(Above) Richard Long, A Line in the Himalayas (1975). Picture © the artist
Exhibition: Richard Long – Heaven and Earth, Tate Britain, London, June 3 – September 6 2009
It's been 20 years since land artist Richard Long won the Turner Prize and 33 years since he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale – long enough, you might think, for notions of a "second coming" to threaten disastrous undertones.
A student of Saint Martins, where he was a peer of Gilbert and George, Long first came to prominence as a young geometrical perfectionist in the 1960s, seeking new and fresh ways of engaging with the natural landscape. What this has led to, fortunately, has been decades of scaling the planet, drawing lines in terrains, casting circles in fields, using the planet as an exploratory canvas through subtle toying, leaving no mark.
(Above) Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line (1988)
This retrospective deals with the lengthy voyages Long has made, and the results are a richly visual, deeply evocative display of sculptures, measurements and musings on the relationship between mankind and planet.
Long himself is a trace, but you can sense the figure and his mindset in every corner, from his beginnings as a student taking a train to a field and walking back and forth until he'd established a line – a "groundbreaking" merger of sculpture and psychogeography at a time when artists were struggling with the concept, according to curator Clarrie Wallis – to invisible snakes through ten miles of Exmoor.
(Above) Richard Long, A Line in Scotland (1981). Picture © the artist
Wallis says Long's work reflects his self-appointment as a successor to cave painters, taking simple, universal shapes and using organic textiles, "touching the earth lightly" through daisy-formed crosses and randomly rearranged stones.
It looks organic as well, betraying no sign of being artificially-formed, left entirely exposed to the elements. "I think that's the thing about him," suggests Wallis. "He has a very straightforward, very pragmatic approach to art. It's real action in real time."
Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967)
Wallis exults his textual works, positioning narratives from Long's mind in enormous fonts, centred on walls like giant thought bubbles in glimpses of his ideas and actions. She's particularly fond of Walking Music, a list of songs Long played in his head. "From there you get a sense of the rhythm and pace of his walk," she says.
Like all great exhibitions, it manages not only to transform the walls and panelled floors, but also to transport us to these incredible panoramas and rugged terrains which have become a playground for Long's pilgrimages and tinkering. All too often photographers and travelling artists leave their audience trailing in their wake, offering fleeting appreciation rather than giddy intoxication. Anyone could traipse across sections of Dartmoor or the Andes, as Long has, and return with a camera full of picture postcards or office wall hangings, as Long could inevitably be accused of.
But here is a conceptualist, opening himself to the imperfection of the places he chooses – jagged rocks in Iceland, sticks placed on beaver dams – which make him seem almost at the mercy of the environment, eschewing predictable landscapes in preference for those which are most compelling, and calling the conspicuous element of luck this involves his "intuition".
One astonishing piece, White Water Line, takes Cornish china clay from a pit in St Austell and flings it at a wall, daubing and crafting the material until it strings from ceiling to floor, dripping into the crevasses of the space. "You have this extraordinary sense of the physicality of the process," says Wallis, surveying the gravity of the piece.
Nowhere is more physical than the room of six stone sculptures taking up one gallery, monuments of his own from an artist prone to starting off at Stonehenge at sunrise and arriving in Glastonbury by sunset on a midsummer's day.
It's the first time Tate Britain has opened up the space to an individual in this way, aiming to "create a landscape" for people to walk through. Flint from Norfolk, Swiss stones, basalt and red slate bring a permanency to the transience of the land.
Richard Long, One Thing Leads to Another
The precision of their actual formation is accurate to the point of being clinical, but Long neither tries nor wants to dramatise what he sees. "I see it as abstract art laid down in the real spaces of the world," he explains, having started his adventures after finding the "language and ambition" of art was "too formal and orthodox", ignoring the natural world.
"To make art only by walking, or leaving ephemeral traces here and there, is my freedom. I can make art in a very simple way, but on a huge scale in terms of miles," he points out. His visions are awesome and vast, but the presentation of them is a homage to the joys of simplicity.
Open 10am - 5.50pm (last admissions 5pm) and until 10pm on the first Friday of every month. Admission £9.80 / £7.80 (half-price on the first Friday of every month.) Call 020 7887 8888 or visit the exhibition online for more details.
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