Date: 02-07-1991
Owning Institution: Hayward Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

Dry Walk is exemplary Richard Long, simple verging on banal, just 17 printed words on a large framed sheet of immaculate white paper: ''Dry Walk / 113 walking miles / Between one shower and the next.'' Well, it's an alternative to Wimbledon. Long's work has a take-it-or-leave-it quality. Devotees may value Dry Walk as a haiku-like distillation of man's relationship with the natural world. The more cynical may prefer to regard it as failed poetry aggrandised by context.

The context is ''Richard Long'' at the Hayward Gallery, a large exhibition which provides the closest thing yet to an Ordanance Survey map of his art. Long was awarded the Turner Prize the year before last but did not pick it up in person because, it was said, he was otherwise engaged ''in the landscape''. Absenteeism is an important aspect of his work. He assiduously seeks to suppress all traces of personality in his art.

Long's text pieces can document actions or places or simply provide rudimentary lists of sensory experiences, while his sculptures, whether made in the art gallery or transplanted there from far-flung locations in the form of photographs, employ archetypally basic structures. He occasionally leaves fingerprints - notably in the large, concentric circles left by his own, mud-dipped hand on the wall of the Hayward - but rarely provides clues to his state of mind.

A carpet of flints; a circle of slates; a circle of peat slabs: the builder who wrote to The Independent re-cently, complaining that he couldn't tell the difference between a Richard Long and his own crazy paving, had a point but missed the main one. Of course he could make something virtually indistinguishable from a Long floor piece (although it would not be a piece of crazy paving), but it is important to Long that this should be so. Because the experiences Long documents and the actions he performs are so basic, so devoid of intricate craftsmanship, this enhances the artist's status as a self-styled Everyman.

A Richard Long is a still moment, a silence made into a thing; a momentary point of exit for those living the busy lives of the busy late twentieth century, who would probably never attempt to do the things that Long does but are glad, nevertheless, for the evidence that someone is doing them. Long's sense of ritual simplicity places him within the primitivist tradition of modern art. It reads as a rebuke of sorts to the devel-oped world.

Long's work operates effectively in large mixed shows because it acts as a soothing counterpoint to the terrible white noise of most contemporary art. In some ways it is less successful when it only has itself for company. The circles and lines begin to look like trademarks; the words, reiterating their hushed, mantra-like lists, become a stream of consciousness that runs and runs until it swamps you in a feeling of ennui.

Long is among other things a superb design and layout man, but at the Hayward he has made a show that feels cramped. At least this has the virtue of suggesting another dimension to his art, by making it seem unusually pent-up. It serves as a reminder that Long is not just the calm, back-to-nature type he is so often cracked up to be, not just a survivor from the late 1960s, the era when Stonehenge and ley lines and all things mystico-natural came into their own. He is also an iconoclastic and, occasionally, violent modern artist.

Take Carrara Marble Line, which on first inspection is another of his hymns to the beauty of natural stuff: God knows how many chunks of floored rock arranged in a rectangular format. But then consider the stuff in question: not just marble, but Carrara marble, the very substance of classical statuary. It is worth remembering that Long, as a student at St Martin's School of Art in the late 1960s, was a member of a generation of young artists there to inherit Anthony Caro's subversions of sculptural form - no more plinths, for one thing, no more Henry Moores on pedestals - and, reacting in turn against Caro, to proceed still further with the dismantling of traditional sculpture. Long's marble fragments amount to an anti-sculpture, sculpture so cracked and broken that it can hardly be described as sculpture.

Long's iconoclasm states a preference for the unformed that goes to the heart of what he does. Long values nature over culture, but is condemned to the recognition of his own, paradoxical position as an artist, a maker of cultural objects. He does so by making sculptures that enact their own destruction: whether liter-ally, as in the case of works that he makes outside, and then leaves to the mercy of the elements; or meta-phorically, as in the case of Carrara Marble Line, which is a sculpture made in the likeness of a destroyed sculpture. Long dreams of making art that approaches so closely to nature that it will cease to be art at all. His violence signifies this; it also suggests that there is a point beyond which his work cannot develop.

Hamish Fulton was a contemporary of Richard Long's at St Martin's and, like Long, bases all his art on walks on the wild side. Their work has, at times, seemed so similar that cynics have doubted separate au-thorship: maybe they were, in fact, just one artist, called Hamish Long perhaps, cunningly operating under two synonyms. ''Hamish Fulton'', at the Serpentine, proves that differences may be established.

''Art that brings natural objects into city galleries is against nature,'' Fulton has said. He is more of a pur-ist than Long, and at the Serpentine, where virtually all he offers is a series of exceptionally clipped word pieces, his philosophy of non-interference is evident throughout. Fulton's work, consisting of the meagre verbal residue of experience, frequently leaves you pondering the disparity between preparatory labour and eventual result: a list of place names stencilled on the gallery wall comes with the information that this is the product of a 21-day, 604-mile walking journey.

Fulton's resolute refusal to embroider the bare essentials causes him major problems. He tries to give a sense of consequence, of momentousness, to his slender next-to-nothings with neat typography Letraset on billboard scale, but these look like desperate measures. And although Fulton insists that the walk is always necessary to the work, there is nothing in the work itself to substantiate this (he might as well drive, for all the difference it would make). This is an art whose justification is monastic self-restraint but whose effect is one of extreme taciturnity. This can be a handicap when you are engaged in an activity whose entire point is communication.

The Boyle Family, who are showing new work at the Runkel-Hue-Williams Gallery, demonstrate that al-though objections can be made to the art of Long or Fulton they are better not phrased as objections to a lack of craft. The Boyles take small, picture-sized scraps of urban land and replicate them in fibreglass; the results are framed and displayed as quasi-paintings. There is lots of craft here, and the pieces in their new exhibition do have you wondering quite how they manage to recreate charred wood, sodden gravel and old pieces of car tyre quite so deceptively. But after the initial how-do-they-do-it? curiosity, their work is almost completely without interest.

The usual (suspect) justification offered for the Boyles is that they prove the continuing vitality of certain once- radical notions about randomness as a creative principle: in the late 1960s Mr and Mrs Boyle got 1,000 people to throw 1,000 darts at a map of the world and - joined, subsequently, by their children - they have been making art out of chance targets ever since. In fact, they are even more dated than this would suggest, since their work exhibits nothing more than the peculiar survival of the late eighteenth-century cult of the picturesque, with its preference for the rotten, the distressed, the derelict milieu. Craft cannot compensate for the absence of anything interesting to say.