However I soon got over this – the book is full of so many different ways of looking at and thinking and talking about walking that it drew me in. First impression highlights were an illustrated Norwegian map entitled Searching for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Regina José Galindo’s bloody footprints in Guatemala City, Bruce Nauman’s Slow Angle Walk, Jeremy Deller’s Manchester procession and Sophy Rickett’s photographs of women pissing in male postures in London streets. A definite lowlight for me was Franko B’s I Miss You - but I never could see the point of that performance.

So, on to a slightly more considered view of the book’s content. I love the old-fashioned feel of the first 7 pages – Peter Liversidge’s very familiar typewriter-written pithy proposals. And his suggestion, adopted by the editor, of having 5 empty pages at the back of the book for readers’ notes is lovely.

This book is comprehensive. It is divided into 7 sections: Footprints and Lines, Writers and Philosophers, Marches and Processions, Aliens, Dandies and Drifters, Slapstick, Studios, Museums and Biennales and Dog Walkers. One of the quite elusive and intangible ways in which I like or don’t like or feel indifferent about books is their ‘feel’. This one definitely has a good feel. It combines photographs, texts, drawings, newspaper clippings, maps, diagrams and artworks in a way which resembles a meandering walk on a day when there is no pressure to get there.

I was lucky to see an exhibition of Regina José Galindo’s Who Can Erase The Traces?  Its inclusion in this book brought back the memory of seeing the film of her walking the streets of Guatemala City barefoot and stopping every now and then to step into a basin filled with blood so that she leaves a trail of bloody footprints, representing the thousands of civilians murdered by the army over decades. It is a very powerful performance.

I don’t know that much about Bruce Nauman’s work but Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) of 1968 has whetted my appetite for more. He writes: “If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio and you’re not a painter…if you don’t start out with some canvas, you do all kinds of things-you sit in a chair or pace around.” The black and white photograph is a beautiful blurred image of him doing just that, walking in a studio in a posture of angles.

Jeremy Deller’s Procession combines processors from different walks of life in Manchester: Scout and Guide marching bands; former mill workers; dancers; players of exotic instruments; mobile libraries; Stretford Rose Queens; the Ramblers Association; Gay City Strollers; mascots from all of the local football teams; The Unrepentant Smokers and many others, all brought together to celebrate the ‘strange glory’ of Manchester. I wish I had been there.

There is no written commentary on the three black and white photographs of women hitching up their skirts and pissing like men, their knees bent, in the streets of London by Sophy Rickett in 1995. They are simply entitled Old Street, Vauxhall Bridge and Silvertown and are strangely seductive while opening up so many questions: why are they doing it?; how are they doing it?; are the pictures a comment on the City and its buildings, symbolic of financial capital, or on the behaviour of men in the streets or both or neither? They are fascinating, enigmatic pictures which open up a space for thought and discussion.

Finally, for this review, Richard Long’s famous A Line Made by Walking of 1969 is treated as slapstick by the curator Dieter Roelstraete in 2010. He associates it with the deadpan ‘dumb’ humour of Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. Interesting.

The Art Of Walking, a field guide is a great book. Great to dip into and great to read and great to look at the pictures. If you like walking and art and you can afford the price, £16.95, buy it.

Paul Allender, 2013.

David Evans (2013), The Art of Walking: A Field Guide. Black Dog Publishing: London, £16.95

Buy The Art of Walking here.

The topics we would like to cover in this symposium include, but are not limited to:

Public engagement with higher education; what is at stake when creative practitioners facilitate change in communities; the relationships between the practices of artists and urban policy makers; the line between public engagement as a democratic tool for society’s voice and as a mould for society’s form; public engagement in industry; public resistance in public engagement; the public’s role in academia; the ‘participatory turn’ and its relational, dialogical and collaborative aesthetics; conceptualising publics; how cultural context inflects public participation; temporality of public engagement; sustainable public engagement; acrimony in public practices

If you would like to submit a proposal for a 20-minute paper, screening, small exhibition or other intervention, please email Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson (a.j.jackson@sheffield.ac.uk) by June 26th at the latest.

