The Shape of a Walk.

Chapter sixteen held some new names. I jammed these names into the Wikipedia engine and now I can see a wider range of walking-related art. Rather than just hog the information, I have decided to leave it here:

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum (born 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a performance artist of Palestinian origin who moved to London in 1975. Trained at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Art between the years 1975 and 1981. In 1995 she was nominated for the Turner Prize for her exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and for her show at the White Cube.
In the early 1980s Hatoum began her artistic career with performance pieces, though later she moved from 'live' work to more mechanical installations, involving video, light, and sound. While mostly focusing on confrontational themes such as violence, oppression, and voyeurism, she has often made powerful references to the vulnerability and resistance, of our human bodies.
During a visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was forced into exile. With this shadow on her shoulders, her early works can be seen as a metaphor for eternal conflict and resistance.
In 1989 Hatoum exhibited her first major scuptural work 'The Light At the End' in the Showroom Gallery. The same piece was shown the following year in the British Art Show.

In 1997, one of Hatoum's works which had been purchased by Charles Saatchi was included in the Sensation exhibition which toured London, Berlin and New York.
In 2000, her work The Entire World as a Foreign Land was at the inaugural launch of the Tate Britain. She had a work called Home at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in 2004.

Marina Abramović

In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramovic described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.” (Daneri 35)
Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.” (Daneri, 35)

Abramović reported that during her walk she was reinterpreting her connection to the physical world and to nature. She felt that the metals in the ground influenced her mood and state of being; she also pondered the Chinese myths in which the great wall has been described as a “dragon of energy.”

Allan Kaprow

Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 - April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately-scaled pieces for one or several players and devoted to the examination of everyday behaviors and habits in a way nearly indistinguishable from ordinary life. Fluxus, Performance art, and Installation art was, in turn, influenced by his work.
He studied (time-based) composition with John Cage at his famous class at the New School for Social Research, painting with Hans Hofmann, and art history with Meyer Schapiro. Kaprow's work attempts to integrate art and life. Through Happenings, the separation between life and art, and artist and audience becomes blurred. He has published extensively and was Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego. Kaprow is also known for the idea of "un-art", found in his essays "Art Which Can't Be Art" and "The Education of the Un-Artist."

Performance art can get its power from people not being afraid of their own public nudity. This conflicts with the glossy nude, which makes us uneasy. "Am I that hairy?" scream the audience [except Cousin It]. An activity like walking half of the GWOC [couldn't resist] could've made a lot of money for nappies, though they do clog up the pipes, p'r'aps it's all for the better.

I think the conviction on people's faces during the often-patronising pisses me off, the absolute seriousness. I laughed a lot at the Twin Peaks pilot episode last night because I felt that David Lynch was taking the piss, it may not have existed without those beautiful faces all over it. Or it was just a tv programme with mild attempts at subversion, I don't care, it made me laugh, unlike any of the performance art I have seen yet [unless you consider comedy to be a performance art, in which case why bother with the tag at all?].

Tags are for tea.