A Line Made by Walking

Richard Long A Line Made by Walking, (1967)

Richard Long (1945) is an English sculptor, photographer and painter

Man’s path through life is not casual and fragmentary, but follows a sequence in which each point is always connected up with the previous one in an infinite process.The land art movement arose at the end of the Sixties in America and Britain. The artists’ intent was to interact with and sometimes modify the landscape. Photographic documentation of these works was fundamental: often they were made in inaccessible places and could in time be destroyed or altered by natural action.

Richard Long works on his own, in silence; his journey is not one of conquest, but reminds us more of the slow progress of a pilgrim in search of some kind of epiphany.

“no walk, no work”

I’d like to carve out a place for my own writing in-between literature and visual arts. Erasure poetry, which I have posted on lately, is such an in-between art form. Some call it conceptual writing, which might be a good term, but to me it’s also problematic, because today conceptual art is almost drowned in theorizing – and I don’t want to do theory (any more): I want to make literature as art!

Today my ongoing investigation into form led me to Hamish Fulton (who have the most beautiful webpage).

Based in Canterbury, Kent, Hamish Fulton has made walking the basis of his practice for the past three decades, producing photography, text and sketches that evolve from the experience of solo and group walks in the landscape. Fulton’s art focuses on an engagement with the environment and the self through the experience of walking. He describes himself as a ‘walking’ artist, resisting the limitations of the terms ‘land artist’, ‘performance artist’ or ‘sculptor’.

Fulton does not approach nature as landscape, in the traditional sense of a still image, but as physical experience. He is not walking through a scenery, he is incorporated into it. While land-artsits chooses to rearrange the landscape, Fulton prefers that the landscape imposes itself on him.

Walking, for Fulton, is about transforming one’s state of mind:

I see walking as my form of meditation,” he says. “If we were going into the mountains and there was no trail, then we wouldn’t be able to think very much, because we would be paying attention to not breaking an ankle or falling over. Then walking becomes meditative. You stop the endless thinking mind. And that’s a good thing – because every now and then you want to stop going down the same neural pathways. Then you have other perceptions.

I didn’t start out as a political artist,” he says, “but when you are walking in 2011, you can’t avoid politics. If someone were to ask me what my work was about today, I might say justice, instead of the role of the land

Against Interpretation

Today I will be reading Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation, from her collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966).

I’m going back to Sontag because I need a bit of backing for some thoughts that have been rambling around in my head lately…

Looking at – and engaging with – conceptual art, it is obvious that this is a kind of art which is made with the purpose of addressing my cognitive skills.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

At the same time, aesthetics, understood as the philosophy of art, was originally a term dealing with the nature of beauty and taste = the sensual and sensational.

The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos, meaning “esthetic, sensitive, sentient”), which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthanomai, meaning “I perceive, feel, sense”). The term “aesthetics” was appropriated and coined with new meaning in the German form Æsthetik (modern spelling Ästhetik) by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735.

The thoughts rambling around in my head are worried thoughts, anxious because I see much to much bad thinking in art, much too many unoriginal quasi-philosophical attacks on beauty and the sublime; and to little focus on the sensual & emotional sides of life and living. In short: If conceptual art is about ideas and concepts, how come its practitioners so very-very rarely are clever thinkers or interesting philosophers?

Is conceptual art Art???

I’m going to Sontag for some emotional backup.

She opens her essay with this beautiful quote:

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

- Oscar Wilde, in a letter