ABOVE
Walking//Counter//Long
by Carol Watts
What might it mean to walk with Richard Long?
To understand his textworks in terms of a counter walking, set in motion. Where walking is a continuous process of encounter, finding spatial momentum.
I am thinking here of walking as a transposition in the carrying through of thought. A spatial poeisis for limbs. Along and between an assembling of forms, from the unwitnessed event of a making in the natural environment, to its visual registries as photograph, text, and sculpture. A movement that takes on another spatial meandering, where words too might be accreted differently, finding visual routes and scores, the precision of shapes. A counter walking: in counterpoint with (as in music)//contrary to. Understood in part as a registry of resistance in the occupation of time, the recognition of the lightest form of human traction; and also as a movement in parallel, with accompanying vectors notated by hand, feet, eye. Without a beaten track, even as it forms. In this sense, then, pacing out the relations between elements of a conceptual practice, where they come together, or hold themselves distinct. I want to question the location of the textwork as a gesture reserved for the imagination, as Long sometimes describes it, a seeming after-notation which would hold sculpture as the primary sensual encounter. In what ways does the visual textwork emerge like an index or score of a walking of another order, sign of an ongoing crossing between forms, their taking place in common.
Not just walking with Long as a grasping of extent, then, as if the duration and reach of his ‘exploration by legwork’ might be measured and experienced directly, recapitulated impossibly in time and space. ‘Real time, real action’. Probing commonplace, yet unseen constraints. One Hour in Dartmoor.1984. Ten Days Walking and Sleeping on Natural Ground. A Ten Mile Walk. England. 1968. Engadine Walk, From Zuoz to Zuoz, taking place ‘while the earth travels 22,260,000 miles in its orbit’. Twenty One Walking Days on the High Veld. The quotidian place of number here, matters: in the sense of the action of material matter-making in time, as well as a finding of significance. Perhaps because abstraction and sculptural form carry secret and shared histories and temporalities of accumulation, which the walking treads or counters, finding its own occulted means of ritual passage, geo-purposiveness, play. I bring this stone or a thousand of them to another place. My hand marks with water and its tidal sediments. I document words as a measure of the matter of my living, here, this labour and imprint.
Footfall. In One Hour. A Sixty Minute Circle Walk on Dartmoor 1984, the circular walk is captured in the round of a concrete poem. If there is a substitutive movement, word for walk, the 60 words might seem to beat out an abstracted pedometry, one per minute. But the substitutive relation here between language and world is not quite a textual switching in the sense, for example, of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete use of the transpositions of flowers and boats. Those work in part through the visual shock and play of exchange between industrial and natural codes, exposing the second nature of the attribution of everyday names, the misrecognition that is at the heart of the arbitrariness of language. A flora of material signs. But also an understanding of the presence of words as objects resisting ‘ordinary syntax’, whereby, in Finlay’s words, ‘nouns should stand still. In their own space’. Finlay’s work takes on an insurrectionary force, routes through Concrete poetry and the traditions of visual emblemata. Long’s work sends you to walk the wheel, as if nouns and gerunds – those active movements, verbs turned things – find their space and stillness in the wheeling of a larger arc, even as they discover the particularity of location. Words stand still, becoming nouns, yet move at the same time in a wider span, as if with a durational pulse. At the same time their stillness has a form of resistance. Of what kind, might only come to be known in answering movement.
With attention, then, to just One Hour in Dartmoor, realising there are two moments of about face, as if the circle encounters itself twice, back-to-back at YELLOWISH and JUMP, and head on at BUBBLING and SQUELCH. The selected words register the proprioceptive experience of moving through an environment, Dartmoor in the south-west of England, a landscape of moors, high granite slabs and weathered rock formations. TOR, TUSSOCKS, HEATHER. Hint of a seasonal locating – ICE – that might also suggest geological time. The textwork notates the direction and nature of movement – DOWNHILL, SWISH, LOPING, KICK, SLITHER, JUMP, with the impacting of boots, SCUFF, CRUNCHING, SCRUNCH, SQUELCH. The acoustic registry of a wider environment, in which the noting of water – POOL, REEDS and the later FLOODLINE – gives way to sound, as if by field recording: GURGLE, BELCH, BUBBLING, GURGLING, SPLASH. The distinction between the landscape, and the body who inhabits it, is not always possible to determine, a body that might BREATHE or BELCH or SNIFF along with SHEEP, animals that leave traces, DROPPINGS, SKULL. There is a phenomenological openness to an outside, the visible, with its architectural angles – SLANT, ALIGNED – its tactile qualities SOFT, WARM – and colour BLUE, RED , BROWNISH, YELLOWISH. Who is WATCHED. Scale: from the SKYLINE to proxemics in miniature, the world of MOTH and SPIDER, the CLITTER of insects, a LARK in some distant and invisible pinprick of sounding, perhaps, but material to the record, as if in equivalence and size with all other words. On the same latitude as SWISH. On a 90˚ angle with JUMP.
