Le Merle – Walking Hours: the Space Between Things and the Passing in Time

In 2011, a right-wing coalition government in the Netherlands announced drastic cuts in public support for the arts and culture as part of an austerity agenda. Absent an effective opposition, the government succeeded in cutting the funding of numerous projects, gutting cultural organizations that were vital to the cultural milieu. Artists, writers and cultural workers discuss the circumstances, the effects of the cuts, and what dampened artists’, students’ and political groups’ attempts to fight them. This issue draws attention to the circumstances, but also to the various artistic and political initiatives that emerged from that struggle. Edited by Edith Brunette & François Lemieux as part of their exhibition Cuts Make the Country Better, presented in 2015.

I will walk.That is the work.

This work lies somewhere between a choreographic expression and an artistic gesture.Walking as an act of engagement, my senses attentive. I am prepared to embrace what I might encounter: ideas, interactions, objects, artistic epiphanies precipitated by the serendipitous convergence of events. But the work is the walk and anything it inspires is supplemental.

Between March and August of 2015 I will walk. That is essentialy it. Just the action of walking: one foot in front of the other, experiencing the gravity-induced pressure between the soles of my feet and the surface of the earth below. I limit the space by walking back and forth between the two Dutch coastal towns of Scheveningen and Katwijk, along the North Sea – from A to B and back to A. The fact that I live in one and my father grew up in the other is just an interesting coincidence, nothing more.

I will walk between 9 and 5, or working hours. Walking hours. The work is to walk.

It is a progression of work that started a few years ago with “Choreography of Love and Labour: The Flower Picker” where for six weeks I embedded myself as a daffodil picker on a farm in the South East of Ireland. Every morning I would stretch and prepare mentally before consciously stepping onto the stage that was the daffodil field. There I would pick till the end of the day funding the work directly by making the work (as I was paid 10 cents per bunch of 10 stems.) I was spectator as well as performer just as my co-workers were simultaneously the audience and part of an intricate, arbitrary choreography. I chose not to document the work in any way. It was ephemeral and lives only in memories maintained by a story of that particular movement and time and space.

“Walking Hours” intends to take the work outside of a conventional space and considers alternate mediums for artistic expression.The work does not depend on the necessity of a tangible result. It isn’t creating for the sake of a product but rather for an object of thought or an inspired vibration set in motion. It seeks to engage in dialogue with unexpected audiences. It does not want to be restricted by conventions – perhaps inadvertently breaking some and discovering others.There are no expectations of what the work might be. All that is intended is to embrace the process and be engaged in the action of walking.

“Walking Hours: the Space BetweenThings and the Passing inTime” will be bookended by two publications of Le Merle. The first – this text – sets the work in motion. It is a statement of intent and also a proposition to participate for anyone who might feel so inclined. I leave it open, just as I have no expectations of what (if anything) “Walking Hours” might bring. There is a title and a loose score to set something in motion. For the rest there is a wide openness within which to explore… from A to B and back to A. The final bookend – to be published later … – will present some sort of documentation referring to what “Walking Hours” was.