thoughts on feat #8: moore the pedestrianist
henry moore (not to be confused with henry moores*) will direct his second feat this tuesday - a thirty six mile walk between all of his public work in the city.
an artist most recognisable for his ‘reclining figures,’ one might question his co-option by the rarely reclining pedestrianists.
in fact, moore might just be the ultimate pedestrianist artist.
moore was very consciously a civic artist. he intended for his work to enrich public spaces and the lives of those who used them. if the pedestrianists had a charter, one of its key tenets would be the promotion and celebration of the city as a public good. walking through the city freely and without aim serves to expand what we consider public space, and what of that public space is worthy of our attention - where moore added new features to the landscape, a pedestrianist enrichment comes from a new sensibility - a willingness to find meaning in both the moore and the mundane.
exactly two years before the walk this coming tuesday our fourth drift set-off from farringdon. we meandered south and, by chance and accident, made our way to kennington’s brandon estate, home to moore’s two piece reclining figure #3. the work punctuated the walk, it did what moore intended: encouraged reflection and debate, it was a question mark, but then so was the wooden cladding on a nearby estate, and the cobblestones of iliffe yard. while the city itself can produce these question marks, the moore adds an exclamation - a louder invitation to pause and reflect, and a reminder that the city is for all of us.
and what of the work itself? when one looks at the overlapping curves in a moore, like the one in brandon estate, it is easy to see the homage to the land that situates it. the hills and valleys of its surface form a landscape stripped of man’s scarification. the work serves as a reminder that beneath the city’s surface ornamentation, there is bare land - shaped by geological time, not human hands. this fact often remains hidden to city dwellers, whose frequent modes of navigation obscure it, but is all too familiar to the pedestrianist, who, when a vista opens - say at crystal palace after a long trudge from the thames - is felt as much as seen, felt in the feet and legs that brought it into being. the act of walking brings a connectedness to the land that moore and humans - since they first stood, and subsequently reclined - have long understood.