There is something here of the messiness of walking despite the abstraction of form, that ‘mixture of attention and inattention to one’s surroundings’ which is not always present in the geometric blocking of Long’s textworks, as Rod Mengham, another walker of Dartmoor landscapes, has observed. For Mengham, Long’s text ‘requires the reader (and viewer) to reflect on the relationship between the different timescales that contextualize human presence in the landscape’, and it is this ‘complexity of time-space relations’ which the text-work renders with particular precision. To walk One Hour in this light is an encounter with a registry on the move, a form of reportage signalling the multiplicity of this spatio-temporal inhabiting.. There are alternative aggregations, axes, forms of number that might allow the cycle to be met differently each time, permutations of poetic events in the unexpected juxtapositions of words mapped by the eye. Words that arrive without what the poet Louis Zukofsky called ‘predatory manifestation’, marking instead within the intensity of the local a non-territorial potential or ‘impulse in matter’. ‘Nature has more effect on me than I on it’, Long states. ‘I am content with the vocabulary of universal and common means: walking, placing, stories, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads’.
This vocabulary is given to cycles and returns. Eleven years after One Hour, Long is engaged again with Dartmoor Time, a textwork recording ‘A Continuous Walk of 24 Hours on Dartmoor’, each of the ten lines a statement of durational time, over 55 miles:
A CROW PERCHED ON GREAT GNAT’S HEAD CAIRN FOR FIVE MINUTES
HOLDING A BUTTERFLY WITH A LIFESPAN OF ONE MONTH
CLIMBING OVER GRANITE 350 MILLION YEARS OLD ON GREAT MIS TOR
Each walk Long takes through Dartmoor and the environs of the south-west marks a form of return, patterned by striations of past and future journeys. The textual paralleling of Two Continuous Walks Following the Same Line. A Straight Northward Walk Across Dartmoor in 1979 and 2010 asks its question about return. Both begin with RAILWAY LINE and end with STONE ROW, but invite the eye to think of the words themselves as staging posts and landmarks, caught up, as MIDDAY moves on to FIRST SUN or SUNRISE, in a diurnal cycle. The same, and yet never the same. Textworks that may come to occupy the height and space of a gallery wall, but originate in smaller repeated acts of private recording.
In lines and rows, we tread the implication of great circles. Within the distributive vagrancy of objects and movements around a planetary skin, in their chance alignments, a sense of cyclical pattern and shape emerges as a form of revolve:
If you put a circle down in any place in the world, that circle would
take up the shape of that place. In other words, every place gives a
different shape to a circle. That circle becomes like a thumbprint. It
is absolutely unique. It is that place and no place is like another place.
This ‘taking up’ of shape treads the paradox of a geometry that might suggest ‘a vocabulary of universal and common means’, in which a circle is always a circle, and yet in its continuous repetition, never the same, in that it belongs to localities, finds place. The scale of this process and its ephemeral nature is something to consider, as if the ‘thumbprint’ of local Euclidian realities – say, the pathbreaking A Line Made By Walking – is articulated at the same time in a wider physics of curved space, on the surface of the earth, and that might be a measure of its commitment and attention. And that a geodesic gestics of the human is discoverable in this practice, which works its ‘materials, ideas, movement, time’ with a seeming simplicity of labour and mark-making, yet needs the act of recording to underpin its freedom to create without a witness present, located in this greater span:
The work might not last very long; I’m not interested in making
permanent works which would turn into a famous site or something. In fact a lot of landscape works you might only see by standing in the position where the photograph was taken from. If you stood to one side you might not see the line. In a way the photograph makes it visible. In the space of the landscape, the piece is almost invisible. It is only when you see it in the photograph that you have that focus of attention.
Long, wrote Kay Larson in 1986, responding to the ‘pristine’ photographs that document his journeys, ‘implicates his audiences in a fantasy – that of being the first human to make a mark on an empty space’. How to respond to the ‘candor’ of Long’s documents, the continuous clarity of image and textwork fonts and settings.I wonder if that still holds, that anthropologically inflected fantasy of the human in ‘empty space’ that cuts a number of ways, both towards an ecological and Romantic notion of wilderness, on the one hand, and an imperial nomos on the other. Jeff Wall, writing of the photo-documentation of Long’s actions in the context of landscape photography, saw the gesture of the famous ‘line walked in the grass’ as
akin to Barnett Newman’s notion of the establishment
of a ‘Here’ in the void of a primaeval terrain. It is
simultaneously agriculture, religion, urbanism and theatre,
an intervention in a lonely, picturesque spot which becomes
a setting completed artistically by the gesture and the
photography for which it was enacted.
