Attention Has Consequences: an interview with artist Alex Wolfe

Alex Wolfe is a writer and artist based in New York. His work explore the relationship between movement, memory, and the built environment through walks, writing, photography, and public programmes. He is the founder and former editor of Pedestrian, a magazine dedicated to people who like to walk and move. Through attention and movement, Alex's practice grapples with, subverts and responds to the social and physical limitations of the contemporary city. In light of our recent publication of The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis and the Rise of Fossil Fascism by The Zetkin Collective. Gillian Robin spoke to Alex about walking in different landscapes, the immediacy of the city, pro-car environments, and more.

Gillian Robin: Your work centres on the relationship between movement, memory and the built environment. Can you speak briefly about what drew you to this?

Alex Wolfe: I’ve always been drawn to the trace of things—what gets left behind when a population leaves, a piece of infrastructure is removed, or a landscape is destroyed. Through learning these histories, I’ve found I'm more interested in its memory: how it is perceived and remembered, and how that understanding inevitably shifts over time. Movement, specifically walking, is a means of paying attention, and in doing so I’m able to have a deeper connection to the places I inhabit, gain access to the overlooked, and satisfy my own curiosity. 

GR: You’re based in New York, where the flâneurs that come to my mind are Marshall Berman and Michael Sorkin. To them, walking in New York is a sort of march through lost histories, destroyed spaces, political struggle and the burden of memory. Your own work is focussed on memory. How so? What do you see is the relationship between the built environment, memory and moving, especially in a place like New York?

AW: I like to think of the city as the omnipresent narrator of my movement. New York City is one of the oldest cities in the United States. My movement through the city is defined by the choices stretching back to the 17th Century, even prior to European settlement. New York is also a place I've called home for more than a decade. Over that time, the city's history has gradually become intertwined with my own. The streets I walk today hold both public memory and personal memory. To move through a city is to better understand both the city and oneself. Walking teaches me that every place already contains stories. My job isn't to invent them so much as to pay enough attention to notice them.

GR: Rousseau writes about how walking has the potential to free the walker from identity, in the sense that walking for hours at a time sort of freezes time. One’s past and future cease to exist. But there’s something about walking in a city that is necessarily about confrontation, encounter and negotiation, whether that’s with other people, cars,  the past or the material building of the future. How do you see urban walking when it comes to the relationship between the Self and the Other? How has it shaped, altered, empowered or complicated this relationship?

AW: Moving on foot is the most intimate way to experience the world. As a result, I'm forced to contend with my surroundings. Walking makes me acutely aware of my own identity because I'm constantly aware of how I'm being perceived in return. In New York, every neighborhood has its own history, culture, and rhythms. Walking doesn't erase my identity. It places it in conversation with the histories and lives of others.

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GR: Most of your work is performed and practiced in the United States which, even its cities, has the unfortunate reputation of being practically and structurally anti-pedestrian. You seem to take this challenge head-on. Your performance On Shade thinks about how the built environment can be conceptually reconfigured to support the pedestrian, and this reconfiguration of hostile or unremarkable spaces comes up a lot through your practice. Can you elaborate on some of the experiences or instances that highlight this idea of anti-pedestrianism or anti-mobility? What kinds of walks about you created to accommodate or play with the anti-pedestrian infrastructure that makes so much of the American landscape?

AW: Yes, I’m interested in that tension here in the United States. I grew up in rural Iowa, where having a car was mandatory to get from one place to another. Walking as a means of transportation was never even considered, nor really possible. While there is much to be desired here in the States in terms of pedestrian infrastructure, I’d also argue that the other side of the coin is changing the narrative around walking. I spent eight days walking from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, and when I returned, people couldn’t even comprehend how it was done. The roads and sidewalks were there. While that’s an extreme example—it highlights the mindset around walking here in America. Walking here is not thought of as something to enrich one’s life, but something to endure. We’ve really lost our patience for the duration here. We prioritize speed in the United States, and, of course, our cars. 

GR: Can you speak to how walking functions socially, particularly in a world where sociality has become all but dematerialised?

AW: I’ve always loved Jane Jacobs’ idea of the public character which she defined as ”any local individual who is routinely present in public spaces and interacts with a diverse range of people.” 

To move through a city on foot is to be constantly presented with new sensory information. Inevitably, that means being in contact with those who occupy the street. I embrace this aspect in my practice.

Though I often walk alone, I rarely feel alone for long. Conversations with strangers, chance encounters, and brief moments of generosity or misunderstanding often become some of the most meaningful parts of the work. 

Our lives are mediated by screens and algorithms, almost to the point where we no longer feel the need to see things for ourselves to form our own opinions. Walking provides a counter-narrative. Much of my teaching practice involves moving through the city as a group, which almost always results in closer relationships, a deeper appreciation for one’s surroundings. The shoe company Mephisto once had a slogan: "Walking is Living."

GR: How do you see this practice in relation to politics of the present, whether in the regard to the climate crisis, privatisation of space, the erosion of mundane instances of walking and gathering, etc.? 

AW: It all comes down to attention. There’s a wonderful line from the philosopher Iain McGilchrist that I think about often: “Attention is a moral act. It brings certain aspects of the world into being, while allowing others to recede. Attention has consequences.”

I also like to think of attention as a form of love. To give something our attention—or even to choose to remember it—is to believe that it deserves to exist. In that sense, the way we direct our attention is inherently political. Walking allows me to notice what has been neglected, erased, privatized, or made inaccessible, and to remain present with places and people that might otherwise disappear from view.

Ultimately, I think all of this is an attempt to better understand what it means to belong to a place, and how places come to belong to us.

Image courtesy of the artist