AN ANCIENT & COMPLETELY MODERN ART A LINE ON RICHARD LONG Sam Bell One ofthe minor highlights of the Sea of Faith conference, and an kn,00nent issue in many of Don Cupitt:s writings, was the interest shown in the relation between art and religion. This article on the work of Richard Long may be of value to anyone interested in the issues which parallel each other in the arts and religion, in particular those of traditionalism, realism and representation and, fundamentally, human creativity.
Anyone coming across a Richard Long sculpture in the world at large would surely be startled. In the first place that person would quite likely be travelling through the most 'elemental' of landscapes - Dartmoor, the Alps, Alaska, the Australian heartland, the Sahara - and as a result would certainly have something in common with Long. It might be the search for that sense of renewal that such primal landscapes hold for the human psyche. It might be the rugged, existential simplicity, the cold beauty of stone ground to dust or the great boulders and cliffs upon which, if one slips, one breaks. Or, as in the Sahara, the starkness of a piece of the surface of the earth that makes for the ultimate canvas. The traveller would be startled as we continue to be startled by the presence of form in the wilderness, by a Stonehenge or a creation story. Here, in an area of the unmade world as yet to be given shape or form by man, one comes upon a walked line, a stone circle, a scratched-out spiral : the sign of a human act, an act left behind, to be rediscovered one day by another walker or be completely lost.
If one was very perceptive, when walking the Devonshire coasts or the lanes of a bleak Irish landscape, one might notice the sequence of stones laid at equal distance mile after mile. We might notice, that is, if they were still in place. Other works we cannot hope to see at all anymore than the artist himself can return to them or rediscover them : the stones thrown out at regular intervals across the cliffs of Magillacuddy's Reeks, the water line splashed on a block of stone and left to dry out in the heat of the day or merge into the wetness of another kind of day. In the late 60s, in a park - that symbol of everyman's desire to be a landscape artist of sorts - one might have come across a large rectangular frame through which one could view a part of the park upon which a circle had been etched.
A MODERN PRIMITIVIST This then, for many, is the art of Richard Long. On the one hand a kind of 'performance art' as Don Cupitt describes it (Creation Out of Nothing p 202-3). It is an art of liberation, of action and of the body at work 10 SOF Magazine 9, Spring 1992 in the world. Through the use of primary materials (stone, wood, mud, water) in their natural state and surrounds, Long's work returns art to its origins in man's manipulation of nature and to his desire to signify a presence and establish form. It is no coincidence that some of the spiral forms loved by the artist have ancient Celtic origins, that the upraised slab stone circles remind us of ancient, pagan ceremonial creations. Long, it can be argued, is a modern primitivist, an artist intent on returning human feeling to its origins and almost ritualistically, like the circle form itself, returning time and time again to primary states of experience given expression through these configurations. The cyclical symbols themselves point to concepts of being more typical of primitive societies with their cyclical lifestyles and pre-modern notions of time and history.
CIRCLES AND LINES Myth and magic surround the early history of the circle and the line as primary configurations in self-expression. But, of course, the circle is not only a symbol of the primitive or a hand-down from nature through its influence on early man, it is one of the most potent forms in modern western art and thought.
It is, on the one hand, a traditional symbol of completion, of order, it speaks of a sense of eternal return and on the other a conceptual dilemma which can be contrasted with the line, a more modern European symbol, with its angst-ridden connotations of beginnings and endings, with history, change and revolution. For Long the line is also a primary human structure, stilled however of its sense of flux in his work, and ever present as a primary artistic device.
Not only does Long return us to our origins in nature, and for a moment stop history in its tracks, his art is an art of primary, almost mythic, forms which resonate throughout the western tradition in art and thought from the Christian tradition and its linear time scale, to the mediaeval and Renaissance cyclical model of the universe. Nor can we miss the echo of Cezanne's restructuring of art itself around his own vision of the primary forms : the cone, the sphere and the cylinder.
Long's work resonates in other ways too. the sense of stillness to be experienced in a Richard Long sculpture echoes the feelings to be found in religious ceremonial art. Like many of his contemporaries - artists such as Carl Andre and Mark Rothko - Long evokes states of feeling which heighten not only our emotional response to art without the trappings of the figurative tradition but also our sense of both the form and the formlessness of the world human beings occupy. The line, as the aesthetic truism goes, does not exist in nature and, of course, there is no such thing as a perfect circle. These configurations point at one and the same time to something complete and ordered and to something singular and discrete. Of these three artists it is, perhaps, Rothko's work which most fully embodies the sense in which form is a kind SOF Magazine 9, Spring 1992 of shadowy nothing, a figment of the imagination.
