Land art

Land art (or Earth art or Earthworks). Terms applied to a type of art that uses as its raw materials earth, rocks, soil, and so on. The terms are not usually clearly differentiated, although ‘Earthworks’ generally refers to very large constructions. Land art emerged as a movement in the late 1960s and has links with several other movements that flourished at that time: Minimal art in that the shapes created are often extremely simple; Arte Povera in the use of ‘worthless’ materials; happenings and Performance art because the work created was often impermanent; and Conceptual art because the more ambitious earthwork schemes frequently exist only as projects. There are affinities also with the passion at this time for the study of prehistoric mounds and ley lines—part of the hippie back-to-nature ethos that expressed a disenchantment with the sophisticated technology of urban culture. The desire to get away from the traditional elitist and money-orientated gallery world was also very much typical of the time, although large earthworks have in fact necessitated very hefty expenditure, and far from being populist and accessible, such works are usually in remote areas; some are intelligible only from the air and therefore can rarely be appreciated other than by people rich enough to own or hire aeroplanes. Moreover, in spite of the desire to sidestep the gallery system, dealers have proved capable of exploiting this kind of art, just like any other, and some land artists at least have made handsome livings from it.

The artist associated more than any other with large-scale earthworks in situ was Robert Smithson, whose Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, is easily the most reproduced work of this kind. The most ambitious of all such enterprises is probably the Roden Crater Project by James Turrell (1941– ), involving the reshaping of an extinct volcano in Arizona (begun in the mid–1970s). Most of the other leading exponents are—like Smithson and Turrell—Americans. They include Alice Aycock (1946– ), whose work has included underground mazes, and Michael Heizer (1944– ), whose best-known work is Double Negative (1969–70) in the Nevada desert—two massive cuts 30 ft (9 m) wide and 50 ft 15 m) deep in an area where he said he found ‘that kind of unraped, peaceful religious space artists have always tried to put in their work’. Some critics, however, consider that earthworks can themselves constitute a type of rape or violation.

Christo is sometimes grouped with land artists, although his work really defies classification. The leading British exponents are Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long.