Richard Long uncovers the experience of vast, open landscape buried beneath the foundation of sculpture and all human construction.

I have never visited the caves at Lascaux. Perhaps I still live in them. In the late sixties, when Richard Long walked into the landscape, he turned the studios of his contemporaries into caves. The route out of modernism went through prehistory.

Long left practically everything behind. But to assume from this that he was oblivious to the concerns of the modern sculptural horde is to assume too much. When he walked off, he did so with the latter's problems. The horde, or at least the St. Martin's School-London, end of it, had decreed in favor of Anthony Caro, then a teacher at the School where Long was a student. Caro had apparently broken down any distinction between the space of a sculpture; as in what it delimits and the ordinary physical space; or the three-dimensional world of perception, of nature as perceived. By making his sculptures as open as possible to the human body and not just the eye, Caro got rid of boundaries, of sculpture as a boundary-making machine. Instead, the various pre-fabricated, steel elements of a work articulate the plain man's space (a room, usually) from which the sculptural space is indistinguishable because perfectly continuous with it.

Whether it was Caro in particular who influenced Long is immaterial. Such notions were in the air and Long had no time for them. Sculptural space was thought to be soluble in nature because the spaces of art and nature were assumed to be identical to each other, i.e., co-extensive. But this assumption meant that the priority of nature, the fact that art is always made within it, got buried, had to get buried.

Long's sculpture marks, in contrast, a strictly relative discontinuity between nature and art. A straight lines and circles are abstract human forms. They can tell us nothing about the places where Long makes them. What can a circle of stones, say, the early "Circle in the Andes" (1972), convey about the Andes other than that it (the circle) was made in the Andes? The boundaries Long draws are of a particular sort: they're no use. Nature cannot be kept out for the simple reason that any human space is always in a larger natural one; being the space of physical nature. Long uncovers an experience - of the vastness of open landscape - buried beneath the foundations of all sculpture and indeed of all human construction. Man attempts to close off a space for himself, to set up boundaries, to fill the world with his gods. Long's control shows in his refusal to let the movement towards marking off a human space lead to ay such closed place. He refuses to let sculptural space bury, as it generally does, the space of its own formation, born in nature, in the terror of it. There is such a thing as a sculptural space, alright, but delimited within the larger natural space so never absolutely distinct from the latter.

"Touareg Circle" was made earlier this year in the Sahara. The bare area where a human (or a goat) could stand within the circle, being open to the surrounding space, is part of it, flooded by it. But it is also an area on the verge of being delimited. So a two-fold movement takes place. The circle begins to draw the viewer and the Saharan landscape into itself but the process of concentration stops short. The isolation of the stones at the center of the circle only serves to underline that they are not isolated in the least but continuous with the stone-strewn landscape which means that the circle is as well. Reversing direction, the drive to close off a space leads to the very opposite, to an intense awareness of the openness of the circle to the place of which it is a tiny part. We’re in nature and there is no way out. The desire to somehow concentrate the scene within, or order it around the circle is related to that other desire, to close off a human space. Integration in nature - the religious impulse - and an independence from nature, with, in the circle, among the community, along the line, are age old dreams with one root: the fear of nature.

Long's sculptures are never about nature, but are human articulations in it, an account not of nature but of man's relation to it. His use of simple, abstract forms implies an equivalence between the archaic closing off of a space and abstract art's floating free of things. The latter's confidence in its own autonomy finds an echo in prehistoric art, it too driven by abstraction, by a desire to find a realm of beings, animal and divine, outside the menacing confusion of nature. The drawings at Lascaux are a flight from nature, not some attempt to represent it. Pushed by Long, modern abstraction in sculpture stumbles over its own absolute confidence - that art can at last be made immanent to, at one with, nature. Stumbling, it falls back into prehistory. The hopeless attempt to integrate abstract sculptural space within nature is a variant of the archaic need to saturate the world with religious forces. Long doesn't let his abstract forms get out of the world and into their caves. His art is not prehistoric. He walks the moment before. Ancient fears and realities are bearable, thanks to our conditions of life, for the first time.

