This bank holiday weekend is the perfect time to go and see some art. On Friday, I went to see Richard Long’s Heaven and Earth show at Tate Britain. Long is a British landscape artist and that’s about all I knew when I showed up, so I figured that I would love Heaven and Earth. In short, I was wrong.
Like I said, all I knew is that Long is a landscape artist. So he lays stones in a circle or in a pile, or he makes marks in a field of grass. Imagine wandering around the English countryside one day and discovering one of his works… It might not immediately strike you as great at, but at least it’s a pleasant surprise. That element of Long’s work is present in Heaven and Earth, but of course, photographs of outdoor work can never replicate the real thing. As Long notes, those photos are documentation and they help the viewer imagine the original work, but that’s all they are. Would you pay £10 to stare at photos of something that’s interesting in real life so that you can imagine it?
The first room of Heaven and Earth consists of two “mud paintings,” which are pretty much what you would imagine. Paintings made of mud. It seems like the appeal here isn’t that the paintings are particularly beautiful like a similar Rothko painting, but the process by which they are made: the mud is actually taken from one of Long’s favorite rivers and brought to wall for it to be applied. I did see one mud painting on paper that I thought was particularly stunning, but that I think its beauty was meant to be secondary to the fact that it was made of mud.
And the next room just made no sense to me. Long takes a lot of walks. Good for him. I love hiking and walking too. Helps you stay in shape and you can see some great things out there in nature. Well, because Long’s long walks are essentially his art and he needs a way to document them for galleries, Long has chosen to draw his walking route on a standard trail map. Where I come from, that’s an everyday activity, not something to put on a gallery’s white walls.
Admittedly, some of the photographs are quite beautiful, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. It’s about documentation again. Maybe instead of an indoor show, Long should be allowed to take over a section of Hyde Park and turn it into a number of artworks that people can experience first person. That would be interesting, and you wouldn’t have to spend the entire show imagining what Long’s work is like.
Long also incorporates text into his work with song lyrics or poetic lists which describe the walks he has taken. These are interesting, but I can’t help but feel they would be more interesting to me if they were a short short in McSweeney’s instead of art. I would actually be very interested to read a book about walking by Long. He seems like a nature writer trapped in an artist’s body.
Seeing Heaven and Earth made me want to go on a long walk. And hey, long walks are free. Weather looks to be okay this weekend, so maybe instead of spending £10 to see photos of a man talking a walk, a better use of this bank holiday is one last trip to the countryside for a hike before summer ends.
