Does anyone get the feeling that he's just going round in circles?

Fans of Richard Long cleave to the notion that he is a wild thing. He isn't

• Rachel Cooke
• The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009

In contemporary art, consensus is rarer than a decent drawing by Tracey Emin. In the case of Richard Long, however, the critics seem mostly to be agreed: hard to describe their usual response to his work as anything other than a swoon. They stare at his maps, his photographs and his stone circles, and a sense of awe creeps over them. They imagine him - bandana around his head, dried foodstuffs in his rucksack - striding out alone into the wilderness, and they tremble at the sheer manliness of the enterprise.

Not since Jackson Pollock strutted at the borders of his canvases, throwing paint at them with all the violence of a street fighter, have our male critics felt so stirred by the thought of an artist's corporeal presence: his bones, his blood, his muscle, his slow-pumping heart. How strong he is, and how heroic!

This is a ridiculous, of course. In 1967, when he was still an art student, Long went into a field and walked up and down until he had marked out a faint path, of which he then took a photograph. A Line Made by Walking was a charming and original idea, and as art it has retained its moderately spectral power down the years. But did it, as the Tate's director, Nicholas Serota, has asserted, change our notion of sculpture, or indeed "give new meaning to an activity [walking] as old as man himself"? No, it did not.

The trouble is, though, that Long obviously agrees with this inflated idea of his early work - or perhaps he merely clings to it - for it is a furrow that he has ploughed (almost literally, in some cases) ever since. A more blandly repetitive artist it is hard to imagine, and, while his fans regard this as evidence of his probity and dedication, there is another view: that he is all out of ideas; that his work is decorative, but dull.

Tate Britain's new retrospective of his work is broadly chronological, with the exception of the two vast wall paintings with which it opens: Heaven (2009), and Earth (2009), made from river Avon mud applied by the artist by hand. I can't think of anything at all to say about these - they're perfectly pleasant, if you like brown wallpaper - so let us move on. The most interesting work dates from the 1960s and 1970s. What Long does is this: he takes walks. Often, they are quite arduous. His favoured ambulatory canvas is Dartmoor, but he has also walked in Nepal and Japan, in the Arctic and Africa. Along the way, and afterwards, he memorialises these walks: in photographs, on maps, in words.

The early photos, in black and white, are lovely: they have a school project feel, albeit one completed by a student with a somewhat Wordsworthian sensibility. England (1968) is a cross - though not a St George's cross - gently picked out on grass in beheaded daisies. A Somerset Beach (1968) is just that, but with the addition of a ghostly rectangle comprising stones lain on its stones. The maps, perhaps, will appeal to the boy scout in some, but they did not detain me. A Ten Mile Walk (1968) is a map of Exmoor with a line marked on it. A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles (1972) is a map of Dartmoor with four circles drawn on it. Boring.

As for the "text" works, these are merely the rambler's notebook made pretty. Long misses out the blisters, the shandy, and the cheese and onion crisps (perhaps the artist disdains cheese and onion crisps), leaving us only with gnomic haikus: yellow parsnips, full moons, pebble ridges, wild cyclamens. I hate the pedantry in these texts, and their arrogance: that we are expected to take so much on trust. It is, apparently, enough for Long simply to tell us that a walk was 33 days long, and that on each day he placed a stone on the road (A Line of 33 Stones, 1998). Thereafter, the effort is all ours as we struggle (or not) to visualise such an expedition. One day, he should go for broke, and write "Mount Everest in 24 Hours" on a gallery wall.

On it goes. When the photographs turn to colour, you feel that something has been lost: what is to separate these images, however beautiful, from one's holiday photographs? The climax of the show, or its centrepiece, is the room in which Long brings his work indoors: here on the gallery floor are six of his collections of stones: angry shards of blue slate, boulders of bone-like flint and basalt, arranged, ever so neatly, in lines and circles. These pieces are so attractive that you find yourself wishing that your garden was bigger, your bank balance sufficiently swollen to allow you to play patron. But they are not provocative. Nor are they particularly memorable.

Here in the warm, corporate glow of the Tate, they speak not of mountains, river beds, or the heaving bowels of the earth, but of interior design. They are a big, heavy, very masculine version of pebbles in a glass bowl on a bathroom shelf. The word that comes irresistibly to mind is tame. And this, of course, is the grand irony. Long and his fans cleave to notion that he is a wild thing. But no real wild thing would allow you to leave a gallery feeling so blank, so docile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jun/07/richard-long-heaven-and-earth-tate-britain