WALKING AND FINDING

 Sometimes I like to think that walking is an abstract, immaterial activity without any end product.  You go out, you come back, and although you may be changed or uplifted or enlightened, you haven’t made or acquired anything.

         Unless, of course, your walk involves scavenging or shopping, and if you’re an assemblage artist.

 

         Having thought about Harry Smith picking up paper planes from the streets on his walks around Manhattan, I started to think about Joseph Cornell.  It seems possible that they met, though I can’t find any hard evidence for it. 

 

I reread parts of Deborah Solomon’s biography of Cornell, Utopia Parkway and she does have Cornell as something of a walker. Apparently he would often go walking in Central Park after visiting the galleries on 57^thStreet, including Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century.  The Cornell exhibition at London’s Royal Academy was titled Wanderlust.

 

But this was the passage in Solomon’s book that really stirred me up, ‘In the 1920s, as Cornell was combing through jumbles of objects in New York City, across the world, in the streets of Paris, Andre Breton was scouting flea markets for intriguing trouvailles … and in his autobiographical Amour fou (1936) he described his practice of “wandering in search of everything.”’  I suppose the thing about searching for everything is that wherever you go, you find what you’re looking for.

 

Breton is widely quoted as saying ‘The simplest act of Surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.’  But I’ve never seen why walking had to be involved.  Wouldn’t it be just as surreal to fire your gun out of the window? Or into your own ceiling?

 

In 1942 Breton and a few other Surrealists were in New York, and were not much impressed by the city. Solomon again, ‘Left with nothing to do, the once-scandalous Surrealists visited galleries, sat through movie matinees and strolled down Third Avenue as Breton pointed out surreal-like objects in the windows of the secondhand stores.’

I can’t find a convincing picture of Breton walking – hard enough to find a picture of him outdoors - but here he is collecting butterflies with Benjamin Peret; some walking must surely have been involved.

 

Cornell and Breton did meet – Cornell organized a showing of some ‘nickelodeon classics.’ And as Solomon says, the Surrealists realized ‘Cornell himself was as exotic as any Surrealist creation, a passive autodidact who wandered the city with a brown shopping bag full of trouvailles.’

 

And then, from the dusty dossiers of my memory, I remembered, a long time ago, I was wandering around Manhattan and went into a fairly modest antiques emporium where various dealers were doing business, and the guys were still all aflutter cause the previous day Michael Jackson had been in and bought a couple of items.

 

         I’m sure this was true, though the idea of Michael Jackson wandering around New York looking for unconsidered trifles seemed as unlikely then as it does now. But a little research reveals the pictures above and below of Michael antiquing, and according to online sources he was a major collector of, among other things, comic books, clowns, unusual jewelry, and materials relating to Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, much of it, it must be said, acquired at auction rather than by wandering the streets looking in antique shops.

 

And then the thought of auctions reminded me of a curious moment in my life when I was staying in the Daily Telegraph flat in Paris.  Did you know the Daily Telegraph had a flat in Paris?  I didn’t.  And there on a bookshelf was the 8 volume auction catalogue of the Andre Breton sale.  

 

I thought very seriously about stealing it, but I didn’t a) because of my own moral compass, though that was probably the least of the reasons, b) because I thought somebody might notice it had gone, and I didn’t want to be pursed by the Daily Telegraph and/or the French police, and perhaps most important of all c) because the volumes were immensely heavy and I would have had to carry them on my long walk to the station to get a train back to England.  

I see that catalogue currently sells for a few hundred quid and I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.

WRONG AGAIN

 In the interests of half-arsed research I typed ‘walking wrong’ into Google and wasn’t very surprised by what I found – this kind of thing:

 

Now of course I’m not actually going to read these articles, though I was almost sucked by this one:

 

Mistakes while walking may not be the same as walking mistakes but I didn’t trouble to find out – nice font variety through.

 

Of course many of the mistakes are apparently about posture.  Yes, sometimes the internet is just like a punishing and over critical parent – stand up straight, don’t slouch, look where you’re going. And in these cases the mistake was often revealed in the image.

But there were some surprises. Overstriding.  I’d never heard of that. 

 

Insufficient weight change – how much is sufficient?

 

And how about this one?

 

It’s the whole universe telling me that I’m walking wrong, and in the wrong direction, such as when I find myself walking into space on a concrete parabola that looks a bit like Lubetkin’s penguin pool:

And of course if you Google ‘walking right’ you still get a lot of hits telling you how you’re walking wrong. However, I this one found moderately consoling.  

Invoking scientists always raises the stakes – and scientists are rarely invoked in order to say everything’s just fine, carry on as you are. But in this case, I was encouraged by that line, ‘And there is nothing we can do about it.’ Which is fine, because nothing is exactly what I was planning to do about it anyway. 

