How we read an artist's work is often the consequence
of where we place it, in which readily-available, art-historical
category. For instance, if we assign Hamish Fulton's work to
the plausible category of Land Art, a certain content comes to
the fore: the artist's environmental concerns, his ethic of minimal
intervention, the references to and respect for native cultures.
Things look a little different if we take Fulton to be a conceptual
artist having one idea - that a walk can be a work of art. In this
case, Fulton's different interests and concerns may be read as
discoveries yielded by this first intuition. The variety of forms
the work takes, the photographs, wall texts, books and notebooks
exist as documentation leading back to the fading and irrecoverable
experience of the walk.
Hamish Fulton began to make art from walking in the late 60s,
when minimal, conceptual and land art practices were still fluid
and interchangable, in a moment of possibility before attitudes
hardened into form.
