Monique Besten is a walking artist, writer, performer, historian and activist. [1] She is known for her long-distance walking work, and is the subject of articles and publications discussing the use of walking as an art practice; [2] [3] [4] she is a member of the Walking Artists Network. [5] She has been cited by scholar Phil Smith as part of a new generation of artists engaging site-specific theatre through 'performative journeys'. [6]
Besten studied Medieval, Cultural history, Media Art and Public art in The Netherlands, Ireland and Germany.
Over four to eight weeks she invites a range of different artists to join and work next to each other. This leads on to developing new work. [7] On her walks she wears a 3-piece suit which has stitched embroidery pieces of art inspired by the journeys. She takes photos, writing, drawing and videos to document and create art out of her work.
A 64 kilometer walk that traveled from Amsterdam to Utrecht. [8] Her aim was to collect every piece of waste plastic she could find. She attached each piece of plastic to herself that then created a large snail shape carried on her back. She gave it to the 'Metaal Kathedraal' and became part of and installation called the '8th continent.' [9]
Besten wore this suit for 108 days; the suit was then shown in the AirSpace gallery. [10] The walk started in Amsterdam the Nomadic village in the south of France (2013). She sewed a new price of text or images and names of the people she had met along the way to the inside of her three-piece suit every day. this created a collaged map of how she saw the world. Through the performance she also wrote reflections which are also on display.
This project was based in Stockholm: a variety of artists, theatre makers, performers and writers began their walk through the dark. The walk-around meeting at various places picking up new people to join then and give them more clues into their culture along their way. They invited new guests, artists, writers, performers and theatre markers, one being Besten in Stockholm (15 February 2016). [11] With her they tried to discover and work out the way in which we talk about what is going on in the world.
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist who works chiefly with sound and sound installations, often in collaboration with her husband and partner George Bures Miller. Cardiff first gained international recognition in the art world for her audio walks in 1995. She lives and works in British Columbia, Canada.
Rebecca Horn is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. She directed the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster's Bedroom (1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculptures in a gallery being viewed by spectators.
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.
Tino Sehgal is an artist of German and Indian descent, based in Berlin, who describes his work as "constructed situations". He is also thought of as a choreographer who makes dance for the museum setting.
Adelle Lutz is an American artist, designer and actress, most known for work using unconventional materials and strategies to explore clothing as a communicative medium. She first gained attention for the surreal "Urban Camouflage" costumes featured in David Byrne's film True Stories (1986). She has designed costumes for film director Susan Seidelman, theater directors Robert Wilson and JoAnne Akalaitis, and musicians including Byrne, Bono and Michael Stipe. In the 1990s, she began to shift from costume to sculpture, installation art and eventually, performance. Lutz's art and design have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), the Victoria and Albert Museum and Barbican Art Centre (London), the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Cleveland), among many venues. In 2002, the Judith Clark Costume Gallery in London presented a career survey. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Newsweek, Village Voice, Vanity Fair and Paper and in books on fashion, costume and public art, including Fashion and Surrealism (1987), Designed for Delight (1997), Twenty Years of Style: The World According to Paper (2004), and Because Dreaming is Best Done in Public: Creative Time in Public Spaces (2012). Her work Ponytail Boot (2002) is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.
Hamish Fulton is an English walking artist. Since 1972 he has only made works based on the experience of walks. He translates his walks into a variety of media, including photography, illustrations, and wall texts. His work is contained in major museums collections, such as the Tate Britain and MoMA. Since 1994 he has been creating group walks for the public. Fulton argues that 'walking is an artform in its own right' and argues for wider acknowledgement of walking art.
Deveron Projects, formerly Deveron Arts, is a United Kingdom arts organisation based in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland that hosts international artists from a variety of disciplines to collaborate with the town community. Deveron Projects follows a '50/50' approach, which gives equal attention to impact on the local community and impact on the international art scene. Residencies have been provided to artists from China, the Americas, India, Africa and mainland Europe as well as North East Scotland.
Clare Twomey is a London-based visual artist and researcher, working in performance, serial production, and site-specific installation.
Simone Kenyon is a performer, artist and producer born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She works extensively with walking, and in collaboration with other artists and dancers. In 2006, with the dancer Tamara Ashley, she made 'The Pennine Way: The Legs that Make Us', a durational art project in the form of a walk, creating a performance lecture about the project for ROAM a weekend of walking at Loughborough University in 2008, and a book published by Brief Magnetics in 2007. With Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday she instigated the 'Open City' project in 2006, exploring the organisation and control of behaviour in the public realm. Kenyon worked with Deveron Arts in Huntly, Aberdeenshire on the founding of their "Walking Institute" and completed a commission 'Hielan' Ways' - a long distance walk in the Cairngorms in 2013-14. She has also completed walking-based work Step by Step, 2013 for Dance4 in collaboration with Neil Callaghan. Kenyon is connected with the Walking Artists Network.
Clare Qualmann is a British multi-media performance artist based in London, UK. She is a senior lecturer in performing arts at the University of East London and also teaches at London Metropolitan University.
The Walking Artists Network (WAN) is an international network dedicated to walking as a critical and artistic practice; it reflects the growth and increased interest in walking art. It is based at the University of East London's Centre for Performing Arts Development and contains a network of over 600 members from across the globe, though predominantly based in the United Kingdom. The network maintains an active email discussion community through JISCmail.
Wrights & Sites is a group of British artists who work with site-specific performance and walking art. Founded in 1997, Wrights & Sites consists of artist researchers Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner. Their work is inspired by the Letterist and Situationist Internationals, particularly the practice of dérive.
Cathy Turner is a British artist and researcher, specialising in dramaturgy, site-specific performance and walking art. She is a founder member of Wrights & Sites, and a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. Turner's practice and research explore how one's life experience can influence one's perception of their environment.
Marjorie Schick was an innovative American jewelry artist and academic who taught art for 50 years. Approaching sculptural creations, her avant-garde pieces have been widely collected. Her works form part of the permanent collections of many of the world's leading art museums, including the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania; and the Victoria and Albert Museum of London.
Sylvia Palacios Whitman is a Chilean-American artist, painter, sculptor, and performer.
Walking art is the act of walking as an artistic practice. It 'has gathered practitioners from nearly every field [. .. and] blurs the borders between the arts, between artist and audience'.:43 While walking artists have diverse interests and backgrounds, many scholars have foregrounded the way it explores the connections between the mind and body, as well as space and time. Some artists consider walking an artistic end in itself, while others use walking as a means of mark-making, storytelling, social practice, or to create work in other artistic media. Despite emerging from a variety of artistic and literary traditions, a 'common feature [of walking art] is the engagement of the body in a process of walking through a landscape based on a specific artistic design.':161
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