Land art

views updated May 14 2018

Land art. In the 1960s and 1970s, experiments were made with earth-moving equipment to create works of art, often ephemeral because of erosion and the elements, also known as Earth art. In part it was an attempt to return to primitive art forms, e.g. the cutting of figures, horses, etc., into the ground. Robert Smithson (1938–73) created his Spiral Jetty, a huge spiral of rocks, earth, and salt crystals at Rozel Point, in the Great Salt Lake, UT. Christo (1935– ) and Jeanne-Claude (1935– ) ( Javacheff) experi-mented with their Running Fence, a meandering construct of white nylon, nearly 40 km (nearly 25 miles) long, running across part of CA and into the Pacific Ocean (1972–6), and other examples of Land art (they are also known for wrapping buildings, e.g. the Pont Neuf, Paris (1975–85), and the Reichstag, Berlin (1971–95)).

Bibliography

Betsky (2002);
Bye (1983);
Jane Turner (1996);
Weilacher (1996)