Still from Marina Abramović, “The Lovers, Great Wall Walk with Ulay” 

Walking upright on two legs is arguably the most essential human trait. Walking—and the vertical posture that enables doing it—are believed to have freed early hominids’ hands to develop and exploit fine skills, which in turn called on their brains to grow larger and more versatile. Walking thus becomes the key to being human.

It’s not surprising, then, that walking has contributed much over history to another fundamental human attribute, that being the making and enjoyment of art. The phrase “gallery stroll” barely introduces it. We should think about garden paths, maps, even the mazes that can still be found today on the floors of Gothic cathedrals. Yet there is something different about the way of walking invented in 1967, when English artist Richard Long deliberately walked back and forth over a space of open grassland, a moor, until he created a long mark that was visible even from a distance. In so doing, he cemented the connection between countless trails, walkways, pavements and footpaths and one of the fundamental elements of art: a drawn line.

It’s one thing for a designer to plot a path, then build it for use by the audience that will follow it. It’s quite another to set out on open ground and walk freely, so that one’s feet take the place of a brush or chisel, allowing the artist to do what artists do, which is to say, to start from an idea but only find out where it leads by going there.

Robert Long, “Desert Flowers”

Long’s addition to the artist’s options came at a time when the arts were both growing and changing in fundamental ways. The newly-minted motto of outdoor activities—“Take nothing but memories; leave nothing but footprints”—may have reminded him that some of the trackway scars that inspired him were thousands of years old, which thought clashed with the timely goal of doing no harm to the natural world that walking made accessible. To be sure, as a couple of Long’s photographs here attest, it took time to settle that question, which happened only after he’d built some stone circles, and probably left other marks of his passage as well. “A Circle in Norway” came about in 2008, “Cold Stones” was built in the Spanish Sierra Nevada in 2009. A recent example of his more sensitive response greets visitors to Park City’s Kimball Art Center as they enter the gallery. It takes the form of a stylized list of impressions he gathered of a walk he took over eight days in the vicinity of Joshua Tree National Park. Here he lists nearly 60 characteristic incidents, presumably jotted down in sequence as they happened, then labeled in a few words arranged to resemble the spokes of a wheel. Thus the walking becomes a vehicle for luggage made of memories.

A large part of the Kimball’s Step After Step consists of such records of experiences found while walking. Essentially, this art takes the classic form of performance art, while what we see in the gallery are the artifacts of what may have been either a private or public event. Some of these artifacts are photographs, some videos, and a few find clever, less literal ways of celebrating ambulatory experiences. Engaging examples of such were contributed by the Museum of Walking (MoW), an organization that potential walking enthusiasts and veterans alike would do well to google. The example chosen from their “small-but-mighty archive and library” is a  Rolodex that indexes “scores” for numerous walks the interested party may then request at the Museum. These scores, like those a musician would create or follow during a performance, suggest a creative walk one might choose to “perform” for oneself.

The Museum of Walking, “Rolodex”

In “Radius,” also from the MoW, 14 artists have each contributed a hand-drawn map of a walk they took, all starting from the same point, with their maps revealing what sights and amenities they encountered along the way. Here we learn that our civic planners generally presume that 15 minutes is the limit for how long, thus how far, the average person is willing to walk, no matter the promised reward.

Another delight consists of Bill Gilbert’s choice to use ceramics to immortalize the fool’s errand that was the 19th century’s effort to apply the grid system, so successful in the Eastern United States, to the West as well. Documenting his effort to walk a square following such a grid, it goes hilariously askew, making visible what he describes in words elsewhere: “On Cedar Mesa, my attempt to trace a grid across the mesa top stays fairly much on track until a 1,000-foot cliff blocks my way forward.”

Many artists have discovered the value of walking as a way of disrupting creative blockages. A walk, often surprisingly short, may be relied upon to shake loose one or more ways forward. An artist who uses this technique has found, further, that his elaborate and cumulative experience, should he continue the walk once he’s achieved that clarity of mind, results in a very different sort of map than the objective view produced by tape measures and drone photos. Sohei Nishino, a Japanese artist, compiles his walking impressions into collages that foreground the subjective errors that fill most memories of places visited. Things appear differently in memory, and prominent landmarks show up multiple times, just as the walker saw them from many different points along the way. Anyone who has ever tried to draw a map from memory may appreciate how well cerebral montages, made on foot, capture the experience of presence in a place—an impressionist cascade that refuses to resolve into a single image that is never seen.

Walking is not limited to forward travel, of course. We soon enough learn how to back up, which is a very different and often more challenging skill. With the invention of the motion picture camera, it became possible to simulate going backwards by reversing the film. Yet what initially looks like that on some of the films in Step After Step turns out to be subjects who actually do walk backwards. In “L’Arbre D’Oublier (The Tree of Forgetting),” Brazilian artist Paolo Nazareth repeats a ritual from the days of legal slavery, in which slaves were forced to walk backwards around a tree in order to “erase” their identities before they were shipped across the Atlantic to an unwelcoming New World. By filming himself doing this, he gives a sense of greater reality to what would otherwise just be words like these. Elsewhere, he walks with his feet painted red to celebrate the peasants whose feet are stained from working the soils they farm.

Regina José Galindo, “El Gran Retorno”

In “El Gran Retorno (The Great Return),” Guatemalan filmmaker Regina José Galindo films herself leading a band of 45 black-clad, professional musicians that march backwards through Guatemala City to call attention to the way so many nations, now led by the United States, have set out to reverse history and take the world back to a time when power and property belonged solely to an elite caste. And because walking in this way is comparatively clumsy, it makes a point about there being a wrong and a right way to conduct one’s life.

There are more artists and works, but it’s appropriate to share with Utah audiences that  the Kimball has included some local walks among them. Puerto Rican Ernesto Pujol, while an artist in residence at the U of U, created an almost two-hour film of a 12-hour performance that climaxed on the steps of the State Capitol, which began and ended with 40 performers walking, initially alone, from various places around Salt Lake City, waiting for the others, then meeting to climb the steps, and finally dispersing back into the city.

Bill Gilbert, “Scorpio”

Gilbert maintains the principle, which was essential to early performances, that the work should relate to the place it occurs. He is also aware of the historical role played by the sky in locating oneself on the ground below, which led to a series he calls “Celestial/Terrestrial Navigation,” in which he may compare skies in two widely diverse places. In “Scorpio,” named after one of the constellations through which the sun passes, he compares Utah’s San Rafael Swell with a place in Australia’s New South Wales. Here, and there, he connected the night sky to the land below, navigating by means that were long used by travelers and are still employed by those who live in deserts or ply the seas—two congruent challenges. The photographs he took on the ground along the way become details that connect specific places with his route through the larger area, shown in the style of a once familiar, map-like aerial view with keyed details.

In some of these works, the artists show the audience what they encountered while on foot. In others, they suggest what viewers might go and see for themselves. Spaceships may be the emblem of our time, but it’s those footprints on the Moon that say the most.

Step by Step, Kimball Art Center, Park City, through September 14.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.