Walk the line
The photograph nods to Van Gogh's 1886 painting A Pair of Shoes, which shows a pair of peddler's boots, worn out by use. It also quietly reproaches Andy Warhol's spangly 1980 reprise of Van Gogh, Diamond Dust Shoes, in which immaculate high heels (coloured ice blue, lilac, aspic green) are scattered like glacéd corpses across the frame. Bob Dylan is there too, his song lending the photograph its title. The other allusion is to Long himself: the invisible walker, the boot wearer, the track maker, the vanished artist. Long's work has always thrived on its maker's absence. Of the thousands of photographs with which he has recorded his walks and sculptures over the past 40 years, he appears in only a handful. Instead, the images show the marks he has made: footprints in river mud, paths scuffed through leaf litter, stones aligned or piled.
His best-known early piece is A Line Made by Walking. On a sunlit day in 1967, he caught a train south-west out of Waterloo. When the suburbs gave way to countryside, Long got off the train, and found a field whose grass was starred with daisies. He walked back and forth, until the flattened grass caught the light such that it was "visible as a line". Then he photographed the line in black and white, and went home.
The vocabulary of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: foil. A creature's "foil" is the track it leaves on grass or other surfaces, such as shale, snow, sand, forest floor. From the late 1960s onwards, Long experimented with foil works. Fire Stones (1974) is a photograph showing the paths left by five stones that have been rolled down the shale slope of a volcano in Iceland. At Bertraghboy Bay in the west of Ireland, he walked a cross into tidal mud, let a film of seawater flood the cross, then photographed the shimmering mark. In 1979, he marched northwards across Dartmoor, treading a straight pathway into the heather - a meridian made visible. In Scotland in 1986, during a thick haar, he tramped a circle into wet grass. The resulting photographs (all that now survive of these art acts) are eerily cryptic. They record the traces of an unspecific human body moving through space and time, causing temporary sight-dents in the skin of the world.
During the 1970s, Long also began to develop different methods of mark-making, working mostly in wild landscapes, and using techniques of impression rather than depression. In 1970, he waded into the Little Pigeon River in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and laid out flat stones on the bed of the river, in the form of an X with five-foot radials. In 1977, on the Alaskan shore of the Bering Strait, exactly at the latitude of the Arctic Circle, he arranged pale limbs of driftwood into a lunar circle. He added 1,000 stones to a cairn by the side of a Cumbrian footpath. He heaped shards of limestone into an angular half-wall in the Burren, County Clare. He has described these pieces as "abstract art laid down in the real spaces of the world" - and this mingling of conceptualism and skewed functionalism is what gives them their distinctive texture.
Photographs of these early works are hung in the second and third rooms at the upcoming Tate exhibition of Long's work, Heaven and Earth. Viewing the photographs in number, you develop an almost sinister sense of time lag. Someone has been hard at work, rearranging the world - but has disappeared before you arrive. The shutter has clicked too late to catch the action. They remind me a little of Eric Ravilious's watercolours from the 1930s and early 40s: deserted English landscapes with hints of ghosts and infiltration. Farm machinery abandoned on ploughed fields. Empty control rooms with strategy maps on the wall. Military convoys steaming away to battles that will occur off-canvas. When people do figure in Ravilious's paintings (marines, soldiers, airmen, farmers), their heads are often featureless and coloured the pink of healed skin - as though they have been face-scalped.
The audacity of Long's early work lay in freeing sculpture from the constraints of scale. He dispersed his art into the landscape, busting it not just out of the gallery, but out of almost all spatial limits. "I could make a piece of art which was 10 miles long," he remembered in 1986. "I could also make a sculpture which surrounded an area of 2,401 square miles ... by almost doing nothing, just walking and cycling." He pioneered vast acts of mark-making: art walks rather than art works, that explored what he called "relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement".
Long's other innovation was to make his work not only in the landscape, but of the landscape. Not land art, exactly - he's always resisted that label (as he has resisted any associations with the romantic walking tradition of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau). His early work was categorically different to the land art projects that were under way in America in the same period (Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, James Turrell). Long's interventions were more modest, his sculptures bigger but less massy. The same year that Smithson was hiring earth-movers to bulldoze his Spiral Jetty into place on the salt flats of Utah (a 1,500ft chameleon's tongue of black basalt, curling out into ruddy water), Long was walking due north over Dartmoor. As Turrell was starting to reshape an extinct volcanic cinder crater in Arizona, Long was arranging a small circle of stones in the Andes. "Nature has more effect on me than I on it," he observed in 1983.