WALKING WRONG

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

Sometimes it seems to me that people only buy weekend newspapers so they can be told that they’re doing things wrong.  They’re eating wrong, drinking wrong, sleeping wrong, dating wrong, bringing up their children wrong, and so on.   For me this  reached new heights of annoyance in Saturday’s Times, in an article by Lucy Cavendish, in which told us that most people are walking wrong too.

This is Lucy Cavendish

She was trying to improve her memory by one method or another (and walking was just one of them).  Of course I’m well used to being told that I walk too slowly.  Briskness is the new healthy walking orthodoxy, but you know, I’m inclined to walk at whatever damn speed I want. 

 

 Cavendish talked to one Susan Saunders who’s a Health Coach (yep that’s a job) who suggested that Cavendish could ‘maximise the benefits’ of her walking by combining it with mindfulness.  More than that, apparently researchers at UCL have ‘found a link between preserving cognition and undertaking self-reflection.’  The article then explained what self-reflection is for the benefit of slack-jawed readers who might be new to the idea of introspection.

 

I found the whole thing so annoying that I went for a dawdle while thinking unintrospectively about Helena Bonham Carter and Harry Styles.  I suspect they both walk wrong.

 

 

PEDESTRIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

  

I was first aware of Harry Smith as an avant-garde filmmaker.

 

 

Only later did I discover he’d put together the 3 volumes of the Anthology of American Folk Music which is a thing of great beauty and wonder.

 

These days when people describe Harry Smith they have to add that he was also a painter, occultist, anthropologist, and collector of many things, not least paper planes.  Like this:

 

This is the cover of a book titled Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I.  I just bought it.  It too is a thing of beauty and wonder.

 

I can’t swear that Harry Smith was much of a walker per se, though one way or another he certainly spent time on the streets of New York, where he picked up and collected paper airplanes: the perfect found object.

 

If the book’s introduction is to believed, and with Harry Smith very few things are to be believed completely, there was a time, say late 60s to early 80s, when you couldn’t walk the streets on Manhattan without seeing a paper plane on the ground, sometimes even in the air.

Smith would swoop down, pick it up, then annotate it with the time and place he found it, just like a ‘proper’ anthropologist.

 

Smith’s friend William Breeze is quoted in the introduction as saying,

‘He and I discussed it more than once as we usually met for dinner and had a trip to the Strand on Fridays …  and walked the neighborhood.  He found several planes and would immediately stop to fish out a pencil and make notes on it. As I recall he was interested in in the changes in their morphology over the years, with some plane designs disappearing and then mysteriously reappearing years later.’

 

In due course the planes went into storage. Some of them at one time were at the Smithsonian, now 251 of them, all the ones in the book, are at the Anthology Film Archives. Very possibly there are a lot more elsewhere.

 

Many things about this collection surprise me.  I think I’m a pretty good scavenger and observer of street detritus, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a paper plane lying in the street.  But times do change. I remember when I used to see quite a few playing cards lying around in the street and for a while I picked them up thinking I’m do something or other with them, but in the end I never got round to it.

 

Is it possible that people have got more conscientious about littering, and now they take their paper planes and their playing cards home with them or put them in a bin?  If this is the case, then on balance I suppose it’s a good thing, but it’s a real disadvantage for the street anthropologist.

FROM THE ASHES

I sometimes worry that my enjoyment of walking in gardens is just another sign of having one foot in the grave, and of course I want to seem preternaturally youthful. 

However I (temporarily) overcame my worries last week as I wandered into The Phoenix Garden, a green space and community garden, tucked in between the dwindling number of bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the similarly dwindling guitar shops of Denmark Street, and right by the Elms Lesters Painting rooms in Flitcroft Street (now no longer painting rooms).

 

The Phoenix Garden is great, not big, though it seems to have expanded since I was last there.  It’s a work in progress and at present parts of it are wonderfully chaotic, and although it’s not a place for a long walk, it’s a great place to wander around.

 

And what really appealed: the things that the gardeners grow there are pretty much the same things I try to grow in my own humble patch: acanthus, euphorbia, cardoon:

and above all echiums, though it must be said that The Phoenix Garden has rather more success with echiums than I do:

Photo: Caroline Gannon

Given the cold it wasn’t a place to stay for too long and I certainly didn’t want to hang around sitting on a bench, though somebody else apparently had done, and then left behind, abandoned or lost, a couple of books.

 

The one on the right was a rather fine notebook containing various not very legible pencil notes about art and film. In other circumstance I’d probably have taken it away with me as an acquisition for the Nicholsonian Institution but I was already quite laden and in any case the book was soaking wet.  I left it for a more or less discerning walker/collector/scavenger.