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. These are in fact hexagrams, ancient Chinese symbols for Heaven and Earth, and they’re done in Avon mud because Long lives in Bristol and the River Avon is his local and preferred mud-source. This eloquent and impressive opening soon starts to dissipate, dwindling in the following rooms to black-and-white photos and maps. Of course, the only way really to experience Long’s work would be to be him. Even to accompany him would be a dilute experience. These photos are even more removed: uninspiring records of long past events, arid conceptual art.
Long’s gigantic ambition (think of all those miles covered, the space occupied) is reduced to contrasty black-and-white photos until we come to the central room of the show in which six stone floor sculptures make an archipelago of experiences. These assemblies are rather beautiful, whether flat like the slate ‘Stone Line’, dense and lumpy like ‘Norfolk Flint Circle’, or reminiscent of a mountain range, like ‘Red Slate Circle’. But as objects they are problematic. We are told it’s wrong to steal pebbles from the beach, yet here is Long doing it on a grand scale. Will these rocks ever be returned? (Otherwise they could become an Elgin Marbles for the Green lobby.) One of the last rooms contains another whole wall of exhilarating white hand-painting and painterly drips and dribbles: quite possibly the best bit of the show.
There’s a separate room (very hot on the day I visited, not air-conditioned) devoted to Long’s books and publications, and showing a documentary of him at work. Catalogues and publications are essential tools for artists these days, but for Long they play an even more important role, for without photographic documentation, his works do not exist except in the memory of the privileged few. His is an ephemeral artform, its best possible effect to return viewers to the natural world with their interest in it enhanced.
In the Duveen Galleries (until 29 November) is an installation by Eva Rothschild (born Dublin, 1971) entitled ‘Cold Corners’. It comprises a sequence of 26 open triangles, made from aluminium box tubing painted glossy black, joined together like a paper chain and extending confidently through the vast hall-like space of the Duveen corridor. The artist has said: ‘I want the piece to have a presence that combines clarity and confusion,’ and the effect alters from where you view it. The jagged black angles elbow their way through the galleries, leaning on the architecture, springing through it, offering a dynamic reinterpretation of the space. I was reminded of the supremely elegant geometric wall constructions in painted aluminium tube that Nigel Hall was producing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Looking again at Rothschild’s installation, I was struck by the clumsy way the corners joined. This detail is unconvincing and even ugly. It may have resulted from structural problems, but it certainly needs to be better resolved aesthetically. Otherwise, this revolt of the set square is quite an effective linear intervention in a majestic space.
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