Emma Bolland’s EVERY PLACE A PALIMPSEST (Part Two) focuses on Prince Phillip Playing Fields (municipal playing fields located on the borders of the Scott Hall and Chapeltown areas of Leeds) and incorporates texts by John Newling, Gordon Burn and David Peace.

Presented at CADS, Sheffield, Wednesday 22 May 2013. Recorded by Brian Lewis.

Reblogged from Helen Abbott:

• 

It's been a busy month or so of poetry/music events here in Sheffield. On 12 April 2013, we held our first poetry reading (in French and English) at the wonderful Nichols Building Cafe in Shalesmoor, attracting members of the public, students and colleagues from the departments of English and French. This first "Baudelaire in the City" evening was then followed up by two "

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“This isn’t some TV-series or drama-workshop universe. This is the real world, Sir: the realm of ants swarming on kerbstones and wasps tapping against the window at dawn. There are sandy mounds behind the brake-drum factory; a myriad of insects dying in drainage ditches or under wheels. They click in their death throes as they are torn by mandibles, stamped on by children, squashed under tyres by roadside verge. The world is a fiery storm roaring at the base of the hedge – flames spreading, invisible in the tussocks.”

Insect Theatre violently drags the spectator into the tussocks. In Edgar’s close up images of dead flies, the spindle trails of spent spider webs and the death-field detritus of broken wings, legs and other shrivelled insect matter we journey into an unrelentingly Hobbesian state of nature, a world of devastation and desiccation-into-dust.

Accompanied by four short essays by anthropologist Hugh Raffles, the book manages to achieve an even bleaker tone than Papadimitriou. The air is chilled by Raffles’ opening depiction of the death throes of a fly as it surrenders “in muddled exhaustion”, stuck fast on a flypaper, and things get no warmer in the tone and staging of Edgar’s images, for even his colour images have a muted, decay ridden palette. The abject effect is also achieved by focussing exclusively upon dead insects – dead defeated insects. This book does not present a valedictory account of the heroic life of rampant insects. The victors are not seen here. These scenes are aftermaths of insect wars, and only the victims are left on stage. This conjurors a strange horror-absence effect , for the victorious protagonist is absent, the sensation of viewing these images is a bit like stumbling into a giant’s cave and its litter of strewn bones. Will the giant return and trap you as you gaze on at the remains of his last meal?

Many of the images show rampant web, a shroud-like dirty gossamer tightly wrapping the trapped insect carcases. These death-bundles are attended by tendrils of web striated across the frame, taught and full of ominous lines of vibration-cord, still capable of signalling to the predator off-stage. Careful where you tread next, you might awaken the monster beyond the page.

The viewer becomes uncomfortable partly because here is dirt as art, but also because of the scale effect of dragging the viewer into the scene. Edgar’s pictures shrink the viewer down to insect size. And strangely this is achieved through removal of human reference points. This isn’t a Honey I Shrunk the Kids world, where the insects are shown living in small corners of our world. No, the absence of such collateral renders this a more alien place, one that is terrifying (and perhaps beautiful in an odd way) in its own terms rather than through any clear association to a ‘background’ human world.

Tim Edgar (2013) Insect Theatre, Black Dog Publishing: London, £14.95

Visit Black Dog’s site to purchase Insect Theatre.

1pm –  Free Lunch

Choose from a selection of:
A Selection of Freshly Baked Soft and Seeded Rolls

Authentic Mixed Samosa Selection V
Chicken Yakitori Skewer H
Yorkshire Crisps
Creamy Lancashire and Roast Vegetable Quiche V
Mini Peppered Steak Pie
Selection of Yorkshire Cocktail Sausages with Barbecue Dip
Selected Fresh Fruits
Mini Cake Bites
A selection of mini cakes including chocolate brownies, flapjacks, tiffin and
lemon drizzle cake.

