Artwork of the Month - May Historian and TV presenter Simon Schama has chosen a Richard Long sculpture as this month's artwork from the Tate collection. Its paintings are ordered to sit politely on the walls of a living room, to respect the rectangular decorum of framing. But Long's mission has been to liberate nature from the school of its designers, restoring its uncouth autonomy. His stones are necessarily awkward and restless in the gallery, suggesting a healthy geological contempt for the designing presumptions of art.
Slate is the stuff of human work and habitation shaved, chipped and hewn to our needs.
Yet in Long's circle it has been de-industrialised, restored to its heroic, rocky autonomy. But Long is not quite a romantic. Circles after all, are about reconciliation, and contemplating this one, you might be forgiven for feeling that the conflicts between human habitat and raw nature, work and thought, the museum and the world, inside and outside, have, for a moment, been resolved within its magic ring. We have no craftsmanship to cling to, no artistic endeavour to admire. But we can feel nature here, and our desire to recreate it in an ordered form.