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

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Round it goes ... Richard Long's Red Slate Circle, 1988, in Tate Britain. Photograph:
Neil Libbert

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.

Richard Long
Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain,
London
SW1
Until Until 6 Sept
Exhibition website

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
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.
Three to see
Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today – Tate Liverpool, until 13
Sep Damien Hirst and Dan Flavin feature in this study of mass-produced colour.

Raqib Shaw: Absence of God – White Cube Hoxton Square, London, until 4
July Religious imagery and grotesquerie from the Kashmir-raised Shaw.

Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture – Saatchi Gallery,

London,until 13 Sep A new wave of abstractionists from across the Atlantic.

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