drawing | being by alec spangler
walking narrative embodiment time drawing
Alec Spangler. Greens #2 , 2015. Coloured ink on paper, 30” x 41”
T he mid -1980 s to early 90s was a big time for extra dimensions. Superstring theorists proposed an 11-dimensional universe; digital virtual realities had become possible, and popular culture abounded with stories of strange, secret worlds overlaid onto our own. It was also the period in my childhood when I became interested in walking. The kind of walks I liked were mundane and arduous; drawn-out errands in back- country suburbia. I don’t doubt this habit began as a way of playing out my Terry Gilliam-fueled inter-dimensional fantasies. I enjoyed going to the often seen but rarely inhabited places I knew from car windows; medians and edges of industrial parks, places where Stephen King might have said that the boundaries between worlds had grown thin. Had I known the word ‘uncanny’ I’d have been able to describe where I wanted those walks to take me. I only knew them as my version of a magic wardrobe.
Years later I found out about more analytic methods for such spell-casting. Erwin Straus thought that when walkers become train travellers the phenomenon of space contracts and is systematised. So for those of us used to mechanised forms of living, walking ought to de-systematise. I think this means ‘make-into-narrative’. When I read about Straus’s idea of mechanised ‘geographic space’ versus bodily ‘landscape space’ I fully understood what walking means to me. 1 Walking is narrative; and narrative is all about embedded worlds. I’ve spent some time thinking about what the expression of walking is in art and design, even in strategies for living. For me, the answer is that the walking-self creates by telling stories: there is duration and spatial extent. The body has a place in it. Possible outcomes are multiple and simultaneous; there are added dimensions. There is meaning. There is no logical necessity. There is no rightness, because stories don’t have to be right. They just have to be good.
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1 Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986. pp52-53
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