Richard Long Research Articles

When drawing speaks: The dialogic traces of a continuous line

This article focuses on my video Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible, an artwork featured in the exhibition ‘Drawn to time’. Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible was made as attempt to create a continuous line drawing using video. The aim of my analysis is to explore how Drawing Breath and Remaining Visible can be read as dialogic, and how the ‘complex interplay of cognitive, somatic, and material conventions’ (Lovatt 2021: 10) that converge in this drawing can provide insights into the dialogic dynamics of this artwork and drawing more broadly. Drawing, claims art Historian Anna Lovatt, ‘is fundamentally relational and deceptively complex’ (2021: 10); it is the complexity and fundamental relationality that I seek to explore through my analysis of this drawing in relation to those of other artists, including Cy Twombly, Richard Long and Lygia Clark. Theorist Roland Barthes’ writing on Twombly supports an exploration on how bodies, surfaces and marks interact to create drawings; and art historian Cornelia Butler’s discussion of how ‘idea-space’, as realized by Clark, is used alongside Barthes’ formulations. In essence, this paper seeks to convey a sense of moving inside and outside drawing in a dialogic process that entangles intentions, marks, mediums and reflective analysis.

Lines made by walking—On the aesthetic experience of landscape

Landscape is often seen as a predominantly visual aesthetic phenomenon, which is closely connected to painting. Georg Simmel calls landscape “a work of art in statu nascendi.” Yet from a phenomenological point of view, landscape can also be seen as something we do not only view but also experience bodily, as something we walk through and live in. In this respect, there are many connections between landscape and the experience of space and place. For Edward Casey, it is important to recognize that a landscape consists of places, which thus function as “its main modules, its prime numbers.” Consequently, the aesthetic experience of landscapes will have to take its located and situated character into account. In my contribution, I will draw on this line of thought and try to point out some key aspects of a phenomenological critique of reductive accounts of landscape and consider its relevance for the arts. As landscape and nature have become a prominent theme in artistic practices since the 1960s and 1970s, this paper will relate the philosophical discussion to artistic projects such as Richard Long’s art of walking. In his practice, the status of the work of art as well as a solely pictorial idea of landscape is questioned.

A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

between home and school walking a way to learning life through the city. (David Haley) This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists by James Perrin Warren

Reviewed by: Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists by James Perrin Warren David Thomas Sumner James Perrin Warren, Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2015. 240 pp. Cloth, $50. Although the oft-quoted claim that race, class, and gender have become the "holy trinity" of literary criticism may continue to hold true, in Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists James Perrin Warren takes a different direction entirely. Warren is interested in the "aesthetic, ethical and spiritual meanings" Lopez creates in community with other artists (184). In this useful, perceptive work, Warren examines Lopez's writing in connection with the work of photographers, painters, sculptors, and musicians with whom Lopez has cultivated long and fruitful creative relationships. The result includes not only a deep discussion of the works of these artists along with Lopez's, but also over thirty illustrations and color [End Page 360] plates aiding readers to visualize the connections Warren—and Lopez—make. Warren argues that Lopez's body of work is the result of three significant practices. First, Lopez finds others who have a lived knowledge of animals, landscapes, and Indigenous cultures and becomes their apprentice. Second, he "participates in communities, often communities that he creates." It is within these communities, Warren claims, that Lopez performs an "ethical questioning as rigorous and probing as any philosopher's" (5). Finally, Warren argues that Lopez engages profoundly with the art produced by this community—painting, sculpture, film, music, dance—creating an aesthetic sensibility that forms the foundation of Lopez's writing, allowing him to travel—physically, intellectually, artistically, ethically—into the "other country" of the title. The initial chapter, "Learning to See," examines Lopez's long relationship with photographer Robert Adams and his photographs. The book then opens up into a journey through visual and performed art and its deep connection with Lopez's writing, exploring many avenues of aesthetic and ethical inquiry. Beautiful illustrations, among them the immaculately reproduced color plates of several artists—Alan Magee, Richard Long, Richard Roland, and Ben Huff—make it easier for us to follow Warren's cogent but sophisticated critical analysis. Warren's book concludes with an examination of Lopez's relationship with the jazz musician Paul Winter, with whom he ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1980, a trip that merged music and landscape. Various musicians and artists completed the list of river runners and resulted in ten tracks on Winter's 1985 album Canyon. The trinity of critical foci mentioned above remains crucial, but here Warren has reminded us of other vital concerns. His text calls for deep engagement with the aesthetics and ethics of one of our most important living writers; and it does so in a readable, clear style. Other Country will be of use to scholars and interested readers alike, taking them further into the other country Lopez's work captures. [End Page 361] David Thomas Sumner Linfield College Copyright © 2017 Western Literature Association

