• Site Specific
• Land Art (Earth Art)
• Conceptual Art
• Environment Art 

'Circles' / 'Line' 

A Line Made by Walking. Simple, utterly effective and a distinctly human thing on the landscape.

It seems to be the thing that’s gone on to influence many of his other pieces, over and over, through the years. He said at the talk that ‘replicating his walking and his line making [over time] has formed a point of view‘. His endless walking and making and leaving of lines has come to define him, to build the work of his life. Apparently it didn’t seem like much at the time, just a sculpture that was made, like so many others, while he was out walking, but returning to the essence of it so many times over the years has given it deep significance.

Richard Long Road Stone Line, China, 2010

Alongside lines he builds circles: 

both starkly (like this white one in Antarctica)

Richard Long A Circle in Antarctica

Connemara Sculpture, Ireland

This is a sculpture that Richard Long did in 1971 in Ireland. The whole artwork includes the photograph (gelatin silver print on paper) with a drawing and hand written text on an off-white background. The drawing is a pencil drawing of the same labyrinthine shape in his photograph, which he had seen on an early rock carving in a museum in Dublin, with the words (below) handwritten in both Gaelic and English.

_________

At 22, Richard Long changed the face of British sculpture. Yet his works are as simple as a track in the snow or a stone circle – left to nature and passersby. As Tate Britain brings his art indoors, he tells Sean O'Hagan how walking has inspired his life's work.

Back in 1964, when Richard Long was 18, he went for a walk on the downs near his native Bristol. The countryside was covered in snow, and faced with a pristine expanse of silent whiteness, he began rolling a snowball through it. When the snowball became too big to push any further, Long took out his camera. He did not take a snapshot of the giant snowball; instead, he photographed the dark meandering track it had left in the snow. The ensuing image, one of his earliest works of what is now called land art, is named Snowball Track. Pure and simple. And, in its purity and simplicity, it denoted all that would follow.

Back then, Long was a student at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, which he describes as "a provincial and conservative place". Soon after his walk in the snow, the college authorities summoned his parents to a meeting and told them that he was being dismissed from the course. They also instructed him not to have any further contact with the other students, even out of college hours.

He tells me this matter-of-factly in his oddly deadpan way, albeit with a hint of mischievous pride. Was he, I ask, a student radical, a troublemaker? "God, no," he says, laughing. "I was anything but. I was quiet, quite shy. My dismissal certainly wasn't down to any revolutionary tendencies on my part."

What was it about, then? "The work. I was too precocious for them even though I was quiet. The work troubled them. They thought it provocative." He shakes his head in bemusement and smiles. "It was more than that, though," he says, after one of the long thoughtful pauses that punctuate his quick bursts of nervous speech. "They also took my parents in and told them they thought I was quite mad. That was really my first big break as an artist."

Forty-five years later, Richard Long is preparing for a big, long-overdue show of his land art at Tate Britain. Entitled Heaven and Earth, it will include sculptures, mud works, photographs and text pieces; slate circles, straight lines of stones, wall markings made with mud from the River Avon, as well as photographic and written documentation of his wanderings over the earth. (It is not a retrospective; even Tate Britain is not big enough for that.) At the exhibition's heart, though, will be the act of walking.

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking," wrote Nietzsche. Richard Long's great thought while walking was to make his walking into his art. In an illuminating catalogue essay for Heaven and Earth, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, writes, "In A Line Made by Walking (1967), a work made at the age of 22, Long changed our notion of sculpture and gave new meaning to an activity as old as man himself. Nothing in the history of art quite prepared us for the originality of his action."

A Line Made by Walking exists now only in a photograph. This, too, is part of the iconoclastic nature - and the imaginative power - of Long's art, that it is often as transient and impermanent as anything in the natural world around it. The grass has long since grown back over the track he left that day in a field of wild flowers somewhere in England. It is quite conceivable that no one else actually saw the original work, or, if they did, recognised it as his, or indeed, as a work of art at all. Likewise, his stone circles in Connemara or the Andes, which may well have been mistaken for ancient stone circles by passers-by, or, in some cases, been so vast that people may have walked through them without really noticing them.

"One thing I like about my work is all the different ways it can be in the world," he says. "A local could walk by and not notice it, or notice it and not know anything about me. Or someone could come upon a circle and know it was a circle of mine. I really like the notion of the visibility or invisibility of the work as well as the permanence and transience."

