http://www.richardlong.org

We never see Richard Long in the photographs of his work. Unlike the more playful Andy Goldsworthy, at times caught up in the action throwing ash in the air or muddied up to his elbows in river clay, Long's pieces evacuate the figure from the field of the visual, leaving only traces of actions past. This probably has much to do with the double iteration of his environmental art: first as the irreproducible act of wakling, then as the monument, and, finally, as a glossy mounted photograph hanging in a clean white gallery miles and miles away. I want to suggest that Long's obsessive series of sculptures stand in for the many little passings of space into place, in so far as "place is the being there of something dead." (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 1)

a circle in ireland 1975

The past of the artist, his history of work, writes itself in a series of places with holes, back doors through which the present escapes, leaving the muted husks of stone or stick gaping wide. The circles, the most common formal choice of the artist, literally enclose a chosen, but otherwise indistinguishabe, ground and clear it of debris in a repetition that ultimately amounts to a ritualized performance of delineation. Whether this hallowed/hollowed site is part of the sculpture, the ground for its figuration, or that which is revealed by its inscriptive mark, remains unclear. Long’s variations between positive and negative accumulation realize this ambiguity in composition. It is this instability that posits the work as a kind of loophole in the structural system of signification, something akin to the "non-place" that Marc Augé describe as “an absence of the place from itself, caused by the name it has been given." (Marc Augé Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p 85) The sculptures are quite literally something "produced in a passing over of place” rather than a permanent inscription upon the land.

Not only do the rings border an interior ground, but they ultimately turn outward to expose the limits of the timely gesture, so that the sculpture always refers to the space (inside/outside) and the time which it is not. Michel de Certeau transfers this referencing of the space beyond the margins of delineation to the historiographical enterprise in an apt manner, as follows:

A geographic unit…must be delimited so that all which cannot be enclosed becomes manifest. The organization of conceptual ‘bodies’ through a delimitation is at once the cause and the means of a slow hemorrhage. The structure of a composition does not retain what it represents, but it must ‘hold’ enough so that, with this escape, the past, the real, or the death of which the text speaks can be truly staged—‘produced.’…It designates through losing it; that is, its relation with the past which it is not…which articulates ‘compositions of place’ over an erosion of these places. (Michel de Certeau, "The Writing of History", p 98-99)

Of course, Certeau is speaking here of the writing of history, the discourse that establishes the past as different from its present articulation, but isn’t Long’s sculpture, in the fact of its always-present photographic record, just such a ‘written’ document? Indeed, Long's land art is usually left to the elements, destroyed by wind and rain, or even dismantled by the artist himself in "especially beautiful" places, so that all that remains is the photographic image. What I mean to say is that these images stand in for the lost mock-megalithic sites which, in turn, index the immediately ephemeral walking body-the artist-that is no more or has walked on elsewhere. However aesthetically framed, Long produces a rupture with the landscape tradition in that these carefully composed works do not allow a place for the human body. They seem to stand as cenotaphs for a human body.

asia circle stones mongolia 1996

gobi desert circlee mongolia 1996

circle in africa mulanje mountain malawi 1978