Richard Long: naturist

What is all this excitement about Richard Long’s retro at Tate Britain? The reviews were so favourable that he got an 8 in the Guardian’s review roundup. Is this deserved? No. (Only Rachel Cooke of the Observer didn’t like what she saw, and all praise to her.)

Richard Long is a naïf. He goes on long walks, and records where he went. He takes a short walk up and down, wears away a patch of ground, and photographs it. He picks up stones, puts them into simplistic patterns, and photographs them. Soon nature will take away his artwork.

He is the Ranulph Fiennes of the art world. Or rather, he’s the Ben Fogle of the art world.

He picks up stones and gets people to carry them to Tate Britain, and put them on the floor. These are his only actual sculptures. All the rest is photographs.

Long is not a ‘land artist’, he is an enthusiast with a camera.

And a maker of lists. Boring, forgettable, naïf lists of place names and weather conditions. In his early works, his framed lists of places visited, and the funny maps, also framed, have the titles written in by hand, with little pencil guide-lines (not rubbed out) done with a ruler. It’s like a child doing homework.

When he gets well known, this childish naiveté disappears. And then the little lines inexplicably reappear in 2006. It’s forced naiveté.

His 1960s photos are competent – but most of us can take a picture of a famous mountain – with our own tramping up and down visible in the foreground.

And then Richard Long tries to think. We get this:

Richard starts things off, but (he says) “Nature makes the rest – revealing the cosmic nature of the microscale.”

This is embarrassing. Small things are big things, really. That has been a cliché of modern thought ever since someone first looked down a microscope. Galileo, 1625, for example.

Then look at some of his recent photos, of Dartmoor, say. They have clearly been Photoshopped. So what happened to ‘nature making the rest’?

You can always trust nature – until you put her into Photoshop!

The new works for Tate B. are on the walls. These are mud works, or when not mud, liquid Cornish clay. There are finger marks everywhere. The last time Monsieur Apache saw anything like this, it was finger-painting from a children’s nursery.

Is Richard Long popular because he fits into an apolitical zeitgeist, in which people look to art for consolation and reassurance? Or popular for the Gaia idea that everything will grow back, so it’s all right really? That we can make our mark on the world, but only a tiny one, which nature – or the sea, or the growing grass – will soon wipe away? (And we wipe away our own little tears as this happens.)

Whereas the great issue of our day – and of the past 250 years – has been the way we have ripped goodness from the earth, and whether we can go on doing so.

It is a Prince Charles view of the world: safe, sentimental, unreal. But Long – like Charles – shows a ruthless commitment to his own limitations.

Being sentimental about “the land” is regressive. Giving Long a good review is regressive.

Richard Long is from Bristol. The only good artist from Bristol is Banksy!