'Search' in Walk on: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff- 40 years of art walking

'Search' was a project made for Television. It consisted of twenty ten second sequences transmitted during the commercial breaks. It was broadcast on Tyne Tees Television between June 21st and July 4th as part of the Tyne International Festival 1993. On Monday May 17th 1993 at 1pm in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup took a synchronised walk in two separate locations in the city centre. This event was recorded on the 16-camera surveillance system recently installed throughout the commercial centre of the city by Northumbria Police and the City Council in partnership with local businesses. The systems' radial vision recorded 16 separate views of the city in any one second, 24 hours a day. 'Walk On: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff - 40 years of Art Walking' curated by Cynthia Morrison-Bell & Alistair Robinson with the collaboration of Mike Collier and Janet Ross. Steeped in the tradition of landscape art, walking has been at the heart of many art practices and performances for decades now. This exhibition, focusing on artists' walks and journeys, both literal or metaphorical is the first to examine the astonishingly varied ways in which artists since the late 1960s have used what would seem like a universal act - of taking a walk - as a means to create new types of art. Walk On offers an as-yet-unwritten history of recent art practice. It argues that from land art and conceptual art, and from street photography to the essay-film, many important artworks have been created by an act of walking. All of the works here start with an artist taking a journey on foot, staking out new artistic territory - whether using the street as their studio, or the landscape as a place to inhabit and change through their presence, rather than merely represent at a distance. The exhibition proposes that across every decade over the last 40 years, artists have worked as kinds of explorers, both making their marks on rural wildernesses and acting as urban 'expeditionaries' "botanizing on the asphalt", as the critic Walter Benjamin put it. Walk On brings together works by artists of global repute, alongside works by some bright new talents and less well known names highlighting walking in both urban and rural settings. Artists: Marina Abramovic, Francis Alÿs, Joe Bateman, Atul Bhalla, Tim Brennan, Bradley Davies, Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle, Rachel Clewlow, Mike Collier, Sarah Cullen, Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, Alec Finlay, Tracy Hanna, Dan Holdsworth, James Hugonin, Tim Knowles, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Bruce Nauman, Pat Naldi & Wendy Kirkup, Julian Opie, Simon Pope, plan b, Ingrid Pollard, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson, Brendan Stuart Burns, Tim Robinson, Brian Thompson, Rachel Reupke, Richard Wentworth, Jeremy Wood, Wrights & Sites, Catherine Yass, walkwalkwalk, Carey Young