I’ve been reading a book by Dieter Roelstraete on one of the artist Richard Long’s most influential works.

A Line Made By Walking. Richard Long, 1967

Naturally, I’m interested in this work because, while Long never used the term “desire line” in his description of it, that is essentially what it is.

The work is essentially known as a straightforward black-and-white photograph of a line of flattened, trampled-upon grass made by repetitively walking up and down an unidentified field in the countryside just outside London

[Roelstrate 2]

There is one primary difference between this work and most desire lines, however. A Line Made By Walking was made by one man. Desire Lines, unlike Long’s work, are collectively created. They have a less deliberate feel to them, more a sense of the coincidental – the coincidence of hundreds of footsteps choosing the same path.

Still, I found relevance and inspiration in reading about this work, perhaps because I’ve been thinking about paths as a sort of art ever since I read Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. In it, he writes of paths, and travelling on them:

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. [Bachelard 12]

Desire Lines, then, might be seen as a city’s life-drawings, as its most natural form of art. Murals on the ground, if you will.

In considering the trampled-down line of grass that is Long’s work, Roelstraete asks a provocative question:

is (was) the at in the walking, in the line made by walking, or in the photograph made of the line made by walking? Did the work exist for no longer than the twenty minutes it took to make the narrow strip of flattened grass appear, or does the work continue to exist in its ongoing transportation? [Roelstraetke 3]

It’s a question that I might ask of my own work too. Shall I focus on the composition of my photographs, the arc of my sentences? Or are they really just documentation of an art that is already there, in the ground? Or does the real art come in the formation of the lines themselves, must I witness walkers on the paths in order to truly understand them?