Richard Long’s Heaven and Earth

I celebrated a special day on Monday in the company of Richard Long and Coco Chanel – definitely two people I would invite to my dream “who would you have to a soiree” quiz. (Audrey Tautou as Coco in the recently released film Coco avant Chanel directed by Anne Fontaine, is extraordinary.)

Richard Long’s retrospective – of the last 18 years – is on at Tate Britain until September 6. I wondered whether having just come back from my long mountain trek I was especially well placed to appreciate the works on show. I was more than usually aware of the act of walking – and hence more responsive to his art. In his words:

 

To make art only by walking or leaving ephemeral traces here and there, is my freedom.

 

I was wearing heels, and the clacking on the Tate’s wooden floors was a rhythmic reminder of the exhausting and sometimes mind numbing but spiritually liberating step by step of mountain trekking. The galleries are quiet and clean and... meteorologically stable.

One of the galleries contains sculptural installations, including Alpine Circle from 1990. (see the Richard Long newsletter at http://www.therichardlongnewsletter.org/item.asp?no=62&m=current&i=1080) I knelt in between the textured surfaces – physical recreations of outdoor surfaces walked on, and I was reminded – coolly – of the harsh steep large grey eroding Dolomites, the cragginess of red lava the splintering of the rocks in Lagazuoi the dust of the underground mines.

The flatness of charcoalled wood like a lattice, the skulls of white rock, the pink of dolomia. These I recognise as Alpine stones.

It was slightly bizarre that in the Tate, of course, you cannot actually walk on the art. And indeed, recreating that outdoor landscape and detaching it from the act of walking strikes me as an interesting evolution of Long’s art.

 

My work is completely physical and personal. I’ve walked or climbed to the place of each sculpture. I’ve made it with my hands (or feet) and energy at that time. To walk across a country from coast to coast, for example, is both a measure of the land itself – its size and shape and terrain – and also of myself, how long it takes me and not somebody else.

 

An extraordinary way of turning an outer geography into an inner one.