Not quite purgatory, not exactly heaven

Two Saturdays ago, I met up with Grandad Bryan and Joyce in their Camberwell home. We relaxed in the garden with some Pimms and sparkling conversation, occasionally interrupted by a small, excitable dog they were looking after called Hamish. One year old, Grandad Bryan said this canine was physically fully grown, but had some growth left to go on the side of personality.
After admiring Joyce's paintings and a photo book compiled from a recent grand family holiday in the Lake District, we decamped to begin a journey to Tate Britain, primarily to see Richard Long's Heaven and Earth exhibition. The Daily Telegraph describes it as "A beautifully installed retrospective of the quietly radical British conceptual artist Richard Long."
We were first confronted with a wall with muddy handprints that could have come out of any infants classroom that had just had an arts lesson. Try as I might, it said nothing deep to me. Appropriately, this set the tone for the rest of the show, which was either so deep it might as well have been on the bottom of the Marianas Trench or something only a portion of the cognoscenti could comprehend and that's because they're imposing their own ideas on the art. Essentially, this can be done of all art for all people, but it illustrated why lay people are so disillusioned with the Tate prize and the coterie of art luvvies in their ivory tower.
The grand theme was mankind's imposition on nature and the transience of that imposition, though I only got that from reading an art review of this. Many of his landscape portraiture are more meaningful for the natural backdrops rather than naything he has done, like scuffing dirt in a desert or walking in a straight line up and down a field to create the kind of kitten-run gardeners throughout the country are only too familiar with. Wordsworth and Coleridge created great works through their walking, but it wasn't as inane as this. At places, there were tranches of words, that were circuitous in nature, that Grandad Bryan described as verging into self-parody e.g. he liked stillness and he liked movement (was he high - not in a Ruskin-like way - at the time of composing this).
Some pieces were exceptioanlly obscure to anyone who hasn't attended art college, such as swirls of arrows on a local map within "an invisible circle" - the arrows might as well have been wind currents on a meteorological chart and that's not art. One photo in Scotland in which he had arranged smooth stones on a mountainside I imagined, with the aid of shade on the rocks, as a pygmy funeral procession and I thought of the circumstances and scenarios that from thence could result in such a brutal and yet beautiful landscape.
My grandfather who had hitherto been muttering to Altaa and I that it was all 'a con', was more impressed by the rock formations that had been arranged in another room into a rectangle, an oval and various circles of homogenous rocks, the red jagged ones were pretty impressive, though not for any message they conveyed to me. Far better was the fourth whole wall mud portrait (the previous two were just drab interlocking bands) with a white band along the top. It was like a massive forest rising up before you, so thick that beneath the canopy no light penetrates and what goings on occur in such a knotted mass, drawing you in.
We saw some more pictures and smudges masquerading as paintings. Landscaped art comes in for some criticism and this exhibition would not automatically be first witness for the defence. My grandfather had taken us along since he had picked up on the buzzword Mongolia. Nothing of this country was in the main exhibition; in a side room with a video as the artist 'explained' his method and ideas (he creates an effect of scuffed dirt, by walking up and down suffing dirt, apparently), we saw a smidgen - one dated photo in the grounds of Erdene Zuu Khiid (I know because I've been there myself), another of khatags (blue scarves) adorning sticks held in place by rocks that could have been in the Altai mountains and a mention 'Genghis Khan' in an uncredited Bob Dylan song. There was also a mention of the River Medway, from which Long walked until he reached the Severn. The exhibition was not a total loss but the entry price was not worth it for this, so afterwards we headed for some 'traditional' paintings by the likes of Turner which was far more rewarding.
We rounded off the day in Trafalgar Square, catching a view of anthony Gormley's 'One and Other' - spectacle art as Gormley specialises in. Good stuff.