Long – whose achingly refined survey exhibition, “Walking in Circles,” is on view at London’s Hayward Gallery through Aug. 11-wants to do more than prop up an easel and render the foliage. He takes walks according to rules he sets out in advance (for example, “A Sixty Minute Circle Walk on Dartmoor”) and makes notes, photographs and ephemeral site-specific sculptures out of found materials along the way. When he’s not walking, Long makes large floor sculptures-primarily circles for this show-assembled of pieces of stone. He wants to make art out of real fragments of the landscape brought back to the gallery, out of printed lists of what he does and sees in the landscape, and out of glorified trail markings. Long’s methods may seem a little leisurely, but they’re hardly a breeze: one of his walks is documented as 560 miles in 20 1/2 days. That’s some workout.
The results are generally fetching. “Cornwall Circle 1991” looks gorgeously paleolithic deployed in the middle of the Hayward’s polite gallery floor. Framed typographical pieces like “Desert Flowers” (1987) somehow manage to evoke hot days, cold nights and furtive wildlife. And his photographs of patches of the Sahara or Nepal are as deliciously textured as O’Sullivan’s or Watkins’s from the golden age of landscape photography in the 19th century. Long’s work is a rigorously consistent attempt to make rationalism romantic and romanticism rational, and thereby close one of art’s great circles. The rationalist in Long seems to say, “Just keep careful records,” while the romantic adds, “Something beautiful will come of all this.”
Despite Long’s grand ambitions and deft touch, the visual impact of the Hayward show isn’t quite as exhilarating as it could be. Like vacation snapshots of the Grand Canyon, there’s no smell, no wind, no traveler’s fatigue in Long’s recreations, only the feeling that it must have been great for him to be there. The conceptual element isn’t as profound or witty as it might be, either. Long lacks a certain irreverence-not toward the landscape itself, but toward his own preciousness-that might give his typography pieces an edge. The show’s superbly produced catalog tends to wax New Agey: in an interview, Long jumps directly from the theory of relativity to Carlos Castaneda on finding one’s “special place” in a room.
Still, the exhibition has something important to say. Even at its most ecological, art is an intrusion on nature, And the best thing art can do is to give us some sense of what it means to be a human intrusion on this natural planet. In its poetry and economy, “Walking in Circles” goes straight to the point.
title: “Bringing It All Back Home” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “David Gregory”
Last week Wonder turned the song into a gospel hymn. Tracing the words’ meanings through three decades and into a fourth, as if reckoning the course of strife on this earth, he told the audience, " It’s a song that will last unfortunately for a long, long time." Playing slow and solemn, he didn’t update the song, he pushed it farther back in time-plucked its roots out of Dylan’s adolescence and sank them deeper in American history, as anonymously central to the national soul as “Rock of Ages” or “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
This transformation was what the night promised: a reappraisal of music that once drove many of our lives and now helps hold them in place. Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Neil Young and others-31 acts in all, including Dylan himself-held a big chunk of rock meaning in their hands, and every bearded, balding guy in New York seemed to have a ticket to ride. But if reappraisal was all you came for, you were the lone fool who went home disappointed. Though some of the concert’s sharpest moments came from lesser-known songs-Lou Reed’s hellbound “Foot of Pride” or Willie Nelson’s spooky “What Was It You Wanted”-the event mostly celebrated old epiphanies rather than chasing new ones. Joining Tracy Chapman in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”–an acutely disingenuous sing-along, really, celebrating a promise that’s spent 28 years not coming true–the audience exemplified the unwillingness of baby boomers to believe their numbers can’t face down hard facts. In this atmosphere, the margin for confronting new demons was pinched. Sinead O’Connor, introduced by Kris Kristofferson as a singer “whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity,” met an unrelenting rain of boos and cheers. As the band began to scratch out a tune, she cut them off, instead screaming an impassioned a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War”–the song she’d sung on Saturday Night Live" two weeks back, before shredding a photo of the pope–and left the stage shaken.
But if our most celebrated protest singer no longer sets a friendly table for protest song, so be it. Most everybody came to rock Dylan’s songs, not to apply them. And rock they did, backed expertly by Booker T. and the M.G.’s (Jim Keltner and Letterman drummer Anton Fig in place of the late Al Jackson) and “Saturday Night Live” bandleader G. E. Smith on guitar. Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones slashed with obsessive desire on “Seven Days.” Clapton’s sober, generic “Love Minus Zero” rubbed the song clean of its biting specificity, but he found something new in “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” vamping it into a toast for the newly departed. And Neil Young, singing “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “All Along the Watchtower,” plain wrecked the place.
Notably missing were Dylan’s female peers. As over-50s outnumbered under-30s, the women–Chapman, O’Connor, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Rosanne Cash, Shawn Colvin, Sophie B. Hawkins–mostly supplied the youth. Even a crowd that constitutionally didn’t believe in aging showed rock’s double standard on the subject. But when everybody joined together, O’Connor included, for a rousing finale of " Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door," it was what you’d call a very happy ending to a magnificent concert, even if it was actually just a trip back to the beginning.
One irony of the show is that while heaven and earth and their lawyers joined to honor Dylan’s songwriting, Dylan himself is turning from it. His new album, due out on Nov. 3, is all traditional folk songs. Who can blame him? In the balcony Friday night, a man in a Springsteen T shirt could find no takers for the joint he tried to pass during Tom Petty’s sloshing “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35.” Such is the fate of music and people who get stuck in time. Dylan, thorny as ever, seems to want none of it. Which only makes Friday’s concert a spectacular midterm gala, not a grand finale.
