Wanderlust: A History of Walking (41 page)

The New York performance artist Vito Acconci did his
Following Piece
over twenty-three days in 1969; like much conceptual art of the time, it played with the intersection between arbitrary rules and random phenomena by choosing a stranger and following him or her until he or she entered a building. Sophie Calle, a French photographer whose works arise from interactions and encounters, later revised Acconci's performance with two of her own, documented in photographs and text.
Suite Venitienne
recounts how she met a man at a party in Paris and surreptitiously followed him to Venice, where she tailed him like a detective until he confronted her; years later she had her mother hire an actual detective to do the same to her in Paris, and incorporated the detective's photographs of her into her own artwork as a kind of commissioned portraiture. These pieces explored the city's potential for suspicion, curiosity, and surveillance arising from the connections and disconnections between strangers on the street. In 1985 and 1986, the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum used the street as a performance space, stenciling footprints containing the word
unemployed
down streets in Sheffield, as if to make visible the sad secrets of passersby in that economically devastated city, and performing two different walking acts in Brixton, a working-class outpost of London.

Of all the performances involving walking, the most dramatic, ambitious, and extreme was Marina Abramović and Ulay's 1988
Great Wall Walk.
Radical performance artists from the Communist east—she from Yugoslavia, he from East Germany—they began to collaborate in 1976 on a series of what they called “relation works.” They were interested in testing both their own and the audiences' physical and psychic boundaries with performances that threatened danger, pain, transgression, boredom; they were also interested in symbolically uniting the genders into an ideal whole; and they were increasingly influenced by shamanistic, alchemical, Tibetan Buddhist, and other esoteric traditions. Their work calls to mind what Gary Snyder described as the Chinese tradition of the “ ‘four dignities'—Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are ‘dignities' in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes,” or Vipassana Buddhism's similar emphasis on meditating in these four postures. In their first piece,
Relation in Space,
they walked rapidly from opposite
walls of a room toward each other until they collided, again and again. In 1977's
Imponderabilia
they stood nude and motionless in the doorway of a museum so that visitors had to decide who to face as they slipped sideways between them. In 1980's
Rest Energy,
they stood together while she held a bow and he held the arrow notched on the taut bowstring, pointing at her heart; their balanced tension and stillness prolonged this moment and stabilized its danger. That same year, they went to the Australian outback hoping to communicate with aboriginal people, who ignored them. They stayed and spent months of a scorching desert summer practicing sitting without moving, learning “immobility, silence and watchfulness” from the desert. Afterward, they found the locals more communicative. From this experience came their
Nightsea Crossing
performance in Sydney, Toronto, Berlin, and other cities: while remaining silent and fasting twenty-four hours a day, they spent several hours each day on successive days in a museum or public space sitting motionless, facing each other across a table, living sculptures displaying a kind of ferocious commitment.

“When I went to Tibet and the Aborigines I was also introduced to some Sufi rituals. I saw that all these cultures pushed the body to the physical extreme in order to make a mental jump, to eliminate the fear of death, the fear of pain, and of all the bodily limitations we live with,” Abramović later said. “Performance was the form enabling me to jump to that other space and dimension.” The
Great Wall Walk
was planned at the height of her collaboration with Ulay. They intended to walk toward each other from opposite ends of the 4,000-kilometer wall, meet, and marry. Years afterward, when they had finally cleared the bureaucratic hurdles set up by the Chinese government, their relationship had so changed that the walk became instead the end of their collaboration and relationship. In 1988 they spent three months walking toward each other from 2,400 miles away, embraced at the center, and went their separate ways.

