Richard Long

Richard Long's outdoor sculpture has always found a transient home in its natural environment, but now comes indoors for a major retrospective at Tate Britain. Ossian Ward tracks his influential and lengthy career.

There's never been a campaign to save a Richard Long. The elegant stone circles he has left behind on his many walks through the wilderness are likely all dispersed by now and the scuffed lines of dirt he etches into remote hillsides barely exist beyond the photograph he takes before trekking on. The chunky flint or slate sculptures and muddy hand-print drawings that he installs in galleries are more enduring reminders of his itinerant practice, but they also get crated up or wiped off the walls between exhibitions. He's often credited with inventing the land art movement, despite never having produced any pieces on the monumental scale of classic, permanent works in the genre, such as Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' or Walter de Maria's 'Lightning Field' in the US. So just what is Long's lasting contribution as an artist?

Despite the transience of the man and his work, he's certainly a worthy subject for a major retrospective at Tate Britain, because he's rigorously ploughed the same artistic furrow for more than 40 years. His first attempts at bringing walking into his work got him kicked out of art school in Bristol at the age of 20, but he found St Martins, in swinging '60s London, a much more sympathetic environment in which to further his radical ideas about sculpture. Long's first statement bit of strolling came in 1967 when he traipsed up and down a strip of field until his actions produced a foot-trammelled grass runway. Entitled 'A Line Made by Walking', it could just has easily have been called 'A Line Made By Thinking', so in tune was the young artist with the prevailing moods of minimalism and conceptualism.

In 1970 he made a cross of pebbles on the bed of Little Pigeon River in Tennessee, superimposing a few lines of Johnny Cash's 'Walk the Line' across the photograph, and soon after began reducing his walks to just a few sparse lines of running commentary: 'Railway Line, Pair of Buzzards, Thistles, A Dead Sheep', and so on. Such personal interjections are relatively uncommon - Long prefers to give us factual travel times, map references and distances - and he never once appears in any pictures himself - a kangaroo or a makeshift hut being the only other signs of life. It's not until later text works, such as 'Walking Music' (2004) and '37 Campfires' (1987), that he reveals a few more private moments, namely which songs accompany his lonely walks (Chuck Berry, Sinéad O'Connor), and what kind of lunch he ate in the tent that day (spicy Thai meal, soup). On occasion, he even avoids his own sticks-and-stones clichés to sculpt lines or loops in the smouldering embers of an Indian rice field or with the droppings from Mongolian cattle.

Without these incidental details, it can be hard work following Long on his solo expeditions, especially when a Herculean ramble is often recorded in the curtest and driest of fashions: '1030 miles in 33 days from the southernmost point to the northernmost point of mainland Britain'. And, as much as I admire the unerringly clinical presentation - all coolly spaced Gill Sans typeface and black-and-white photographs - it too can distance the viewer. However, to say that he hit a stylistic impasse over 20 years ago would be far too harsh an assessment. More accurate would be to suggest that he's been going round in circles for all that time and more.

It's a circuitous trip, but the repetition leads us to consider our ever-changing historical relationship to landscape, from early cave painters and aboriginal songline trackers to gardeners and landscape artists. Not that he's a poster boy for the climate change lobby, simply that Long's mark-making, whether in the trace of a trudged path or in the smudge of a mud-smeared hand, both builds and destroys; adding to and subtracting from the land. I suggest a campaign to preserve the sprightly 64-year-old Long himself, rather than his work. Because if he's not walking, he's not working.