A Long Walk Through Art and Nature

Lightly is the operative word with Richard Long. The tall, lithe British artist moves lightly around his work, his crisp, softly spoken words barely mixing with the air around him. Of the long, solitary walks that form the basis for his art works, Long says, “I travel lightly. I touch the world lightly.”

Shaking off theories and complex interpretations of his work as if oppressive weights, Long sticks to a light, lean vocabulary and common sense. Yet when he seizes an idea that suits him, a touch of the ethereal comes over his mellow green eyes.

This subtle vacillation between the plain and the mysterious, the obvious and the secret, describes Long as much as his work. For the last 20 years, he has taken long walks in the wilderness of his native England and remote regions of India, Africa, Spain, Bolivia and Nepal. Often he sets his course in advance by drawing a straight line or a circle on a survey map, or by determining the number of minutes, hours or days he will walk. Along the way, he may assemble stones or pieces of driftwood in a circle or line, or pick up stones at regular intervals and place them back down a prescribed distance later. Often he will represent a walk through a single photograph and a few written, sensory responses.

“My work has become a simple metaphor of life,” he has written. “A figure walking down his road, making his mark.”

Long, 44, spent the last two weeks in San Diego, preparing work for his first West Coast museum show, which opened Sunday at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and continues through Oct. 15. Using local mud, he hand-painted a circle on one gallery wall and a long, horizontal line on another. He sculpted circles out of delicately streaked stones from Utah and dark rocks from Baja California. The visual and verbal documentation of two previous walks completes the show.

“I make my art out of very normal, basic human activities,” he said in an interview at the museum. “Everyone is familiar with walking. If I make a walk, just by some subtle change I ritualize it a bit more than most people’s walking. Just by ritualizing it I make it into art.”

Beyond the simple, declarative presence of his work is a hint of the spiritual, the sacred. Ancient stone circles that were used as sites of worship and monitors of the celestial theater float through one’s memory when viewing Long’s work. The connection is deliberate, like all of the artist’s actions, but never forced.

“I just choose (the stones) out of the world and put them into a circle and show them to you as a circle of stones,” he said. “But I’m actually tapping a knowledge of materials and a knowledge of images that people are deeply familiar with. Lines and circles are part of our culture but they’re part of all cultures--they’re universal human symbols.

“For me, lines and circles are far more powerful and emotional than if I were making my own idiosyncratic, personal images. They also have a power because they’re extremely open systems. I can make a circle of stones, a circle of muddy water, a walking circle a hundred miles wide. Even though it’s like repeating the same idea, it’s such an open image that they can be vehicles for endless ideas.”

Like the Japanese Zen calligrapher who guides his brush in the form of a circle over and over again, investing each gesture with meditative, spiritual significance, Long has kept his work simple and consistent. For his first walk, while a student at St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1967, he used only his own weight and movement to impress a line across a grassy field. Wind, water, wood, stones and words have all joined his vocabulary since then, but the essence of Long’s art has remained the same--a “direct, one-to-one experience” with the materials of the earth.

Though Long often alters the land during his walks, his touch, he says, is light and his respect profound. The landscape gradually absorbs the marks he makes, without damage to the site’s ecology. These fleeting, temporal expressions live on, however, in the photographs, maps and word pieces that Long publishes and exhibits. However private his experiences in the wilderness may be, they are incomplete as art unless shared with others.

“I very much like the idea that art can be made completely alone in nature, without an audience,” he said. “I think if I just worked out in the landscape and never showed my work in galleries or in the art world, I suppose I could be considered an escapist. But I accept that I’m an artist and it interests me to share my work with other people.”

Few others participate in the making of his work. His two teenage daughters accompanied him on a walk once, and he has also had the company of artist Hamish Fulton, a student with Long at St. Martin’s, whose work also stems from walks in the countryside. Normally, Long prefers to conduct his walks alone. “Making a walk in a wilderness area on one’s own is a very profound way to be in a place,” he said.

The diaristic nature of many of Long’s documented works and the hushed aura of his stone sculptures set him apart from American earthwork artists, such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, whose works involve massive displacements of earth, carried out by bulldozers and crews.

“My work is about me and my own scale and my own sensibility, how far I can walk every day,” Long said. “It’s a different point of view, a different philosophy.”

With rare levity, Long recalled a friend’s remark that American land art is “true capitalist art, because you have to have a lot of money to make it, to buy the real estate, to hire the machinery. It’s about ownership and possession of land, whereas my work is much more about ideas.”

In this regard, Long feels he has much more in common with American Conceptual and Minimal artists. Others have labeled his work romantic because its source is nature, but with characteristic pragmatism, Long considers himself a realist, simply using the world as the raw material of his art.

“In the mid-’60s, the language and ambition of art was due for renewal,” he wrote in 1982. “I felt art had barely recognized the natural landscapes which cover this planet, or had used the experiences those places could offer. Starting on my own doorstep and later spreading, part of my work since has been to try and engage this potential. I see it as abstract art laid down in the real spaces of the world.”