The Great Wall, built to keep marauding nomads out of China, is one of the world's great emblems of the desire to define and secure self or nation by sealing its boundaries. For these two raised behind the Iron Curtain, this transformation of a wall separating north from south into a road linking east to west is full of political ironies and symbolic meanings. After all, walls divide and roads connect. Their performance could be read as a symbolic meeting of East and West, male and female, the architecture of sequestration and of connection. Too, the artists believed the wall had been, in the words of Thomas McEvilley, the critic who has
most closely followed their work, “mapped out over the millennia by feng shui experts, so if you followed the wall exactly you would be touching the serpent-power lines that bind together the surface of the earth.” The book on the project records, “On March 30, 1988 Marina Abramović and Ulay began their walk over the Great Wall from opposite ends. Marina embarked from the east, by the sea. Ulay started far to the west, in the Gobi desert. On June 27, to the blare of horns, they met up in a mountain pass near Shenmu in Shaanxi Province, in the midst of Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist temples.” McEvilley points out that this last performance also expanded upon their first, in which they strode toward each other until they collided.

Both artists have a section in this book in which sparse words and evocative photographs give a sense of their experience, functioning like Richard Long's photograph-and-text pieces to evoke carefully chosen fragments of a complex experience. In between the two texts McEvilley's essay revealed another face of the walk: its entanglement with endless layers of bureaucracy throughout the journey. Like Tolstoy's Princess Marya wishing to be a pilgrim on the road, Abramović and Ulay seem to have set out with an image of themselves walking alone in a clear, uncluttered space and state of mind, but McEvilley describes the minivans that took them to lodgings every night, the handlers, translators, and officials that bustled around them, ensuring they met the government's requirements and attempting to slow them down so they would spend more time and thus money in each province, the quarrel Ulay got into at a dance hall, the way schedules, rules, and geography had fragmented Ulay's walk (while Abramović made sure she started each morning where she stopped the night before, declaring, “I walk every fucking centimeter of the wall.”). The wall was crumbling in many sections, calling for climbing as much as walking, and atop it the wind was often overwhelming. The walk had, in McEvilley's version, become another kind of performance, like a record-seeking one, in which the official goal is realized only at the cost of countless unofficial distractions and annoyances. But perhaps the two artists who had worked so long on their powers of concentration were able to shut out the surrounding clutter from their time on the wall. Their texts and images speak of the essence of walking, of the basic simplicity of the act amplified by the ancient emptiness of the desert around them. Like Long's pieces, theirs seem a gift to viewers of the assurance that a primeval purity of bodily encounter with the earth is still possible and that the human presence so crowded and dominating
elsewhere is still small when measured against the immensity of lonely places. “It took a great number of days before, for the first time, I felt the right pace,” Ulay wrote. “When mind and body harmonized in the rhythmical sway of walking.”

Afterward, Abramović began to make sculptures that invited viewers to participate in the basic acts her performances had explored. She set geodes, chunks of crystal, and polished stones into wooden chairs or on pedestals and mounts where they could be sat with or stood under—furniture for contemplation and for encounters with the elemental forces she believes the stones hold. The most spectacular of the sculptures were several pairs of amethyst shoes included in a big survey of her work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1995. I had arrived there at the end of a long walk from downtown Dublin to find that the museum was housed in an elegant old military hospital, and the walk and the building's history seemed preparation for the shoes—great rough chunks of translucent mottled purple that had been hollowed out and polished inside, like a fairy-tale version of the wooden shoes European peasants once wore. Viewers were invited to put them on and close their eyes, and with them on I realized my feet were, in a sense, inside the earth itself, and though it was possible to walk, it was difficult to do so. I closed my eyes and saw strange colors, and the shoes seemed like fixed points around which the hospital, Dublin, Ireland, Europe, revolved; shoes not to travel in but to realize you might already be there. Later I read that they were made for walking meditation, to heighten awareness of every step. They were titled
Shoes for Departure.

Kaprow's 1958 prophesy is fulfilled by all these walking artists: “They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But out of this they will devise the extraordinary.” Walking as art calls attention to the simplest aspects of the act: the way rural walking measures the body and the earth against each other, the way urban walking elicits unpredictable social encounters. And to the most complex: the rich potential relations between thinking and the body; the way one person's act can be an invitation to another's imagination; the way every gesture can be imagined as a brief and invisible sculpture; the way walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it; the way each act reflects and reinvents the culture in which it takes place.

