Richard Long

In conversation with William Furlong, London February 1984

from Audio Arts supplement 1985

Transcript

Sculptor Richard Long agreed to work with Audio Arts on a tape in 1985. This included a conversation with William Furlong, which was juxtaposed with the artist reading some word pieces:

William Furlong: You talked about walking a line, and a driftwood circle. You have tended to use very simple forms in your work from the 1960s onwards – straight lines, circles, spirals. You haven’t ever felt the need to make the formal components of the works any more complex?

Richard Long: No, I don’t think you can get anything more strong or powerful than those things. I like the idea that a circle doesn’t belong to me and that lines or circles are universal human images that belong to everyone. Also they belong equally to all times in history. So I am not interested in making an idiosyncratic personal mark. I like the idea that if somebody sees one of my works in the land they see it just as a mark of a man, not of Richard Long. I think the first time I actually used a circle I just used it almost without thinking about it. It just seemed a good thing to use. I see it also as a very modern idea; as I said before, it is outside of time, in a way. I think a lot of art is made now which belongs to the present, but it is like a stone. A stone is millions of years old and yet it is a stone here and now. So maybe the circle can be given all those meanings. A circle is a very perfect human idea.

WF: To some extent you are presumably working on the associations that people will bring to those images, because people won’t actually be able to go to the Andes or wherever.

RL: No, it is not my intention that people from the art world will see my remote works. The whole idea, the thing I find interesting, is that art can make what is not necessarily seen, or if it is seen by people it is seen by people outside the art world. Like maybe a shepherd or someone. Maybe the person who sees it won’t recognise it as art, but I quite accept the idea that a photograph brings the idea of that work into the art world in another way. Also I think it does enough to seed the imagination. It is not meant to stand for the work, it becomes something else, it becomes art in another way.

WF: Without labouring the point, would it be unacceptable to you for one of those remote spots where you might make a work to be designated as the site of one of your pieces of art.

RL: Yes, that would be wrong. One of the points is that the place should be anonymous in the art world. Really the only thing that reaches the art world is the image of the work. I might just call it, say, A LINE IN ICELAND. So the title is very abstract; it is not important to know where it is. It is only important to have knowledge of it through what the photograph looks like. 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.

WF: One piece I have seen recently by you was a piece of River Avon mud, at the Coracle Gallery in Camberwell, actually pressed into a series of concentric circles with your hand. Perhaps you could talk about this – drawing with mud in its relationship to the Avon and so on. Is this a new series of groupings of work or are they an extension of the other pieces.

RL: The hand piece at Coracle is just a continuation of my other mud works. It is just that I have changed the procedure. I see those mud works as being as much about water, in a way, as about mud, because in fact there is always a small quantity of mud and then it is mixed with a lot of water. It’s obviously more clear in the splash work that I did. This was just to chuck a bucket of muddy water at the wall, which left a beautiful print of silt down the wall. Water is one of the themes of my work. For example, I have walked between the sources of rivers, or I have used the length of a river to be the length of a walk, or I made a piece on Dartmoor where I drew a circle on the map and then I walked down all the river beds within that circle so that I was using river beds as a footpath. I like the idea that when you make a walk along the road you are tracing the way, like a human record on the land, whereas if you walk down a river bed you are following a sort of natural path.

I suppose the River Avon was always a potent influence in my childhood – this big tidal river in Bristol, which has the second biggest rise and fall in the world. I was always fascinated by the beautiful mud banks of the river and I suppose I have just ended up by making art out of it, finding a way to turn it into my work. Also talking about the hand prints, my work has always been about my own physical scale. In a way, my walk is about my own strides, my own footprints. It is about how far I can walk in a day. So the footprints and the handprints are all about the same person. It is always a human scale.

WF: One other way in which you have worked is through publication. You have actually been involved in a lot of publications, haven’t you? What role do you see this having?

RL: Well, that is another way of putting the work out into the world. It just does that job. It makes the ideas available to the people very cheaply and easily. The work is not about possession. To say ‘to know it is to possess it’ is not quite right. It is like people can know a fact of life. That knowledge is common to everyone – no one actually possesses it on their own.

WF: What you are saying reminds me of Australian Aboriginal concepts, which don’t actually include the concept of possession but a place and location and site.

