P.28 Richard Long has now been walking for forty years, touching the earth
lightly, and rarely crossing an earlier path.
P.33 Snowball track, Bristol, 1964
P.34 …using walking as a medium. Time as a fourth dimension as well as the
potential scale of distance travelled, now took its place within the
materials of art.
… Long’s work is always a balance between the natural patterns of a place
and his repeated use of a limited number of archetypal forms.
P.43 This resulted in [Ben Navis Hitchhike 1967], which he did on his own.
It was the first work that Long made with a map and photographs. He
hitchhiked and walked from London to the summit of Ben Navis in Scotland,
and back again. The journey took six days and at 11 a.m. each day he took
two photographs. For one photograph he pointed the camera straight up at the
sky and for the other he pointed it straight down at the ground and these
pictures were the only record of the journey.
P.47 As Rorimer points out, the photograph does not just function as a
visual souvenir but is intrinsic to and inseparable from the overall
conception of the work. … Long describes his text works as ‘narratives of
events and sculptures — walks — that I have made’. His very first text work,
which treats language in a neutral way, was made for the exhibition [When
attitudes become form, in Berlin in 1969.
P.49 Long has also made works where he has carried stones in his pocket for
many miles to make sculptures about movement, transference and location.
P.56 Long’s text works and Andre’s poetry carry out a similar reassessment.
They highlight the palpability of language, the tactile sense of words
themselves, and its potential for arrangement on the blank page. In the case
of Long this takes the form of words and phrases drawn into particular
arrangements that centre on the rhythms and structures of walks, exploring
the relationship between words, ideas and experiences.
P.142 artist statements
‘Five, six, pick up sticks,
Seven, eight, lay them straight’
I like simple, practical, emotional,
quiet, vigorous art.
… I like the idea that stones
are what the world is made of.
My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale
and my own physical commitment.
My work is real, not illusory or conceptual.
It is about real stones, real time, real actions.
My talent as an artist is to walk across
a moor, or place a stone on the ground.
Time passes, a place remains. A walk moves through life,
it is physical but afterwards invisible. Sculpture is still,
a stopping place, visible.