INCANDESCENT WALKING

 As you may have worked out by now, I like walking in the desert, and I like deserts even 

when I’m not walking in them, and I have a tendency to buy books about the desert and 

then leave them unread on the shelf for a few years.

 

And so, very belatedly, I’ve been reading my copy of The Desert Is No Ladysubtitled ‘Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,’ edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk.  It’s great.

 

There’s a chapter in it about about Nancy Newhall titled ‘Walking on the Desert in the Sky’ – you can see why I was drawn to it.

 

Wikipedia says Nancy Newhall is best known for writing texts to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, which is fair enough, though she was also a critic, designer, editor, and a very good photographer in her own right.  These are a few of her photographs:

 

The texts that accompanied Adams’ and Weston’s works weren’t just prefaces or introductory essays but poetic utterances.  Some of the pages look like this:

 

The perfect balance between words and images always seems like a great idea but offhand I can’t think of many (OK, any) books where the text and the photographs have equal weight and importance. And the proof of the pudding may be: Adams and Weston are still regarded as great photographers. Nancy Newhall is not regarded as a great writer.  I don’t think this is entirely the fault of patriarchy.

 

Still, I find myself fascinated by some lines of Newhall’s This Is The American Eartha book she did with Adams:

‘you are shut in by distances of light.  You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays.  You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. …

‘Night clings, paling to your body, until once more day is limited, and you are walking in the desert in the sky.’

 

I alternate between thinking this is a bit too artsy fartsy, and then thinking this is a very wonderful description of walking in the desert.

I shall continue to think about this, sometimes while walking.

WALKING WITH STATUES

 When a person walks through the world he or she inevitably sees other people walking 

through the world, and it seems this is a suitable subject for art.

 

More often than you might imagine you see sculptures of people walking through the world.

 

This is Giacometti's Walking Man:

And this is Giacometti's Walking Woman, which would probably be cancelled if more people knew about it:

You’re seldom just walking along and suddenly come upon a work by Giacometti – you tend to be in an art gallery - but I realized that in my walking, without looking for them, I’ve come across a certain number of sculptures of people walking.

 

Just a week or two back, walking in Holland Park I came across this walking man by Sean Henry. The statue is painted bronze but the path is genuine concrete:

 

And I was reminded of the walking man I probably know best, this one in Sheffield by George Fullard, positioned outside what is now called the Winter Garden.

 

I feel that most Sheffield walkers aren’t quite as lean as that – but let’s call it artistic license.

 

And I was also reminded of this statue at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by George Segal.  People stopped walking in order to stand and stare at it.

Naturally there are some interesting ironies in all this.  The viewer is walking, but even though the statue shows somebody walking the art work is perfectly still, frozen in time and space.

 

And then it clicked that Sean Henry, the artist who made the walking man in Holland Park  was also responsible for this Walking Woman in Colchester, which I know quite well and like a very great deal.  

Apparently there are different versions in different locations, often in snowy climes.  Frankly she doesn’t really look dressed for it.­

WALKING IN HOUSES

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has the fantasy that some time after I’m dead my home 

will be turned into a small private museum.  Visitors will come from all over the world to see 

how the great man lived, and to walk from room to room looking at my cool stuff, 

preserved and displayed in cabinets and vitrines. This goes along with the notion that in the 

end everybody’s home becomes a kind of museum of the self.

 

         This has been on my mind because I’ve recently walked in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House in Lansdowne Walk, Holland Park.  These, you’d have to say, were severely constrained walks, like walking in an art gallery but more so.  

         Soane (1753-1837) was a ‘proper’ architect who designed the Bank of England, the Royal Chelsea Hospital and much more besides.  His museum consists of three houses that he bought, demolished and rebuilt.

I think you could say Jencks (1939-2019) was more of an architectural theorist that an architect, and a post-modeernist at that.  He designed the Cosmic House in collaboration with Terry Farrell, modifying a house built in the 1840s - John Soane’s era more or less.

 

         Both houses are fantastic in several senses, and (it may surprise you) both Soane and Jencks had a great deal more cool stuff than I do. Soane’s is full of antiquities, including a sarcophagus.  

 

Jencks’ is full of cosmic symbols and symbolism including an Eduardo Paolozzi mosaic of a black hole.

 

Both seem to have had a taste for obelisks.

 

In both houses as I walked around I lived in fear that I might turn suddenly and accidentally knock over some prize artifact.  I didn’t but I easily could have.

 

There are of course some houses where you can actually have a good walk inside. Hardwick Hall, for instance has a Long Gallery that’s 162 feet from end to end, but if you lived there I bet you’d spend a lot of time looking for your misplaced cellphone and wallet.

 

 

MORE ALCHEMICAL WALKING

You almost certainly don’t recall a post on this blog from 2017, with this image:

 

and the quotation ‘He that endeavors to enter into the Philosopher’s Garden without a key, is like him who would walk without feet.'  They’re from a 1617 alchemical ‘emblem book’ by Michael Maier (aka Michael Majerus) titled ‘Atalanta Fugiens, The Flying Atalanta or Philosophical Emblems of the Secrets of Nature.’  Now read on.

