Richard Long: Textworks

Richard Long's textworks are quite hard to define as they only give you but a glimpse into his artistic intentions and like a six word story give you very little to work on, as they are intended to do so. You see a textwork is only supposed to give you brief outline that you fill the gaps yourself. Like for example his textwork "dry walk" only tells you that he walked 113 miles between two showers, something we don't really pay attention to on a journey since we always look forward to the destination and now without a destination we must imagine the journey. What I really like about this idea of interpretational text is the fact that it’s tailored to allow your own ideas to flow through so depending on the person’s point of view it could be a life-changing pilgrimage or a simple trek. Plus the fact that it mainly focuses on the smaller things about the journey you can make up your own locations, times, places, and reasons but still have memorably little moments that dot a long journey. And that is what is beautiful about a journey, not the main big parts but the small little observations and patterns that crop up that we remember the most as the textworks demonstrate. 

What’s quite interesting about his textwork is as it progresses over the years the words are arranged in different, weird, and creative ways to try to illustrate the journey in a more advanced way. For example, his textwork called “Beyond God” is constructed to resemble a mountain and its shadow relating to the text which is about a walk up a mountain and how intimidating it is to climb it, plus some philosophical references towards the existence of God, fate, and the natural order. What I don’t like about these written experiments is because you leave so much room for interpretation for the viewer it sometimes feels like a cheap way to be intellectual by just allowing your viewers to formulate their own conclusions about the text instead of actually constructing a piece of art with a clear meaning I have said I sort of praise this aspect but that’s the problem with it is that if gets way too out of hand your building messages and philosophical questions without even trying to be deep or meaningful. 

For example, “Giant Steps” is just him listing the locations that he visited on his journey which doesn’t even feel like he is trying to bring up any points and instead he is trying to make people over think to try to come up with some philosophical message. It seems both Richard Long and Martin Creed have the same problem of using too little to try to explain more than really what it is; a ball of paper, and a description of a journey. Maybe for my own artwork I should try to do what they did but add a little more meat to make it easier to chew for the audience.