RL: I would hope my works are close to that same spirit, yes. It was never really my intention that my early landscape works could be owned or possessed. That is why I feel it is like the American land artists with their emphasis on possession and ownership of the land, and really not being artists unless you have so many thousands of dollars to actually make the art. I never had any theories at the time but I obviously must have been attracted to the idea that you could make art with almost no means at all in the parts of the world which were free for everyone to use.

WF: I suppose when it comes to the natural landscape it is mysterious in the sense that the land is what really gave people sustenance, and their relationship to the land in the past was obviously very positive. In one sense or another there must be some sort of undercurrent of that there. But as well there must be a feeling of civilised society – urban society – conspicuous by its absence, because now we have the means to put buildings and factories everywhere, so the fact that there aren’t factories and buildings in a remote spot is based on some conscious decision by people living in an urban society.

RL: I think these places are only mysterious to the people who don’t know about them. You know, I would say most of the art world and a lot of the art critics have urban perceptions and urban sensibilities, and so the things that I do, the places I go to, to them it is mysterious and romantic. But in these places there are often people living their normal everyday lives – you know, like in Nepal, it is quite well populated. So I don’t feel as though I am making an escape. The world is like that in those places, and I use the world as I find it. I think it just depends on where you are standing in the world, what opinion you have of it, what perception you have of it. In fact most of the world is like the landscapes that I make the work in. It is only a small percentage of the world that looks like central London or New York, it just happens that that’s where all the art is. Art is basically an urban culture. So I feel that my work is more about reality than other art.

WF: When I said mysterious I didn’t really mean romantic. What I was really referring to was that when you go around remote areas of Ireland you very often see the remains of ruined cottages of people who once lived on the land and no longer do, and that makes one start wondering about the people and about how they worked on that land and how they lived.

RL Yes, and I do too. The work doesn’t precisely relate to those problems, if that is what they are. I suppose you could say that I have actually found a way to go back into the land and use it in a different way from those farmers, and maybe those farmers couldn’t use it, but I can – but that is not really my prime motive.

I go there just because they are great places. I don’t think work is really about any kind of social stuff like that. One thing I am aware of is that the surface of the world is actually made up of all these different layers of civilisations. People have used it in different cultures for different reasons all through the centuries. Whatever I do on the land is just like one more layer on these layers of marks, historical marks, and my marks will in turn be superseded by the marks of other people. So it is really just part of the human pattern on the surface of the world. In other words, I take my place on the same surface as all the other people. Some of the sculptures are impermanent but they illustrate permanent ideas. For example, I might make a spiral of seaweed on a beach in Cornwall. Now that pattern itself will be washed away by the next tide, but the record of it through the photograph just demonstrates that the cycle of patterns of seaweed left by the tide in a natural way has gone on for millions of years.

WF: Until quite recently you have been fairly reluctant to write about your work or talk about it. Do you feel more confident now, or do you feel that you should be talking?

RL: Doing something like this is a struggle. In the early years I had this idea that the work should speak for itself, but of course it doesn’t actually work like that. I think if the work becomes well known to a certain extent, then people start writing about it anyway. It is a bit like Chinese whispers. If there are only a few articles written by misinformed people, if that is all there is about you then those articles take on an importance that they shouldn’t have. So I did my first piece of writing in a way just to try to set the record straight. That was the reason for doing the statements. I think art is a very moral activity. It doesn’t threaten people, it doesn’t use people, it sort of humanises us, I hope. My work really is just about being a human being, living on the planet, using nature as its source. On another level it is also about making up other things by doing things that I enjoy. It is not really about a struggle, I actually enjoy thinking about ideas, I actually enjoy camping and being on my own and the whole business of lighting fires or choosing a camp site and sleeping on the ground. I always get my best sleep on some stony patch somewhere. I love the whole ritual and rhythm, the great simple rhythm of being on a walk. It is just like getting up with the sun and making breakfast and walking all day, being very tired in a very physical, simple way. Apart from anything else it is just a very good way to live life. Somehow I have found a way to make it into art.

WF: Presumably, that is really the source of your work, that physical involvement with nature.

RL: Yes, it is – yes – you said it.