Richard Long

Art

Richard Long, Heaven and Earth, at the Tate Britain, 3 June – 6 September 2009

September 10, 2014Giselle Barcia

A curious map hangs in the second room of Heaven and Earth, the new Richard Long exhibit at the Tate Britain in London, which opened on June 3. From afar, the map of Dartmoor Forest in southwest England resembles strategic battle map, with four concentric circles drawn atop a specific area, perhaps suggesting a target. The map, however, exists as a simple record, a history, of a walk Richard Long took thirty-seven years ago. “A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles, England, 1972,” the caption reads. Each of the circles on the map represents Long’s self-imposed paths for his walk and do not necessarily symbolize dominion.

New York Arts in Australia

The Kaldor Family Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

July 3, 2011Alan Miller

What does a landlocked museum do when thirty-five million dollars worth of contemporary art, much of it larger than a bread box, falls into its lap? Such was the happy conundrum of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which has just unveiled the John Kaldor Family Collection to the public. If I call the Gallery’s architectural solution the institutional equivalent of refurbing the basement of a Boston three decker to house returning in-laws, then I mean that as high praise of the Gallery’s willingness to make the most of what they have. The AGNSW’s situation, surrounded by inviolable parkland and very much heritage listed, has required an economical use of space in its subsequent expansions, which trade big architectural gestures for a seamless flow between old and new. The Kaldor Collection is now housed in former storage space on the third basement level, now renovated by architect Andrew Andersons, designer of the Bicentennial wing in which it sits, to open up 3300 square meters of new gallery space, essentially an additional floor. Though the Kaldor Collection leaves the Gallery’s appearance unchanged, the sudden materialization of arguably the greatest collection of contemporary art in Australia will certainly change the institution for good.

Art

Richard Long, Stone Cross. Photo Michael Miller.

Richard Long – Walking and Marking – National Galleries of Scotland 30th June to 21st October 2007 – Part III of a series (Edinburgh Walks)

December 1, 2007Michael Miller

Setting off alone along the now familiar route down Henderson Row past a silent Academy, now in break, I savored a sense of purposefulness and anticipated my visit to the Richard Long show at the NGS Modern Galleries, their major exhibition of the year, open for the Festival, and an important one for Long as well. He hasn’t had an exhibition of this size in Britain in over fifteen years. I also relished another walk along the Water of Leith. Crossing unnecessarily over to elegant and brightly sunlit Dean Terrace, I crossed back at the bridge and descended into the path just before St. Bernard’s Well, a sulfurous source discovered in the mid-eighteenth century and decorously enclosed in a pump house designed by Alexander Naismyth, following the circular design of the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, a favorite destination on the Grand Tour. A statue of Hygieia stands within ten Tuscan columns, a sober northern interpretation of the original’s Corinthian order.

Art

Alex Hartley, John Stezaker, William Blake: A Stroll through Some Edinburgh Galleries – Part II of a Series, Edinburgh Walks

November 30, 2007Michael Miller

Richard Long has observed that the best and safest way to cross Dartmoor is to walk in a straight line, but in the city things are rarely so simple. Long’s important exhibition at The National Gallery of Modern Art was postponed to another day, and I shall postpone it to a review of its own, while I follow our ramblings southwards towards the Old City, seeking out addresses my friend had given me. As sophisticated and rational as Edinburgh may be, at least the New Town, certain prospects encourage one to think of it as a city of the earth. It is mostly built of stone, after all, as neatly chiselled as it may be. As you turn the corner around the façade of the new Parliament, Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano, appears ready to swallow it up...or is that only wishful thinking? The classical structures on Calton Hill, stone-built as they are, only draw attention to the chthonic presence of the eminence on which they stand. (Like Rome, Edinburgh has seven hills: Calton Hill, Castle Hill, Corstorphine Hill, Craiglockhart Hill, Braid Hills, Blackford Hill, Arthur’s Seat.) This theme, moreover, had its way of cropping up, not only in Richard Long, but in other exhibitions as well.

New York Arts in Edinburgh

Edinburgh Walks – Part I of a Series

November 30, 2007Michael Miller

One of the most astonishing passages in Homer is the simile in Book XV of the Iliad, which describes the rapidity of Hera's flight to Olympus (Il. XV, 79ff.): but went back to tall Olympos from the mountains of Ida As the thought flashes in the mind of a man who, traversing much territory, thinks of things in the mind’s awareness, ‘I wish I were this place, or this’, and imagines many things; so rapidly in her eagerness winged Hera, a goddess. —trans. Richmond Lattimore

New York Arts in Edinburgh

Alfred G Buckham, Aerial view of Edinburgh about 1920, gelatin silver print.

Edinburgh Walks – Part I of a Series

November 30, 2007Michael Miller

One of the most astonishing passages in Homer is the simile in Book XV of the Iliad, which describes the rapidity of Hera's flight to Olympus (Il. XV, 79ff.)...