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September 15, 2004
Art made by walking
Richard Long’s walks and GPS Drawing.
The GPS Drawing Six Spirals is nice enough, but compare it to Long’s lovely Walking with the River’s Roar or austere Mind Rock.
Contrast Long’s careful statement about walking, recording, and self-awareness…:
Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking—as art—provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.
…with the GPS Project’s parallel statment:
The drawings are of journeys captured using GPS receivers. They were created by treating travel like a geodetic pencil or a cartographic crayon. The drawing takes place as and when one is being recorded by the satellite technology. The work considers our journeys, from or approaches and treatments of them to their functions and significance to us.
Long’s respect for the walking, and the traces left, are missing from the GPS Drawings’ statement, in which journeys are “captured”, and the drawing “takes place” in this awful, passive-voice way. Far from considering journeys’ function or significance, most of these are aimless.
Posted by Andrew at September 15, 2004 02:03 PM
Comments
this was a nice read. i didn’t realize you were a fan of long.
Posted by: heather at September 16, 2004 11:30 AM