Ummm, that went to the wrong list...
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From: Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Jan 23, 2006 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: Richard Long at SFMOMA
To: UB Poetics discussion group <[log in to unmask]>
the only visual artist i know is beverley carpenter
http://www.freewebs.com/cambourneartist/. she maintains a commitment
to text, having studied under George Szirtes at one stage, although
she usually brings in somebody else to do the text - see
http://www.beverleycarpenter.co.uk/htdocs/asylum.htm. She's well,
brilliant is just one of the words that springs to mind.
i recall having a heated conversation btn myself and her boyfriend
(another visual artist, Rob Long) about a display in the Fitzwilliam
of Lucien Freuds etchings. I got fixated on the labels Freud had given
his etchings. Freud did a series of etchings direct to copper plate,
quite impressive technically speaking, except that he'd decided to
give them labels (apparently, according to freud, art gallery curators
usually screw this bit up). The choice of text seemed to me to
indicate real problems with his work, apart from the overall machismo
of his technique. For example, one portrait was entitled "head of an
irishman" (this one was particularly problematic), he didn't label the
"famous" characters (I recognised a couple of these "famous" people,
but I suspect not many below the age of 40 would do), and one "a
woman" could have done without it as the portrait had a pleasing
androgynous quality. So, I says to Rob, "don't you have a problem with
the labels?" "What labels..."
in some respect, i wonder if both parties are blind to the others
concerns because that's the way they are... poets and writers tend to
see the world wholly through text (and memory to a large extent)
whereas artists see the world through images, the here and now (the
latter makes O'Hara very interesting). As poets, I think we maintain a
touching faith in the world of text and I think we're particularly
disturbed when we meet people who don't share it. I used to measure
people in terms of their book collections, towns in how many bookshops
they had. I got ahead because I read books, wrote essays. I remember
watching Beverley tear a book up. This act seemed to me to be
rebarbative and shocking, and the act continues to echo through my
work and practice. It was one of the factors that made me look at the
tidy nest of books I had hauled with me through my life, echoing my
fixations (http://www.badstep.net/image/collage/shelford/death-of-soldiers.jpg,
which is a collage of some of the books that i owned) and aspirations
(all those computer books), and deciding that I should be a little
less attached to them and how I viewed the world through them ...
Our practices met through collage
(http://www.badstep.net/image/collage/shelford/shelford.jpg). She was
worried, I think, when I dabbled in film
(http://www.badstep.net/image/moving/index.html) then, horror of
horrors, I started into representational art
(http://www.badstep.net/image/representational/long-road-autumn-2005/index.html).
For me, drawing represents a visceral sense of the here and and now, a
thinking directly in the now, with the body. Poetry seems to be more
about thought, memory, recovery, contemplation and semantics of text.
My sense so far is that poetry and art don't meet easily. See
http://sherbooke.livejournal.com/2006/01/21/ for example. (apologies
that this has turned into an advert for my amateur scratchings). Ummm.
A friend of mine in Cambridge, a poet, is a watercolourist. I'll have
to think on this. The thoughts aren't fully formed yet.
Actually, Richard Long reminds me of Lottie Glob, a danish sculptor
who settled in Durness in Scotland
(http://www.durness.org/Balnakeil%20Craft%20Village.htm). She goes off
for days or weeks into the mountains with nothing but some food and a
plastic bag, and deposits her sculptures in the mountains. None of her
work strikes me as being particularly literate. I don't know her
practise, but i'm willing to wager that she doesnt grok "the word"
either in such a big way. I almost met her, but she was out in the
hills somewhere...
Alison's comment about inter-disciplinary curiousity is interesting.
It's not that this has just happened. People - particularly visual
artists, have rubbed along without recourse to other disciplines quite
happily for a long time now as far as I can see. There's a whole
history of it. Read any biog of the major artists, look at photographs
of them in their studios, their homes. I think you'll search a long
time before you find evidence of books in those photos. Even more so,
evidence of the kind that Stephen seems to long for. I'm not saying it
doesn't happen, i just think it's rare.
The book isn't the only means of carrying knowledge in the world. In
fact, for Richard Long, it might be a drag on his work, it might
"poison" or "pollute" the way he looks at the world. I'm not saying
this is so, I'm just postulating the counter theory that reliance on
text isn't always good. Recourse to a literate history might be
counter-productive or "evil" putting it in more fashionable terms.
ahh, work calls...
