HOPE AND GLORY

 I like land and I like art, so obviously I like land art, work by people like Nancy Holt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long etc.  Some of this art, and certainly seeing some of this art, involves a fair amount of walking, which is all to the good.  And of course in some cases the traces of walking create the art.

 

Certain works of land art look like they must have been massively difficult to make, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty:

  

But other kinds look less so. You go to some out of the way place, rearrange some stones or twigs or leaves or pieces of wood and Bob’s your uncle.  Not that art needs to be difficult.  This is by Andy Goldsworthy:

However, this sometimes raises the question is it art or just a row of rocks? 

 

Is it a JG Ballard-inspired installation of crashed cars?  Or is it just a row of crashed cars?

 

Perhaps one doesn’t preclude the other.

 

On Sunday I was in Shingle Street in Suffolk, where there was a white line of shells that led from the sea’s edge all the way up the beach, more or less to where the houses were, about 300 yards away. 

This looked about medium difficult – a lot of searching to find the shells, a chance of back ache because of all bending to create the line, but I assume that cranes and earth movers  were not involved.

 

A little research reveals that the Shingle Street line is the work of Lida Kindersley and Els Bottema who both grew up in Delft.  The former is a letter cutter, the latter a ceramicist.  The line was first made in 2005 when they’d both been diagnosed with cancer and has endured as a symbol of friendship and survival.

 

This image from their website, shows them at work:

 

A SHORT LONG WALK

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Richard Long - walker, artist, sometime walking artists, sometime land artist, sometime sculptor.

Some of his best work – and his best walks - involve “interventions” in the landscapes.  Sometimes these might involve stamping out an “intaglio” on the ground, or he might move rocks into patterns.  

Very early in his career he went up Kilimanjaro, and made a kind of sculpture there.  “I was very proud of the fact I had probably made the highest sculpture in the world, ” he said in a recent interview with the Guardian.

If I’m walking in the desert or some isolated place I often see that somebody has rearranged rocks, and I always say to myself “Maybe Richard Long was here,” but I never really think he was.  And occasionally I myself have been known to rearrange rocks – in which case it’s definitely not a Richard Long, but I suppose it might be “School of Long.”

Long’s work also sometimes involves transporting pieces of rock or slate from natural settings or quarries, and then arranging them in art galleries or in outdoor sculpture parks.  An exhibition of these kind of sculptures titled Land and Sky: Richard Long at Houghton just opened at Houghton Hall, near Fakenham, in Norfolk, England.

Part of the coverage included that article in the Guardian which quotes Long as saying that he’s walked every piece of Dartmoor, but avoids pilgrim routes and old ways. “I made a conscious decision that there’s so many ways to walk in new ways or original ways. I was quite proud of the fact that no one has walked across Dartmoor in a straight line before.”  He’s referring to works like these:

I have definitely walked on Dartmoor – a long time ago, not sure I’d even heard of Richard Long at the time.  I definitely didn’t walk in a straight line and if I walked on pilgrim routes I certainly didn’t know about it.

Long says, “Ideas can last forever …  I’m one of the artists who realized a journey – from a straight path in the grass to a 1,000-mile walk – could be a work of art.”

Of course It’s in the nature of art that it changes the way you see the world, so when you’ve got Richard Long in your head and you find yourself, as I did the other day, walking in Los Angeles along Wilshire Boulevard, past a building that houses a Wells Fargo Bank and a slightly distant outpost of Cedars Sinai hospital, I was amazed to find this sea of rough but carefully arranged slabs of red rock. 

I’m as sure as I can be that these are not “real” Richard Longs, but who’s to say that the landscape architect wasn’t familiar with his works?  Maybe he or she too belonged to the School of Long.