He frowns for a moment, in concentration. "The idea of ephemerality was never my main interest, though. It's important to say that. Always my interest was to realise a particular idea. Obviously, some of my stone lines just disappear. They get overgrown or moved by sheep, or whatever. That's great. That's the natural way of the world. But the reason I made the work has really nothing to do with that. It is simply about making a line of stone in a particular place at a particular time."

I have travelled down to the Avon countryside just outside Bristol to meet Long in his home-cum-studio in a converted schoolhouse that looks out over fields and woods towards the Severn estuary. He greets me at the door, a tall, lithe, youthful-looking 63, and ushers me into a big, bright room, where a cupboard is stacked full of boxes of carefully catalogued photographs - Sierras '95, Mojave '94, Torino '83, Scotland '81. My eye is drawn by a sculpture made from ancient pieces of wood, adorned with what look like silver fingerprints. I walk into the kitchen and, through the door, glimpse one of Long's signature slate circles standing rather incongruously in his paved back garden. He flits about nervously in the kitchen, making coffee and awkward small talk. He is, he says, "not fond of talking to the press".

My original plan was to walk and talk with him for a few hours in the surrounding countryside, but I can tell he wants to get the interview over with as painlessly as possible, so we agree to sit in the kitchen and chat. I like him immediately. Despite his palpable discomfort, there is something sure-footed about his way of talking, a determination to be accurate, rigorous and, when talking about his work, as straightforward as possible. In an age of conceptual obfuscation, this is refreshing.

"It is my inclination to make simple, personal things," he says. "When I was making my early works, I always used to think, if it takes more than half an hour to make, there's something wrong with it. In a way, those pieces were like songs. They had to work instantly."

That is often still the case. When Long undertakes a walk in order to make art, the walk itself may last hours, days, even weeks, but a work made along the way may still only take up half an hour of his time. Sometimes, famously, he walks in circles until his imprint is left on the earth or the grass: sometimes he walks back and forth in a straight line to the same end. Other signature pieces are made by arranging stones in a circle or a straight line, echoing other more ancient rites and rituals, the mysterious traces left by our ancestors.

"The work often has all kinds of echoes," Long says, "some accidental. If you undertake a walk, you are echoing the whole history of mankind, from the early migrations out of Africa on foot that took people all over the world."

Although Long has undertaken walks lasting up to 24 hours and often at high altitude, he does not train for them other than by undertaking other walks. He once threw a white marble stone around a mountain in Ireland for a work later recorded in one simple photograph - Throwing a Stone Around McGillycuddy's Reeks (1977) - that hints only at the dogged absurdity, and the mystery and mischief, of that artistic act. "I just liked the idea of walking around instead of over," he says. "The idea of originality is important to me; the sense that, despite the many traditions of walking - the landscape walker, the walking poet, the pilgrim - it is always possible to walk in new ways."

Long doesn't see himself in the Romantic tradition of the solitary wanderer lost in thought. "What I do is not Wordsworthian," he says. "I am working out of an art tradition, but it's not Romantic. I'm not a tortured soul grappling with my demons or even struggling to make art. It's a pleasure. That is central to it for me."

Richard Long was born in 1945 and attended a local Church of England school in Bristol. "I had an easel when I was 5; I was very much the school artist." An enlightened headmistress let him paint and draw during assembly, when the other pupils had to sing hymns. He remembers the first series of paintings he did as a child that satisfied him: "They were of guardsmen, with busbies on their heads." At art college in Bristol he did "all the conventional stuff, life drawings and still lives", and was drawn to Gauguin and Van Gogh rather than the iconoclasts of minimalism or abstract expressionism. After his expulsion, he did odd jobs for a year while living in a collective squat-cum-studio. "That's when my outside work began," he says, smiling. "I started making holes in the back garden and realised I did not have to work in a studio." That has been the case ever since. "Out there is my studio."

Long graduated from Saint Martins College of Art in London in 1968, having been taught by Anthony Caro, Pater Atkins - "our intellectual guru" - and the influential head of sculpture, Frank Martin. His time there on a scholarship was crucial to his development, though not for the obvious reasons. "We were required to sign in every morning and then they simply left us to get on with our own work," he says. "The tutors were not really that interested in our work, nor that encouraging of mine. One of the more famous ones took me aside one day and told me that I'd probably be able to get a job in the forestry commission when I left." He will not be drawn into saying which one. I ask him how he felt when that verdict was delivered. "Insulted, really." And discouraged? "No."

