Andre Kertesz, Artist

Ann Hamilton, Artist

Myein

The United States Pavilion
48th Venice Biennale 1999
Venice, Italy
June 13, 1999-November 7, 1999

The word myein is an ancient Greek verb meaning "to close the eyes or mouth." Linked to the initiation rites enacted in medieval cults, the closing of the eyes or mouth refers to the secret status surrounding their rites. Across time, myein has come to stand for that thing which has not been, or cannot be, explained.

Hamilton's interest in the temple form as an idealized image projected onto civic space led her to engage the neo- classical building of the United States pavilion as both subject and object of the project. It was a meditation on aspects of American social history that, like weather, are present and pervasive in effect but which remain invisible or unspoken. Her self-given task was to make a place in which this absence could be palpably felt and to create a space simultaneously empty and full.

Text and images from annhamilton.com.  Link here to see and read more. 

Francis Alys, Artist

Sometime Making Something Leads To Nothing

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian contemporary artist living in Mexico City. Above are stills from the short movie Paradox of Praxis 1, where Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts; serving as a way to mark time and measure existence.

Zapatos Magneticos

Walking, shoes with magnets

Cuentos Patrioticos


Artist's website.  Link here. 

William Pope. L, Artist

Link here for an interview with William Pope. L

William Pope.L

by Nick Stillman

The Great White Way
Fulton Street to Reade Street, Manhattan

The socio-economic implications of Broadway are enormous, and examining what Broadway "represents" is the first key to making some sense of William Pope.L’s complex, ongoing street performance The Great White Way. Stretching from Manhattan’s southern tip all the way up the island, Broadway is the borough’s longest street. It’s also a signifier of distant dreams, lavish wealth, and commodity fetishism. It’s the passageway along which major financial transactions occur— the ebbs and flows of the stock market, lavish shopping expenditures, astronomical real estate sales, and of course, the wheelings and dealings of commercial art galleries.

But William Pope.L’s Broadway is an entirely different beast: one of despair, desperation, and degradation. Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has been infecting the streets of New York with periodic street performances, reminders that the country, city, and culture he lives in have a long way to go before the discomforts of race and stereotyping have safely receded. Pope.L works as a writer and visual artist (his terrifically stinky peanut butter painting was included in Ronald Feldman Gallery’s recent survey of new American art Ameri©an Dre@m), but it’s his performances that have gained him notoriety and caused sensation. He has poured Thunderbird wine over himself while sitting peacefully on a West Broadway sidewalk; he has publicly munched on the Wall Street Journal while sitting on an American flag; and he has tied himself to a Chase bank with a link of sausages, wearing only workboots and a skirt made of dollar bills, trying to hand out free money to the bank’s customers. A spectacle, yes, but a thought-provoking one. Still, none of these actions have gained Pope.L the same level of public attention as his crawls, in which he dresses up in various costumes and slowly drags his limp body along city sidewalks.

The Great White Way is Pope.L’s masterwork-in-progress. For this piece, he plans to traverse Broadway’s 22 miles via painstakingly slow and rigorous crawling over the course of five years. This appropriately began at the Statue of Liberty, from which he took a ferry to the Financial District. From there, the inching up Broadway (which is uphill for a while) began. You can take your pick of the symbols relevant to Pope.L’s Broadway. Within the Financial District, one of the first that seems relevant is a large sculpture of a staggering bull, prominently located on a small island in the middle of the street. The reminder here, in the context of Pope.L’s crawl, is multifarious. This bull, tamed by man and his surrounding culture of money-making, resonates nicely with Pope.L’s concurrent battle: a man battling not just nature, but outcast status among his own species as he crawls pathetically along the dirty, heavily populated street. American flags are everywhere down here in Trade Center territory, but Pope.L (when in character, anyway) joins the class most Americans prefer not to think about.

For this installment of The Great White Way, Pope.L began at Fulton Street and called it quits at Reade Street, about six blocks. He doesn’t set parameters on how long the crawl will last, he just goes until he can’t go anymore. And he tends not to go too far, since he insists on pulling himself along in the most laborious way possible, using only his elbows and knees. He wore a Superman suit and gloves, and strapped a skateboard (with a Superman logo on it) to his back with bungee cords, so as to cross streets expediently. Pope.L was flanked by a cameraman and a photographer, with a few in-the-know enthusiasts milling around. It was cold and windy and had rained hard the day before, filling the sidewalk’s convex pools with dirty water. The crawling is by no means fast or focused— this is not a sporting event— and without the small crowd of followers, Pope.L would probably be construed as an insane homeless man. After all, he’s not only wearing a Superman getup with a skateboard strapped to his back and dragging himself through puddles, he’s also black, like most of the other homeless men in the area. He crawled with seeming oblivion through the puddles, and stopped to breathe heavily, to grunt plaintively, and to wring out his sopping gloves. Pedestrians acted exactly as you would assume they would to a black man crawling on the sidewalk wearing a Superman suit: some with total indifference, some with open staring and laughter, a much safer reaction given the cameraman and the small crowd of followers watching his every move.

