Covering new ground

New on my bookshelf, the catalogue of an exhibition that was held in two venues this year (PMG, London, and NGCA, Sunderland) and will be in three further venues next year - MAC Birmingham, 8 February - 31 March 2014; The Atkinson Southport, 7 April - 30 July 2014; Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 19 September -12 December 2014.

Artists included are: Marina Abramovic, Francis Alÿs, Tim Brennan, Atul Bhalla, Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle, Rachel Clewlow, Mike Collier, Sarah Cullen, Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, Alec Finlay, Dan Holdsworth, James Hugonin,Tim Knowles, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Bruce Nauman, Julian Opie, Simon Pope, Plan B, Brendan Stuart Burns,Tim Robinson, Brian Thompson, Rachel Reupke, Richard Wentworth, Jeremy Wood, Wrights & Sites, walkwalkwalk, Carey Young.

From the Art Circuit website: "Steeped in the tradition of landscape art, walking has been at the heart of many art practices and performances for decades now. This exhibition, focusing on artists’ walks and journeys, both literal or metaphorical is the first to examine the astonishingly varied ways in which artists since the late 1960s have used what would seem like a universal act – of taking a walk – as a means to create new types of art.

"Walk On offers an as-yet-unwritten history of recent art practice. It argues that from land art and conceptual art, and from street photography to the essay-film, many important artworks have been created by an act of walking. All of the works here start with an artist taking a journey on foot, staking out new artistic territory – whether using the street as their studio, or the landscape as a place to inhabit and change through their presence, rather than merely represent at a distance. 

"The exhibition proposes that across every decade over the last 40 years, artists have worked as kinds of explorers, both making their marks on rural wildernesses and acting as urban ‘expeditionaries’ – “botanizing on the asphalt”, as the critic Walter Benjamin put it."