Richard Long’s Passage as Line: Measuring Toward the Horizon

Abstract

In 1967, artist Richard Long became famous for completing his revolutionary^ Line Made From Walking (Figure 1)-a simple black and white photograph of a straight line etched into the ground. Long's mark managed to underscore the perspectival space of the field as it receded into the distance, while it simultaneously functioned formally, akin to a Barnett Newman zip down the center of the canvas. This was not Long's first attempt to carve his mark onto the surface of the earth, but his earlier experimental work from 1966, Turf Circle, a large circle of grass sliced from its soil and reconstructed into a recessed position, was initially overshadowed by the sheer visual power of the line. Today, it is clear that both Turf Circle and A Line Made From Walking have become the basis for Long's life-long art practice. After decades of trekking in both straight and circular paths, the artist has progressively undertaken more ambitious walks, as is represented by a 1981 piece entitled A Line and Tracks in Bolivia: An Eleven Day Walk Crossing and Re-crossing a Lava Plain. Despite the increased scope, the premise remains the same, with Long etching a line into the land through his repeated movement back and forth over the surface of the earth. The performance of the walk, a ritual wandering, is only later documented through a photograph, marked map, or text work. Though the art object is created as a permanent remembrance of the walk, the traces are always ephemeral, sometimes drawn in the snow, or sometimes signified by upturned stones, and will disappear through the passing of time and exposure to the elements.By making his own human contact with the earth the central focus of the artistic performance, Long marks his own presence and withdrawal from the site (Boetzkes 18). Because his physical body is almost never visible in the documenting photograph, the line alone reveals the artist's existence in the landscape but simultaneously announces his absence from the scene. This seemingly paradoxical insight extends the concept of passage beyond Long's traceable movements from point A to B, with each coming and going gesturing toward the existential. In a 1982 artist's statement, Words After the Fact, published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Amolfini Art Gallery in Bristol, Long announced to the world: My work has become a simple metaphor of life. With this highly charged statement, the artist offered up his oeuvre for thoughtful reflection; his artworks are not to be appreciated exclusively on an aesthetic level, but rather with a certain ontological attention.It is significant that Long's artistic breakthrough came during his time at St. Martin's College (1966-1968) as a student in the recently developed Advanced Course. This unique program offered a rather unconventional approach to traditional artistic techniques, and former instructor Peter Atkins recalled of his own curriculum that it was specifically engineered to expose young artists to a larger philosophic, psychological and social context {Heaven and Earth 38). It would seem that the atmosphere was intellectually inspiring for Long, and, in conversation with contemporary curator Clarrie Wallis, he fondly remembered the many hours spent poring over a copy of Bertrand Russell's 1945 History of Western Philosophy (38). It is reasonable to speculate then, that, given his keen interest in both path-making and philosophy, Long might have taken a special interest in the teachings of Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century German philosopher who has written at least two texts devoted solely to the consideration of paths: Der Feldweg or The Pathway and Holzwege, literally translated as wooded paths but known to an English audience as Off the Beaten Track. Heidegger placed himself within a long trajectory of great thinkers-Hegel, Kant, Rousseau-who recognized the simple act of walking as a form of mediation (Roelstraete 11), asserting further that [t]he pathway remains as close to the step of the thinker as to that of the farmer walking out to the mowing in early morning {The Pathway 33). …