There’s an impulse to criticize Pope.L for hiring a cameraman to document the crawl so closely and obviously. Both the psychological influence on and response from spectators is potentially diluted by the realization that they’re seeing something planned, some type of theater, something that’s safe to stare and laugh at. If part of Pope.L’s objective is to make people confront something they don’t want to, he’s offering them a mechanism to subvert the psychologically prying dart he’s aiming at them. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley are two other artists who have explored similar psychologically affecting themes like violence, grotesquerie, and humiliation. But their videos and performances have always had an art world connotation. By bringing his performances to the streets, minus the hanging-on and hullabaloo of the art world, Pope.L promises the potential to connect directly with pedestrians, who would have no idea what they’re seeing is considered "art." But in the current format of The Great White Way, the crowds and camera signify it’s okay to gawk.

After all, the crawls are, I think, the most earnest element in Pope.L’s diverse oeuvre. While all of his work calls attention to the paradoxes of race and, more specifically, what it means to be a black man, he also tends to add a pinch of the absurd or hilarious to the cauldron, and it works. His art is accessible and exciting (check out his website, www.distributingmartin.com). It addresses sticky ideas without preaching. And in the case of The Great White Way, the Superman suit is that element of humor. But there’s nothing funny about a potentially crazy man laboriously pulling himself along a sidewalk. It conjures the concept of escape. There’s the obvious migratory aspect of Pope.L’s crawl, the notion of the impossibility of escaping your own skin or class, the pedestrian’s challenge of how to escape the impulse to stereotype. When at his best, he makes you confront what you’d rather not.

But sometimes it’s the camera itself that causes the type of confrontation and dialogue Pope.L seems to be encouraging. Consider Tompkins Square Crawl in 1991. Pope.L set out to crawl through the East Village’s Tompkins Square in a sharp black suit, holding a small flowerpot containing a blooming flower. A white cameraman documented the performance, immediately attracting a black pedestrian, irate at the thought that this white man was exploiting a black man’s humiliation. Then, after a cursory explanation, he became more irate when he interpreted Pope.L’s donning of a fashionable suit as a slight to his own integration into business society. "I wear a suit like that to work!" he cried. Race, class, and gender politics are all well-trod fields in recent gallery art— to the point where a lot of it feels derivative and tired. But the ability to prompt such emotion and resultant dialogue on the topic make Pope.L by far the most exciting and relevant artist working in the field of identity politics today. -source is The Brooklyn Rail.  Link here.

Ruben Brulat, Artist

Ruben Brulat, Au temps disparu, Bromo, Indonesia, 2012

Richard Long, Artist

RIVER PO LINE

ITALY  2001

DUSTY BOOTS LINE

THE SAHARA  1988

BRUSHED PATH  A LINE IN NEPAL

A 21 DAY FOOTPATH WALK 1983

A LINE MADE BY WALKING

ENGLAND 1967

MAHALAKSHMI HILL LINE

WARLI TRIBAL LAND  MAHARASHTRA

INDIA 2003

More to see on artist's website.  Link here. 

Various and Gould, Artists

A cobalt blue streak sweeps through a narrow street in Istanbul as Various and Gould don fluorescent orange work vests and push brooms with a purpose. The lunchtime crowd gathers a few steps back and to the sides to witness a remarkable cloud of ultra-marine pigment forming a wake behind the two German Street Artists as they perform their new installation focusing on work and workers.

Simply by changing the color of the dirt, the effect of an everyday act by municipal workers is effectively transformed, if not understood. 34 kilos of non-toxic blue pushed up a street with confidence and industry by two people wearing an official-looking logo on their uniforms does cause confusion. "What happened? Did someone die?" asks a spectator. No, they are assured, it is an art performance - an explanation that calms most but not all, including restaurant owners here in this eastside tourist district of "Beyoğlu" while their dining guests look curiously with mouths agape.

More to read.  Source is Huffington Post.  Link here.

Richard Long, Artist

In the nature of things:
Art about mobility, lightness and freedom.
Simple creative acts of walking and marking
about place, locality, time, distance and measurement.
Works using raw materials and my human scale
in the reality of landscapes. - Richard Long.  Link here.

Link here to read article entitled 

Walk The Line

guardian.co.uk, 23 May 2009

Everton Wright, Artist

"London based artist Everton Wright works in all types of media from design, sculpture, and drawing, to film and public installations. Over the course of eight years, Wright has developed this project, Walking Drawings, as a series of live, interactive, large-scale drawings that take place in public spaces.  Covering at least one quarter of a mile, he creates patterned line drawings in the sand, using a combination of freehand and mechanical tools. Once the drawing is in place, Wright invites people of all ages, genders, and cultures to come and freely walk along the detailed design that he created. By inviting the public to interact with the still images on the sand, Wright brings life to an otherwise static drawing. Wright says, “Walking Drawings combines the elements—sand, sea, air—to create a new way of making, seeing and experiencing drawing, swapping traditional media such as paint, charcoal and paper with landscapes, digital video pixels and people.” If you are interested in this interactive artwork, you can see a video of the live interactions." -source is Feel Desain.  Link here. to seem more and a video. 

DDB China and China Environmental Protection Foundation

See more and watch video here.  

Stan Shellabarger, Artist

detail of Untitled (Walking Book 14, 2201 S. Union, 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL), 2008

Stan Shellabarger is an artist who walks or, rather, he is a walking artist—that is, walking is his art. He records his walking activities not with pen and map nor strewn breadcrumbs, but by attaching graphite or sandpaper to his soles and making contact with paper laid down in his path. He follows a planned route, albeit a brief one: a staircase, or a stretch of sidewalk. Back-and-forth repetition is key. The resulting paper reveals either a smeary frottage of silvery graphite or a patterned tread of holes, depending on which implement Shellabarger wears on his feet. The paper is proof of contact with the world.