EDINBURGH EXHIBITION AT SUMMERHALL : THE DARK WOULD

       

ONE HOUR : A SIXTY MINUTE CIRCLE WALK ON DARTMOOR 1984 by Richard Long, courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

from Black List -- Saul and Elaine Bass -- 2006 by Simon Patterson, courtesy of the artist

Arcadia, 2012 by Tony Lopez with Orchard Memorials, photo by John S. Webb

These three images are from a forthcoming exhibition in Edinburgh -- details in the announcement below -- my works will be shown 'in conversation' with Ian Hamilton Finlay works also on display. What a great idea to put on this ambitious exhibition Philip Davenport.

THE DARK WOULD 

Summerhall, Edinburgh 7 Dec - 24 Jan (Public preview 7pm, 6 Dec)

World-leading text artists and poets have been invited to make work about living and dying for The Dark Would exhibition, which includes work by Richard Long, Susan Hiller, Tom Phillips, Simon Patterson, Richard Wentworth, Tony Lopez, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Baum, Ron Silliman and many others, including ‘outsider’ artists. 

Whether homeless people or outsider artists or art stars - we all have to find our way through the dark. Challenging and uplifting, The Dark Would reads the human traces that we leave in the world. This is an extraordinary gathering that asks what it is to have a body and to lose it. As well as including work from the living, there will also be 'answering' works by dead artists and poets including Stephane Mallarme, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Joseph Beuys. 

Summerhall hosts the world premiere of this ground-breaking exhibition curated by poet Philip Davenport, before it travels elsewhere in Britain and abroad. The Dark Would exhibition is an ‘out-growth’ of the large anthology of text art and poetry edited by Davenport and published by Apple Pie Editions 2013.

There will be a series of artist's talks paralleling the exhibition.

Further information here: Summerhall

HEAVEN AND EARTH

I was in London for the Royal Literary Fund Summer Party (thanks to Steve Cook of the RLF for a great spread and good company) so I went to see the  exhibition Richard Long: Heaven and Earth at Tate Britain. I've seen lots of Long's work at different galleries but I haven't seen a really big show before. The large scale mud wall paintings and the installed stone sculptures really have a strong physical impact when gathered together on this scale and Tate Britain can show this kind of work very effectively. The other work is documentation of events, especially walking and making land art out in the landscape. So what you see is a record of something already over and the work is conceptual, communicated through wall-painted lists and photographs which have their own generic aesthetic: the lists assembled in large scale Gill Sans capitals, typically in red and black. The photos usually empty of humans except the evidence of Richard Long's own low impact interventions: walking to make a line in grass or moving some local stones about. 

     There is something unsatisfactory about work that is communicated only through documentation. It's like having a theatre programme to a show you couldn't attend. So for me the wall paintings and sculpture installations have an important function in the exhibition, even though they undermine the conceptual purity and the aesthetic of minimal environmental intervention in Long's work. The impact of hand made work that is there in itself is a crucial experience. The work wants not to be Romantic about the landscape, but the life story of a singular walker in the UK and in remote wilderness locations all over the world, cannot help but establish an heroic artist explorer like a posh Victorian mountaineer at the centre of the enterprise. Even so, it is very moving to have this record of a life work of great clarity, intelligence, and environmental concern.