In the spring of 2003 Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center relocated a stone circle created by landscape artist Richard Long from an estate in Woodside California to the McMurtry Family Terrace at the Center. The work, Georgia Granite Circle, is 7.5 tons of unhewn granite rubble arranged in a 5m-diameter circle. Following written specifications—a combination of photograph, plan and text—provided by the artist, the installation was undertaken by a group of Cantor Center employees and local volunteers.

Richard Long is best known for his interaction with landscape or as he would describe—interventions into nature. While these interventions may coalesce at various points in the course of a walk through the countryside, it is the walk that constitutes the primary intervention. Walking is a fundamental form of bodily engagement with place and Long has transformed this quotidian activity into art. Long often emplaces regular shapes—a line, rectangle, square, a circle—or, at times, asymmetrical forms—a cluster of standing stones, a watermark, a worn circuitous path—upon the local (natural) terrain in the course of his walks. The effect as Colin Renfrew has noted of Long’s work Caulk Line is not unlike the stone surface exposed by an excavation trench (2003).

For Long, geometric shapes made of local materials, whether stone, wood, or snow, in a specific locale and the materializations of them, photographs, notations on maps, even words, are but traces of his interactions. In his work the experiential process, the act, is emphasized over the material product. Later in his career Long began to adapt his interventions in the landscape for exhibition space. Georgia Granite Circle is one such piece.

Aspects of Long’s work resonate well with basic themes of archaeological practice. The emplacement of his work on campus provided an opportunity to explore some fundamental themes relevant to archaeology today such as, the relationship between the corporeality of the human body and that of place, sensory experience and the material world.

The peripatetic video begins on the Geballe Family Balcony at the top of the stairway in the Main Lobby of the Cantor Arts Center. The participant is asked to focus the camera on the entryway to the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery. After a short discussion of the relocation of Long’s work in combination with footage from the Woodside estate where the piece was previously located, the participant is asked to move forward and keep pace with the video walk.

As one progresses they note how the galleries have changed. After a few moments the doorway to the exterior terrace comes into view. There are people gathered on the far side of the terrace between wooden crates loaded with stone. Some are conversing, others laughing and all are listening to music. As they move back and forth between the crates and a waxing circle of stone the participant is asked to continue walking around the event to the right. The video sequence carries on in this direction for a one and a half revolutions then reverses direction for three quarters of the full circle. Throughout this engagementthe camera is held at a similar angle to the original shot (refer back to Figure 4.4).

This effective overlay of the visual and aural qualities of the original event upon the subsequent engagement both confounds and confuses the experience of walking around a completed stone circle and the mediated event associated with its emplacement. However, it also simultaneously highlights the disjuncture of the two engagements. Given the wider sensory qualities of video and the bodily level of this experience, connections arise that would not otherwise have occurred. The participant arrives at a new and different understanding of Georgia Granite Circle. Yet infusing the mediated process with the final piece can also be held as demystifying the work of art. Still, in all a new and different understanding of the work of art and the associated event may be arrived at. Giving yourself over to such an experience remains a matter of choice.