The Guardian (UK) is abuzz at present with articles on Richard Long, the British sculptor whose “time has come” as one of them says. (You can read three of these articles here, here and here.) Plus there’s a slide-show of his impressive current retrospective at the Tate Britain, which really shows the international standing of this “sleeper” in the world of sculpture.
Seeing all this work online reminded me of how, when I was studying sculpture, I was influenced by this artist, particularly by his early works such as A Line Made By Walking. As Robert Macfarlane says in one of the above Guardian articles:
His best-known early piece is A Line Made by Walking. On a sunlit day in 1967, he caught a train south-west out of Waterloo. When the suburbs gave way to countryside, Long got off the train, and found a field whose grass was starred with daisies. He walked back and forth, until the flattened grass caught the light such that it was “visible as a line”. Then he photographed the line in black and white, and went home.
And here is that photograph:
Richard Long
A Line Made by Walking, 1967
I don’t imagine that Richard Long had in mind the noumenal field when he walked this work – it’s my overlay onto the work that it stands for me as a kind of “ur-work”, a definition of an attitude to art making and a reverence for the underlying ground that supports this attitude. And it has the overlay of a remembered work, the only trace of which is the artifact of the black and white photo above. It’s like the feeling I get when walking into a local gallery in Paddington, and seeing (maybe it’s behind the counter where the minders sit) a small study or drawing by the current artist, setting the theme for the show; and having the feeling that the paintings for sale on the walls are “blow-ups” of that single, energised study – that the sum of the energy in the entire gallery space exactly equals, and is determined by, the energy generated by the single dense study, that ur-work. A good metaphor, for me, of how the noumenal field, the original ur-work, explicates.
On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan
