CultureShockRichard Long and Sean Scully allow us to envisage the west of Ireland as a place to question and restore a lost link between culture and nature, writes Fintan O'Toole
Earlier this year, I was taken to see what is arguably one of the most important pieces of contemporary art in Ireland. It is a paradoxically situated work, both on open display and a kind of secret. It is a perfect circle of limestones in the Burren that encloses and frames a floor of similar stones. It was constructed in 1975 by the English artist Richard Long in a relatively remote spot along the Co Clare coast. Long photographed the circle and the photo itself became the saleable work of art that helped to make his reputation as a major force in the avant-garde. It also represented a breakthrough moment for conceptual art, for the notion of art as not so much an object as an idea. But until very recently there was no general knowledge of whether the circle itself still exists and if so, where it can be found.
Its discovery, though still a semi-secret, is intriguing. Given its exposed coastal location, it might be expected that the circle would have been broken by wind and weather, so that only Long's photograph would remain. And this might seem to be the appropriate fate for the piece, given the broad notions that surround it. Long's use of found materials, of bits of the ambient landscape, suggest that the intention was that the piece would eventually disappear back into its surroundings.
But the circle is perfectly preserved, to an extent that suggests conscious and conscientious maintenance. Someone - a local, a fan of avant-garde art, an agent of the sculptor himself? - has been minding it. Given the fame of the photograph and Long's huge international reputation, the circle could now have been turned into an object of commercial value. It could be claimed as a piece of property or at least included on a tourist trail. Thus, the stones within it have changed their nature at least three times, from natural objects to virtual elements in a self-conscious work of art (the photograph) to parts of a physically accessible sculpture.
As it happens, Long's circle looks out on another site that has now become part of a similar exploration of landscape, art and the relationship between them. Sean Scully's Walls of Aran exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin is, at one level, exactly what it says: black-and-white photographs of stone walls on that geological extrusion of the Burren, the Aran Islands. You can look at the pictures in isolation, just as you could look at Long's photograph, as merely beautiful images of stones arranged in complex patterns. But even if the photographs were not set beside some of Scully's own iconic paintings with their rigorously patterned, slab-like fields of colour, it would be obvious that they are intended to say something about art itself. Scully, like Long before him, is using the west of Ireland as a space in which to test big ideas about nature and culture.
An important shift is happening here. From the late 19th century onwards, the west of Ireland was seen in both visual and literary cultures as a space whose purity could inspire creativity. Out there on the edge of Europe, imagined as a physical and cultural remnant of something ancient and defiantly unmodern, it was a place that could give an elemental charge of authenticity to painters (Paul Henry), poets (WB Yeats), playwrights (JM Synge), film-makers (Robert Flaherty) and political activists. It was the very otherness of the landscape, its status as pure nature, that gave it its force. But Long and now Scully have turned this notion on its head. They have humanised the landscape by making it almost pure culture.
Long's stone circle is part of his engagement with the idea of landscape as both permanent and shifting, both outside and inside history. "A sculpture," he has written, "may be moved, dispersed, carried. Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture." His landscape sculptures, such as the Burren circle, inhabit, he says, "the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'." The circle, indeed, wonderfully manifests this tension. You could stumble over it and imagine it to be one of the ancient ruins of the Burren, a ritual space, perhaps, from a prehistoric time. Or you could pass it by and barely notice it among the proliferation of stones that surround it.
Scully takes this idea even further. Long photographed a pattern of stones he himself created, retaining an obvious sense of "art". Scully photographed stones whose patterns have been created by other people - the anonymous wall-builders - and that become art only when he photographs them and displays the results in a gallery and a book. "I nominate them as art," he writes, "because of their unremitting, austere, repetitive variety." And indeed, as we encounter them through his eyes, art is what they are. But not in any simple sense, for what Scully is evoking is a hidden, unacknowledged, perhaps unconsciously expressed artistry. A phrase he used in relation to his own monumental sculpture at the Univeristy of Limerick - a work intimately related to his Aran pictures - is that he wanted it to be "a wall that might fill in, in its intention, the tragedy of a lost cultural space". This perhaps is what Long and Scully are doing - allowing us to envisage the west not as a mere inspiration for artists but as a place to question and restore a lost relationship between culture and nature. In these times when we desperately need to understand our own responsibility for the natural world, this is a deeply humane and subtly challenging enterprise.