Carey Young/Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking 1967

Photograph and pencil on board
image: 375 x 324 mm
on paper, print

Purchased 1976

P07149
This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.


CAREY YOUNG's

Lines Made by Walking
Louise Menzies

First published in Scape Biennial catalogue , 2006

Experienced as a series of projected 35mm slides unfolding at automated one-second intervals, Lines Made By Walking (2003) reveals the certain actions of an individual amidst a crowd. More specifically, these are the actions of the artist herself walking back and forth as she attempts to crave a line within the space of a crowded strip of commuters in central London. Intentionally recalling Richard Long’s 1967 piece A Line Made By Walking, Young inserts in our memories the politicised acts of the neo avant-garde, while suggesting how such actions of an individual can still offer a negotiation of space within our late capitalist situation.

Performed in public space, Young’s work sharply sketches the globalised daily reality of the worker and suggests an attempt at updating contemporary relationships between corporate and cultural politics. Dressed in a suit like those around her, in many ways Young is a nameless face in the crowd; collapsing the distances of artist, worker and audience. Over time however, her self-directed and purposeful walking offers us a form of resistance drawn from the very structures it seeks to resist. In place of Long’s flattened grass, we are left with negative urban space.



© Copyright Louise Menzies and Scape Biennial Trust, 2006