Exhibitions
Richard Long (Anthony d'Offay till 12 November) Glenys Barton (Angela Flowers till 1 November) Ivor Abrahams (Mayor Gallery till 14 November)
Sponsored walks
Giles Auty
Until about 15 years ago, most people thought of walking either as healthy exer- cise or a cheap means of travel. Since that time we have seen the advent of the sponsored walk. Now hardly a week passes without demands being made of us to sponsor someone, at so much per mile, for an ostensibly good cause.
During roughly this same period, the artist Richard Long has elevated the spon- sored walk to new planes of refinement. Instead of 50p a mile for a few laps of the school playing field or public park, Long has found sponsors to indemnify him against the very considerable costs of traversing many of the world's more obscure corners: Alaska, Bolivia, Lapland, Iceland, Mexico and Nepal. Closer to home he has also strolled extensively on Dartmoor, the Irish hills and the Sierra Nevada.
By an odd chance, on the very day I visited Long's latest exhibition of works at Anthony d'Offay (9 & 23 Dering Street, W1), I happened to be reading Gerald Brenan's magnificent account of the years he spent in Spain following the first world war: South from Granada. Brenan, too, walked extensively in the Sierra Nevada, though in his case simply from curiosity and financial necessity. On one occasion, Brenan walked 60 miles to Granada in a day, crossing a col of some 8,000 ft in the process. Brenan's peregrinations subse- quently became a subject for excellent writing which allows the reader to share the author's interesting travels to the full.
Long, who styles himself as a visual artist rather than writer, generally offers a rather more terse record of his voyagings: an annotated map, a photograph, a list of place names encountered, a few notes of a meteorological nature. Such meagre evi- dence of his journeyings is all his would-be patron can physically acquire; a case not so much of purchasing the Cheshire cat, one may think, as of buying his smile.
Concept Art, of which certain aspects of Long's activities provide a fairly typical example — although the artist himself has now abandoned the term — arose through an idealistic wish to break the capitalist tyranny of the commercial market. It was reasoned that if artists produced nothing recognisable to sell, sordid commercial transactions would become impossible. Such artistic abnegation of the flesh is Franciscan in its purity. Personal impover- ishment would seem its inevitable conse- quence but, ironically, things don't seem to have worked out that way.
Since much, but by no means all of Long's art is intangible, he has inevitably become a controversial and divisive figure. While some, especially the young and anti-intellectual, see him as a purist of messianic status, others regard him as no kind of artist at all. If staunch advocates laud his life's work for its poetic side, others criticise it as being precious and often arbitrary.
To what extent will the present exhibi- tion, or the finely produced new book from Thames & Hudson, Richard Long by Rudi Fuchs, help resolve such division? Not at all is my guess, although the book certainly does show more attractive geometric in- stallations of stones in galleries than that currently on view. Long uses circles, lines and rectangles of stone, wood and mud, indoors and out, for their 'organic reality', but often his indoor contexts simply look contrived. By contrast, the cairns or stone circles he builds in the mountains look thorOughly at home on their sites. How- ever, contrary to what Long's more ardent supporters seem to believe, Long did not personally 'create' either stones or moun- tains.
Unlike Long, his exact contemporary Glenys Barton still resolutely commits herself to the hand-made, beginning with unattractive mud but in her case ending up with a series of cleverly conceived and striking ceramic heads. Apparently these are less fragile than I imagined and are thus just the kind of artefacts which might help redeem our artistic reputation in the fu- ture. A cache of Barton's heads would certainly provide a wonderful thrill for the excavating archaeologist and furnish some evidence that we are not all as bad, mad or sad as future generations may surmise. A bright blue copper glaze may sound in- appropriate for the human brow but in Barton's hands becomes strangely effec- tive. The best heads have a brooding, totemic presence and I also especially enjoyed her one-eared semi-profiles. Based at 11 Tottenham Mews, Wl, Angela Flowers Gallery is just round the corner from the expense-account luncheon land of Charlotte Street. By cutting out the second armagnac, diners could find ample time for a rewarding visit.
Ivor Abrahams, who is currently show- ing at The Mayor Gallery (22A Cork Street, W1), is a sculptor who seems to be making a steady return, both in his forms and materials, towards the interests and ideals of earlier eras. How this will affect his reception with the Modernist lobby, I cannot guess. In a catalogue for an earlier exhibition, the historian Richard Shone admitted his relief that Abrahams had abandoned the 'witty' materials of his former work — latex, foam, resin, flocking etc — and reverted to the essential serious- ness of bronze. This process is also paral- leled in the artist's subject matter as sculpted hedges have made way for the less lumpish proportions of the female form. The present exhibition features models for projects involving bathers, the animation of whose forms harks back to Rodin. My one reservation lies in the sculptor's use of colour which robs his bronzes of a certain dignity.
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