 

I’ve been doing some further reading about walking and alchemy, mostly in a book titled Alchemy, the Philosopher’s Stone, by Allison Coudert who quotes from atext titled The Nei P’ien by Ko Hung (c.280–340 CE), a Chinese alchemist and philosopher whose name sometimes gets transliterated as Ge Hong.   This is him:

 

 In The Nei P’ien he writes ‘Chao T’o-tzu took cinnamon for twenty years whereupon the soles of his feet became hairy and he could walk five hundred miles a day.’ That’s just under 21 miles per hour, which I don’t really think counts as walking.

 

Ko Hung also writes ‘Tu Tzu-wei took asparagus, with the result that he had eighty concubines, sired one hundred and thirty sons and walked three hundred miles a day.’

         

This is the Formby Asparagus Walk, a National Trust property on Merseyside:

So Tu Tzu-wei walked 200 fewer miles a day than Chao T’o-tzu but no doubt that was because he was distracted by his concubines.

 

I have taken cinnamon and asparagus but admittedly not every day, so perhaps that’s why my own soles remain hairless and why I have yet to sire 130 sons.  Also why I can’t walk even 300 miles a day.

HYPER-OBSERVERS

 

 I was dipping in to Genpei Akasegawa’s Hyperart: Thomasson, as I do from time to time, and I came across this picture:

 

For those who’ve missed it previously, a Thomasson is an architectural feature that remains in place even though it’s no longer functional: bridges and staircases to nowhere, third floor doors that open into space, and so on. The name is Akasegawa’s invention.

 

That picture was actually taken by Yomota Inuhiko, back in the day, in the Rue De Cardinal Lenoine, in Paris.  Yomota Inuhiko writes, ‘At first glance, it looked as though huge band-aids or strips of scotch tape that had been affixed to the building had, over the years, become rotten and faded leaving behind only a scar.’

 

In fact I’m not sure that the photograph really shows a Thomasson.  I think it’s just a badly repaired bit of masonry, but it made me realize that in my own wanderings I’ve developed quite a taste for looking at and photographing badly, or eccentrically, repaired walls and brickwork, if not strictly speaking masonry.

 

Further research (although ‘research’ sounds a rather grand term for it) revealed an article by Terunobu Fujimori titled by ‘Under the Banner of Street Observation.’  Tom Daniell seems to be the man who made it, and much more information on this subject, available to we gaijin.

 

The article is partly about the Street Observation Society, formed in 1986 by the author of the article - Terunobu Fujimori, an architectural historian - and Genpei Akasegawa (op cit) who is probably best thought of as a multimedia artist.

 

Alone, together and with others, the pair wandered the streets of Japan, looking, photographing, making drawings, giving names to things.  But above all looking, and if that meant looking at things in a new or different way then so much the better.  The Japanese name for the activity was, and I suppose still is, Rojo Kansatsu -- Street Observation.

 

I find this just wonderful both as a practice and as an idea.  And yes of course it involves many of the same activities as psychogeography, but I find this Japanese version so much more appealing because it involves going out walking and looking at whatever’s there, not making any claims for "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,”  a la Guy Debord. 

 

Among many wonders in the article, some of them quite inscrutable, there is this photograph captioned ‘Genpei Akasegawa photographing a tsuboniwa (spot garden) in a manhole cover, in 1986. From Kyoto Omoshiro Watching (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1988).

 

That would be fine in itself but it also brings in Joji Hayashi (about whom I can find very little), described in the Terunobu Fujimori article as ‘a bizarre individual who finds everything worthy of close attention and orderly documentation; he glues train ticket chads into albums, places pebbles that lodge in his shoes into small bottles, all carefully dated, and has famously taken thousands of photographs of manhole covers.’  There’s a book:

There’s something Zen about this I think, though my understanding of Zen is patchy.  And I realized that I too have photographed a certain number of manholes and even coalholes in the course of my ‘street observation’ though the ones I’ve photographed aren’t nearly as cool as the Japanese ones.

                                             

If the Internet has proved anything it’s that there you’re never alone in your obsessions.  However arcane your interests may seem, there’s probably already a website, a chatroom, a Facebook page, for people who share your interest, and in this particular case there’s now an activity called Drainspotting.

 

But the notion of street observation raises the issue of whether you go walking and look for specific things – manhole covers, Thomassons, brick work repairs or whatever, or whether you try to walk and be open to whatever turns up, whatever happens to be there.

 

I haven’t solved this problem.  I don’t see how you can be equally open to all stimuli.  That would be like some intense but amorphous acid trip.  Human consciousness is nothing if not selective. And a lot of the time I don’t even think it’s a problem.

 

And then, out of the swamp of the Internet this appeared.  I'm not so sure about that, Stanley: