In today's complex urban environment, taking a walk may involve a particular kind of tense alertness. Our sensory apparatus tends to shut down under stress unless, of course, we make a conscious effort to observe the visual spectacles around us or have the occasional luxury to take a stroll without the pressure of having to meet a schedule. For many, taking a walk is no more than an unconscious routine - like eating - a normal everyday activity, performed in a nearly automatic or involuntary manner. The typical urban/suburban dweller tends to bracket the visual environment in order to attend to the more expedient tasks of running an errand, crossing the street without getting hit by traffic, or avoiding potential hazards near parking lots, alleys, or construction sites. There is a distinctly detached attitude about routine walks taken amid a fabricated system of signs and buildings as compared with the experience of taking an isolated walk in a wilderness environment. It is the latter approach to walking which has been the source of Richard Long's art for two decades and the subject of his major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last fall.

Unlike the contrasting sensory conditions found in cities, the experience of walking on the plains of Bolivia or in the mountains of Central Nepal - two examples of the artist's many walks, taken at various locations around the world - may be characterized as less detached and more internalized. In removing himself from the numbing congestion of urban signs, Richard Long has established a completely different basis of intentionality as an artist working in close proximity to nature.

Although structured according to specific sites, places, distances and durations, the walks and markings made by Long appeal not only to an essential experience of the sublime but to another kind of language system where meaning is immediately transcribed according to the subjective referent of one's own consciousness. In the wilderness, there is little necessity for mediation in that the mind is not imposed upon the deconstruct messages that intervene between the rhythmic flow of memory and the external and subliminal projection of ideological referents. The engagement of one's own physicality and sense of biological time with nature through the act of self-propulsion as an ambulating intelligence in upright form attends directly to the intentionality of consciousness. The language of meaning is not deflected into narcissism but expanded through memory.

Long's walking projects began in 1967 while still a student at St. Martin's School of Art in London with a piece called "A Line Made By Walking." The work involved walking a straight line through a field of grass, thus marking the place of the walk in the process according to the traces of bent grass left by his footprints. While the structure of the walk was conceptually predetermined, the experience of the walk and the photodocumentary evidence which followed signified another type of subjective involvement with language other than a purely structural or scientific analysis of method and meaning. It was this poststructural emphasis upon subjectivity in relation to the physical and perceptual experience of the site that implied the necessary means to transcend all bifurcated systems of language in favor of a direct involvement with time, distance, and place.

As the recent Guggenheim retrospective has revealed, Long has maintained an indelible consistency in exploring these parameters of time, distance, and place. In one sense, all of Long's museum and gallery installations, his inscribed maps, his inventive typographies, and sumptuously framed photographs - usually, but not always in black and white - add up to a single work, a continuum based on the first walk made in 1967 where he intentionally chose these parameters as his artistic medium. His works revive a sense of awareness in terms of urban environment. It is as if Long is looking to regain some insight into those lost recesses of primordial consciousness as suggested by his ritualized circles and spirals, composed of stones, sticks, chalk, slate, and driftwood, often arranged on location at the site of a particular walk using indigenous materials.

Long will give considerable attention to the natural forces present in the physical world and to the rhythms and observations he makes in reference to these phenomena as indicated in his more recent typographical notations, such as "A 118 Mile Walk Under the Sky" (1980), in which he concentrates on one aspect of the environment: the quality of light piercing through the clouds. In Long's photographs of site-markings, such as "Avon Gorge Water Drawing, Bristol" (1983), or an earlier piece entitled "A Circle in Alaska, Bering Straight Driftwood on the Arctic Circle" (1977), Long insists on presenting us with the evidence of an on-site representation, a signifying distillation of the experience that invites the outsider to arbitrarily participate in a place. The photographs then are metaphors of place as well as records of the artist's act of rearrangement and order given to the place in a very fundamental way.

In addition to the framed documents, word-works, and photographs, Long also reconstructs natural artifacts within the context of museums. He thereby translates a feeling for another place outside the domain of art within it, which gives the institutional space an aura of meditative transformation, an arena of contemplation that allows configurations of stones and sticks to be perceived as signs. This view of poststructural reality does not attempt to reiterate the dialectical site/non-site juxtapositions of Robert Smithson. Rather, Long is attempting to establish within the institutional space a sense of subjective wholeness, an intentional reality of connectedness - that the physicality of self is commensurate with the physicality of nature. Along one section of the spiraling ramp at the Guggenheim, Long placed a line of red slate interrupted midway by a line of black slate. The impetus of the slate line spiraling down the ramp suggested walking - simply walking - as one observed the patterns of the slate in the course of the artist's reconstruction. There is a gestalt presence as the perceiving person clearly occupies the space of the work and thereby establishes a point of view that is in relation to the temporal act of perceiving. With Long, this act of perceiving through conscious ambulation has both epistemological and ontological dimensions. One might add that there is a teleological dimension as well. To walk is to become aware of one's consciousness in direct response to the natural environment, and by becoming aware of nature one may begin to de-acculturate signage and gradually to comprehend the real substance of design as the inner and outer relationship between those things that exist at the material foundation of culture.

This desire to transform is not located in the traditional romantic mode of perceiving; it is more about this artist's evolution through structuralist philosophy toward a seemingly reduced poststructural position. His documents and installations are not so much about a sensibility as they are about indexical connections with the sublime wilderness landscapes in which he walks. The markings, such as the series of "Avon River Mud Circles" which reveal the imprints of his own hand, are always induced according to the lexical presence of himself a corporeal intelligence within nature as opposed to the radical transformations imposed upon nature in the tradition of classicism. Paradoxically, Long's work is wedged somewhere between Minimal and Conceptual Art, for he gives us both the evidence and the idea.

- Robert C. Morgan