Wall catches the trace of the modernist primitive in Long’s work, a staging of human facture in the impression or daub of hand or foot. At its most evanescent, there would be nothing to tell that the artist’s ‘touching of the earth’ had taken place, actions remaining unrecorded in their secret sites and contingencies. A ‘Here’ that is a ‘nowhere’. Yet the extension of this gesture among multiple forms of recording arguably suggests an archival disassembly, rather than completion, which finds its way into the spaces of the gallery, or the graphical dispersion of a catalogue. It is as if walking continually falls back into its multivalent elements, the repeated documenting of a single act of sculpture opening to other indices of legwork, at times playing out a manual array as natural historical registry. And in that practice, something takes place as art: the continuous physical act of a traverse that could impossibly bring together blue and white clays from China and Cornwall, say, or cause stone from different geological locations to bisect along magnetic lines that will always point the same way, as if human intervention becomes in this way local to a tectonic and monumental truth, and to other modes of time. In this way Long’s textworks contribute not only to a reporting on the singular event that has always already occurred elsewhere, but to a performance of the archive that might be repeatedly earthed, walked again. And there, in the appropriation of objects and materials, even in their thieving (another form of counterwalking), archival relations with space-time are continually remade.
If there is then the implication of a fantasy of mark making as an original gesture in ‘empty’ space, documented in photographic form, it is integral to a wider gestics fascinated in the long duration of a repeated registry. There is no ‘empty’, however solitary the walk, and despite the singular clearing of other humans from the photographic frame. For Long, ‘ a walk is just one layer laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographic history on the surface of the land’. In Human Nature Walk, Twenty One Walking Days on the High Veld, these layers are evident. The textwork indicates what might seem a founding anthropological gesture, since it records walking in the ‘Cradle of Humankind’: the title loaded with symbolic freight, it might appear, yet specific to place, keyed in to layers of ancient inhabitation. Long’s residencies in 2004 and 2009 in the South African World Heritage Site of that name, famous for its ancient hominid fossils, produced a number of works: multiple walks, each leaving behind a single footprint; stone sculptures and installations; fingerprint drawings. The circular concrete poem of the Human Nature Walk suggests an encounter where layers of human making meet species life. The list of animals, birds, insects and reptiles, from FIREFLIES through KUDU to FISH EAGLE occupy half the cycle, which is completed by that answering gesture of the human which is, in Wall’s terms, ‘simultaneously agriculture, religion, urbanism and theatre’: from CAVE DUST CIRCLE and STANDING STONE and CAVE DIGGINGS of ancient settlements to the tools and mechanisms of subsistence agriculture – PLOUGH, HAND AXE, SALT LICK, IRRIGATION CHANNELS – to industrial landmarks – MINERS’ TALUS, OIL DRUMS – and a wider network of connections - PYLONS, PAYPHONE. This textwork sets out in its wheel something of the archaeology at stake in each word object or sculpture, the internal tracks of its composition.
To respond to this work through its counter walking might be to hear another score, worked through the compositional parataxis of objects and forms. I am thinking of music, the point where form moves off from a massy condition of tactility, as Zukofsky describes in Song 28 from Anew, where the ‘extrication’ of notes, ‘moving towards a definite shape, become capable of being apprehended, themselves their own existence in the plain of surrounding existence, tactility of materials become tangible’. The ‘plain of surrounding existence’ is logged in Long’s textworks through word objects coming into apprehension, as themselves, in shapes governed by geographical distance and time. Is this to demand a reading, where reading is itself dependent on human spatial development, our moving from four limbs to walking on two.
Yet the encountering of words might be to ask questions of place and its located shapeliness. Not just its anthropological and romantic invocation, as a natural outside brought into contrastive relation with the ‘non-site’ of the metropolitan gallery, as Robert Smithson termed it, which was so important to the charge of this work in the late 1960s and 70s. But also that a word registry can now be encountered as a different mode of tracing in the light of the contingencies of global human and non-human flows, among contemporary axes of transit, or forms of acceleration that as Peter Larkin has suggested produce ‘a telluric retraction of the spaces of the world… planetary space reduced to one vast floor’. Walking now in a time of networks, under the dromological arc of drones and finance logics. So this human scale of mark making in time and space brings into question, what? The nature of twenty-first-century itineraries in their constitution of place. The abstracted ‘invasion of space by text’ as Marc Augé writes of the non-place. The relation between the body that walks, and the spatial and planetary registries of contemporaneous times, with their forgetting of paths and journeys. To pick up on the resistance in a counter walking with Long, the lightness of its traction, might be to set out into the Dark Would attending to other shared ecologies of route making, other velocities of words.
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