England Japan Circles イングランド・ジャパン・サークルズ

This work, in which oblong pieces of slate of roughly the same size are placed in circles on the floor, was created for the exhibition "Aspects of British Art Today" (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and other venues) held in 1982 in Japan. Richard Long is one of the practitioners of Land Art and, besides producing works of sculpture like this, has traveled to various sites in Britain, the U.S., Holland, Peru, and Nepal, recording them with maps and in his words and picking up stones and twigs and later arranging and photographing them. In either style of working, he does not resort to complex techniques, but simply creates very unpretentious forms such as circles, straight lines, or zigzags."The circle is the knowledge we share and take part in. It belongs equally to the past and to the future. The stones construct the earth. I hope that the earth still has a future, and that art will benefit human existence." As these words of his from 1981 shows it, the circles, formed by arranging pieces of natural stone and looking like an ancient ritual site, here seem to symbolize "eternal time," shared by the East and the West.