I just wanted to notice the import­ance for work of some­thing as small and taken for gran­ted as walk­ing. I thought about it when I saw the ret­ro­spect­ive on Richard Long at Tate Bri­tain. Richard Long works through walk­ing. Early pieces include his walk in an ‘unspoiled’ meadow to cre­ate a line. He has walked in per­fect circles, walked every bit of the road within a defined area and pro­duced decon­struc­ted sculp­tures through leav­ing a pebble at reg­u­lar inter­vals on a walk. These are rep­res­en­ted in pho­to­graphs, maps and con­cise stor­ies. The spirit of Richard Long’s walks, which “fol­lowed my own unique, formal route, for an ori­ginal reason, which was dif­fer­ent from other cat­egor­ies of walk­ing, like trav­el­ling” (http://www.richardlong.org accessed July 13th 2009) seem a long way from routine, instru­mental walk­ing to and around the work­place. Walk­ers are ram­blers, or flâneurs, or artists. Work­ers have pur­pose, they do not walk with ideas, like Long does.

Walk­ing mat­ters to get to work and leave again; look at Alan Bates as Vic Brown in A Kind of Lov­ing, try­ing to track Ingrid when the buzzer goes and all the staff of Dawson Whit­taker walk out of the gates; walk­ing here is flirt­ing (from c 4 minutes into this clip).

But we don’t often think about walk­ing as a way of doing work. It is one of many dimen­sions of work­ing lives that is taken for gran­ted: the sales assist­ant rushes from fit­ting room to clothes rail and back again in response to a cus­tomer request, or the admin­is­trator wanders down the cor­ridor to ask a favour, work­ers in Durand’s Peugeot fact­ory must walk side­ways, as they work up the line, and they walk to the store area to get more equip­ment, car­ry­ing double the amount they’re sup­posed to, to save need­ing to take another trip.

Walk­ing is often a taken for gran­ted bod­ily move­ment, an action most of us do often and unthink­ingly, the leg swing, foot lever­ing and the many tiny but essen­tial adjust­ments the body makes at each step. It is integ­ral to many forms of work as skill, train­ing and know­ledge are, though we might only notice it when we or someone else can’t man­age it.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Dur­and, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Liv­ing Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France. Pal­grave Macmillan.
  2. A Kind of Lov­ing (1962) dir John Schlesinger.