Richard Long - at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Yesterday I went to hear Richard Long (walker, sculptor & photographer) give a lecture and (extensive) slide show of his work, as well as to see the installation of his recent site specific Sierra mountain walk, including photographs, text and mudwall hand paintings at San Francisco’s MOMA. Such lovely work, but a troubling human presence. Long is more of what I would call a “geomancer” than one interested in human relations within and about the variously global habitats of his long walk and camping visitations. (Most often there are no people visible at all). The actual work - photographs and texts, however, possess an extraordinary sense of precision, spatial relations and time. Indeed the work, as he admits, a form of earth science, one with roots in ancient origins and practice - whether for religious or other cosmological purposes of study.
During the period of questions at the end of the talk, I threw him what was probably a “ringer”: “What kind of reading informs your work?”
He looked puzzled, so I asked, in the long tradition of English walkers and writers, “Like do your read Wordsworth?” I had no doubt that that would push a button!
He reacted with the contempt that many minimalist sculptors no doubt reserve for romantics.
“No, I don’t read Wordsworth.” And then made mention that he was reading a popular detective writer.
In the context of his recent 20 day walk in the Sierra along the Pacific Crest Trail, there was no indication he had read John Muir, Rexroth, Snyder or Whalen’s work in those same mountains - which, I suspect, must remain, at least a personal loss, though I do not know how the reading of those writers might have shaped this recent work at all. (Well, if he actually read a history of the Donner Party - in reference to a slide of a circle of stones he built there - he would not have said the Party merely “got stranded there.” It was not like those in the Party who either died or barely survived had just missed a bus!)
When I did not budge from my question, or looked at him as if he were not being fully truthful, he allowed that had recently read a book on gravity and Newton.
Which was right on his mark, his work. Long, I would say is a kind of scientist of “the sublime,” though I am sure he does not frequently use that “word” in his vocabulary. But much of the work is – framed by classical formal elements (circle, line, time units) - in its precision and severity - incredibly beautiful, indeed, Sublime. (If I can be critically comparative, Long’s work definitely sub-rates the crowd pleasing, Hallmark card aspects- and no where near the intelligence - of much of the work of Andy Goldsworthy).
But it intrigues me how many artists – in this case those in a minimalist tradition (Carl Andre, Judd, De Maria, etc.) tend to avoid the literature about the spaces that their work inhabits. Not always. Smithson, for example, seems very conversant with the literature and history of, say, what occurred about the site of Spiral Jetty (intentionally sighting it near the golden spike that connected the first transcontinental railroad.)
Unfortunately I did not get to ask Richard Long if he even reads Thomas A. Clark - the Scottish poet who also examines remote landscapes in an also rigorous fashion - though, different from Long, Clark is much more interested in the human implication of what he discovers on his walks. Long, by the way, is quite insistent that his text pieces not be confused with poems. The words he considers as “objects”, not different than individual stones or other natural items, and shape in which the are printed on the paper correspond to shape of the walk or some aspect of the terrain. The elegant portrayal of evidence - the printed works.
In fairness, I guess we can also count in multi-multiples the number of writers who have no literacy around the visual! It’s probably the sad irony of so many art programs in the way they exclude literature study from their requirements, and, reciprocally, the way creative writing programs remain blind to visual literature, let alone the history of music, avant garde innovation, etc. Whatever writers, artists or composers discover beyond the frames of their discipline, I suspect is left to do it on their own. I suspect, or imagine the multi-disciplinary character of computer technology is rapidly altering the situation (tho I personally do not know if the ‘pedagogy’ is keeping up with these changes at all. )
Oh well, similar to scientists and surgeons, there is nothing to expect in Long’s work to suspect him to be an expert in human or social relations – (spatial relations, yes) He likes being out there long, and often alone. Yet, one must applaud the counter-imperial, non-monumental, ephemeral character of the work - Long clearly means no natural harm - and only brings home, primarily, the visual record and analysis of what he has temporarily built, discovered and witnessed with camera and journal.
No small achievement. Paradoxically - for the space of an exhibit, or in the presence of many of his books - the evidence is touchingly, not only beautiful, but large and instructive.
