lines to walk along, marking against
Performance of line charcoal line markings, Ginza, Tokyo. Undocumented.
Lines to Walk Along, Marking Against was a large-scale drawing intervention first performed in Ginza, Tokyo in 2011 as an expansion of an ongoing engagement with urban materiality and temporality. Following A Subsumed Brilliance and Assembled Earthly Geometries, this work used charcoal rubbed onto the sides of shoes to create lines on surfaces of the city. The work was used the act of walking to create a performative gesture of mark-making to generate long, sweeping lines on walls that navigated, disrupted, and responded to the urban environment of Ginza.
The work drew on Krauss’ concepts of the expanded field, where the flatness of paper is reimagined as a spatial and performative act that occupies the hardness of architecture. The use of walls as a substrate situates the work within the urban fabric but also positions drawing as a form of physical interaction with space. The charcoal lines, smudged and uneven, reflect the resistant texture of Tokyo’s surfaces, emphasising the materiality and endurance of the cityscape. The methodological process of creating the lines foregrounds the body as an instrument and a participant in the urban system.
The side of the shoe becomes a mediator between artist and environment, while the physicality of walking transforms drawing into an embodied proces that also mirrors Lefebvre’s theory of rhythmanalysis, where the rhythms of the body interact with the spatial rhythms of the city. The lines, though static, suggest motion, traces of movement, gestures of negotiation with the hardness and permanence of urban structures in which charcoal, as a material, brings its own resonance to the work. Fragile yet potent, it creates marks that are at once deliberate and susceptible to erasure. The blackened lines stand out against the architectural surfaces, asserting a presence that is also impermanent.
The scale of the drawings amplifies their impact. These long, linear gestures disrupt the rigid geometries of Tokyo’s urban grid, introducing a fluid, human-scaled counterpoint to the structural logic of the built environment. Yet, the work resists total opposition; instead, it engages in dialogue with its surroundings, treating the city not as an adversary but as a collaborator in the creative process. The rough, uneven walls shape the marks, embedding the materiality of the space into the work’s aesthetic. By situating drawing within the hardness of urban spaces, Lines to Walk Along, Marking Against interrogates the role of art in navigating and reimagining the built environment.
The charcoal lines trace the duality of urban life: its unyielding structures and its potential for reinvention through small, human gestures that speaks to the fragility of artistic interventions within systems designed for durability, positioning the work as a meditation on the possibility of engaging with, and inscribing oneself onto, the city’s enduring surfaces. In these charcoal lines, a map map was created of not only the physicality of Ginza, but also the temporal and affective dimensions of moving through urban geometries.