Andre, on the other extreme, loves the sheer sense of volume and substantiality of well defined forms governed by straight lines and precise geometrical structures. Long lives somewhere between these two, in a world where lines and circles are real enough but also conventions and hence ultimately as significant as we have made them.
BEING AND TRANSIENCE Perhaps the line that defines Long's modernist intentions most characteristically is Walking a_Line in Peru. In the photograph of the work (the consumer medium but also part of the message) a straight line can be seen walked across a rough and varying landscape, a straight line created essentially by the viewpoint of the viewer. This is a line that becomes a ragged and variable one by merely shifting the viewpoint to the left or to the right to bring into play the landscape's own form. Long's work points, then, to man's defining hand in nature as he plucks from it or applies to it forms that define him and symbolise his dilemma. This is an art that stares into the nature of being, exploring the twin miracles of being and transience, an art of wonder and awe, and as such in the tradition of religious art. Long's use of the spiral takes us back to a Gaelic obsession with form building itself in the action of being and forward to its sense as a path, best personified in Dante's spiralling to perfection in the Commedia. In the Long the spiral is the line and the circle united, in which there is movement but never completion.
OUTSIDE THE GALLERY In a more radical sense Long has also been part of the move by artists of the past 30 years out of the gallery and away from the concept of the artist as a special figure and of art as a precious activity in production of a precious object. This art makes a medium of the walking itself and the stone circles are as much about the building as the finished objects.
The artist's activity is not exclusive and does not depend upon special, elite physical or manipulative skills. Many people on seeing Long's work will say : "But I could have done that".
Apart from the assumption that art is in essence a statement of supreme individuality (something much of Long's almost anonymous work challenges), ironically that is partly what Long's work is about : an art that is founded on the individual's needs and feelings expressed within the traditions available to him or her, not upon a measure of craft or skill. Stone is not transformed into something else in the action of Long's art ; the integrity of the stone is of equal value to the action of the artist. Historically Long works and moves on, his works are weathered back into the world out of which they were made or are deliberately returned to it by the artist himself. They are not consumer objects to be found in prized situations, given a spurious permanence or deemed items of good taste. They exist for a moment and are gone.
Long's work is an art of the contingent and the impermanent even as many of its forms point to a sense of permanence and completion.
INSIDE THE GALLERY Equally important, Long's use of the gallery to place his sculptures and mud paintings has its special effects. An art born outside the gallery is transformed when placed in it. The galleries chosen are also very important. They tend to have a simple abstract form, sense of space and white walls. The sculptures are here contrived symbolic statements. Set in a situation which contradicts the sense in Long's work that, to quote Ezra Pound, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol", the works evoke a reverence which transforms these places.
As the Rothko room in the Tate Gallery was church-like in its form and mood, Long's gallery exhibition rooms perform like holy places : they are, at one and the same time, a revelation, an affirmation of human sensibility and an elaborate artifice. Perhaps these mud-hand circles, one within the other, are the ultimate symbol of his art : the imprint of man's creative presence in nature. On one level it is only mud and as a symbol of impermanence we expect the gallery to wash its walls clean for the next exhibition and another artist. At the same time the circles humble us : they resonate with the power and value of the sacred, a sacredness made by the hand of man and resonating with something beyond the discrete world of present action.
In the end it is in Long's commitment to the tradition that we see the source of all his work, not in some kind of romantic or primitivist commitment to nature or to a particular religious perspective. The tradition defines him and his creations, from the significance of the circle to the magic of line, even as the art of primitive societies were defined by their own traditions and assumptions as much by 'nature'. In a religious context Long is also completely modern in his use of ancient symbols. The religious experience is not set within the parameters of a dogma or a specific historical faith. It is a religious view that has freed itself from the dead hand of orthodoxies and found in art itself and its commitment to renewal the full sensual expression of his individual spirituality. As such, Long's is an art that has also challenged tradition in its conception of the artist and artistic activity, whilst finding value in its forming of the primary symbols that engage the mind and feelings.
This is not Stonehenge : it is a modern, completely self-conscious art and a spiritual understanding born out of the particularity of history, an art that recognises the need for renewal and rebirth in the tradition, not merely the heralding of it. (Ifa moral can be forced from al/ this for SOF radicals perhaps it is this that in a century in which art has been the vehicle for the fullest expression of human spirituality and in which orthodox religion has been reduced to a backwater perhaps Christianity's hope lies with its radicals, who are pressing to dismantle' tradition that now threatens to destroy it Personalo/ / wonder i7 the creative energies of the twentieth century have not already moved too far away from the Church, if not Christianity itse for it to be saved) A SLOW DEATH OR NEW LIFE ?
SAM BELL teaches English and American Studies at a school in Cambridgeshire.