Long arrived at Saint Martins when it already had a reputation for making, as the influential American critic Clement Greenberg put it, "the strongest new sculpture done anywhere in the world at this moment". The weight of expectation does not seem to have impinged on Long, who often worked on the college roof, making work in sand that had been dyed different colours. "My progression was very easy. It was not some didactic struggle with any preceding generation. Pop Art was done, Abstraction was done, and there was all the Greenbergian welded metal stuff that came out of Saint Martins - Caro and all that. But, by then, it was a school of mannerism. So, for me, the art world seemed a clean sheet up for reinvention."

Among his fellow students was George Passmore, later to become one half of Gilbert and George. (Long took the famous photo of the young pair, laughing, on the roof of Saint Martins.) "In my first week, George was sitting at the next desk, " says Long, smiling. "One of the first things he told me was about the week he tried to murder his mother. I thought, 'Now, this is an interesting guy.'"

Long remembers that Gilbert turned up one day at Saint Martins and "simply hung around" until they invited him on the course. "He hadn't had an interview, or even applied, he just came. In a way, it shows how intuitive Frank Martin was."

Another fellow student was Hamish Fulton, who has since become famous as "a walking artist", photographer and a painter, who, like Long, paints directly on to walls. The two are good friends and often go on walks together. "He's a bit more politically correct than me," quips Long, referring to Fulton's belief, best summed up in his creative motto, Take No Photographs, Leave No Footprints, that the landscape should not be altered for the sake of art.

Long's first stone circle was created up in the Andes in 1972; similar circles have since been made from slate, stone, wood, even pine needles in locations such as the Sahara, Ecuador, Mongolia, the west of Ireland and Dartmoor. Often, too, he walks in a straight line, measuring his progress by leaving stones at equal distances along the way. "In some of the road walks I'm simply following an idea. In other kinds of works, the walking can reveal the idea."

Does he believe in the idea that certain landscapes are charged with powerful energies? "Oh, yes, you can feel that. I mean, the west of Ireland: Connemara and the Burren. But those are very beautiful places to me, too. I like deserts, the empty, barren places of the world."

And yet, for all his wanderings, he has remained here in the countryside close to where he was born. "It's an ideal base," he says, "a few hours by train to Dartmoor, and overnight to the Scottish Highlands. And there's easyJet now, too," he adds, smiling.

His girlfriend, Denise, arrives back for lunch, and, obviously relieved, Long begins preparing omelettes and salad, and pouring wine. The idea of our walk in the countryside recedes even further. Once the tape recorder is turned off, though, he loosens up. We talk about the important place music occupies in his life and work. He once made a piece called Reflections in the Little Pagan River, created after a walk in the Appalachians, and using the chorus from 'I Walk the Line' by Johnny Cash. "I tried to go see him at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, but it was full. The cop on the door told me so by spitting very precisely on to my toecap."

"Music is there in the work for people to find it. I like rock 'n' roll, country, old rhythm and blues, any kind of tough, emotional music." Does he ever listen to music when he undertakes a walk? "No. It's a solitary thing." Is he annoyed when he meets other people? "No, social encounters are inevitable. Shepherds, villagers, nomads." Only one work of his features a human figure, though. It is called Nomad Circle. "A Mongolian nomad came and sat in the circle when I was taking the photograph," he says. Why did he leave him in there? He could easily have taken another photograph without him in it. "Well, he is the beautiful exception. Sometimes things just occur like that and I go with it. You choose a moment and something unexpected happens, and it nearly always makes the work better. There's a work called Half Tide, where I made a cross out of stones on some seaweed on a deserted foreshore. When I woke early the next morning, the tide had come in and covered it, but there was this beautiful cross made out of pure water, just floating there among the green."

He pauses once more. "I guess I'm an opportunist, really. I go out into the world with an open mind, and I rely to a degree on intuition and chance. The idea of making art out of nothing, I've got a lot of time for that. Walking up and down a field, or carrying a stone in my pocket, it's almost nothing, isn't it?" Almost.

Richard Long

'The Living Surface'

'The Poetry of Forms'

Jean Arp is one of the most renowned artists of the 20th century. From his early collages and reliefs made with simple materials, to the later biomorphic sculptures evoking leaves, pebbles and other natural forms for which he is best known, Arp’s diverse practice had a poetry and playfulness at its core that is as engaging for audiences today as it was in the early decades of the 20th century. His role in stylistic developments such as Dada, Surrealism and Abstraction as well as his collaborations with leading figures of the European avant-garde make him a fascinating artist through whom we can view the artistic developments of the 20th century.  The Poetry of Forms will provide a unique and long-overdue opportunity to evaluate the impact Arp had on the British avant-garde. In addition, it assesses his legacy for a younger generation of artists and introduces his work to new and diverse audiences.

