Richard Long ()


Longs work makes obvious breaks with traditional concepts of the artwork. Longs walking practise in particular occupies an ambiguous site between, event, idea, and documentation.
We will start our discussion of the ‘artwork’ of his walking practise with a discussion of Idea. The walking practises often contain a clear idea; an a priori, often near mathematically/ideological cut of the landscape through which Long will walk, for example, a 10-mile walk in a straight line. The role of such a cut can seem to have some function as a tool to some postmodern paradox - creating a gap between the representational idea and the organic everything of the ‘nature’ through which he will be travelling. Some gesture towards a break between thought and experience.
My experience of this aspect of his work is, however, far from characterised by this kind of mechanism - the introduction of a second order -- that of an extensive ‘nature’ -- to undermine the first -- thought. This is no ironic sublime. Long’s work while potentially encompassing aspects that insinuate the feeling that something is unpresentable does not lose itself to only this mechanism of excess and disproportion.
The ‘Idea’ as discussed by Spinoza and Deleuze, functions as both, a mode of representational thought, its objective reality and as the idea of an idea, “the reality of the idea insofar as it is itself something” – Its formal reality (Deleuze n.d.). This formal reality is undoubtedly connected to the object the idea represents - but, as Deleuze points out,
“it is not to be confused with the object: that is, the formal reality of the idea, the thing the idea is or the degree of reality or perfection it possesses in itself, is its intrinsic character.” (Deleuze n.d.)

Here we are in the territory of a post-structuralist difference. We deal with the idea in the performance of an utterance or the event of Long’s walking practise.
We establish the idea and add a something else - a man, the artist, walking the 10 miles in a straight line – with all of the possibility of his subjecthood. The aspect of his subjectivity made by the walk and those acting on the walk and its environment.

The Idea performed enters a process of variation, the space of its performance shifting into that of a smooth affective space - the objective reality of the idea is continually given as other in the event of its performance than it was a priori as idea, though in this process its formal reality will remain in its relative perfection unaffected by any process of actualisation.
Within the performance we talk of we find the 'affect' in relation to the idea. If we are to oppose idea and affect as Deleuze has we, on an initial level discover that as an opposition to our first understanding of idea – being representational modes of thought we can consider affect to be all non-representational modes of thought. At our second level of understanding - where we also consider the formal reality of the idea we have to take our understanding further.
We will refer to Deleuze's discussion of the subject in his lectures on Spinoza and affect and idea. He introduces an aspect of time to the discussion and the succession of ideas,
"our ideas succeed each other constantly: one idea chases another, one idea replaces another idea for example, in an instant." (Deleuze, 1978) He claims that in the succession of ideas is not the only thing that is happening.
Here he refers to Spinoza's notion of humans as spiritual automata. This spiritual automata is less one who has the ideas than a subject within which ideas are confirmed. There is another realm that functions as well as that of the change or the succession between ideas; "there is a regime of variation which is not the same thing as the succession of ideas themselves". (Deleuze 1978)
Variation is a concept primary to much of Deleuze’s philiosophical project. Deleuze champions a philosophy and a world full of flow, movement and flux. He gives various examples for the concept of variation, music for example is traditionally based on the idea of scales and counts – fixed orders of pitch and meter. Though for Deleuze these structure are considered secondary in relationship to the flow, the variation of sound itself which for Deleuze is fundamental – a pure movement of difference without identity. Another example of variation from Deleuze’s thought that could serve us well in our discussion of long is that of Smooth Space. **what is Smooth Space
In Long’s work it is the manifestations of both an abstract formal reality continually given as such and the regime of variation and non-representation that interests me. As I have mentioned my experience of the doubling of realm in longs work is not that of the post modern sublime where one order trumps and undermines the other and itself. This post-modern mechanism only function in one direction, it needs the logic to function in one order for it to be able to cut itself away from it. For Lyotard, the sublime “would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia in for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in, but to better produce, the feeling that there is something unpresentable.”
**a little on Lyotard and the sublime.
It is the harmony of the co-existance of these two realms which I am moved by in Long’s work. The gap between the eternal re-capitulated of the abstract and formal reality of idea and the perpetual differentiation of the performance. This exchange, this accord can been seen given our already opposition to the notion of the sublime in term of the beautiful.
**some on beauty