Art for earth’s sake: Outside In

Landscapes aren’t there to carry messages. Is landscape art? Hannah Bullock talks to Richard Long

“No comment.” Richard Long isn’t interested in guessing the impact of his landscape art. “I didn’t approach my work with any premise in mind. Any environmental connotations are implicit in my work, not explicit.” Long makes images by ‘walking the landscape’ and charting his path in wood and stone. “All my work is about what I like doing”, he tells Green Futures. “And there are great places to make art on the planet that are still fantastically beautiful and empty.”

“Actually being out there makes me very optimistic – when I see storms, or animals...”

His first work outside the studio was a snowball track; a meandering, ephemeral line that carried on until the ball was too heavy to push. Over forty years later he still marvels that “the way it was made and the way it looked were all combined in the same process.” But the thinking came afterwards, he insists; at the time, he was simply making the most of the overnight snowfall.

Asked what’s behind his more recent Karoo Crossing, he replies: “I didn’t know it was going to be a cross; it was dictated by the character of that particular piece of landscape. I’m an opportunist, you see. I’m still a great believer in intuition over intellect.”. In essence, he says, his walking pieces are a “distillation of experience”. He also condenses his journeys into poetry. A 12-mile walk he took on Dartmoor comes to life for gallery-goers through his evocations:

“Into a low sun, Fox tracks, Glistening frost...”

Long believes in “bringing the outside in”. Visitors to his exhibitions come face to face with walls plastered with clay – modern-day cave paintings with handprints that convey the “very physical and sensual experience” of touching mud. “

It is viscerally more powerful to stand in front of a big mud work than in front of a photo of a faraway place,” he says. Yet he remains realistic about the transformative power of his work. For him, there’s no doubt that “actually being out there makes me very optimistic – when I see storms, or animals...” But for the viewer? “Who knows? An artist puts his work into the world and has to take his chances. It’s like sowing seeds. Some germinate, some don’t.”

Richard Long’s The Time of Space exhibition is at London’s Haunch of Venison gallery until 10 February.
020 7495 5050,
www.haunchofvenison.com

The Sound Of The Wind Looks Like This

On a glitzy Blackpool promenade, two artists invite passers-by to listen to the sound of the sea breathing. John Gooding and Liam Curting’s High Tide Organ plays haunting musical chords, magnifying the sound of the rising water through a series of pipes. Passers-by can also stop to see the colour of the wind. Stephen Hurrell has made a semi-circle of poles, lit by the adjacent mini-wind turbines – as the wind speed changes, the light moves up and down the poles; as the direction changes, so does the colour. What does the artist call it? The Sound Of The Wind Looks Like This.

Total immersion

One hundred cast iron figures face out to sea along a blustery beach, taking in the vastness before them. A trio of life-size figures crouch, stand and kneel on the shoreline. When the tide is high, you can almost feel the chill of the water as it touches their feet. Like his Angel of the North, arms outstretched above the A1, Antony Gormley’s coastal sculptures are art designed for place. He wants their presence to draw people to the coast – to connect.

“When the tide is high, you can almost feel the chill of the water.”

Another Place came to Merseyside in July 2005. The figures, Gormley tells us, are “no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.”

5 January 2006

Hannah Bullock