Richard Long: Walking as an art form

The English love to walk. (The Germans merely hike.) Walking is what humans are really made to do, and England is a good place to do it. They say Newton discovered gravity after being hit by a falling apple while sitting under a tree, but my hunch is that the idea came to him on a walk— well, maybe several of them.

In any case, it was just a matter of time before someone came along who decided to make walking an art form, and the odds correctly predicted it would be an Englishman. His name is Richard Long.

Walking as an art form is a counterintuitive idea, but think about it for a moment. You can describe any geometrical form by walking; you can walk a straight line or a circle, a triangle or a square. Depending on your route, your walk can produce all sorts of significations: literary and aesthetic; historical and political; geographical and geological. Obviously, you can make a statement by walking; marches do that all the time. The question is how to make it art.

How to make a mark?

The answer, just as obviously, lies in documentation. If I make a mark on a landscape in such a way as to organize or inflect it differently— say, by a cleared path or a pile of stones— I have the rudiments of an artistic statement; if I designate or document it, I make it available to others. The documentation can be a photo, or a map, or a text. Long uses all these devices.

Obviously, his work shades into conceptual art. It also relates to landscape art, as practiced by such artists as Robert Smithson. But Long isn't interested in reflecting on cultural conventions in the manner of, say, Jenny Holzer; nor is he an earth-mover who reshapes large swaths of landscape. His goal is more philosophically and ecologically modest, but all the more effective for that: He wants to acknowledge the human imprint as part of nature, but also to reduce it to its original scale— to de-imperialize it, as it were. We were walkers, perhaps, before we were speakers; we started out as a species the way each of us still does as an individual: by taking steps.

Respect for the ground

Thus Long records his journeys, but with the understanding that steps vanish and piles of stones tumble. He respects his passage by respecting the ground he traverses. The walk itself is part of the art-making, and not merely the record he makes of it.

This is the compact he makes with the viewer (and, of course, with himself): that he has really gone where he says he's been, and not merely appropriated landscape through an aesthetic gesture in a studio or from a tripod. This approach connects him to a genre he doesn't generally use, and which seems to have gone out of favor in avant-garde circles: painting.

A painting is an accretion of individual brush strokes, sometimes many thousands. In a painting, you can see not only the result but, if you look closely, the artistic effort as well. Similarly, a walk is composed of individual steps, and those steps, in Long's art, comprise a moral journey to the work of art that results: a compact with the earth, the viewer and the artist himself.

A vanishing act

Of course, Long likes to walk. His pleasure is infectious; one textual work is simply a record of the songs he sang to himself on his way. Long seldom photographs himself (a walk is a vanishing act), but his images as well as his words bespeak the sheer delight he takes in the planet and the occasions for wandering it provides. He is highly responsive to (and deeply mindful of) topography— soil, minerals, rock— and, though England remains his favorite terrain, he has journeyed to the ends of the earth.

But some of his work, usually on commission, has been executed for museums and galleries, and the most impressive space in the Tate Britain's current retrospective of his more than four decades of work is one created for it, consisting of stones and rocks (flint, basalt, etc.) laid on the ground in circles and other basic patterns. If there's a sacred space in contemporary art, this room is it, and part of its effect is precisely that it is transitory— the installation is temporary, and the rock sculptures themselves, some displayed previously, are never entirely the same for any two occasions.

Contrast with Rothko

That prompts a further reflection on Long's project: his use of time. Mark Rothko's chapel in Houston creates a sense of awe similar to Long's, although it uses verticality and light rather than horizontality and stone. But Rothko's chapel will presumably look the same in a century (unless a Wal-Mart heiress decides to nab it), while Long's cairns will be disassembled this month.

A walk, too, is an event in time as well as space; one of Long's works is entitled A Line of 33 Stones A Walk of 33 Days. The dimension of time is what is concealed in most artworks: One sees the result, not the documented effort. But the effort is in a real sense the result in Long, or at any rate inseparable from it. A stone left every day for 33 days: The accomplished work is more an idea than a material residue, since the stones cannot be seen as a whole, nor do they necessarily constitute a pattern. The salient fact is the expenditure of time (and energy) represented by the walk itself, the life consumed. The stones symbolize the footsteps; they also denote the slightness of the walker's imprint on the landscape that surrounds him and absorbs his journey.

The dancer and the dance

Collectively, humans can bulldoze much of the earth at will, but individually, their passage is evanescent. Long wants to remind us of this truth— which is, among other things, the fact of our mortality. But he's also stating the human difference— the difference, say, between a man traversing 33 miles and a deer or a wolf ranging the same distance. The 33 stones symbolize the difference; 33 Egyptian pyramids wouldn't state it more emphatically.

William Butler Yeats wondered how one could distinguish the dancer from the dance. In Richard Long's work, we're invited to consider the relation between the wayfarer and the way. It's an art rich in implication and wisdom, and one that invites us to rejoin ourselves to the earth. Without belaboring his point, Long nonetheless states it clearly: In the degraded world we've created in our arrogance and greed, we face no more urgent task.