The British Avant Garde:A Joint Venture Between the New York Cultural Center andStudio InternationalMagazine

This essay considers the relevance of The British Avant Garde exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in 1971 to the reputation and discussion of British artists in the US, and its subsequent impact in Britain. It situates the exhibition with reference to Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects at the NYCC and Information at the Museum of Modern Art, both held in 1970, and within the background milieu of a lively transatlantic and multi-directional network of artists such as Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Barry Flanagan, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Richard Long, Mel Ramsden, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, who were developing alternative ways to make and to distribute work by using text, photocopies, and self-publication as forms of production as well as becoming the site of exhibition. Devised by Charles Harrison, assistant editor of Studio International magazine, the exhibition was a collaboration between the magazine and the NYCC, directed by Donald Karshan. Despite the mixed press reviews in New York, the exhibition paved the way for establishing institutional support for the artists in the UK.

Renewing the New: British Sculpture in the 1980s

Greg Hilty introduces the case studies in his 1980s section of “British Sculpture Abroad”. He also points to two exemplary instances of British sculpture's expansion onto an ever wider global stage: Tony Cragg in Warsaw in 1988 and Richard Long in Paris in 1989.

Disposing of veterinary practice leases

There are a variety of situations where a vet may wish to leave the property and dispose of the practice lease before the end of the lease term. Richard Long...

Painting Into A Corner: The Pedagogic Agenda, the Immersive Mediation (and the Overdetermined Experience) of ‘Play Van Abbe 4’

Play Van Abbe 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flâneur (and the Worker) (2011), the final installment of the experimental, Play Van Abbe program at the Van Abbemuseum – invited viewers to play one of four ‘roles’, each of which entailed a different mode of engagement. The pilgrim sought divine inspiration, the tourist an encounter with something unusual. The flâneur strolled along in passive observance while the worker, not merely a consumer of experience, produced in return. To engender these perspectives role-specific ‘tools’ for art mediation were extended to the exhibition’s visitors. While not explicitly fetishized on pedestals or in vitrines, mediation was the overriding object and subject of Play Van Abbe 4. Works such as Richard Long’s Wood Circle (1977), James Lee Byars’ Hear TH FI TO IN PH Around this Chair (1978), and Oliver Ressler’s What is Democracy? (2009), functioned merely as a backdrop. Each of the artworks included could have been exchanged with any other. In such a situation it is imperative to ask: in the midst of so much discursive and immersive mediation is there any space left in the museum for art?

Intersections of creative praxis and urban exploration

Since the 1960s, walking artists have documented the multifarious relationship between humans and their built environments. By turning walking into art, key figures such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Marina Abramović, and Hamish Fulton paved the way for future practitioners, such as Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Tim Knowles, and Rachel Clewlow, among others, who continue to use walking as an opportunity creatively to investigate notions of place, identity, time, consciousness, and heritage. Whether walking fosters new artistic inquiry or remains its product, what a vast majority of walking artists have in common is that they pursue a form of praxis on the surfaces of their habitats. This practice-led research project contributes to creative walking praxis by pursuing notions of cultural identity through an engagement with sub-suburban infrastructure. By developing sound-based, visual, and textual interactions with subterranean space – specifically stormwater drains – this project seeks to investigate alternative ontologies of everyday life.

Network(ed) TV: Collaboration and Intervention at Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and Videogalerie Schum

