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Walk this way to qualify as an artist If you’re a student of popular songs, as I am, you’ll have noticed how many mention walking as the refuge of the unloved. Songs like ‘Walk on by’, ‘These boots were made for walking’, ‘You’ll never walk alone’ portray reliance on Shanks’s pony as for saddoes. The assumption is that as soon as the walker has walked back to happiness with whoever, he or she will happily give up. This could explain the loopy logic behind a set of beliefs that has gained general currency in the art world. The argument goes something like this - walking is for loners, artists are loners, therefore artists are walkers and walking is art - and it has made the reputations of Rambling Richard Long and his St Martin’s sidekick Hamish ‘No walk, no work’ Fulton, with their rag-tag retinue of camp followers, movement artists and expeditionaries. Long is now officially 'one of the great figures of contemporary artî. It has been a long hike from St Martin’s to his present eminence, taking him back and forth across the world from Nepal to Patagonia and Oregon to the Sahara, with major milestones - the Venice Biennale (1976) and the Turner Prize (1991) - along the way. Now, several thousand miles and 150 exhibitions later, it has brought him to Edinburgh where the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is honouring him with a retrospective, Walking and Marking. (The person who chose the title obviously doesn’t own a dog.) It was while still a student at St Martin’s in the late 1960s that Long realised that walking could be more than 'a means of getting from one place to anotherî. He had his eureka moment in a field in Wiltshire, where by pacing back and forth he flattened the grass, creating a line preserved for posterity in a photograph currently on display at Tate Britain. Ever since then, he has felt compelled to leave marks of his passing in the landscape. Where lesser folk drop crisp packets or fag ends, Long leaves behind rocks or sticks laid in straight lines or circles, to be reabsorbed by nature 'as metaphors for its transience and mutabilityî. Apparently he finds insufficient evidence of transience and mutability in nature herself. Like most walkers, Long also brings stuff home. Unlike most of us, though, it isn’t the odd pebble in his pocket; it’s bloody great rocks for which he has to return with a truck. These he arranges in scaled-up show-and-tell exhibits as reminders, to gallery-goers in danger of forgetting, of 'man’s relationship with the landscapeî. To rub that relationship in he also uses mud, which for this exhibition he has dredged from the Firth of Forth. 'Mud is a simple, direct, natural materialî, the SNGMA informs us, 'like water, stones or dust. It is the product of the continual flow of water over millennia, caused by the pull of the lunar tides; it speaks of the natural world and the passing of time.î The fact that when the exhibition opened it spoke of ruined three-piece suites, rocketing insurance costs and unsaleable properties on flood plains was just bad timing. Even an artist with a deep affinity with nature can’t be expected to predict the weather. Why does Long annoy me? He’s perfectly harmless, and his stone circles and mud drawings are perfectly attractive to look at. The problem, for me, lies in his insistence that the experience of the walk constitutes the art, with its suggestion that his experience, as an artist, is somehow superior to that of other walkers. OK, I can see how a solitary artist might lay claim to a deeper, even more ‘spiritual’ communion with nature than a family out on a Sunday afternoon stroll. But wouldn’t the same be true of any lone professional walker, for example – since we’re in Scotland – a gamekeeper? Beside a gamekeeper, Long starts to look like a phoney. A gamekeeper can look at a patch of flattened grass and say what animal occupied it and when; all Long can do is flatten a patch of grass and photograph it to say ‘I woz here’. Leaving aside the question of blood sports, it’s bleeding obvious which of the two has the closer relationship with nature. But does that make the gamekeeper an artist? No. To be a ‘walking artist’, it’s not enough to walk the walk. You have to talk the talk, and the talk is the sort of bollocks that would stick in the craw of any countryman. For those unversed in the genre, here’s an excerpt from Hamish Fulton’s 1999 exhibition in Japan recording seven one-day walks on a sacred hill in Kyushu. (Fulton is not just a master of pedestrobollocks, he’s a wizard with magic numbers who is forever counting things – days, miles, rocks - in a meaningful way.) ‘WALKING IS THE CONSTANT THE ART MEDIUM IS THE VARIABLE./QUESTION: IS, 'THE WALK' - REALLY - THE ART?/ANSWER: 'THE WALK' - CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS AN 'ARTFORM'/ANSWER: BUT, LIKE 'AN ARTOBJECT'/ANSWER: A WALK CANNOT BE SOLD/MY ARTWORKS EQUAL CONTROL/MY WALKS EQUAL FREEDOM./IT IS A FACT, NOT AN OPINION -/THAT THIS RIVER IS FAST DEEP AND COLD./CRASHING WAVES, BAREFEET, RED PETALS A NECKLACE OF SHELLSEE. LOST TO THE STARS. SLOWNESS.’ Fulton’s portentous staccato phrases are oddly reminiscent of Gordon Brown, but even when delivered in the PM’s accent they make as little sense as the collected writings of Pete Doherty. In the old days when poets wandered lonely as clouds and travel writers confined their observations to slim volumes with snappy titles like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, we knew where we were. Now we’re terminally lost, and have to be oriented with the help of artists’ maps and photographs (which help the artist too as, unlike the walks, they can be sold). These visual records, with their attendant mud-splashings and stone-circlings, are the means by which the rest of us are meant to share the benefits of the walking artist’s special relationship with nature. But what special relationship? Fulton boasts of having covered 12,000 miles on five continents, but the miles he has flown to get there are the only things he hasn’t counted. If he cared a hoot about his relationship with nature, would he be jetting around the globe notching up air miles like there was no tomorrow? No, he’d walk. It’s always hard to swallow the sight of artists doing the same as everyone else while claiming to be doing it differently and better. Taking a line for a walk is one thing; taking a walk and spinning a line is another. Claims that these artists are ‘distilling’ their experience are plainly bunkum, since as any Scottish bairn-in-arms can tell you, distilling means making something stronger. Between 30 minutes spent in a white-walled gallery with a few nicely arranged stones and mud-dipped pages and 30 seconds spent on the nearest hill, which is the more concentrated experience? As for the doggy compulsion to leave marks, it smells suspiciously of territorialism. Surely being in the country is intervention enough? Experiencing nature as art - if that’s what you want to call it - is open to everyone, and anyone who says different can take a hike. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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