earth art

The Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005.

Land art, Earthworks, or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation. The works frequently exist in the open, located well away from civilization, left to change and erode under natural conditions. Many of the first works, created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.

History

Land art is to be understood as a protest against the perceived artificiality, plastic aesthetics and ruthless commercialization of art at the end of the 1960s in America. Exponents of land art rejected the museum as the setting of artistic activity and developed monumental landscape projects which were beyond the reach of the commercial art market. Land art was inspired by minimal art and concept art but also by modern and minimal movements such as De Stijl, cubism, minimalism and the work of Constantin Brancusi and Joseph Beuys. Many of the artist associated with land art had been involved with minimal art and conceptual art. Isamu Noguchi's 1941 design for Contoured Playground in New York is sometimes interpreted as an important early piece of land art even though the artist himself never called his work "land art" but simply "sculpture". His influence on contemporary land art, landscape architecture and environmental sculpture is evident in many works today.

Museum paper board left on the bank of the river for 4 days. By Jacek Tylicki, S.W. of Lund, Sweden, 473 X 354 mm.

Bunjil geoglyph at the You Yangs, Lara, Australia, by Andrew Rogers. The creature has a wing span of 100 metres and a 1500 tonnes of rock was used to construct it.

Alan Sonfist is a pioneer of an alternative approach to working with nature and culture that he began in 1965 by bringing historical nature and sustainable art back into New York City. According to critic Barbara Rose, writing in Artforum in 1969, she had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. In 1967, the art critic Grace Glueck writing in the New York Times declared the first earthwork was done by Douglas Leichter and Richard Saba at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The sudden appearance of land art in 1968 can be located as a response by a generation of artists mostly in their late twenties to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging environmental and women's liberation movements.

The movement was "launched" in October 1968 by the group exhibition Earthworks at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the Earth Art exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca New York. The artists included in the Earth Art exhibition were: Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker. The exhibition was directed by Thomas W. Leavitt. Gordon Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Perhaps the best known artist who worked in this genre was the American Robert Smithson whose 1968 essay "The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of Modernism from social issues as represented by the critic Clement Greenberg. His best known piece, and probably the most famous piece of all land art, is Spiral Jetty (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and algae so as to form a long (1500 ft) spiral-shape jetty protruding into Great Salt Lake in Utah. How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water.

Smithson's Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust (1968) is an example of land art existing in a gallery space rather than in the natural environment. It consists of a pile of gravel by the side of a partially mirrored gallery wall. In its simplicity of form and concentration on the materials themselves, this and other pieces of land art have an affinity with minimalism. There is also a relationship to Arte Povera in the use of materials traditionally considered "unartistic" or "worthless".

Satellite view of Roden Crater, the site of an earthwork in progress by James Turrell outside Flagstaff, Arizona.

Land artists have tended to be American, with other prominent artists in this field including Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Hans Haacke, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Andrew Rogers, Alan Sonfist, and James Turrell. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. Perhaps the most prominent non-American land artists are the British Chris Drury, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long and the Australian Andrew Rogers.

Some projects by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who are famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric) have also been considered land art by some, though the artists themselves consider this incorrect.^[1] Joseph Beuys' concept of 'social sculpture' influenced 'Land art' and his '7000 Eichen' project of 1972 to plant 7000 Oak trees has many similarities to 'Land art' processes. Rogers' “Rhythms of Life” project is the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world, forming a chain of stone sculptures, or geoglyphs, around the globe – 12 sites – in disparate exotic locations (from below sea level and up to altitudes of 4,300 m/14,107 ft). Up to three geoglyphs (ranging in size up to 40,000 sq m/430,560 sq ft) are located in each site.

Land artists in America relied mostly on wealthy patrons and private foundations to fund their often costly projects. With the sudden economic down turn of the mid 1970s funds from these sources largely dried up. With the death of Robert Smithson in a plane crash in 1973 the movement lost one of its most important figureheads and petered out. James Turrell continues to work on the Roden Crater project. In most respects 'Land Art' has become part of mainstream public art and in many cases the term "Land Art" is misused to label any kind of art in nature even though conceptually not related to the avant-garde works by the pioneers of Land Art.

Land Art can be found in virtually every country in Europe and America. In Africa it's a growing form of art with Strijdom van der Merwe ^[2] from South Africa in the forefront. One of the Land Art in South Africa objects grounded in ancient history is 'Mama Africa' which is part of a privately owned botanical garden near Robertson in the Western Cape. This man made Earthwork is 3 metres high, 16 metres long and 7 metres wide.

Contemporary land artists

Michael Heizer, One complex in City, photo by Tom Vinetz, The New York Times c.1999

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2008)

Further reading

• Lawrence Alloway, Wolfgang Becker, Robert Rosenblum et al., Alan Sonfist, Nature: The End of Art, Gli Ori,Dist. Thames & Hudson Florence, Italy,2004 ISBN 0615125336
• Max Andrews (Ed.): Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook. London 2006 ISBN 978-0-901469-57-1
• John Beardsley: Earthworks and Beyond. Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York 1998 ISBN 0-7892-0296-4
• Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. University of California Press 2002. ISBN 0-520-24116-9
• Amy Dempsey: Destination Art. Berkeley CA 2006 ISBN 13-978-0-520-25025-3
• Michel Draguet, Nils-Udo, Bob Verschueren, Bruseels: Atelier 340, 1992
• Jack Flam (Ed.). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley CA 1996 ISBN 0-520-20385-2
• John K. Grande: New York, London. Balance: Art and Nature, Black Rose Books, 1994, 2003 ISBN 1-55164-234-4
• Eleanor Heartney, Andrew Rogers Geoglyphs, Rhythms of Life, Edizioni Charta srl, Italy, 2009 ISBN 978-88-8158-712-4
• Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg / Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University,
• Jeffrey Kastner, Brian Wallis: Land and Environmental Art. Boston 1998 ISBN 0-7148-4519-1
• Lucy R Lippard: Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York 1983 ISBN 0-394-54812-8
• Udo Weilacher: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ISBN 3-7643-6119-0
• Edward Lucie-Smith (Intro) and John K. Grande: Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists, New York 2004 ISBN 0-7914-6914-7
• David Peat & Edward Lucie-Smith (Introduction & forward) Dialogues in Diversity, Italy: Pari Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-88-901960-7-2
• Gilles A. Tiberghien: Land Art. Ed. Carré 1995

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Land art

• Monumental Land Art of the United States.
• SaveLandArt.org - Media Initiatives to Protect Land Art from Urbanization, Industry and Overcuration.
• EarthArtists.org - listings of Earth, Land, and Eco-artists.
• Alan Sonfist Official Website
• Artist in Nature International Network
• Denarend.com - About land art
• Land Arts of the American West
• Official UNM Land Arts of the American West Program Website
• Land & Environmental Artists & Art
• Australian land arts
• Roden Crater by James Turrell
• Jacek Tylicki Land & Environmental Art projects
• - Land Art project in South Africa