• 1.45pm – The Baroque Melancholy of Hashima. Mark Pendleton
• 2.30pm – a slip of the land / a slip of the language. Paul Evans
• 2.50pm – Discussion and coffee/tea & biscuits
• 3.10pm – The Ghosts of Furnace Park. Luke Bennett
• 3.30pm – Every Place a Palimpsest, Part 2. Emma Bolland
• 3.50pm – Closing discussion
• 4.30pm – Close

The symposium takes place at CADS, 5-7 Smithfield, Sheffield, S3 7AR.

The research blog for the project can be found at: http://youwillhearmecall.wordpress.com/

Emma Bolland

The paper will focus on Prince Phillip Playing Fields; municipal playing fields located on the borders of the Scott Hall and Chapeltown areas of Leeds.  This was the site of the murder, and subsequent discovery of the body of Wilma McCann: a victim of Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ The paper will examine the anonymity of the site, and the exploration of the idea of the ‘non-space’ as an attempted erasure of traumatic histories; referencing the writings of Gordon Burn and John Newling and their examination of Gloucester City Council’s demolition of 25 Cromwell Street; the home of Fred and Rosemary West. The author’s history and ‘pre-history’ of a continuing personal and creative relationship with the site will locate the experience of site as mediated through the lenses, mythologies and narratives of contested memories, media representations, and pre-existing themes of landscape and trauma as central to her practice. The conclusion will examine the site’s position in relation to the author’s on going collaborative project  ‘MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall’, (the project blog can be found at http://youwillhearmecall.wordpress.com/ ). The paper will be contextualised by an exhibition of visual work from the project.

BIOGRAPHY

 Emma Bolland is an artist and writer. She resumed her visual and written practice in 2004, after several years as a professional musician, focussing on narratives of danger and sexual risk filtered through the site, landscape, and contemporary and folk myth, using media including drawing, installation, film, text, performance and sound.

To reserve a free place at the symposium, please visit our eventbrite page.

This presentation is a joint iteration of our performance project Hashima, begun in 2012, and continuing with AHRC ‘Care for Future’ funding. Combining the work of a performance theorist, geographer, geologist, environmentalist, historian of Japanese culture, and visual artist, the project is based on a series of field trips to Hashima, Japan, a former site of intensive offshore coal-mining and once the most densely populated spot on earth.  It is perhaps best known in the popular imagination as the base of the mysterious, oedipal villain in the recent Bond movie Skyfall. Our field trips allow us to gather materials to be reworked into a number of creative outputs, including postcards, improvisational scores, site-specific performances, soundscape, and installations. Underpinning the project is a collective concern with the future of ruins in a traumatised landscape. More specifically, we want to rethink the meaning of ecological horizons through a non-sentimental encounter with a human and non-human past, present and future. While we do not ignore the specificity of Hashima, we want to draw out its allegorical value as a site of monstrous transformation and futural possibility.

Presenter Biographies:

Professor Deborah Dixon works at the boundary of the arts and sciences, including looking at “monstrous” geography and BioArt, where artists take living tissue as their artistic medium. She teaches in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

Dr Carina Fearnley is a Lecturer in Environmental Hazards at Aberystwyth University and a specialist in Disaster Risk Reduction. She focuses on the role of understanding and communicating uncertainty, risk, and complexity to develop resilience to natural and environmental hazards.

Lee Hassall is a performance artist, course leader in Fine Arts at the University of Worcester and a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University. His research proposes reclaiming a sense of the visual within the study of landscape and explores and contextualises articulation of the visual in relation to the performative.

Professor Carl Lavery teaches theatre and performance at Aberystwyth University. He has authored several books on space and performance, and is currently involved in a number of AHRC funded projects exploring the relationship between community, ecology and environment.

Dr Mark Pendleton is Lecturer of Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield. A social and cultural historian, he is interested in how people relate to the past through memory texts, sites and practices. He is currently working on a large-scale research project on modern and industrial ruins in Japan.

To reserve a free place at the symposium (which will take place on May 22nd, 10am-4pm), please visit our eventbrite page.