In 1969 Gerry Schum short-circuited conventional mode of art production and exhibition with a broadcast of contemporary artist films on television. Schum--a documentary filmmaker for West German broadcast television--saw traditional hierarchies of painting and sculpture as outdated, and institutions in which they circulated as an inaccessible system. He sought ways to challenge what he referred to as the eternal triangle of studio, gallery, collector, (1) and employed network systems via conceptual means to achieve new forms of communication. The Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (1968-70), a conceptual that produced and exhibited artist films for broadcast on television, and Videogalerie Schum (1971-73), first commercial gallery dedicated to production and sale of editioned artist videotapes, were animated by a sensibility born from dynamic nature of film, broadcast television, and video technology, that was also a major precursor to rise of new media and video art collectives in Europe and United States in following decade. The apogee of this strategy--democratizing art object and exhibition--served to decentralize and decommodify work of art, and in turn reclaimed agency of artists and audiences from institutional confines of galleries and museums. Despite Schum's innovative and prescient articulation of art and technology, there has been very little critical writing about Schum and his pioneering experiments in television and video distribution outside of Europe. To reexamine Schum's pursuit of artistic collaboration and communication in postwar landscape is an effort in recontextualizing historic understanding of his work--away from traditional concept of a single creator and toward a new understanding of collaboration. Thus, Schum's approach to time-based art and democratic aspirations, as well as dynamic nature of loosely organized group of artists he worked with, require further study. The strategies were revolutionary, and are especially relevant to ever-changing landscape of contemporary art and technology today. This (overdue) study examines Schum's network of artists and system through which their work was produced. Faking specific works as examples of what I identify as networked and Schum's role as proto-curator of screen-based art, this essay will provide a comprehensive exploration into televisual activities of Schum's projects that have yet to be discussed elsewhere. Is it possible to create a virtual network through television? How can a nexus of transmitted art maintain cohesive impact or influence? What does it mean to curate for screen? These are some of questions 1 intend to pursue, while analyzing themes of authorship, collaboration, and curatorial tendencies that emerged from art's relationship with TV. In tradition of futurists, surrealists, and Dada--collective artist practices that experimented and exploited new media, like sound, radio, and film--the Fernsehgalerie (translated in English as Gallery) attempted to conjoin innovations in technology with new artistic modes of collaboration. Separated by nationality and discipline, artists involved with TV Gallery did not interact with one another, nor did they see each other's work before each broadcast exhibition. Similar to a network like Fluxus, artists working with Schum and his wife, Ursula Wevers, were connected by their shared interest in new media as a response against object-based practice. But unlike Fluxus and its distant collaborative performances or mail art networks, Schum's network existed only by virtue of his lens and broadcast and distribution system that allowed television transmission and, later, video distribution. In Schum's first television broadcast, Land Art (1969), Richard Long conceived and executed his first work on film in Dartmoor, England, while Barry Flanagan, Jan Dibbets, and Marinus Boezem instigated impressions in other European land and seascapes. …

The resilience of sustainability, creativity and social justice from the arts & crafts movement to modern day “eco-painting”

This paper develops an earlier one on key principles of Green Aesthetics published in City, Culture & Society. It extends the application of such principles backwards in time to the original Arts & Crafts movement as practised in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century, and in terms of contemporary eco-art, forwards to a variety of styles including site-specific art, environmental art (both strongly sculptural) and eco-painting, which is organic, local and sustainable. It is shown how, from the beginning, these styles have shown great resilience in the face of a dominant industrialist paradigm. In the process such ‘outsider’ art has maintained an evolving and striking creativity and innovativeness. The evolution in styles has also contained its own inner dynamic where some strands of eco-art favour modernity and modernism while others seek a synthesis of medieval modes of guild production yet with a view to producing for commercial markets. More recently a strong strand of extreme disenchantment is evident in the work of some ‘land artists’, for example represented at Fattoria de Celle sculpture park near Pistoia in Tuscany against today’s capitalistically signed and saturated dominant semiotics. This is expressed in references in such work, including Richard Serra, Richard Long and Robert Morris to Neolithic motifs captured in the megalithic remains of such culture.

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

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). …

Land-Art, Ecologie, Politică şi Societate

Abstract The Land-Art was integrated to Postmodernism by the most art historians, having as arguments the important affinities presented by the two artistic phenomena, both at the expressing modalities level but, especially, at the level of principles and, of the ideological sphere. The Postmodernism intended, as it is well-known, to parody or to interpret, in a proper way, a cultural tradition whose authority had become disturbing the Land-Art also started an innovating programme in the 60s -70s of the 20th century, through which the millenary art of the landscape was questionable, trying this way, a new and radical art-like approach of nature. The Art-Land was given various other names, syntagms which points out the work modalities or the materials used in the creation art: “Sociological Art”, “Earth Art”, “Works Art”, “Environmental Art”, “Earthworks”, “The Art of Landscape”, “The Sculpture of Landscape”, “The Walking Art”. The Land Art borrowed, in a great measure, the own means of expression of other tendencies which were performing on the artistic stage in the same time, such as the technique of installation, some of the principles experienced by Process-Art, by the Environmental Art or by Happening. The most representative land artists knew to integrate all the borrowings to a new vision, an original one, which, for the first time, was turning the nature into the support of the artistic creation. Apart from the point of view through which the Land Art is understood as an integral part of Postmodernism, there are also opinions, supported by well-known specialists, through which the Modernism of the 60s from the past century is seen as a possible origin of the Land-Art, especially if we have in mind the works of some great modern artists, such as Henry Moore, Robert Morris, Anthony Caro, Yves Klein and Tony Smith. Land Art presents two different ways of demonstration, hostile from the point of view of attitude towards nature and public: on the one hand some of the land artists look for the privacy of the act of artistic creation in the natural environment (one example this way is Richard Long), others, on the contrary, are guided by an art with clear social implications (e.g. the typical case of Christo). The ecological position of the tendency is underlined by the artists ' spokesman, Robert Smithson, who thinks that it should be adopted a committed, fighting attitude, pragmatically sheltered itself towards future.

