Making tracks

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain, until 6 September

The title of this exhibition may not be exactly modest, but then there is a god-like aspect to all artistic creativity, particularly when it operates in the domain of Land Art. Some practitioners of this genre have literally made the earth move in their excavations and reshapings of nature, others keep their human interventions to a minimum. Richard Long (born 1945) is one of the latter, confining his activities principally to walking and to making tracks in the wild, or leaving behind him cairns of stones. Occasionally he brings back mementoes of his trips to make sculptures or painted installations in galleries, but most often he simply photographs what he’s done or where he’s been, and exhibits the photos along with wall texts.

Photos of landscape, even with stone circles materialising in them, do not make for a particularly dramatic exhibition, and the texts that Long puts with them are either of the descriptive variety (‘A Walk of 603 Miles in Nineteen Days Across France to Switzerland, Autumn 2008’), or embarrassingly quasi-poetic. Much better are his paintings and sculptures. Outside the exhibition, in the entry corridor, is a wall painting in orangey mud called ‘From Beginning to End’. This is painted or drawn in Vallauris clay directly on to the wall, and bears the rhythmic gesture of Richard Long’s hand. It’s very painterly in effect, and I have always enjoyed Long’s wall pieces, whether splashed or smeared, though some of his contemporaries dismiss him as ‘Jackson Pollock without the colour’.

In the first room of this retrospective, Long has made two large drawings in Avon mud on the gallery walls, a combination of stripes, fingermarks and splashes like a messier version of Sean Scully’s trademark blocks.