His exhibition this autumn at Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London, namely of works photographed on a trip in the Sahara, showed sculptures related more directly and systematically than heretofore to a dominant feature of the environment. "Sahara Circle" (1988) is not the only circle around. The rock up ahead has a sloping circular base. Is the sculpture some sort of homage to the rock? Or is the homage the rock might inspire in any case simply what the sculpture captures? The rock soars heavenwards while the stone circle is, as always in Long, flat and earthbound. Strange homage. It is as if the circle bows so low that it disappears, thereby revealing its own nature, that it is in the open space, around, inseparable, while still discontinuous to a degree. An open space in which the rock is just another circle, earthbound as well. The magical circle of concentration drawing the viewer to the rock turns out to have two ingredients: the human desire to close off a space from nature and the human desire to transcend nature. The work holds both desires within its circle which nature transcends. The walks and word pieces are, like the sculptures, open to where they are while never being purely an articulation of the landscape. When they take their shapes from nature they do so to a limited extent. "A Five Day Walk" (England 1908), may be a walk to Bristol but that does not mean that Bristol is the end to which the walk is a means. The end of the walk is the walk in its entirety, the way in which it gives a controlled and regular shape - each day, ten miles - to the distance between Totnes and Bristol. Setting the shape of the walk by means of a rudimentary arithmetical operation, dividing fifty miles by five, doesn't subordinate the walk to its fifty-miles-away end point, but instead absorbs the latter into the walk's pattern. This absorption is effected by what the pattern re-activates: an unmotivated, purely conventional element (Why tens? Why miles?) in our ways of counting and measuring without which it would make no sense to say that Bristol is fifty miles away. The walks have an element of calculation or human ordering about them which is independent of the contours and vegetation of the land, at one remove from them while still in them. Sometimes this can only be seen on paper, not in the actual shape of the walk itself. "A Hundred Tors in a Hundred Hours" (1976) was presumably a highly irregular walk as Long went from one tor to the next, each one located wherever there is an elevation in the area. This contrasts with the text's five, neat lists of twenty tors apiece. The incantory similarity of the names would appear to infect the tors with the arbitrariness involved in Long's ordering of the walk. Being nothing but one hundred names on the page, they get reduced to the numbers from one to a hundred. Long maps the lost religious order of which the tors are archeological remains onto numerical order on the page in an attempt to recuperate imaginatively the religion's ordering impulse. At the root of a particular, unknown, ordering system he locates a pure will to order, the tor maker's cognitive blank before the immensity of nature, a blank which their religion fills.

in "Crossing Stones" (1987) the two main lines run side by side unlike the walk they record. Not only is the direction of the second line the opposite of what it would be were the return walk's reversal of direction to be represented not just recorded. The same is true of the first line which moves map-like from west to east on the page while plotting a walk in the opposite direction, from east to west. But it is the second line which has got it right, though only thanks to the rules of writing and map reading, which could as easily have gone the other way. if both sets of rules were reversed so that we wrote from right to left and went in pursuit of the east on the left side of our maps, the second line, conforming to the new regime, would still be in the clear, inching leftwards now towards the east. If just one of the two sets of rules were reversed, then it would be the turn of the first line to enter its own and represent the direction of the walk it records.

Whichever of these options we choose one of the two lines appears to be in trouble by misrepresenting its walk. The only way out of the impasse is through a loss of direction. Paradoxically neither the outward nor return walks have direction, which is to say that they are one and the same walk, "A 626 Mile Walk in 20 days?" How so? Imagine a landscape as blank as an unspoilt page. A straight line in a void has two ends but nothing whatsoever differentiates them. Being identical, there is no difference between walking from one end to the other or vice versa. Direction - not just the notion, also the fact of it - vanishes once there is nothing external to the line, no version of the sun, by which to establish bearings. The walked line's lack of direction is the correlate of the blank around it. The two define each other: without the line's indirection there would be no perception of a blank and vice versa. nature is blanker than any page which has edges for coordinates.

