Richard Long at Tate Britain

‘A Line in Scotland’, a sculpture by Richard Long

Richard Long at Tate Britain

(Source Financial Times,Visual Arts) Landscape as a site for artistic pleasure began in the late Middle Ages, reached its apogee with the romantics – Constable, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich – and petered out with the end of modernism. It was alien to classical civilisation and is anathema to most contemporary art. So the great revelation of Richard Long’s retrospective at Tate Britain is that here is an artist who, since the 1960s, has been quietly, radically reclaiming landscape as a source of delight, both sensual and intellectual.
This is a sweeping, joyful, dramatically alive show. Long’s seminal idea – that walking became art when he said it was – is demonstrated in different ways: slate circles arranged on specific sites or imported into the gallery; sticks or stones marking intervals on a walk; photographs; text pieces noting times, places and thoughts on his journeys. The idea gains seriousness, credence, occasionally humour, from the repetition and variety of its manifestations. And even if you leave, as I did, unconvinced by every element, the show coheres room by room into a persuasive exploration of man’s relationship with and place in the abstract entity we call nature.

“Heaven” and “Earth”, the mud-and-water frescoes opening the show and providing its title, evoke both the visceral, spontaneous primitivism of cave-painting and a highly ordered vocabulary of abstraction. Derived from ancient Chinese symbols, Long’s marks include signs for mountains, river, wind, tranquillity. “Heaven” is based on six solid lines; “Earth” on six broken ones, denoting the basic sky/earth, cerebral/physical duality at the heart of his work. It is a delicately rendered metaphysical piece, answered by the concluding work, a wall painting in Cornish china clay which, Long says, “represents the force of my hand speed, and the forces of water, chance and gravity”. The clay courses down like summer rain, shaping patterns that suggest cosmic variety, life-giving energy, lyrical affirmation.

Both pieces are rooted in the personal and gestural, with the mud in “Heaven” and “Earth” coming from the Avon in Long’s native Bristol. Throughout the show, the city’s contours of oozing river, mud banks, spring tides, caves, limestone cliffs, together with the flat expanse of nearby Dartmoor, leave an imprint on Long’s work that is as pronounced as Suffolk’s Stour is on Constable. A photograph of a Somerset beach, a text work denoting “A Straight Northward Walk Across Dartmoor”, an Exmoor Ordnance Survey map marked with the route of “A Ten Mile Walk”, as well as photographs recording treks across treeless plateaus in the Alaskan tundra, the Mongolian steppes, the Argentine pampas – all echo or reference these landscapes of Long’s childhood.

Standing out radiantly from them all is “A Line Made By Walking”. In 1967, aged 22, Long took a train from London’s Waterloo, got off at the first station in open countryside, found a field, walked back and forth until he had made a flattened line, waited for sunlight, took a photograph and went home. The rough, grainy image of that sunbeamed line is direct, luminous, mysterious, but also earthy, heavy with the weight of feet trampling grass. Read Article...
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‘Richard Long, Heaven and Earth’, Tate Britain, London, to September 6. www.tate.org