Precedents did exist for Long's "big move" of the late 60s, his heave of sculpture into and across the landscape. Henry Moore, reflecting on the origin of his carved stone Recumbent Figure (1938), described how he had "become aware of the necessity of giving outdoor sculpture a far-seeing gaze". Ravilious had an unexecuted plan to paint a map of all the places on the South Downs that he and his lover, Helen Binyon, had kissed. Edward Thomas developed a method of making one-day walks in the design of "a rough circle", "trusting", as he put it in The South Country (1909), "by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return at last to my starting-point". On these walks, Thomas would follow what he called "the old ways": the holloways, pilgrim paths and Neolithic-era chalk paths that seam the Downs. Thomas's walks knowingly laid new tracks on an already marked ancient landscape. "A walk is just one more layer, a mark," Long noted in 1980, echoing Thomas.
Thomas never covered the distances that Long does, however. On Midsummer Day in 1972, Long tramped 40 miles westwards from Stonehenge to Glastonbury, "following the sun". In 1999, he covered 349 miles in 11 days, from Cardigan Bay to the Suffolk coast. He knocked off the 1,030 miles of the Lizard to Dunnet Head in 33 days, leaving 33 stones by the wayside as he went. He possesses a pair of what Keats once called "patient sublunary legs". Long legs, too: he's 6ft 4in. Divider-like, they measure the land, and as his legs measure it, his feet mark it, leaving their "three-dimensional traces" (the footprint as an act in time as well as space). Long's legs are his stylus, his feet the nib with which he inscribes his traces on the world. Walking becomes an act of inscription, and his work is a reminder that our verb "to write" originally referred to a kind of incisive track-making. The Old English "writan" carried the specific meaning "to incise runic letters in stone": thus one would "write" a line by drawing a sharp point over the surface - by furrowing a track.
One of the surprises of Long's work, in fact, is that the foot acts as an artistic instrument. We don't intuitively imagine the foot to be an expressive or perceptive body part. It feels more of a prosthesis, there to carry us about, rather than to interpret or organise the world for us. The hand always out-skills the foot: we speak of manipulation, but not pedipulation. The historian of walking Jeffrey C Robinson puts it nicely: "the foot ... seems not quite part of the heart and mind ... it mingles with the dust, lies in the mud, smells badly of the day. At once platform and engine, it bears us and launches us."
But the foot is extremely sensitive: so sensitive that foot-beating is a notorious torture (featuring, for instance, in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, a novel full of tracks and tracking, in which a key betrayal is made by a footprint in river mud that reveals a child to have six toes). Feet are receptive to pleasure as well as to pain: the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd loved to walk barefoot, as a way of tasting the landscape. "Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth," she wrote in 1946 with a fetishy flourish, "so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth." Long's feet, like Shepherd's, act in multiple ways: they mark, measure, taste and interpret the world. In personal correspondence, Long signs off with a spiky signature and, beneath it, a red-ink stamp - rather like a Chinese chop - that shows two feet with eyes embedded in their soles.
Long's feet see the world for him. But they also, less conceptually, bear him and launch him. Again and again in interviews, Long has emphasised the pragmatism of his art: "My work has become a simple metaphor for life. A figure walking down his road, making his mark. I am content with the vocabulary of universal and common means; walking, placing, stones, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads." He likes overnight walks, he says, because he likes "sleeping on the ground". He takes the same pleasures in the open path as almost any walker or wilderness lover. "My work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature as its source," he observes in one of the wall-texts at the Tate. "I enjoy the simple pleasures of ... eating, dreaming, happenstance, of passing through the land and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces along the way, of finding a new campsite each night. And then moving on."
I like this unpretentiousness. It's probably what appeals to me most about Long and his work. He practises a kind of ritualised folk art. His circles, lines and crosses are radiantly symbolic, but also childishly simple; or, rather, they're radiantly symbolic because they're childishly simple. It's for this reason that Long is ill-served by those interpreters who draw a cowl of Zennish mysticism over his sculptures, or who interpret his textworks (strings of words and phrases, often superimposed on to a photograph of the landscape that has been walked) as koan-like chants. When questioned about the textworks, he plays an amusingly straight bat: "'Heathrow Airport' means I just passed Heathrow Airport. 'Dead Stoat' means I passed a dead stoat in the gutter." Long is frequently compared by critics to Joseph Beuys, but his work seems to me remote from the shamanistic ecology of Beuys, who made his incantations in wild spaces with chrisms of fat and fur, and the Cro-Magnon cantrips of leather and horn.
No, Long is no magus. More of a high-end hobo. Among my favourite of his pieces is Walking Music, a textwork that records the songs that trundle through his mind as he walks 168 miles in six days across Ireland, the music keeping at bay the loneliness of the long-distance walker. Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Sinéad O'Connor singing "On Raglan Road", Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting for a Train", Róisín Dubh played on the pibroch ...
Samuel Beckett - who, like Long, found much to meditate on and much to laugh at in the act of walking; and who, like Long, loved country lanes and bicycles, pebbles and circles - once observed that it is impossible to walk in a straight line, because of the curvature of the earth. There's a great deal of Long in that remark. His art reminds us of the simple strangeness of the walked world, of the surprises and beauties that landscape can spring on the pedestrian. It's good that Long is out there, knackering another pair of boots, singing Johnny Cash to himself as he walks the line.
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