Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility

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Notes

1. Will Self, Psychogeography (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007); Will Self, Psycho Too (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009); Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (London: Pocket Essentials, 2006); Walking, Writing and Performance, ed. by Roberta Mock (Bristol: Intellect, 2009); Phil Smith, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2010); Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking (Chelmsford, Harbour Books, 2010); Kuopio AntiFestival, <www.antifestival.com> [accessed 31 January 2012]; Deveron Arts, <www.deveron-arts.com> [accessed 31 January 2012]; Walking Artists Network, <http://walkingartistsnetwork.org/> [accessed 2 February 2012]. Perambulations part ofthe Hidden City Festival held in Plymouth 2008 <www.hiddencityfestival.org.uk>, <www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=22833 [accessed 12 April 2012].

2. Coverley, Psychogeography.

3. André Breton, Nadja, trans. M. Polizzotti (London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1928]).

4. For instance, Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London and New York: Verso, 2002) references specific male walkers approximately four times as frequently as it identifies female walkers, despite her consciousness of questions of gender, feminism and the history of prostitution. The list of men to whom she devotes most space bears some similarity to Coverley's genealogy, and to the lineage we suggest in our opening remarks: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Muir, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Guy Debord. The only women given comparable space are Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf and Ffyona Campbell.

5. ‘Women Walking’ was funded by the British Academy. We completed peripatetic interviews with Emma Bush, Hilary Ramsden, walkwalkwalk, Tamara Ashley and Simone Kenyon, Elspeth Owen, Rachel Gomme, Linda Cracknell, Sorrel Muggridge, Misha Myers, and Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre.

6. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), p.197. The recent statement by a representative of Toronto Police that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized’ is a stark indication of the ways in which the occupation of space remains gendered. Responding to such patriarchal ideology, the ‘Slut Walk’ was founded by four women in Toronto. At the time of writing, satellite Slut Walks have been proposed in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, South Africa and Mexico. See <http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/> [accessed 1 September 2011].

7. See Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 14; and Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 110–11.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953 [1782]), p. 382.

10. Thoreau, ‘Walking’, pp. 57–58.

9. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in Waldo R. Browne (ed.), Joys of the Road: A Little Anthology in Praise of Walking (Chicago: Browne's Bookstore, 1951), pp. 56–75 (p. 64); originally published in Atlantic Monthly, June 1862.

11. Wrights & Sites, ‘Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City’, Performance Research, 11 (2006), 115–122. Also available at <http://www.mis-guide.com/ws/documents/dealing.html> [accessed 26 May 2011]. Wrights & Sites, founded in 1997, is a group of four artist-researchers (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner) committed to producing experimental, site-orientated work. See <http://www.mis-guide.com/> [accessed 2 February 2012].

12. André Breton, ‘Leave Everything’, in Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978 [1922]), p. 166.

13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are key critics here. See Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

14. Cresswell, On the Move, p. 53.

15. See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas and Sternberg 2009), pp. 94, 99. It would be possible to extend this discussion by looking at Bourriaud’s notion of ‘relational art’ and its aspirations, as well as Grant Kester's related concept of ‘dialogic’ practices (see Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)). Such an analysis deserves more space, however, and a thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this article, though see our comments below.

16. Ibid., p.185.

17. Guy Debord, ‘Théorie de la dérive’, Internationale Situationniste, #2 (Paris, December 1958) ed. and trans. by Ken Knabb in Situationalist International Anthology, (2nd Edition, 2006) pp. 62–66 available to download at <www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm> [accessed 30 November 2010].

18. Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Stirling: A.K. Press, 1991), p. 34.

19. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 81.

20. Iain Sinclair, ‘An Introduction to LightsOut for the Territory’, Telegraph, 1February 2010, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/7140533/Lights-Out-for-the-Territory.html> [accessed 27 May 2011].

21. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

22. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 147.

23. Ibid., p. 103.

24. See Coverley, Psychogeography.

25. Bernstein's writing in Tous les Chevaux du Roi is unreliable because of its fictional nature; its status as anhistorical record of Situationist activities is therefore unclear. However, it is evidently based onBernstein's personalsituation andSituationist practices.

26. Bernstein was married to Debord.

27. Michèle Bernstein, Tous les Chevaux du Roi (Buchet-Chastel, 1960; trans. John Kelsey as All the King's Horses (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2008]), p. 65.