'Spiral'

Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located at Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake. Using over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth from the site, Smithson formed a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that winds counterclockwise off the shore into the water.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, located at Rozel Point on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake in Utah, is one of the most remarkable examples of Land art. In 1970, assisted by a crew operating dump trucks, a tractor, and a front loader, Smithson displaced some 6,000 tons of black basalt rock and earth from the adjacent shore to form a coil 1,500 feet long and approximately 15 feet wide, winding counterclockwise into the lake. Created at a time when water levels were particularly low, Spiral Jetty was submerged in 1972. Droughts caused the lake to recede in 2002, and the sculpture has remained visible ever since.

“I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,”¹ Smithson once observed. The site of Spiral Jetty was chosen by the artist for the lake’s unusual ecological and geological properties. The reddish coloration of the water, caused by the high presence of microbes, initially attracted Smithson to the north arm of the lake. The spiral shape alludes to the molecular lattice of the salt-crystal deposits found throughout the lake’s expanse, and in forming the work, he chose to use basalt boulders of hardened lava found along the peninsula, scattered remnants of the now extinct volcanos in the area.

The fractured landscape, fluctuating water levels, and the water’s salinity also speak of the artist’s preoccupation with the concept of entropy. Smithson envisioned an artwork in a state of constant transformation whose form is never fixed and undergoes decay from the moment of its creation. His thinking was equally shaped by his understanding of the third law of thermodynamics as well as a fascination in science fiction and popular science. 

As a path for walking and looking, Spiral Jetty is a sculpture to be experienced. The act of traversing the earthwork is a prominent image in the eponymous film completed months after Smithson built the sculpture. Along with aerial shots of Spiral Jetty is a sequence of images of the artist running on the sculpture. Reaching the innermost point, Smithson gazes out at the spiral path, lake, and mountains. Spiral Jetty serves as a site from which to view the surroundings—the prehistoric environment that Smithson selected for it. 

notes:
Robert Smithson, “Conversation in Salt Lake City (1972),” in Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 298.

video via: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/smithson-jetty

Rainbow Disks

French conceptual artist Daniel Buren presents Excentrique(s), an incredibly beautiful exhibit at the Grand Palais. The installation was part of the Monumenta, an annual art project now in its fifth year that has been won by French artists since it began. The 8 feet high colored disks bring the space to life as they wash it with vibrant colors and energy. He is the fifth artist to take over the Grand Palais in Paris. His offering is Excentrique, a giant kaleidoscope-style installation that fills the building’s nave. Rainbow colored disks act like trees one walks underneath. It’s part of Monumenta, an annual art project now in its fifth year, that dares an artist of international stature to overtake one of the French capital’s most monumental buildings. The translucent circles, colored in red, blue and green, create a second roof that’s just eight feet high. As light streams in through the windows, the installation comes alive.

The translucent circles, colored in red, blue and green. Colorful installation by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s Kaleidoscope installation

Daniel Buren has punctuated the past 50 years of art with unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought-provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations. Throughout his career Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of Conceptual Art, a “degree zero of painting” as he called it, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In 1965 he began using his 8.7cm-wide vertical stripes as the starting point for research into what painting is, how it is presented and, more broadly, the physical and social environment in which an artist works. All of Buren’s interventions are created in situ, borrowing and coloring the spaces in which they are presented. They are critical tools addressing questions of how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature. In his work life finds its way into art, while autonomous art is able to reconnect with life.

‘Diamonds and Circles’ works ‘in situ’ is the first permanent public commission in the UK by the acclaimed French artist, Daniel Buren. The artwork transforms Tottenham Court Road station with Buren’s signature geometric patterns across the vast central ticket hall and multiple station entrances.

Buren’s designs play with simple concepts; shapes, colours and stripes. Buren has created a colourful series of large-scale diamond and circle shapes fixed to the station’s internal glass walls. 2.3m in height and diameter, the diamond and circle shapes repeat through the space. A cabinet containing the ‘parents’ of the forms in three dimensions is installed in a vitrine inside the ticket hall.

‘Diamonds and Circles’ makes us look again at the space of Tottenham Court Road station. It measures out the physical space with stripe and shape, and also asks us to consider the pace and path we take passing through the station. The work sits firmly within Buren’s illustrious practice, and yet presents the public with something wholly new.

