Walk On: 40 Years of Art Walking @ The Atkinson, Southport

Artists walking? They get ferried around by Saatchi limo don’t they? At the very least some smart, gallery-paid-for black cab. Apparently not so. They walk, just like us mere mortals. Not only that, they make art out of walking and as you can currently see at The Atkinson Gallery, Southport, much of it is pretty damn good.

Walk On: 40 Years of Art-Walking focuses on 'artist’s walks and journeys', however Francis Alӱs, whose use of the city and social space as canvas makes him the obvious choice for this exhibition, makes an important distinction. 'A journey,' he says, 'implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point.'

There are some big names in Walk On: Richard Wentworth, Janet Cardiff, Hamish Fulton, etc. Richard Long shows one of the first ever images of his drawing interventions into the landscape (England from 1968), and Carey Young’s Body Techniques – after Long’s A Line In Ireland (2007) – is nearby. Marina Abramović and Ulay’s walk towards each other across the Great Wall of China is represented by a series of photographs and drawings. One of the great stories of performance art history, the lovers intended to walk towards each other and marry, but the project was delayed by so many years that, by the time they complete it, they meet instead to separate.

Sophie Calle’s Venetian Suite (1980-1996) could be mistaken for an obsessive love story, but is resolutely non-romantic. Calle expelores in the city, following strangers akin to Vito Acconci’s earlier work Following. Calle followed strangers around the streets, photographing them and noting their movements. A chance encounter at a party with a stranger she had been following during the day inspired Calle to follow this man, Henri B, to Venice. Her daily frustrations in not being able to locate him, and her various disguises and routines, are displayed in text and photographs.

Several works explore the physicality of walking, of the human body moving through space, for example Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-8) or the cute video projection, Hill Walker (2009) from Tracy Hanna, which sees the artist projected teeny-tiny on a mountain of 25kg of plaster. She walks up the mountain only to have her journey begin again and again, consigned to a Sisyphean fate. Another work positions the viewer as the walker – Dan Holdsworth’s large-format image Blackout 10 (2010), which is displayed in a huge lightbox. The image, taken on a walk in southern Iceland, has been rendered tonally monochrome and the scale of the photograph makes you feel like you could walk right into this abstracted alien landscape. [Sacha Waldron]