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I would have preferred to step out into the Peak District. I had been looking for a last tour of the sites of walking's history, and that locale seemed to have everything. I had envisioned starting in the hedge maze at the magnificent estate of Chatsworth, then wandering through the surrounding formal gardens into the Capability Brown–landscaped later gardens. From there I could go into the wilder reaches of the Peak, toward Kinder Scout, where the great right-of-way battles were fought, and past the famous gritstone climbs where “the working-class revolution in climbing” took place, then head for bordering Manchester with its formative suburbs or Sheffield with its industrial ruins and climbing gym in a former forge. Or I could begin with the industrial cities and work my way into the country and then to the garden and the maze. But all these picturesque schemes came to an end with the sneaking suspicion that proving that it was still possible to walk in Britain didn't count for much at all. Even Britain's industrial wastelands signify the pale northern European past, and it wasn't pedestrianism's past but its prognosis that I wanted to inspect. So one December morning I stepped out of Pat's van onto Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, and he set off to spend the day climbing the boulders and cliffs at Red Rocks.

Down most of Vegas's east-west avenues straight as latitude lines you can see the thirteen-mile-long escarpment of Red Rocks and, behind its ruddy sandstone domes and pillars, the ten-thousand-foot-high gray peaks of the Spring Range.
One of the least celebrated aspects of this arid, amnesiac boomtown is its spectacular setting, with mountain ranges on three sides and glorious desert light, but Las Vegas has never been about nature appreciation.
Las vegas
means “the meadows” and makes it clear the Spanish got to this Southern Paiute oasis before the Anglos did, but the oasis didn't become a town until the twentieth century—until 1905, when the railroad from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City decided to put in a station here. Las Vegas remained a town for drifters and tourists long after the oasis was sucked dry. It lacked the mineral resources of much of the state and only began to flourish when gambling became legal in Nevada in 1931, while Hoover Dam was being built on the Colorado River, thirty miles to the southeast. In 1951 the Nevada Test Site was established sixty miles to the northwest, and in the decades since more than a thousand nuclear weapons have been detonated on its premises (until 1963, most of the tests were above ground, and there are some startling photographs of mushroom clouds rising up above the casinos' towering signs). Las Vegas is bracketed by these colossal monuments to the ambition to dominate rivers, atoms, wars, and to some extent, the world. It may be, however, a much smaller but more pervasive invention that most shaped this city in the Mojave Desert: air conditioning, which has much to do with the recent American mass migration south and west to places where many will spend all summer in climate-controlled interiors. Often portrayed as exceptional, Las Vegas is instead emblematic, an extreme version of new kinds of places being built around the United States and the world.

Las Vegas's downtown was built around the railroad station: visitors were expected to get off the train and walk to the casinos and hotels of downtown's compact Glitter Gulch area around Fremont Street. As cars came to supersede trains for American travelers, the focus shifted: in 1941 the first casino-hotel complex went in along what was then the highway to Los Angeles, Highway 91, and is now the Las Vegas Strip. Long ago, after falling asleep in a car headed for the annual antinuclear gathering at the Nevada Test Site, I woke up when we came to a halt at a traffic light on the Strip to see a jungle of neon vines and flowers and words dancing, bubbling, exploding. I still remember the shock of that spectacle after the blackness of the desert, heavenly and hellish in equal measure. In the 1950s, cultural geographer J. B. Jackson described the then-new phenomenon of roadside strips as another world, a world built for strangers and motorists. “The effectiveness of this architecture is finally a matter of what that other world is:
whether it is one that you have been dreaming about or not. And it is here that you begin to discover the real vitality of this new other-directed architecture along our highways: it is creating a dream environment for our leisure that is totally unlike the dream environment of a generation ago. It is creating and at the same time reflecting a new public taste.” That taste, he said, was for something wholly new, something that dismissed earlier Eurocentric aping-one's-betters notions of recreation and taste, something adapted to cars and to the new futuristic and tropical fantasies of those cars' inhabitants: “those streamlined facades, flamboyant entrances and deliberately bizarre color effects, those cheerfully self-assertive masses of color and light and movement that clash so roughly with the old and traditional.” This vernacular architecture invented for automotive America was celebrated in the famous 1972 architectural manifesto
Learning from Las Vegas.