Roger
On 1/22/06, Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yesterday I went to hear Richard Long (walker, sculptor & photographer)
> give a lecture and (extensive) slide show of his work, as well as to see the
> installation of his recent site specific Sierra mountain walk, including
> photographs, text and mudwall hand paintings at San Francisco's MOMA. Such
> lovely work, but a troubling human presence. Long is more of what I would
> call a "geomancer" than one interested in human relations within and about
> the variously global habitats of his long walk and camping visitations.
> (Most often there are no people visible at all). The actual work -
> photographs and texts, however, possess an extraordinary sense of precision,
> spatial relations and time. Indeed the work, as he admits, a form of earth
> science, one with roots in ancient origins and practice - whether for
> religious or other cosmological purposes of study.
> During the period of questions at the end of the talk, I threw him what was
> probably a "ringer": ³What kind of reading informs your work?²
> He looked puzzled, so I asked, in the long tradition of English walkers and
> writers, ³Like do your read Wordsworth?² I had no doubt that that would push
> a button!
> He reacted with the contempt that many mininamlist sculptors no doubt
> reserve for romantics.
> "No, I don't read Wordsworth." And then made mention that he was reading a
> popular detective writer.
> In the context of his recent 20 day walk in the Sierra along the Pacific
> Crest Trail, there was no indication he had read John Muir, Rexroth, Snyder
> or Whalen¹s work in those same mountains - which is, I suspect, must remain,
> at least a personal loss, though I do not how the reading of those writers
> might have shaped this recent work at all. (Well, if he actually read a
> history of the Donner Party - in reference to a slide of a circle of stones
> he built there - he would not have said the Party was merely "stranded
> there." It was not like those in the Party who either died or barely
> survived had just missed a bus!)
>
> When I did not budge from my question, or looked at him as if he were not
> being fully truthful, he allowed that had recently read a book on gravity
> and Newton.
>
> Which was right on his mark, his work. Long, I would saym is kind of
> scientist of ³the sublime,² though I am sure he does not frequently use that
> ³word² in his vocabulary. But much of the work is framed by classical
> formal elements (circle, line, time units) - in its precision and severity
> - incredibly beautiful, indeed. Sublime. (If I can be critically
> comparative, Long¹s work definitely sub-rates the crowd pleasing, Hallmark
> card aspects- and no where near the intelligence - of much of the work of
> Andy Goldsworthy).
>
> But it intrigues me how many artists in this case those in a minimalist
> tradition (Carl Andre, Judd, DeMaria, etc.) tend to avoid the literature
> about the spaces that their work inhabits. Not always. Smithson, for
> example, seems very conversant with the literature and history of, say, what
> occurred about the site of Spiral Jetty (intentionally siting it near the
> golden spike that connected the first transcontinental railroad.)
>
> Unfortunately I did not get to ask Richard Long if he even reads Thomas A.
> Clark - the Scottish poet who also examines remote landscapes in an also
> rigorous fashion - though, different from Long, Clark is much more
> interested in the human implication of what he discovers on his walks. Long,
> by the way, is quite insistent that his text pieces not be confused with
> poems. The words he considers as "objects", not different than individual
> stones or other natural items, and shape in which the are printed on the
> paper correspond to shape of the walk or some aspect of the terrain. The
> elegant portrayal of evidence - the printed works.
>
> In fariness, I guess we can also count multiples the number of writers who
> have no literacy around the visual! It's probably the sad irony of so many
> art programs in the way they exclude literature study from their
> requirements, and, reciprocally, the way creative writing programs remain
> blind to visual literature, let alone the history of music, avant garde
> innovation, etc. Whatever writers, artists or composers discover beyond the
> frames of their discipline, I suspect is left to do it on their own. I
> suspect, or imagine the multi-disciplinary character of computer technology
> is rapidly altering the situation (tho I personally do not know if the
> 'pedagogy' is keeping up with these changes at all. )
>
> Oh well, similar to scientists and surgeons, there is nothing to expect in
> Long's work to suspect him to be an expert in human or social relations
> (spatial relations, yes) He likes being out there long, and often alone.
> Yet, one must applaud the counter-imperial, non-monumental, ephemeral
> character of the work - Long clearly means no natural harm - and only brings
> home primarily the visual record and analysis of what he has temporarily
> built, discovered and witnessed with camera and journal.
> No small achievement. Paradoxically - for the space of an exhibit, or in the
> presence of many of his books - the evidence is touchingly, not only
> beautiful, but large and instructive.
>
> Stephen Vincent
> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> New blog site / same archives!
>
--
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
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