Introduction
CLARRIE WALLIS
Richard Long’s art is grounded in his direct engagement with the
landscape. Born in Bristol in 1945 he first came to prominence in the
late 1960s and is part of an international generation of artists who
extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials
and methods. This anthology brings together a selection of texts
about his work, as well as statements by the artist, which chart Long's
impressive career and are key to an understanding of a body of work
that encompasses sculpture, language, mudworks and printed matter.
Collectively, they reflect on how the art is rooted in Long's love of nature
and the revolutionary implications of using walking as a medium. As the
articles in this volume confirm, what is striking is both the early stage
at which Long established the formal parameters within which his work
would develop, making art directly connected with the landscape, and
the unwavering continuity of his approach. This new form of art was
not only located in the landscape but was made from landscape itself.
‘The texts gathered together here are arranged chronologically
to enable an appraisal of the different ways in which Long's art has
been received over the last 4o years. Interspersed between the texts
is a selection of photographs of key exhibitions. Remarkably, the
idea-based approach of Long's mature work is already well established
in his student work at St Martin's School of Art where he studied from
1966 to 1968. In his last term, the German gallerist Konrad Fischer
wrote to Long inviting him to have an exhibition at his gallery in
September 1968," and at Fischer's suggestion, Long took the train to
Amalfi in Italy and participated in II Rassegna di arti figurative: Arte
Povera + azioni povere, (RA3: Third Amalfi Exhibition: Arte Povera +
azioni povere). This was an annual event, which in 1968 consisted
of an exhibition in the old Arsenale and three days of actions and
collective works by artists and writers including Ger van Elk, whose
commentary of the event is included here (pp.16-17).
In retrospect, the works made in Amalfi form a microcosm of the
radical new approaches to materials and forms being explored by a
number of European and American artists, including Richard Long.
10
4101_2017_1_LongReader_001-187.Indd 10-11‘They were intent on exploring new ideas about sculpture. By the early
1970s critics would describe these approaches in different ways such
as ‘process-orientated, ‘anti-form’, ‘earthworks’, ‘Conceptual’ and
‘post-Minimal’. Long's presence in exhibitions such as Op Losse Scbroeven,
situaties en cryptostructuren and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become
Form (Works-Goncepts-Processes-Situations-Information) (both 1969)
highlight the rapidity with which his work achieved international
recognition. John Perreault's review of Long's exhibition at the John
Gibson Gallery, New York, 1969 (p.17) together with Elizabeth Baker's
review of his show at the Dwan Gallery, New York in 1970 (p.26)
give an insight into how Long's practice was discussed at the time in
relation to these new categories of work. Likewise, Paul Wember's
catalogue essay for Long's first institutional exhibition at the Museum
Haus Lange, Krefeld in 1969 (where he realised three works on the
lawn), offers an early attempt to position his work alongside other
international artists who took art beyond the studio (pp.19-21).
From the beginning of his career, Long developed two distinct but
complementary aspects of making: the outdoor sculptures and walks,
and the sculpture installations, photo, map and textworks. Photography
was always important to him, as it was a practical way of showing
people what he had made in the landscape. As Andrew Wilson's text
notes, Long soon became interested in the different ways he could
put work into the world: a photograph, a postcard, a sculpture, a text,
or an artist’s book were all possibilities, and all could be given equal
status (pp.225~233). Long’s first textwork, which treats language in
a neutral way, was created for the exhibition Live in Your Head: When
Altitudes Become Form. After completing a walk in the Alps near Bern
his work for the exhibition that followed consisted of a printed poster
pasted to the wall, which read: ‘Richard Long, March 19-22, 1969,
A Walking Tour in the Berner Oberland,* In Ian Tromp’s text he
considers the use of poetry and language in Long’s work that began
with this work in 1969 and has continued to be a crucial element in
Long's work since (pp.188-201). In 1970, at the Dwan Gallery in New
York, Long walked a spiral on the floor with muddy boots, a work that
he thought of as a two-dimensional sculpture. Later he realised that
he could use the same material in a liquid state and apply it directly
onto the wall with his hands.
Long's use of the natural environment meant that in early reviews,
particularly by critics from the United States, he was often associated
0
tworr2017 2228ee eee; torr2017 2225,4 Skulpturen
Stidtisches Museum Abteiberg, Ménchengladbach,
16 July - 30 August 1970
All works untitled
22,
101_2017_1_LongReader_001-187.indd 22-23,23
torr2017 2225ELIZABETH BAKER
Richard Long at Dwan Gallery
New York, 3 - 29 October 1970
[The] young English artist, Richard Long, has evolved an unusually
complex and personal mode among the international contingent of
earthworkers. In his new show were two characteristically under-
stated, lyrical and multi-referential pieces, both closely related to his
more familiar landscape-sited works. One was a pale grey clay track
of Long's footprints, wound up into a spiral nicely filling the confines
of the room. The track was walked over several times, the footprints
casually but quite neatly superposed. The track refers to a real outdoor
situation: Silbury Hill, a prehistoric mound, the largest man-made hill
in England. It has been partly excavated but nothing has been found —
its purpose and origins are unknown. Long has included a local legend
about the hill on his exhibition announcement, (The devil intended to
set the hill down on a town; the town's most virtuoso liar tricked the
devil into dropping it in an open space instead.) Long's walked spiral
is the exact length of a path from the bottom to the top of Silbury
Hill. The concept of duration, of distance, of walking, of traces of the
artist's presence in a specific locale are all important factors in Long's
thinking. The peculiar balance between an arbitrary visual form and
a perhaps whimsical but completely specific ‘subject’ or place, the
modest physicality and moderate scale, all contribute to the personal
quality of what Long does, Many of his pieces, in fact, seem ‘English’
— subtly picturesque, even pastoral. Spectators may walk at will over
the clay foot-track — while the clay is tenacious, the piece is ultimately
ephemeral. The other work in the show is off-limits for wandering,
intended just to be seen, and will continue to exist: it comprises
concentric circles laid out on the floor ~ thin contours formed of
wooden sticks. The circles are a variant of a recurrent formal motif
which he has insinuated into numerous landscape situations (grass,
woods, hillside, beach pebbles, etc.). The placement flat on the carpet is
as straightforward as, say, a Carl Andre floor piece, but the sensibility
is more fragile and the piece far more dematerialised than Andre
even at his most linear.
