Walking the Line
Immersive art experiences are all the rage these days. Take the usually somewhat apathetic museum-going public and give them an installation that confers an ‘experience,’ especially one that allows only limited numbers at a time, and they will promptly queue round the block. Think of Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light at the Hayward in 2007, or the butterfly room at Tate’s recent Damien Hirst show for instance.
What is it that we like about these? Is it that it is easier to discuss a physical than a visual experience and therefore we feel we can relate to the shared process of moving through a smoke-filled, shadow-lit environment more easily than to standing and looking at a sculpture together? I often struggle with such immersive works, getting irked by the control imposed on my interaction with the piece. I like to be able to walk backwards and forwards, and to skip around the crowds, so I dislike having the way that I look so rigidly dictated.
It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I set off on the high-profile Walking artwork installed in the landscape of North Norfolk, by the artists Robert Wilson, Theun Mosk and Boukje Schweigman for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. This required attendees to follow a prescribed path through the Holkham landscape, following a series of white stones, or responding to instructions from yellow-poncho clad volunteers. Our slow walking pace was set, we walked in a line, about 10 yards behind the person in front, but in enforced solitude, not speaking to each other, and leaving our phones, cameras, watches behind. At various points on our path we entered installation spaces that contained, re-lit or directed our view differently. The idea was to create an intense and personal experience of the walk.
It is exciting to see such work coming to Norfolk, and I hope it is the advance guard for many more. Yet, if the purpose of such works is to engage with this different coastal setting, then I felt strongly that the work engaged with the landscape on a merely superficial level. It was only through applying my own tacit knowledge of these beaches through years of walking and reading them with my parents, that I came out, I think, with the responses intended. I had to look in spite of some of the installed spaces, and ignoring the fact that my pace and interaction were controlled by the people walking before and behind me. Again, this is my dislike of having my viewing controlled, but if this was supposed to be an isolated, personal experience, then should I not have walked genuinely alone? And why were imported white granite markers used in an entirely foreign East Anglian setting? The concept I liked, but if as an attendee I respond more to the landscape being drawn on than the artist does, what is the process making me see?
Was I being ‘curated’ is a last question. But that is the subject for another blog post.