Green design aesthetics: Ten principles

The rise of a green consciousness in societies affected by or recovering from carbon pollution has not fully emerged in a clear aesthetic form as yet. This paper is not comprehensive but will be a reflection upon the work of certain architects, designers and artists who display some kind of ’green aesthetic’. In architectural design, we shall return to an evaluation of the contribution to organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, looking for contemporary consistency with his ’horizontal’ and ’related variety’ approach, possibly captured in some work of Zaha Hadid and others. Some elements of this re-emerged in the later ‘Critical Regionalism’ architectural movement. In art, we shall review the sculptural contributions of ‘land art’ after David Nash, Richard Long, Peter Randall-Page and Andy Goldsworthy amongst others. Finally, in aesthetics, more generally, we shall attempt to ’abduce’ or at least deduce certain aesthetic principles that might inform a ’green design ethic’ in contemporary society from these and other artists.

Does Richard Long’s Art teach us to aesthetically appreciate nature?

La qüestió que plantejo en aquest article és si algunes obres d'art podrien ensenyar a apreciar estèticament la natura. En una primera part, es presenta el debat actual en estètica analítica sobre l'apreciació de la natura, i s'examina la tesi d'Allen Carlson segons la qual només les ciències naturals, i no l'art, ens ensenyen a apreciar la bellesa natural. En una segona part s'analitza en detall el rebuig de Carlson a l'art, estudiant concretament les seves raons per rebutjar la pintura de paisatge. En una tercera part es proposa l'obra de Richard Long com un art que no pot ser rebutjat amb els arguments de Carlson, i es defensa que sí ens ensenya a apreciar estèticament la natura.

Walking in rhythms: place, regulation, style and the flow of experience

Following Henri Lefebvre, this article investigates the distinct rhythms of walking and the ways that it intersects with diverse temporalities and spaces. Because walking is practised and experienced in innumerable contexts, generalisations are problematic. Nevertheless, this article identifies some of the ways in which walking produces time-space and the experience of place. I subsequently discuss how walking is inevitably conditioned by multiple forms of regulation but possesses peculiar characteristics that always make these orderings of space and body contingent, facilitating immanent, often unexpected experiences. I further examine how walking is surrounded by notions of style that reproduce particular rhythms. Walking is inevitably, therefore, suffused with contending notions about how and where to walk, by ideals and conventions laid down by the powerful and not-so-powerful. However, I pay attention to the multiple phases and moments of walking. Both the conventions of walking and its unfolding, sensual and contingent apprehension are difficult to elucidate in academic prose, and luckily there are several challenging walking artists whose work highlights these issues and the rhythmic dimensions of walking. Accordingly, I draw upon the ‘textworks’ of Richard Long, Francis Alys's series of walks entitled Railings, and Jeremy Deller's 2009 Procession to elicit some of the rhythms of walking.

Framing the outdoors: landscape and land art in Britain, 1973–1977

With the formation of the first sculpture parks in Britain in the 1970s, the gallery roof was lifted off — in both the literal and figurative sense — so that works of art could be displayed and exp...

Absurd lines, protest walks: notes on Richard Long

‘I like simple, practical, emotional, quiet, vigorous art,’ wrote Richard Long in 1980, in his first substantial statement to appear in print. ‘It is about real stones, real time, real actions.’ ‘I am content,’ he added shortly afterwards, ‘with the vocabulary of universal and common means: walking, placing, stones, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads’ – as if he has needed to encourage an ethic of the ordinary and the practical as the major determinants of his art. 1

Elegiac inscription: a discussion of words in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Richard Long

Elegiac inscription: a discussion of words in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Richard Long

Complexity Theory

In popular dialogues, describing a system as "complex" is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates 'self organising' principles and 'emergent' properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s.