for laurie lange

_______________________________________
ON walking practice

Our other projects introduced meaty material to chew on but for me walking practice took the cake. This kind of practice can be done in two distinctly different ways. One was clearly laid out in our assignment----create a rule for what to note, quantify the amount and kind of activity involved. I found the other way butting into the formulaic approach: more a dreamtime, a way to be in metaphor with the beings of the natural world. Walking to be with Earth's tribes---- Pinon, Juniper, Pack Rat, Rock and Bee. Walking practice is rich. Thanks, Catherine, for an introduction to it.

In an ecological art practice I think it's important to plumb our relationship with the natural world alongside measuring and quantifying how we're there. I question whether some of the practices I've seen portrayed as ecological walking practice present the right sort of message. For instance the guy who walked back and forth in a line til he'd made his mark on the land, worn the land to bare dirt where there was vegetation. Artists make marks, it's our stock in trade. But what is the environmental validity of a walking practice that creates denuded land? In ecological art, don't we need to think about creating a practice that offers both ourselves and our audience a way to be WITH the land and not impose ON the land?

More and more this distinction between being with the land rather than on it seems necessary to the sustainability we seek. We've already made and make more than enough marks on her, outside of “environmental art”, on a massive and damaging scale. If our intention in ecological art is to foster a consideration of ecological imperatives, we as artists need to speak to this softly and not holler “look Ma, I made marks!”.

If we weere to diagram what I'm suggest as a guideline for evaluating how ecological a walking practice is we would have on the questionable side a thick black line between 2 points made from many footsteps being down on the same ground, and on the other little dashed lines where individual footsteps each time step in a different place on slightly different routes at each pass, so the imp[act on the ground is never more than a footstep once on any patch of ground. That would be an ecologically sound way to walk repeatedly between 2 points.