In recent years, however, something wholly unexpected has happened on the Strip. Like those islands where an introduced species reproduces so successfully that its teeming hordes devastate their surroundings and starve en masse, the Strip has attracted so many cars that its eight lanes of traffic are in continual gridlock. Its fabulous neon signs were made to be seen while driving past at a good clip, as are big signs fronting mediocre buildings on every commercial strip, but this Strip of Strips has instead in the last several years become a brand-new outpost of pedestrian life. The once-scattered casinos on the Strip have grown together into a boulevard of fantasies and lures, and tourists can now stow their car in one casino's behemoth parking lot and wander the Strip on foot for days, and they do, by the millions—more than 30 million a year, upward of 200,000 at once on the busiest weekends. Even in August, when it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit after dark, I have seen the throngs stream back and forth on the Strip, slowly—though not much more slowly than the cars. Casino architecture itself has undergone radical changes since the prescient 1966 Caesars Palace played up fantasy architecture over neon signage and the 1989 Mirage presented the first facade specifically designed as a pedestrian spectacle. It seemed to me that if walking could suddenly revive in this most inhospitable and unlikely place, it had some kind of a future, and that by walking the Strip myself I might find out what that future was.

Fremont Street's old-fashioned glitter has suffered by comparison with the Strip's new fantasy environments, so it has been redesigned as a sort of
cyber-arcade. Its central blocks have been closed to cars so that pedestrians can mill around freely, and up above the resurfaced street is set a high, arched roof on which laser shows are beamed by night, so that what was once sky is now a kind of giant television screen. It's still a sad half-abandoned place in daylight, and it didn't take me long to tour it and wander south on Las Vegas Boulevard, which would eventually become the Strip. Before it becomes the Strip, the boulevard is a skid row of motels, shabby apartments, and sad souvenir, pornography, and pawn shops, the ugly backside of the gambling, tourism, and entertainment industries. A homeless black man huddled in a brown blanket at a bus stop looked at me walking by, and I looked at an Asian couple across the street coming out of one of the tiny wedding chapels, him in a dark suit, her in a chalk-white dress, so impersonally perfect they could have fallen off a colossal wedding cake. Here each enterprise seemed to stand on its own; the wedding chapel unintimidated by the sex shops, the fanciest casinos by the ruins and vacant lots around them. There weren't many people on the sidewalk with me in this sagging section between the two official versions of Vegas.

Farther on I came to the old El Rancho hotel, burned out and boarded up. The desert and the West had been romanticized by many of the earlier casinos: the Dunes, the Sands, the Sahara, and the Desert Inn on the Strip and the Pioneer Club, the Golden Nugget, the Frontier Club, and the Hotel Apache on Fremont Street, but more recent casinos have thrown regional pride to the winds and summoned up anyplace else, the less like the Mojave the better. The Sands is being replaced by the Venetian, complete with canals. I realized later that my walk was an attempt to find a continuity of experience here, the spatial continuity walking usually provides, but the place would defeat me with its discontinuities of light and fantasy. It defeated me another way too. Las Vegas, which had a population of 5 at the beginning of the twentieth century, 8,500 in 1940, and about half a million in the 1980s, when the casinos seemed to stand alone in the sweep of creosote bushes and yuccas, now has about 1.25 million residents and is the fastest growing city in the country. The glamorous Strip is surrounded by a colossal sprawl of trailer parks, golf courses, gated communities, and generic subdivisions—one of Vegas's abundant ironies is that it has a pedestrian oasis in the heart of the ultimate car suburb. I had wanted to walk from the Strip to the desert to connect the two, and I called the local cartographic company for recommendations about routes, since all my maps were long out of date. They told me that
the city was growing so fast they put out a new map every month and recommended some of the shortest routes between the southern Strip and the city edge, but Pat and I drove along them and saw they were alarming places for a solitary walker—a mix of warehouses, light industrial sites, dusty lots, and walled homes from which an aura of abandonment emanated, only occasionally interrupted by a car or grimy hobo. So I stuck to the pedestrian oasis and found that I could mentally move the great casinos like chess pieces from the flat board of the desert: ten years back the fantasy casinos were gone; twenty years back the casinos were scattered and there were almost no pedestrians; fifty years back there were only a few isolated outposts; and a century ago only a tiny whiskey-saloon hamlet disturbed the pale earth spreading in every direction.