But Long uses maps, and a compass probably, to move through a landscape any feature of which suffices to establish a direction towards which or away from which he walks. And when he gets to Aberystwyth Beach he knows it isn't Aldeburgh Beach. So where is this blank he is supposed to be in? The two beaches cannot in fact differentiate the ends of the line walked from ach other for the line is undifferentiated from end to end. To be at the Aldeburgh end is to be at the Aberystwyth end: it is the beaches, not the ends, which differ. The line floats free of external coordinates, those mountain ranges, beaches, or groups of trees, by defining itself as in a void, i.e., as a line without direction so without coordinates.

The more invisible the walks, the further Long travels through things. Where no trace remains, often because there were no foot marks to begin with, the walks, recorded only on paper, gain in power by being so tenuous. it is as if the more insubstantial they are, the less divides them from nature. But then the plainer it becomes how distinct they are from nature which knows nothing of abstract ideas, of sculptors, or of men. For the more insubstantial a walk, the more obviously abstract is the idea which it embodies. Between the two poles, nature (in the physical sense) and abstraction, lies the gulf in which that work will disappear (not merge with anything, disappear) if it hasn't done so already. Long's sculptures are boundaries closing off nothing. Of what lies beyond and within, they can tell us nothing. But they do tell us at least that they can tell us nothing. Nature is outside, inside, quite beyond them. The sculptures made indoors know no doors. "Stone Line" (Sydney, 1977) galvanizes the room by making it resonate with the line's quasi-religious presence, an altar in church to which all glances are drawn. The sacralization of space, turning the gallery into a sealed-off place, is only momentary. The intensity of the stone line dissolves; the stones have no inner meaning and are seen for what they are, atoms of the surface of the earth, unshaped by human hands. So the gallery, first flooded by the cultic aura of the line, turns into one place on the surface of the earth which knows no cult at all.

So often with Long, wonder results rather than bafflement which needs complexities to get going. The power of any work appears to be wholly contained within the place where it was made. But this very insistence on the irreducibly empirical conditions for sculpture - the works are particular formations in particular places to which they are in part reactions - serves to mask the systematic idea or vision which informs them all, namely that the space of nature and that of art cannot be equivalent, that art or culture, if you will, always happens within nature, in part as a human reaction to it. The repetition of basic forms is an expression of a unity in the idea. But this idea is no empty generality: it is only in so far as it finds concrete embodiments in works in particular places that it can justify itself, indeed, have any content. The works all repeat the same idea but difference lives off this repetition in that the repeated idea's insistence on the site specificity of any sculptural space, if it is open to the larger natural space within which it is set, implies that a radically different work is possible in every new location. Long's vision is for all that a vision of its own limits, that it knows nothing anywhere.

Long walks a thin, needle thin, path between the Scylla of identification with nature, through religion, Zen mysticism or psychosis, and the Charybdis of absorption into circumscribed spaces which hide their insertion in nature, the spaces of the every day human world. Psychotic delirium is never far away. His journey over the earth's surface depositing one of his two signatures - line or circle - wherever he goes has all the marks of a delirious ceremony where he takes possession of countless places previously untouched by a human imprint. The mark he makes would appear to turn a landscape into part of himself and transfer to him that place's density, its reality. Psychoses often exhibit such symbolic acts of possession and a breakdown of the ego/other and ego/world distinctions leading to identifications with other people, places, nature and so on. Long's art is in fact an anti-psychosis because it asserts the impossibility of ever possessing or being at one with nature. Psychoses, religions, mysticism, all have the same origin, man's refusal of the fact that nature transcends him. The circles, walks, etc., defuse the desire to close off a space or to make human space co-terminus with the realm of nature. It is the viewer who has psychotic impulses if he or she sees Long that way.

So what is all this talk of "nature," of a systematic distinction between different sorts of space, for example, "natural" versus sculptural or human space? The claim made above that "art of culture, if you will, always happens within nature, as in part a human reaction to it," what sort of claim is that? The problem is that if these terms have meaning and the claims of Long's art are true, then they invalidate it. For they are cognitive claims, albeit of a watered down sort and Long's art has nothing to do with cognition. He knows nothing, walking the moment before knowing begins. There is something - it may be nothing - within which human knowledge is no more substantial than a straight line walked or dreamt. But my terms and claims are the coordinates of a map which, like all the other maps, must be left behind to walk out into the open.

- Conor Joyce