Long Walks
Viola Crellin, Thursday, 23rd July 2009
‘Hell is other people’. Tate Britain’s retrospective of Richard Long’s land art, ‘Heaven and Earth’, gave me cause to agree with Jean-Paul Satre’s sentiment. The artist shows a heavenly earth found through solitary walks. The exhibition includes photographs, maps and texts from Long’s travels in seemingly uninhabited and timeless landscapes; rock sculptures reminiscent of dry stone walls and entropic yet geometric mud paintings inspired by his epic walks. It feels blissful escapism.
The Turner Prize-winning land artist from Bristol has a refreshing and enviably humble outlook on existence. He enjoys ‘the simple pleasures of well-being, independence, opportunism, eating, dreaming, happenstance of passing through the land’. Long’s meditations on human interaction with nature are expressed in his organised simplicity of clean lines and geometric shapes that are documented harmonious physical disturbances of the landscape. His most famous work, A Line Made by Walking (1967), saw him walk repeatedly in a clear-cut line through a field of grass to make an impression of footsteps.
Long’s soothing photographic style and poetic minimalist texts describing ‘simple pleasures’ such as ‘holding a butterfly with a life span of one month’ encourage the viewer to think about ideas such as the passing of time and how we engage with the natural world. It feels liberating and exciting to imagine stumbling across a landscape in which Long has intervened, or to visualise a romantic, mountainous horizon such as in Snowdonia Stones, Wales 2006, in which upright jagged rocks scratch the skyline with their vicious spikes. Although Long’s roaming is concisely reported – both visually and verbally – one is left frustrated at experiencing the work second-hand through documentary information.
The inclusion, therefore, of works such as Earth (2009; pictured above) – a mural of six solid lines referencing the I Ching symbol for heaven – placates the viewer yearning for a physical work of art. Every swish and splash of the Avon river silt evokes Long massaging the wall with watery mud. His performance can be imagined to be rather like Pollock – the mud splattered as far as the adjacent walls betrays Long’s frenzied execution of what he calls ‘wall sculptures’. He explores human versus nature, chance and chaos versus geometry and order. These wall paintings are made from these deeply-dredged concepts and are a sensitive summary spattered across the gallery.
Stone sculptures such as Basalt Ellipse (2000) and Stone Line (1980), however, feel alien and awkward in a sheltered, spotlessly white, city gallery. As if birds in a cage, these tense arrangements of flint, basalt and slate seem trapped away from the idyllic scenery of Long’s travel brochure-like photography. Long says, ‘the art world is essentially received “indoors”’ and he expresses his desire to ‘present real work in public time and space as opposed to photos, maps and texts which are by definition ‘second-hand’ works’.
On leaving the exhibition I had an urge to buy some hiking boots and head off into the wilderness. Richard Long is an artist with nomad ideals, and this retrospective ignited my too rarely nourished desire to engage with the natural world.
‘Richard Long: Heaven and Earth’ is at Tate Britain, London, until 6 September.
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