28. Ibid., p. 37.

29. Cited in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 52.

30. Unpublished interview with Heddon (2009). Tamara Ashley and Simone Kenyon are dancers committed to creating work that engages with aspects of ecology and environment. They have created solo pieces and collaborative performances. At time of writing, Ashley is Artistic Director of DanceDigital whilst Kenyon is a producer with Battersea Arts Centre. The Pennine Way walk was blogged: <http://ashleykenyonwalk.blogspot.com/> [accessed 15 July 2011]. An illustrated book was subsequently published, offering a poetic and diaristic reflection of their experiences – The Pennine Way: The Legs That Make Us (London A Brief Magnetics Publication, 2007). The dancers presented a performative account of their walk at RADAR, Loughborough University (‘Roam: A Weekend of Walking’), 15–17 March 2008.

31. As Rebecca Solnit writes, ‘Having met so many predators, I learned to think like prey’, Wanderlust, p.168.

32. Linda Cracknell is the author of collections of stories including Life Drawing (Glasgow: 11/9, 2000), edited anthologies (A Wilder Vein (Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, 2009)), and radio plays (including The Lamp, R4, December 2011). Her walks from 2007 are informing a series being published in Cracknell's pocket book imprint, ‘best foot books’ which includes Whiter than White (2009), The Beat of Heart Stones (2010) and Following Our Fathers (2012). See <http://www.lindacracknell.com/> [accessed 2 February 2012] and <http://walkingandwriting.blogspot.com/> [accessed 25 May 2011].

33. Unpublished interview with Heddon (2009).

34. Unpublished interview with Heddon (2009).

35. Though an established ceramicist, Elspeth Owen also embraces time-based, live practices. Since 2005, under the guise of a persona, ‘Material Woman’, Owen has completed a number of long-distance, durational walks: Looselink (2005), Orbit (2007), Grandmother's Footsteps (2009) and In the Dark (2009). See <www.elspethowen.net/> [accessed 1 May 2012].

36. See Rebecca Schneider, ‘Patricide and the Passerby’, in D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr and Kim Solga (eds), Performance and the City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 51–70.

37. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 70.

38. Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’ unpaginated.

39. Ibid.

42. Rogers and New, <http://www.planbperformance.net/meandyou.htm> [accessed 6 January 2010].

40. Daniel Belasco Rogers and Sophia New have been performing together under the name plan b since 2001. Residing in Berlin, they make solo and individual works, across a range of forms, including video installation, drawings, and performance. Since 2003, Belasco Rogers has been recording his outside journeys with a GPS (The Drawing of My Life). In 2007, New began to record her movements. See <http://planbperformance.net/> [accessed 21 May 2011].

41. Exhibition, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen (2008).

44. Unpublished interview with Heddon (2009).

43. Wrights & Sites, performance-lecture performed at Arnolfini, Bristol as part of Situations’ Material City programme on 11 October 2006. Documented at <http://www.mis-guide.com/ws/documents/situations.html> [accessed 30 May 2011].

47. Unpublished interview with Heddon (2009).

45. Qualmann, unpublished interview with Heddon (2009).

46. <www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk> [accessed 5 September 2011].

48. Emma Bush is a member of propeller (along with Neil Callaghan, Augusto Corrieri, Pete Harrisonand Timothy Vize-Martin). Founded in 2003 and based in Harbertonford, propeller’s work is focused on explorations of place and social ecologies, and is committed to collaboration, dialogue and exchange. They utilize a variety of performance modes (including walks and performative lectures). See <http://propellernews.blogspot.com/?zx=d6aad53070ae114c> [accessed 2 February 2012].

49. Unpublished interview with Turner (2009).

50. See Misha Myers and Dan Harris, ‘Way from Home’, Performance Research, 9 (Summer 2004), 90–91; and DVD supplement.

51. Unpublished interview with Turner (2009).

52. As Myers' article proposes, there is a certain ‘conviviality’ among many performance works by men. In addition to the works mentioned there, the walking practices of Lone Twin and Mike Pearson, for example, often involve engaging with people.

53. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (2004), 51–79 (p. 65). For ‘relational aesthetics’, see Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by John Howe (Paris: Presses du Réel, 2002).

54. Lone Twin are the duo Greg Whelan and Gary Winters, who began collaborating in 1997. ‘Walk With Me Walk With Me Will Somebody Please Walk With Me’ was the title of Lone Twin's 2002 performance lecture, which drew on their repeated use of walking in their work. In one piece, for example, they walked for eighteen hours back and forth across a bridge spanning the Glømma river in Norway, with people choosing to join them.

55. Schneider, ‘Patricide and the Passerby’, pp. 52–6.

56. Unpublished interview with Turner (2009).