List of works related to music and walking, or walking music.
Hammons from “Going Out” anthology book and the buddha quoted by Derek Jarman in his memoirs “Modern Nature”
Hammons recognised the diversity and flow of public space as creative inspiration, as creativity. “The less I do the more of an artist I am”. A simple manifesto that suggests much without filling the observer with long words, words encoded with the possesive nature of logistics.
I read three essays in “Going Out: Walking, Listening, Soundmaking”, an anthology of walking related practices. 150 pages. Reading is a kind of movement, a motion, so it would not be fair to ridicule the corporeal paradox of sitting and reading a book about walking which may not be a negative paradox. However the logistics of an anthology tries to gather patterns from a diverse array of creative practices, to categorise, and to assimilate these practices into a dominant language.
Another quote from Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s put to criticism, not to understand and it never has any fun! Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? That’s like going into the lion’s den. So I refuse to deal with that audience. I will play with the street audience. That audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don’t have any reason to play games, there is nothing gained or lost.”
Criticism: an assertion of bourgeious elitism? Fred Moten writes in “The Undercommons”: “Critical theory neglects the possibility of there being an outside, an untameable…” The relation beteen the critique and the outside. What is outside of the critique? How can we imagine outside as a sort of unframing, outside of logic? And walking as an evaporation of logic, of verbalism. Evaporation: context leaves through the pores, the self empties, the wind rattles through us. Wanting to feel in this way would be dangerous in a rotting landscape full of grief and violence. But then to smell the gorse on an empty stomach is beautiful and intense. Digestion: swallow some words, walk them out, test them in their relations to the thick spatial experience of an environment, stick them to the lands and leave them hanging on trees and motors, take a shit and the opened hollow will birth a new idea, not yours, but one made in space.
Notes now on “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
In moten and Harney’s framework of the colonial dynamic, the settler does not surround the exploited but is surrounded. The settler attacks outwardly, transforming heterogeneity into homogeneity and defines the commons. In this framework, why repair and why fight for visibility? Why fight for the commons? Rather then defend our commons, can we inhabit the outside, the space unframed by those categories and logics defined by the settler?
What is looming outside of every attempt to politicise?
There is resonance here between Moten and Harney’s commons and Hammon’s art world. They both desire to looks beyond the critique. The critique may be the tool of a rationalising order, to tame whatever’s left outside.
So how to inhabit the outside, close to chaos? This call may be beyond politics that may be already encapsulated by an order codified in hierarchy and domination. A call to bring life into intensity, to imagine chaose as a source of intensity.