Hannah Forbes Black

Richard Long happens to feature in one of my formative memories of childhood. I was taken to an exhibition of his work as a small child and distinctly remember assuming that land art was simply what one did as an adult. It seemed so clear and necessary.

In brief, Richard Long goes for long walks and returns to the art world to tell people about them. He's like an explorer in the old model, when huge tracts of the world were genuinely unknown each to the other, and things that happened far away were genuine marvels - except that Long doesn't embroider or tell tall tales, but rather goes for a sombre, quaintly formalist precision.

As a kid I didn't know anything about all that, but I looked forward to my own long walks in uninhabited places, and fretted about future camping arrangements.

Actually perhaps the world of deserts and plains is still profoundly unknown to those of us who spend most of our time enclosed between walls. Returning to Richard Long for his retrospective at Tate Britain I thought about my childhood assumption again, from the ironic perspective of two decades lived mostly indoors.

There is something about Long's work that invites copying, participation - it intimates a well-lived life, respectful and resourceful. His precisely arranged and photographed lines of stones don't demand analysis or admiration; at their best, they feel like invitations, and model a way of relating to the world without harming it. Although I wonder if there's a note of macho braggadocio in the works that diagrammatically represent the number of miles he covered in one day, or how long it took him to cycle from one city to another. Oh, Richard, what long walks you take!

OK, so it's bad form to start a review by talking about yourself, but unlike Richard Long with his meticulous regard for procedure and form, I am a shiftless Generation Y type. And maybe that's why his endearingly humanised formalism came across as oddly old-fashioned, despite its very zeitgeisty air of environmental awareness and low-impact living.

I surreptitiously tried to take a photo of one of the stone sculptures - a quite beautiful little self-contained landscape - and a gallery attendant spotted me and told me it wasn't allowed. The freedoms of Long's boundless, long-horizoned spaces had well and truly evaporated, and what was left were traces of indeterminate value.

Long himself seems to have done a bit of hand-wringing about the value of bringing his work indoors, and the mix of photographs, diagrams, text art and sculpture might reflect not just a development in practice but also an uncertainty about how best to represent the experience of walking. However interesting and invigorating it is, the gallery work isn't the main show, even though it's the only show. This is part of the quaintness of Long's work, that it so explicitly, so nakedly confronts the central difficulty of how to represent experience. It's not so much that post-modernity isn't interested in this as that we've collectively thrown our hands up and branded the problem intractable.

A video of the artist at work had Long swirling buckets of the River Avon mud he uses to make his gratifyingly tactile mud paintings, I Ching lines painted directly on the gallery walls, and talking about how lucky he was to make a living out of hobbies like going walking and camping. And somehow this was disappointing, to hear him sounding like a self-indulgent, footling British hobbyist. I hadn't realised how much I'd wanted the work to be for me.