Walking Around Consciousness: Reading in the Medieval Cloister and the Art of Richard Long

Walking is necessary to our experience and understanding of architecture and landscape. Walking is a fundamental human activity and a persistent characteristic of the human. Yet walking is overlooked in the practice of design and the experience of the built environment. Four practices, sighting, measuring, reading, and merging, inform how we walk, whether we walk as designers or as citizens. This paper considers the walking practice of reading by comparing two apparently divergent examples: the work of the artist Richard Long and the medieval monastery courtyard.Richard Long’s work, for example, requires multiple layers of action and representation. Long explores and evokes the idea of the dynamic present, and the contemporary secular values of high art and environmentalism. In the twelfth-century Benedictine cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa, circumambulation also promotes layered readings. Like “open work,” text and images from scripture interweave with secular images. Corporeal deformities and phantasms create a complex non-linear experience of significance to the practicing monk.This comparison of examples separated by a millennium reveals similarities and differences in the negotiation of physical space and time, of geometry, of interpretation, and in psychological and spiritual engagement. This paper focuses on the last category and the promotion of human consciousness. Though outwardly the two examples appear to be substantially different, they both involve a psychological and spiritual quest in a landscape. That one such quest was explicitly religious while the other is explicitly secular suggests a re-imagination of walking and reading in the dominant landscapes of consumer capitalism.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8