Found Constraints and Followed Contours

Abstract

The Barkley Marathons is an infamously brutal endurance trail race, having only been completed by 15 runners in its 30-year history. It takes place in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee, is approximately 130 miles long, and must be completed in under 60 hours. Its rules follow a unique set of constraints specific to the contours of the local topology, to the history of incarceration in the area, and to the idiosyncratic aesthetics and ethics of the race's two founders.

Considered as a form of constraint-based endurance performance art (which it is admittedly not), the Barkley Marathons suggest a "found" approach to performance constraints: an approach that puts performance in a more direct and fine-grained relationship with the details (geological, topological, meteorological, botanical, human-historical, non-human-historical) of the world in which (and with which) the performance occurs. The race opens out onto the mountains at multiple scales, multiple speeds, and along multiple vectors; and in turn, these particular mountains are allowed to have their own specific, non-generic influence on the form and style of the event.

Notes

1 See www.drawingrestraint.net