Art News, vol.69, no.7, November 1970, p.22.
26
101.2017 4 LongReader_001-187.indd 26-27A SCULPTURE LEFT BY THE TIDE
CORNWALL 1970
A SOMERSET BEACH
ENGLAND 1968
to7r2017 2228,Richard Long, Mexico 1979WALKING A LINE IN PERU
1972SIMON FIELD
Touching the Earth
Lisson Gallery, London, 23 January ~ 24 February 1973
‘They inscribe a human meaning upon the hostile wastes of
nature, in a graphic record of a forgotten but once important
ritual. They are an architecture of two-dimensional space,
consecrated to human actions rather than to shelter, and
recording a correspondence between the earth and the universe...
They are an architecture of diagram and relation, with the
substance reduced to a minimum.
George Kubler on the Nazca Lines, The Shape of Time, 1962
‘The redesigned Lisson Gallery has two spaces, separated by a single
doorway. In Richard Long's recent show the one was occupied
entirely by a sculpture of stones, the other by nine photographic and
map pieces, the majority of them made on a recent trip to Bolivia and
Peru; of the remainder, two were of Dartmoor walks, the third of the
Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. The nine pieces, like Long’s previous
work, were photographs of places, usually where he had traced one
of his ‘sculptures’: walked a line, a cross or made a circle of stones. As
in the past, there was no explanatory material, just a simple evocative
caption: Two Sacred Places (1972) or the briefest information:
A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles (1972).
One is left entirely alone to gauge Long's concerns, left with images
and a presence that are extremely poetic, expressive of particular
places, scale and time. The peculiar strength of Long’s work is that
behind this immediate poetry is a resonance that carries far beyond
the gallery in which we stand, each work implies and involves all his
others and furthermore, in this show, take their strength from and
interlock with an even larger network of ‘earthworks’ from another
time and another place.
Walking a Line in Peru (1972) is on the surface a simple piece. The
photograph is taken from one side of a wide valley. Into the depth
of the image and across the floor of the valley goes a thin walked line
that disappears into the foothills in the distance. As in many of Long’s
photographs, scale is there but it’s elusive, one can’t judge how long
49
tworr2017 2225Richard Long
in Venice 1976
101.2017 4. LongReader_001-187.indd 60-61Venice Biennale XXXVII
British Pavilion, 18 July ~ 10 October 1976
A Line of 682 Stones 1976
or
sworteo17 22:25SASKIA Bos
Richard Long, Art & Project
Amsterdam, 23 January ~ 20 February 1982
In his recent work, Richard Long unexpectedly appears as a kind
of painter. On the white walls of the gallery are huge monochrome
circles, two in brownish grey and one in a warmer reddish-brown;
within the circles the white wall is left visible at intervals, thus
implying not only a flat ornament but also structure and depth. Long
painted with his hands, dipping his fingers in mud and clay with
which he then covered the walls in a tense, rhythmic motion. Because
of the supple and continuous movement of his fingers, the paintings
have an overall structure that is both dynamic and controlled. On the
one hand, their patterns remind one of intricate latticework; on the
other, they recall the organic feeling of old landscape etchings.
The connections with Long's past work ~ especially with the book
in which he used mud from the River Avon on the pages, enabling the
viewer to ‘read’ the river — are obvious. River Avon Mud Gircle (1982)
and Red Clay Circle (1982) also relate to the circles of driftwood that
Long has made for many years. What distinguishes them from these
earlier sculptures is the suppleness and sensuousness of the new medium,
which enable Long to convey different moods and sensations. Making
an abstract image of nature out of nature's own materials, Long evokes
the rhythms of flowing water and of moving earth in a river by using
mud from the river itself.
In this impressive show, in which Long made his largest mud.
circles so far (previous works were presented in London and Lyons),
he created a complement to his landscape photography. Both strongly
evoke nature, but in quite different ways, It is always fascinating to
see an artist find new formulations while remaining true to his central
concerns; this is the more welcome in a period when eclecticism.
seems to be the only avenue for most ‘new’ painters.
Artforum, 01.20, n0.10, June 1982, p.95.
70
101.2017 4 LongReader_001-187.indd. 70-71ness “A CIRCLE IN ALASKA ,
aT aa Ve DRIETWOOD Clete ae oun ced ied ay
BRE ~ 2 z
- Se eS “Richard Long
Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, 28 January ~ 20 April 1986
Madrid Circle 1986 | Segovia Slate Circles 1986
104
101.2017 4 LongReader_001-167.indd 104-105PY rn
105
sorteo17 22:28Richard Long, Alaska 1972
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