THE ART OF RICHARD LONG

By William Malpas

The central fact and act of Richard Long’s art is walking. His work is founded on the art of walking, the act of walking, the actuality of walking, and on walking as art, as act, as experience. His walks become ‘artwalks’, artwalks which become artworks.

Richard Long is a British land artist and sculptor who works with and in the natural world, but also with and within the highly sophisticated, artificial and humanmade world of art and culture. ‘I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, ’ Long explained of his early work, ‘but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking’.

Richard Long is sometimes termed a ‘Romantic’ sculptor, and part of this book relates his art to British Romanticism, as found in the literature of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and others, and the British landscape tradition, as in J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin and other landscape painters. Aspects of British Romantic culture in 20th century and 21st century art also considered (such as the ‘New Ruralists’, ‘New Romantics’, ‘New Arcadians’ and ‘Neo-Romantics’). Malpas also explore some of the aspects of Romantic culture in Europe as well as Britain.

In the course of this book William Malpas references many of Richard Long’s contemporary British sculptors (Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow, David Nash, Barry Flanagan, Alison Wilding, Shirazeh Houshiary, Hamish Fulton, Stephen Cox, Philip King, Anthony Caro, Tim Head, William Tucker, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley, David Mach, and Gilbert & George).

Further chapters include: one on women, feminist, body art and performance sculptors, as a comparison with Richard Long’s art, which has a strong component of performance (even if it’s nearly always private). Also, a consideration of gendered sculpture and art. The chapter on Minimal, Conceptual, Process and other 1960s and post-1960s art and artists, discusses the artists (primarily European and American) who have most in common with Richard Long’s art: the great Minimal and land artists, such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, James Turrell and Robert Ryman, and the important Conceptual artists, such as Hans Haacke, Bruce Nauman, Yves Klein and Lawrence Weiner.

This book also considers topics such as contemporary and postwar art and sculpture; Richard Long’s contemporaries, including fellow British sculptors; and land art.

REVISED AND UPDATED, WITH NEW ILLUSTRATIONS

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text. Bibliography and notes.

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