“That picture give you a pretty good idea of the physical details of the journey,” she says. Participant Lisa Herbold’s feet-battered during last year’s sojourn-are featured prominently on the Long Walk website. This is a way I can share that with people.” There’s an endurance quality just to being an artist. In that way it’s just like any other art practice-as an artist you’re telling yourself, ‘Why am I doing this? How long will I keep doing it?’ But you keep doing it. Why are you doing it? You can just hop on a bus and go home, but you tell yourself you’re gonna continue. “It’s difficult to just continue to do it. “A big part of the project is about endurance,” Robb says. During one 18-mile day, extreme blistering ran so rampant that a full-time amateur medic was enlisted to treat defeated feet. The participants of last year’s Walk encountered more than default art. I assume the participants will bring some kind of creative energy to the project, so things will just sort of happen.” “These things will take place and people will encounter them or not encounter them. “Historically, humans have spent a lot of time walking and talking,” Robb says. Unlike last year’s Walk, this year features work in a variety of mediums by eight of Robb’s peers from around America, which will be encountered at way-stops and overnight locales: Seattle Phonographers Union, a found-sound improv collective the Bicycle Choir, a women’s a cappella group Sarah Kavage, who’s weaving a large-scale grass braid Todd Shalom, a New York-based poet interested in place and persona the Seattle Experimental Animation Team, who will project animated film onto kites several more.Ī pair of geographers and an art critic/horticulturalist will join the walk, encouraging conversation. (The parallel curvature of overhead overpasses, the brushing of shaggy green treetops against rare blue sky, early morning mist layering a dew-damp lawn, a bald eagle’s substantial nest, well-deployed graffiti.) The pace of walking allows you to see all the art that exists by default.” And there’s also the paying attention to the surroundings and looking at the found art that exists all around us. “There’s the socially engaged aspect, a lot of conversation and what you call navigating, what happens with each other. “There’s a couple of different ways to access the arts in this piece,” she says. And to hear Robb describe the intention behind the Long Walk, which makes its second annual pilgrimage this month, is to fall under the spell of an extremely observant, articulate human. There is pretense in portraying walking as an artistic act, but it’s a necessary pretense in a culture that consistently overlooks the beauty of mundanity in favor of spectacle and superlative. “There’s a support van that carries everything.” The Long Walk is Robb’s “time-based, ‘open-source,’ socially engaged art event,” as she describes it-a four-day, three-night, 45-mile hike from Seattle to Snoqualmie falls on the Regional Trail System.
It reminds you there’s adventure anywhere you are.”Īnywhere: an old hangar in Sand Point, a stretch of strip-malled roadside in Bothell, a grassy suburban park in Duvall and every step between. “Remember when you were a kid, and you could disappear into the woods behind your backyard and find adventure?” says Seattle artist Susan Robb. By JONATHAN ZWICKEL - JAdventure is where you find it.
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