Art, Soul and Earth

Richard Long

Artist of the Landscape

Sculpture and Landscape Art have always held a powerful attraction for me. Andy Goldsworthy was the first eco-sculptor I came across and his sculptures and the pictures of his installations enabled me to experience the ephemeral beauty of art created in situ with natural materials, not created for any particular beholder or market simply for the beauty of the piece itself.

Richard Long was if not the original, one of the first contemporary artists to make marks on the landscape and present this as art. His recent exhibition 'Heaven and Earth' at Tate Britain covered the whole panorama of his work over close to fifty years. This show was a phenomenal experience, an elemental tribute to the man his mission and prodigious dedication to his work.

In its totality, as well as in its particulars the exhibition allowed the visitors to sink deeply into the consciousness of an artist whose art is totally integrated into the meteorological, cosmological and planetary rhythms of the natural landscape. My overwhelming impression in experiencing the exhibition was not of Richard Long the person, but more of him as an emblematic archetype of human motion crossing the planets terrain, evoking hundreds thousands years of trekking, migration and movement across the surface of the earth. Long, outstanding in his art because of his total immersion in nature, conveys the primal urges that drive humanity in the timeless quest to explore the landscape of the living planet.

The central motifs or cohesive themes that ties all Longs’ pieces together are his walks, which are mostly solitary quests, walking in straight lines, or exceptional distances daily, framed or envisioned by a simple mathematical or poetic blueprints.

As well as installations of stone, rock, wood or within divergent landscapes Long creates textworks that relate to walks he has undertaken. These are to me, some of his most powerful offerings, a three line textwork to encapsulate a 366 mile 8 day walk a walk to a Lunar Eclipse or a textwork outlining a walk of 173 miles in seven and a half tides. Not given to excess verbiage, Longs textworks are items of sparse simplicity, the tip of the tsunami of his endeavours. Some works purely describe occasional sounds heard on a 700 mile walk or sights seen on Dartmoor, remarkable for their lack of commentary and absence of emotiveness, these austere recordings of elemental nature strip away surface experience to reveal our inner timeless primordial instincts.

The exhibition was deceptive, as the exhibits could been viewed simplistically as just objects on display, isolated from one another and so consequently the show might have had limited impact on the observer. A magnificent mural painted on the Tate’s walls for the exhibition, one with gold coloured clay paint, applied in swirling interwoven shapes across a twenty feet span, which were displayed together with textworks inscribed on the walls and installations of stone of irregular shapes and sizes weights and appearance, arranged and organized into coherent oval circular or oblong shapes. However walking through the hall with intention and deliberation, absorbing and imbibing the art as organically as the artist may have created it, revealed the immensity of Long artisitc vision and the impersonal expression of his soul as a force of nature itself.

This exhibition fully portrayed the ability of art to connect to transcendent spirit and as such is light years ahead of the supercilious products of the celebrity obsessed art establishment.

Glorious 39

Film Review

Stephen Poliakoff’s film the Glorious 39 is a suspenseful study of identity, class and paranoia set in the immediate period before the start of the Second World War. Romola Garai plays the adopted but eldest daughter of an aristocratic family whose life unravels as she progressively uncovers their complicity in a plot to dissociate Great Britain from the battle against Nazism unfolding in mainland Europe.

Avoiding the pitfall of presenting a far fetched action thriller, the director underplays the murder and espionage elements of the film to subtly study the deterioration of once secure familial relationships, as well as the suffocation and patronage of the highly cultured and excessively mannered pre war British nobility. Using classic suspenseful cinematic touches, the director heightens the viewer’s sense of the main protagonist’s immediate danger, her escalating isolation and deteriorating mental health, so much so that seemingly innocuous occurrences evoke irrational apprehension and a sense of extreme peril in the audience.

The accidental discovery of an intriguing gramophone recording that she stumbles on in the family’s barn, triggers the disappearance then murder of friends and close associates eventually revealing the full extent of her adoptive family’s involvement in a plot to undermine the war effort. These events are portrayed against the backdrop of palatial family homes the idyllic surrounding countryside and the misleading calm cleverly contrasts the insular life of the privileged rich with the gathering storm poised to engulf Europe.

The beloved daughters increasing alarm is frequently assuaged by her father, played by Bill Nighy a brilliant paragon of calm assurance and unctuous duplicity. Even at her worst moment when his actual evil intent is starkly exposed, he speaks to his daughter in such caring fatherly tones that it is possible to believe that he still harbours genuine concern for her. The erosion of her position as a cherished and beloved daughter culminates in the alienating revelation and discovery of her Romany heritage and the rising tension of her estrangement both grips and horrifies. Her outsider status is manipulated so comprehensively that her sanity becomes unhinged, isolated, desperate and times drugged, her captors undermine and fragment her tenuous hold on reality.

This enthralling film emphasizes the vulnerability of women in the pre war age, their dependence on social status for security and protection, without family and deprived of social connection whilst living in permanent anxiety with mental instability an inevitable outcome.