A Line Made By Walking (1967)

Works of art that require neither a museum nor material longevity to please us.

Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking (1967) is a performance related as a story captured as a photograph when the light was right.

It is, at the very least, three things.

For further details, link to the Tate site here. For the museum's 2007 "display caption," see below:

This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape. 

Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.