Time of walking

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716), ed. Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), where his text, as well as essays on it, are included.

2. ‘A picturesque stroll around Clara-Clara’, October (Summer, 1984), pp. 32–62.

3. The piece brings together two segments of steel, leaning towards each other; one of which, if reversed, would form the lower part of the segment of a cone, if they were assembled differently.

4. See ‘Shifting Sites … ’, in Recovering Landscapes. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), in note 22 below.

5. This is the title of Part I in Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A history of Walking (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

6. He cites the Petit Robert dictionary and notes that Serra once used the term ‘parallex’. See also Annmarie Adams, ‘Peter Collins: A Study in Parallax’, Journal of Architectural Education, 58, 2005, pp. 32 ff.

7. See also ‘Sergeim Eisnstein. Montage and Architecture (c. 1938)’, Assemblage, 10, December 1989, pp. 111–131, where the parallexis is traced from a child’s drawing of movement through space to August Coisy’s analysis and sketches of the approaches to the Acropolis. I am indebted to Georges Descombes for this reference.

8. See the catalogue, Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the National Museum of Wales, 2014), p. 30; see also on painters’ excursion, p. 63.

9. Quoted by John Barrell in the London Review of Books, 25 September 2014, citing the essay by Lars Kokkonen in the Wilson catalogue (ibid.) for the influence of Vernet on Wilson, but focusing entirely on the art historian point about the rise of plein-air painting. Not what I explore here.

10. See Ian J. Lochhead, The Spectator and the Landscape in the Art Criticism of Diderot and his Contemporaries (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982).

11. Two of the paintings exhibited by Vernet in the Salon of 1767 have been lost, but engravings of them are illustrated and Diderot’s text cited in the catalogue, Diderot & l’Art de Boucher à David (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1984), pp. 405–409. It is also clear that Vernet’s paintings would be precisely the static visualizations that were identified above, and that Diderot’s effort was to find a way past (or into) them.

12. I am indebted to Luke Morgan for this remark and his cogent responses to a draft of this paper.

13. Raymond Williams, Country and City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) has a fine analysis of Wordsworth’s London walking, pp. 233–247. See also Solnit, op. cit., pp. 104–118 on Wordsworth’s walking.

14. The example of Baudelaire is taken up, among other reflections and quotations, in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and Keven McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) in the section (‘M’) on the flaneur, pp. 416–455.

15. Besides Solnit, see Francesci Careri, Walkscapes. Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, text in English and Spanish (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002), and Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking. The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).

16. Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1957), p. 111. Luke Morgan suggests something of this particular difficulty by citing Henri Lefebvre on the possibility of a coherent reading of a space: ‘Yes and no. Yes, inasmuch as it is possible to envisage a “reader” who deciphers or decodes and a “speaker” who expresses himself by translating his progression into a discourse. But no, in that social space can in no way be compared to a blank page upon which a specific message has been inscribed (by whom?)’, from Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 142.

17. Richard Long, Walking in Circles (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991, reprint 1994), with an ‘Interview with Richard Cork’ (pp. 248–252) and a piece by Hamish Fulton, ‘Old Muddy’ (ibid., pp. 241–245).

18. Guardian Weekly (7 November 2014), pp. 26–29. Self also presented a program, on BBC’s Radio 4, on walking round CERN.

19. Books by Careri and Solnit both consider Debord’s art of walking.

20. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Taverner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 9–23.

21. Alice Foxley, Distance & Engagement. Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010).

22. I am reminded of a claim made by the literary historian, Terry Eagleton, that — compared to literary studies — there is nothing that ‘geography isn’t about’: his remark was cited in publicity material by Cork University Press for their Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, ed. F. H. A. Aalen.

23. See ‘The Shape of the Walk’ in Distance & Engagement.

24. ‘Shifting Sites … ’, in Recovering Landscapes. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 79–80. See also Georges Descombes, ‘Wanderweg mit Akzenten — Looking to the past — the Swiss Path’, Topos, 3, May 1993, pp. 93–99, also the essay by F. Morin et al., in Spazio e società, 15/57, January–March 1992. The whole project was eventually abandoned, but this Geneva stretch was published, illustrated and with contributions by various authors, as Voie Suisse. L’itineraire genevois de Morschach à Brunnen (Geneva:, 1991). Part of my discussion here draws on pages from my book, Historical Ground (London: Routledge, 2014).

25. Recovering Landscapes, p. 82.

26. This is illustrated as figure 30 in my The Making of Place (London: Reaktion Books, 2015).