else was doing this, I think because the piece looked very much like an actual sheepfold and visitors didn’t recognize it as art.  They possibly thought I was some crazed eccentric.

Across the water and up the hill there was more art by Goldsworthy, three works collectively called Hanging Trees.  These definitely looked like art, but not many art lovers or walkers got up to them.

 

And even higher up the hill, in a bit of woodland, there was another Goldsworthy titled Outclosure.  But the day was hot and the hill was steep and I have to admit it defeated me.  Next time.

 

         There was also a temporary Robert Indiana exhibition which was mostly in a gallery, but some was outdoors so there were still some opportunites for walking.  

 

And showing in the exhibition was Warhol’s Eat (starring Indiana).  That was wonderful and didn’t even involve any walking.  Or in fact any sculpture.

 

WALKING WRONG

 

There was a brief news item in the Metro newspaper a couple of weeks back that read, ‘A 

lifetime of brisk walking can make your “biological age” 16 years younger by mid life.  

Health data from 405,000 Brits showed those who walked quickly had more of the DNA 

that reduces ageing, a Leicester University study found.’

 

         I didn’t know there was a kind of DNA that reduced ageing, but I’m no scientist.

       In any case, it seems I’m doomed.  I’ve never been a brisk walker.  I just haven’t. I mean sometimes I walk faster than others, if I’m in a hurry or especially eager to get somewhere, but generally I’m a bit of an ambler if not a dawdler.  It seems I’m walking all wrong.

 

It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. My dad was a great one for telling me that I was doing things wrong.  Walking was just one of them.

 

He insisted that a boy should walk with arms swinging like pendulums: right foot and left arm forward, then left foot and right arm forward,  I had difficulty with this, and I still do, but I see the point. The swinging arms surely help carry you forward.

 

Some guys at the University of Michigan would agree. They measured the energy used by people who walked in different ways—swinging their arms, holding them to their sides, and so on, and they found that the swinging actually reduces the overall amount of energy it takes to walk.  According to the study, people who hold their arms still while walking use 12 per cent more metabolic energy than people who swing their arms.

 

Of course some people walk in order to ‘keep fit,’ which may be akin to lowering their biological age, so I suppose in fact they’d welcome the chance to use extra energy.  More research required, lads.

 

I found this information while doing an online search for ‘walking wrong,’ and it appears the Internet is awash with articles telling me, and you, that we’re walking wrong, articles with titles like, ‘Common walking mistakes,’ ‘The 97 walking errors you didn’t know you were making,’ ‘101 walking blunders to avoid,’ and so on. These guys were a bit hit and miss:

         Who knew?  But my response to all this is pretty much the same as I said to my dad back in the day, ‘Leave me alone. I’ll walk to hell in my own way. And at my own pace.'

 

This is Raquel Welch in the Seinfeld episode where she doesn’t swing her arms:

 

And here she is in life – swinging with the best of them.