Under the tired pavilion in front of the Stardust, an old French couple asked me for directions to the Mirage. I watched them walk slowly away from the old vehicular American fantasyland of glittering futures and toward the new nostalgic fantasyland at the Strip's heart and followed them south myself. The scattered walkers began to become crowds as I traveled south. The bride and groom I had seen come out of the wedding chapel showed up again walking down the boulevard near me, she with a delicate quilted jacket over her wedding dress and spike heels. Tourists come here from around the affluent world (and employees from some of the less affluent ones, notably Central America). Another of Vegas's ironies is that it is one of the world's most visited cities, but few will notice the actual city. In, for example, Barcelona or Katmandu, tourists come to see the locals in their natural habitat, but in Vegas the locals appear largely as employees and entertainers in the anywhere-but-here habitat built for tourists. Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking. It has always been an amateur activity, one not requiring special skills or equipment, one eating up free time and feeding visual curiosity. To satisfy curiosity you must be willing to seem naive, to engage, to explore, to stare and be stared at, and people nowadays seem more willing or able to enter that state elsewhere than at home. What is often taken as the pleasure of another place may be simply that of the different sense of time, space, and sensory stimulation available anywhere one goes slowly.

The Frontier was the first casino I went inside. For six and a half years visitors could watch an outdoor floor show there, a round-the-clock picket of workers—maids, cocktail waitresses, busboys—fighting the union-busting new owners, testifying with their feet and their signs day and night, in summer's withering heat
and winter's storms. During those years 101 babies were born and 17 people died among the Frontier strikers, and none of them crossed the picket line. It became the great union battle of the decade, a national inspiration to labor activists. In 1992 the AFL-CIO organized a related event, the Desert Solidarity March. Union activists and strikers walked three hundred miles from the Frontier across the desert to the courthouse in Los Angeles in a show of their willingness to suffer and prove their commitment. Vegas filmmaker Amie Williams commented, while showing me rushes from her documentary on the Frontier strike, that the union is like an American religion of family and solidarity: it has a credo, “An injury to one is an injury to all”—and in the Desert Solidarity March it got its pilgrimage. In Amie's footage, people who looked like they didn't walk much at all straggled in a line alongside old Route 66, bared their feet for bandaging in the evenings, and got up and did it again the next day. A carpenter and union representative named Homer, a bearded man who looked like a biker, testified to the pilgrimage's miracle: in the middle of a rainstorm, a sunspot followed them, and they stayed dry, and he sounded as enthused as one of the children of Israel for whom the Red Sea parted. Finally the union-busting family that had bought the Frontier was forced to sell, and on January 31, 1997, the new owners invited the union back in. Those who had spent six exhilarating years walking the line went back to mixing drinks and making beds. There was nothing of that struggle to see inside the Frontier, just the usual supernova of dizzily patterned carpet, jingling slots, flashing lights, mirrors, staff moving briskly and visitors milling slowly in the twilight that suffuses every casino. They are modern mazes, made to get lost in, with their windowless expanses full of odd angles, view-obscuring banks of slot machines, and other distractions designed, like those in malls and department stores, to prolong visitors' encounters with the temptations that might make them open their wallets before they find the well-concealed exits. Many casinos have “people movers”—moving ramps like those in airports—but here they are all inward-bound. Finding the way out is up to you.