OK, "Disney" was sloppy, but there is for me a recycled quality to 
the making of lines in a Peruvian valley full of Nazca lines, or the 
making of stone circles in places no more uninhabited than the places 
where indigenous peoples continue to make stone circles. Like the 
indigenous circles they would be evocative even if they had no 
cultural associations (the indigenous circles are of course immersed 
in the associations of the cultures that produced them), but as it is 
they gain much of their power, it seems to me, by piggybacking on our 
awareness of indigenous traditions. And I think they give the artist 
a sense that he's entering into the mindstate of indigenous makers. 
That's the newage stuff, and it's almost certainly wrong: for the 
work to be other than a commentary or appropriation he'd have to 
transform himself in ways that I don't think are possible short of 
major brain trauma--one otherwise remains a member of one's own 
culture and gets no closer to the culture of the other than a 
reasonably accurate imagining. But hey, I get to imagine him 
arranging rocks in a place I wouldn't mind being. I'm not sure that 
his performance, or mine, qualifies as purity.

I hope he puts the rocks back where he found them when he finishes. 
Right, he's less destructive than a lot of other land artists, but 
our culture is pervasive enough without his marking some of the few 
spaces that are left.

When I was at Chaco Canyon a couple of teenage tourists were found 
making pictographs on the rocks in imitation of the pervasive Anasazi 
pictographs. The rangers had the good sense to make the kids scrub 
them off, which nonetheless removed the desert varnish that coated 
the rocks. The kids claimed that they were entering into union with 
the Anasazi. The evidence of their work will remain for a couple of 
thousand years.

Mark

At 06:54 AM 1/24/2006, you wrote:
><snip>
>The text pieces and the gallery pieces are wonderful. The outdoor
>sculpture strikes me as, what, neoneolithic? The disney version of
>say a stone circle in the west of Europe or a sun circle in
>Wyoming--more than a bit of newaginess to them. Or so it seems to me.
>The gallery pieces, on the other hand, take what he's learned from
>his elders and add a bit of himself to them. [MW]
><snip>
>
>I've followed RL, on and off, since 1972 or before. Consumerism and the
>issue of *taste* apart, *Disney* seems to me a matter of substitution and
>superimposition, not of finding and rearrangement, and is, I think, quite
>wrong. Long's smallness and discreetness is also quite different from the
>monumentalism of, say, Robert Smithson. Though that is Land Art too.
>
>The *new age* charge is more interesting, the point at which Arte Povera
>(Long was part of the 1968 Amalfi exhibition) and *new age* touch one
>another being roughly analogous to that at which cucina povera and
>macrobiotics also touch one another.
>
>In 1972 Long shared Anne Seymour's London exhibition with (unsurprisingly)
>Hamish Fulton and Barry Flanagan, but also with Gilbert & George; John
>Latham, Victor Burgin and Art & Language (Atkinson & Baldwin) amongst
>others. Three different approaches (at least) to the politics of looking,
>but with curious interconnections: Caro and St Martins (Long, Fulton,
>Flanagan, G & G); Foucault and Big Theory (Burgin and A & L); collaboration
>(G & G, A & L), putting the artist and *performance* in the work (Long,
>Fulton, G & G; Latham's work was also performative), using text (Long,
>Burgin, A & L, G & G) and treating the work as the epiphenomena of some
>ethical position (Long, Latham, G & G).
>
>I'm not sure how clear I'm being in saying all this. Long's work doesn't, I
>think, comprise Long's performance and/or the texts and/or the landworks
>and/or the gallery materials. Rather it exists (it's dematerialised in Lucy
>Lippard's term) in the tension between these and other elements. So the
>'wonderful' objects and texts are, in a way, beside the point. On the other
>hand, as epiphenomena, they reveal a practice of purity (performances
>carried out in isolated landscapes, *pure* because uninhabited; unmuddy mud
>applied to walls, the arrangement of cleaned up stones and so forth) that I
>find disquieting.
>
>But my hole is getting deeper. I shall stop.
>
>CW
>____________________________________________________________
>I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when
>nobody calls. (Thoreau)