28/02/2014

The Walking Encyclopaedia's Walking Artists of the Day - Anwyl Cooper Willis, Bertram Weisshaar and Bill Aitchison


























In a continuing series throughout the duration of The Walking Encyclopaedia, we'll be highlighting, daily, the works of three practitioners who employ the walk within their practice. Each of the highlighted artists and artworks were submitted for exhibition to The Walking Encyclopaedia. In each case alongside their artist statement, a link to the artist's website is provided for further exploration.

The Walking Encyclopaedia is a co-production between AirSpace Gallery and the Walking Artists Network.

#13 - Anwyl Cooper Willis - Two Books about Walking and Dates




Books are way of turning a virtual collection into something physical and of imposing a particular view- point on the material through the way it is organised and presented. My aim was to make the books distancing and dry. The two books are hand made, the text is stamped in blue. ‘...they look precious’, a perception based on the time expended in their construction. As in On Kawara’s date paintings, each date marks a day that has passed into an increasingly distant past, and we are now that much closer to the end than we were on the given date. 



Twelve months on the Pavements of Paris (2012).

Coloured photographs of dates stamped into the pavements of Paris are ordered by month. Ostensibly boring, but they have their variations and their interests. They are minute details in the landscape visible only to the interested and observant pedestrian.
Dates always refer to time (is my birth date included, what happened that day – to me, in the wider world?). These dates were carefully and purposefully made on the stated date, for some formal reason and according to some bureaucratically engendered ritual. There are shades of the Situationist derive in this book. 










The Distance between Two Points is a Line (2012)


Dates ordered by month. While walking the dog early in the morning I noticed that a trace of the route
was briefly visible in the dew. The trace of this route, the diagonal across a single field, is recorded in 33 photographs, taken between the end of January and June. Seasons pass, the attempt at making a straight line is mostly not very successful. 






The addendum:

The dog was walked every morning between 7.30 and 8.00
The path taken across the field was visible in the dew
The aim was to make that diagonal a straight line
The dog died in early January 


Website http://acooperwillis.wordpress.com/

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#14 - Bertram Weisshaar - Spaziergangswissenschaft in Praxis. Formate in Fortbewegung

(that means: Strollology in Practice. Formats in Locomotion)





The book documents several formats of walking practice in the context of city-planning an art and therefore shows examples from Germany, Vienna (A), ZĂĽrich (CH) and includes even the article Walking and Talking East London.

Some articles in the book expound on the theories of Lucius Burckhardt, the founder of the so called Strollology.

Please note the English written book 

Lucius Burckhardt - Writings. Rethinking Man-made Environments    



















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#15 - Bill Aitchison - The Walking Encyclopaedia

Bill Aitchison was commissioned by AirSpace Gallery to write the introduction to the Exhibition - which can be read here - http://www.airspacegallery.org/index.php/projects/the_walking_encyclopaedia

Artistic director, Bill Aitchison works in and between performance, writing, video and audio. At the centre of the work is performance which thrives upon the danger of the moment and sense of being part of something unrepeatable. His performances are both rigorously structured and dynamic in their execution. Each are significantly different, though as a whole have a consistent style being open-ended, formally precise and using dry humour. Work in other media extends and adapts these strategies.

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