![]() It’s a crass sense of sublime, perhaps more suited to a National Geographic coffee table book. It’s out of key, like an intervention from Caspar David Friedrich, man pitted against the ‘great outdoors’. As much as Long has resisted the legacy of Rousseau and the label of romanticism – preferring instead to align his practice with conceptualism, minimalism, arte povera – there is something uncomfortably romantic about this tent. In one, Antarctica Footprints, words are arranged in an uncharacteristically clumsy circle over a snow-coated landscape in another, A Camp on the Driscoll Glacier, Long’s red tent is shockingly included in the shot. This sober distance, however, gets lost upstairs, where photographs are displayed documenting Long’s 2012 trip to Antarctica. If we think of him at all, it is 10 steps back, sizing it up, already removed from the work. Viewing Four Ways, for example, a giant slate cross that dominates an entire floor, we hardly think of the artist (or even his assistants) labouring and sweating to ease these blocks of Cornish stone into position. ![]() ![]() There’s something recognisably Pollock-like about some of these spatters, but it’s difficult to imagine Long as the hardy action-hero painter. When Rose, an East Village tattoo artist, has a torrid encounter with Martin, a hardened loner, they discover they are unwitting pawns on opposing sides of a battle that has shaped the course of history. These texts share a room with two vast canvases covered in Cornish clay and Avon mud. Installation view: Richard Long at Lisson Gallery, London (23 May–12 July) Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery ![]()
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