THE PEDAGOGIC WALK

The mighty John Baldessari died recently, which was a great shame,  though he was 88.

He was not, in the current sense, a ‘walking artist’ but walking sometimes featured in his works, as in Walking Forward-Running Past, 1971(single-channel video, black and white, sound; 12:45 minutes). 

According to the New York Met, it’s a piece in which ‘John Baldessari examines the chronological relationship between still images and motion pictures. The artist constructs a purposefully crude moving image from still pictures of himself walking toward the camera, then running past it. By creating a video with still images, Baldessari urges viewers to question notions of sequence and cinematic time, and how we depict the past, present, and future.’  Well yes.

Another is A Movie: Directional Piece Where People Are Walking, 1972-1973; 22 black and white photographs with acrylic paint on them that looked like this when installed:

And there’s Walking the Plank, again acrylic on black and white photographs, 1988.

I can’t say that John Baldessari and I had much in common, though we did both teach at Cal Arts, in Valencia, an hour or so up the road from LA.  We taught at very different times and with very different results.  He was there 1970 to 1986:  I was there about 30 years after he left.  He was well loved.  I was not.

An article by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker described one of Baldessari’s artistic strategies. ‘They had a game, in which a student would throw a dart at a map of Los Angeles, and then they’d all go there and spend the day, taking pictures and Super-8 films or videos.’ 

I assume they drove to the place where the dart pierced the map, but walked when they got there.  I have also read, though can’t currently find the source, that Baldessari described this artistic practice as ‘fucking about.’ 

I think my time at Cal Arts would have been much more enjoyable if I’d done more fucking about. As it was I took things rather too seriously.  I did try to incorporate some walking into my pedagogic method, with limited success.

            However, given how things are these days in American colleges, with students who regard themselves as clients and consumers, determined to get their money’s worth, if you did too much fucking about you’d no doubt be fired. Probably best just to walk away.

THE REMAINDER WALK

I just read the novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy.  It’s a good book, I think.  I wished it had been a bit shorter but then I wish that about most books.

If it’s about what it appears to be about, it concerns a man who’s been hit by ‘something falling from the sky,’ and is severely injured, so badly in fact that he has to learn to walk again

The narrator says, ‘And if you thinkThat’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you’re wrong.  Completely wrong.  That’s just it see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis.  You just do it without thinking how you do it: you just stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits.’

This is good stuff.  It sounds absolutely authentic and believable.

         Then the guy’s compensation comes through – eight and a half million quid  - and I honestly couldn’t decide whether or not that was really enough money to carry out what he has in mind, even given that he invested it wisely. Essentially he decides to reshape the world, or at least some very specific parts of it, and make it exactly the way he wants it.

In the first instance, this involves searching for a building that he once lived in.  The search is long and arduous and he decides to employ some oblique strategies to help him.

‘I cooked myself some breakfast and pondered how best to make my search irrational.  The first idea that came to me was to I-Ching the map; to close my eyes, turn round a few times, stick a pin in blindly and then go and look in whatever area it happened to have landed on… Colours was the next idea I had: following … I also considered following a numerical system .. Or I could devise a corresponding process using the alphabet… I could …’

The guy has turned into a psychogeographer!!!

I went onlike to look for an author photograph of Tom Mccarthy to illustrate this post.  There’s no shortage, and he evidently meets quite a decent class of photography.  But in the end what struck me is that he resembles (in some pictures anyway) a rather more stylish Dwight Shrute of the American Office fame.  Unforntunately we cannot choose who we resemble.

LOAFING WITH BRYSON

I have nothing against Bill Bryson but I admit I couldn’t make it all the way through his recent book The Body: A Guide for Occupants.  There was just too much about death and decay,  which reminded me of the death and decay going on in my own body; and frankly I needed no reminding.

But I did read the chapter titled ‘On the level: Bipedalism and exercise’ because it had some stuff in it about walking. Most of it was pretty well known to pedalists such as you and me but I my eye was caught by the information that ‘Today the average American walks only about a third of a mile a day – and that’s walking of all types, including around the house and workplace …  According to the Economist, some American companies have begun offering reward to employees who log a million miles a year on  an activity tracker suck as a Fitbit.  That seems a pretty ambitious number but actually works out to just 2,740 steps a day or a little over a mile,’

Those must very short steps - 1.92 feet per step by my calculations: that is not the step of anybody engaged in actually walking.

But then Bryson was in the Times last weekend saying ‘I’m very active.  I walk between 16,000 and 20,000 steps a day.’  I have no reason to doubt him, and nobody believes that walking in itself makes you thin, but I would say he certainly doesn’t LOOK like a man who walks 20,000 steps a day.

WALKING UNWOUNDED (AS YET)

I have no idea of the real politics (or even realpolik) behind the killing of Qasem Soleimani, but I do know that on CNN, Nation Security Analyst Samantha Vinograd said that as a result ‘all American citizens are now walking prime targets.’  

Again I have no idea if this is actually true – I’d have thought if you were working on a ranch in Wyoming, the Iranian Quds Force is unlikely to come after you - but in any case I find something strangely tonic about the notion of being a ‘walking target.’  It seems so much better than being a sitting target or even a running target.  Let’s take comfort where we can.

AS I WAS GOING TO ST IVES ...

During his expedition to Mecca (1851-3) Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and the rest of his party anchored at a place called Marsa Mahar on the Red Sea.

Burton writes, ‘Wading ashore we cut our feet on the sharp rocks.  I remember to have felt the acute pain of something running into my toe; but after looking at the place and extracting what seemed to be a bit of thorn, I dismissed the subject, little guessing the trouble it was to give me.’

It seems he had stepped on a sea urchin, and the foot was so seriously infected that he couldn’t put any weight on it. He had to be carried for part of the journey in a sort of litter or shugduf, and later he rode on a donkey that was itself lame.  Various treatments were recommended for the foot but they all failed.  Dressing the foot with onion skin only inflamed it further, although by the time he got to Mecca it must have healed – he was fit enough to make a good few enthusiastic circuits of the kaaba.

Burton has been on my mind since I was in Cornwall at the weekend, and partly in St Ives which is home to the Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton Museum, in a private house run by one Shanty Baba (conceivably not his real name).

It was great – a kind of son et lumiere, enjoyed while sitting in a room modeled on Burton’s smoking room in Trieste (don’t you find that fewer and fewer of your friends have smoking rooms these days?) surrounded by Burtoniana, including a page from a Burton manuscript, Burton’s medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and this fine little figure, also from the Royal Geographical Society.

There was some walking to be done in St Ives, by me, not by Burton, who as far I can tell never set foot there.

There was Mount Zion and there was Teetotal Street – I’ve searched in vain to find how these places got their names

There was also some intriguing ground, for those of you who like that kind of thing.

Burton would have been taking notes and measurements, learning Cornish, and probably finding his way to the nearest brothel.  I did none of these things.  But I did have a Cornish pasty.

 Incidentally, Burton once wrote, 'The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.'  I don't know how you'd test the accuracy of that statement, but it seems all too likely to be true.