"I am from '
the suburbs' and, if there's on thing that's rather
noticeable in
autobiographical accounts of walking, it's that walking tends to occur in either
rural or
urban environments rather than in the hinterlands
between the two. There may be a
reason for this,
art-historically speaking, beyond the dearth of
permissible routes through a
landscape of clearly demarcated
privately owned plots. In
1967, the year that
Francesco Careri identifies as 'the year of walking' - [...] the American artist Robert Smithson [...] set off on a 'suburban
odyssey' of
the city in which he was born and then mounted the
photographic traces of this
journey. The images of Passaic's
empty streets, blunt metal pipes, disorientating
bridges and obsolete machinery that he chose to share in this exhibition add up to a vision of
suburbia that Smithson evidently considered shallow, mimetic,
false, and always already incomplete [...] At one of the (admittedly many)
moments that heralded the birth of
aesthetic walking practice, the suburbs were deemed and represented as void and
empty, denied a legitimate
sense of
past or future and, perhaps even worse, of either the
present of (
human) presence."
Roberta Mock, "Introduction: It's (Not
Really) All About Me, Me, Me" in
Walking, Writing & Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, Bristol, UK: intellect, 2009, 8.