Daniel Buren is largely considered France’s greatest living artist and one of the most significant contributors to the conceptual art movement. His major public art interventions can be seen worldwide at locations including The Palais-Royal in Paris; Odaïba Bay, Tokyo and the Ministry of Labour, Berlin. This is his first permanent public commission in the UK offering millions of Tube users and wider public a unique chance to enjoy a world-class piece of contemporary art.

Daniel Buren was selected in 2008 to create a permanent installation at Tottenham Court Road station as part of a £500 million programme transforming the station into one of the key transport interchanges in London. The project was completed in 2017.

Daniel Buren has commented: “A public work is interesting for me because you can develop the place, the people who use the space, and connections between all of these things… Museums attract only a portion of the population. The public in the Tube station is everyone, and there is a constant flux of people running both ways. I want to offer them a beautiful bubble of oxygen for the spirit.”

Photo-souvenir: On Ash – 5 25 elements, situated work, November 1989 (2017), 13 elements: yellow wax-colored ash, 12 elements: antique white colored ash, 85 5/8 x 85 5/8 x 2 in / 217.5 x 217.5 x 5 cm

Photo-souvenir: On Ash – 1 25 elements, situated work, November 1989 (2017), 13 elements: black wax-colored ash, 12 elements: antique white colored ash, 85 5/8 x 85 5/8 x 2 in / 217.5 x 217.5 x 5 cm

Photo-souvenir: Optical Fiber, White and Blue Arch, Situated Work, November 2012, Fiberoptics, 99 1/3 x 99 1/3 in / 252.3 x 252.3 cm

Photo-souvenir: Les Deux Plateaux, permanent sculpture in situ, 1985-1986, Cour d’honneur du Palais-Royal, Paris. Detail

Melanie Counsell creates elegiac and earthy temporary transformations of unusual environments and unoccupied buildings. Her works are remarkable for their economy of means and their poignant engagement with feelings. It deals with aspects of grief, melancholy, human tragedy and loss. Counsell's art links abstract, formal considerations with psychological content, and equivocates between natural processes and the world of construction or manufacture. She favours industrial materials but connects them to the natural processes thus endowing the material with a sense of delicacy and fragility. Light and water, as membranous, reflective elements, also figure prominently, along with sounds and smells. 

Rosetta, 2012

Melanie Counsell has built a considerable reputation over the past twenty years for her films, installations and sculptural interventions.

Notable for her economy of means and material sophistication, Counsell has created numerous critically celebrated installations in gallery environments and disused buildings that created new psychological environments through intense manipulation of time and space, architecture and object. In recent years Counsell has also increasingly created autonomous sculpture and works on paper extending her vocabulary into both abstract and representational space to strikingly poetic effect.

Melanie Counsell is a rigorous realist. Her mature work is based on an intense commitment to the specifics of time and place, although earlier installations occasionally allowed the intrusions of memory into the present. At Matts Gallery in November 1989, for example, Counsell subtly modified the existing space of the building to convey the affect of a previous experience. She partially stripped back the lino, giving the room an air of desolation. Along one wall she created a shallow trough above which a curtain was looped over a single wire. Water dripped steadily from a row of tiny tubes projecting from the wall into the trough, then oozed from a rolled carpet over the edge of the trough and onto the floor. The artist’s memory in this case was of working at an institution where sensory evidence of lost control seeped out of every room.

In 1992 at the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Counsell had already adopted her more immediate, realist strategy of drawing only on the present moment, and allowing the memories and perceptions of the viewer to interact with the space and time of the installation. Her site was an old room to one side of the main entrance that had been used as a warehouse, and still contained the original wooden lift shafts and lifting apparatus. For fire safety reasons, the room had long been disused, and was closed to the public. Counsell’s solution was to build a simple glass wall supported by a steel frame in the form of a cross. This wall completely blocked the entrance to the space, sealing off all the objects and the evidence of their use. The glass was punctured by drilled holes in the shape of a diamond, not unlike the speaking holes in a bank teller’s window.

At first glance the frame of the ‘window’ looked like a hologram of a room, as if the real room had become a representation of itself. Looking through the holes, however, one could see – and smell – the space directly, thereby experiencing the glass as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of representation. Counsell’s installations have an indelible logic. The fact that we can subsequently analyse our first impression and even name the material components that gave rise to it in no way detracts from the poignancy of that fleeting moment prior to recognition and evaluation.