In last week's article, we identified obstacles for pedestrians in Barcelona. But once the bicycles and those abducted by their mobile phones have been dodged, aimless strolls are an inexhaustible source of pleasure, and walking has given rise to many works of art, some even in Barcelona.
Walking is very old (that's why we say something "is older than walking"), and aimless wandering dates back, at least, to the Greek peripatetics. Aristotle's philosophical school, which wandered through Athens with his disciples chatting, now about this, now about that. Nothing, moreover, that everyone didn't do. Years later, Jesus of Nazareth would do the same with the apostles: encircling the Seca, Mecca, and the valleys of Galilee and living the adventures that, in installments, the Gospels collect. Later, in enlightened France, Baudelaire would invent a cooler name, to be a flâneur, to define the stroller who merges into the crowd and enjoys the human kaleidoscope.
Art reaches walking the moment the Dadas go on an excursion. On the afternoon of April 14, 1921, Breton, Éluard, Tzara and company visited the church of Saint-Julien le Pauvre (very close to the Ile de la Cité) as if it were an anti-tourist tour. Instead of venerating Parisian beauty, they proposed to glorify the most banal parts of the city. From the initiative remains a group photo (11 gentlemen and no women, like a soccer team) and the honor of entering art history as one of the first attempts to displace art, from objects (paintings, sculptures) to spaces. The surrealists would version them with their "deambulations," which consisted of planting themselves in a random place and starting to stumble around, with the intention of promoting accidental discoveries. The situationists would call this "drifts," and currently the Homo Velamine collective calls it "garbeos." In their latest excursion through Barcelona, they planted themselves at the Torres y Bages metro station, where they visited a ham shop and the headquarters of the neighborhood's "legionnaires." If this is art or something else, we leave it to the reader's discretion.
Aside from drifts, "strolls" and variants, walking has entered the art world in other ways. "My art materializes by walking," proclaimed the British Richard Long. Works such as A line made of walking are his, where he amuses himself by going back and forth in a meadow until his trail of footprints draws a line on the bushes. Okay, at first glance it might seem like a happy idea, "I could have done this myself." But he had the idea first, which is why his work is at the Tate Modern and I'm still on the couch at home.
Or the series I went: the Japanese On Kawara dedicated himself, every night, to tracing on a map the route he had followed during the day. And these painted maps constitute the work of art. I could have done this too, if it weren't for the fact that On Kawara drew maps every night for 11 years, never missing an appointment.
Finally, there is walking in such a way that the routes draw shapes on the city's cartography, such as, for example, walking by tracing letters that would be seen from the air. This is what one of the characters in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy does, and which inspires the protagonist of Jordi Puntí's story Vertical (within the compilation This is not America). In this case, he dedicates himself to writing the letters that form the name MAITE through Barcelona, and draws the "I" by calmly following the Paseo de San Juan.