Line Made by Walking
Richard Long’s work is an exciting and direct engagement with the natural world. He is most well-known for works of actual, physical lines and geometrical shapes in landscapes, made using nothing but the elements of the landscape itself and his own limbs. The art asks us to appreciate what surrounds us and reminds us of how we leave our marks on the earth by even the most everyday tasks.
The artist’s most celebrated piece (and the opening image for this article) is “A Line Made by Walking” and was done in England in 1967. Although, at first glance, the image may appear to be at best trivial, and at worst banal, it is nonetheless a seminal piece. It represents the crossing of the line between real life and art production. While few people make art the vast majority perform menial tasks with pause for thought. Long used the simple task of walking to production a temporary mark on his landscape and in using his own body drew the art’s emphasis away from traditional means of mark making to the examination of a more bodily experience. The context was also of huge importance as, at this time, there was much debate about the necessity of museums and the legitimacy they give the works they display.
Crucially though, and due to the piece’s transience, the actual recording of the work draws us back to more traditional means of art production, resulting in a two dimensional representation of the world. Long has never sought to fully sever art’s relationship with flat pictorial space and later went on to create mud “frescoes”.
Fresco in Duisberg made from mud taken from the River Avon
One year later Long went on another walk. A Ten Mile Walk on November 1 was made in 1968, and left no trace. It was documented on a map leaving the art historian Antje van Graevenitz to expound that the actual work lies beween two documents and needs to be re-contructed in the viewer’s mind.
Critics were not all as receptive. Jurgen Claus accused him of making art like a naturalist hunting the fabled blue flower. In Die Zeit Petra Kipphoff, deliberating on whether recorded actions could be considered as legitimate art pieces and how they could be judged, asked ‘Is it possible to behave more aestheticisingly than this?’ Contemporary critics also asked what was the difference between Long and a rambler showing his slides in his own home? For some the though, self awareness and conceptual aim had to result in marks, however temporary, being made.
Stone Circle in the Andes
Richard Long paved the way for artists such as Andy Goldsworthy to engage with the environment. He was also part of the global art scene which spawned environmental interventions of a large nature by artists such as Richard Serra and Robert Smithson (click here for the preservation of Smithson’s most famous work, Spiral Jetty). In this atmosphere artists reprised the grand gestures of past civilisations creating latter-day henges and earthworks, ramparts and moats. However, unlike these artists Long’s interventions are gentle and transient.
Standing Stones in Nepal
Long respects his materials- his immediate environment. His work does not seek to permanently alter the essence of his surroundings but just to temporarily engage with them, and, once documented, to leave. In this way he is a counterpoint to the prevailing ideas of the time, as edified by Smithson.
Richard Long, Driftwood, 1975, 48 pieces of wood, overall 206 x 950 cm from Kunsthaus Graz
The artist has also created works that were created specifically for a gallery context and fully removed from nature. By bringing mud, pine needles, twigs and other natural materials into gallery spaces his process becomes the concept.
However, the forms he goes on to create using these materials, out of their normal context, are so clear and so defined, that the end result must have been envisaged. Instead of emphasising his methods, the artist was bringing an unordered natural world into the clinical arena of academic debate and creating a deliberate arrangement. He was discussing our desire to control the world around us.
British critics love to frame British artists in a historical context, for example Long as the standard bearer for Constable. In many ways this isn’t really what Long’s art is about. If anything, his works have a greater relationship with Hadrian’s Wall or with archaeological remnants of wooden trackways, wooden henges or even ditches.
The temporary nature of Long’s work is a poignant look at the problems the earth is faced with due to our presence. The artist deliberately made as little intervention in his surroundings as was necessary. In fact at times his presence in a landscape was all that he needed, as he documented walks through the Swiss Alps for instance. In his artist’s book of 1971 entitled From Along a Riverbank, he simply walked a riverbank and took banal photos along the way and in doing so recalled the precious notebooks of Turner and the Lake District ramblings of William Wordsworth amongst others, thereby ensuring his place, for the critics at least, among the pantheon of celebrated British artists.
Bibliography
A hymn of love to the earth, Jonathon Jones reviews the Tate Britain show
Conceptual Art, Tony Godfrey, Phaidon, 1998
Twentieth Century Art,Karl Ruhrberg, Taschen, 2000
Art Since 1960, Michael Archer, Thames and Hudson, 1997
This article was posted by Ronan McDonnell on
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at
03:17.
It is archived in Art, Culture, Environment and tagged British, conceptual, environmental, environmental art, land art, Richard Long.
If you enjoyed this article, please help The Inquisition grow by sharing it.
Comments are closed.
