FUSE#5

FUSE #5
For author Rebecca Solnit, walking is “a bodily labour that produces
nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals… the mind, the body and
the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in
conversation together, three notes suddenly making a cord” (Solnit,
2002, p. 5). It offers a form of embodied movement that responds,
connects and shifts ways of thinking, making, seeing and moving and
approaches physical landscapes as “sensory environments… constructed
and understood through kinaesthetic motion” (Rogers, 2012, p. 63).
Doris Humphrey did it as a procession (1928)
Bruce Nauman did it in an Exaggerated Manner (1967)
Richard Long did it backwards (1967)
Trisha Brown did it up and down walls (1971),
Anna Halprin did it in mandalic circles (1987)
James Cunningham does it slow, isolated and performatively (2010–)
Amanda Heng did it so every step counted (2019–2020)
Walking is choreographic, it is rhythm, it offers multiplicity in thinking
processes, it is simple and has the ability to take the body and press it
up against, submerge in and on top of the place in which it finds itself
in. Walking is historical, its durational, repetitious, idle, spatial, temporal,
political and cultural. It is primal, yet not quite universal. For those that
cannot walk, can it still be universal if it is not bound to the body alone?
Can walking be evident without the body? Can process be a long walk?
I visited the national gallery the other day, Sunday 1st March and
found myself wandering throughout the gallery space for two and a
half hours. The grandeur of the walls, tall and stark in history lead
me up winding up back stair passages. So quiet and empty I felt I
was intruding until I’d land in the open spaces, alone with the art.
About one and a half hours in, I came across a video work by a Thai
artist Araya Rasdjarmrearsnook called Two Planets (2008) and it
sits in Gallery 15. Turning left into the gallery I noticed it placed
in the far-right hand corner of the room, I had to consciously walk
around three or four other artworks to meet it face on. Here I stand
shifting my weight from left to right and right to left, a lingering
metronome in front of two TV screens. On one of these screens, is
a collective of Thai villages, who sit, staring at an artificially placed
painting mounted on an easel in a clearing amongst the bamboo.
It was Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). It’s the notorious
one, that features two men in their gentlemanly attire, one lady off
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