119 Stones 1976

Richard Long's "119 Stones" presents us with a deliberate arrangement of natural materials within the gallery space, a line of stones laid across a wooden floor in a meandering path. The structure echoes the concept of a journey or a map. This artwork challenges the conventional definitions of sculpture by using the gallery floor as its canvas. The grey stones contrast with the warm wood, their raw texture playing against the smooth, artificial surface. Long's practice, which often involves walking and interacting with landscapes, is distilled here into a minimalist gesture. By bringing elements of the external world inside, he questions the divide between nature and culture, organic and artificial. Each stone, an individual unit, contributes to a larger configuration, mirroring structuralist ideas about language and systems. Long invites us to consider the relationship between individual components and the overall structure, urging us to interpret the cultural coding and question the values we assign to natural materials when displaced from their original context.