land art

land art or earthworks, art form developed in the late 1960s and early 70s by Robert Smithson , Robert Morris , Michael Heizer, and others, in which the artist employs the elements of nature in situ or rearranges the landscape with earthmoving equipment. The resulting work, often vast in scale, is subject to all natural changes, such as temperature variations, light and darkness, wind, and erosion. The technique was in part an attempt to counter the perception of art as an acquirable commodity, although as the movement developed such items as site photographs, cartographic studies, and artists' notebooks were made available to collectors. Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), a huge spiral of rock and salt crystal in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, is a characteristic example of the land art form. Because of the fluctuating water level of the lake, Spiral Jetty is not always visible. Another notable artist is Michael Heizer, whose vast City (1971-) in the Nevada desert is probably the largest such project yet attempted. Still another monumental land art work is James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano near Flagstaff, Ariz., the interior of which he has transformed since the 1970s into an enormous work of art with rooms, tunnels, and openings to the sky. Among other artists working in this genre are Dennis Oppenheim, Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Walter de Maria, Newton and Helen Harrison, and Andy Goldsworthy.

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)

Land art (or Earth art or Earthworks). Terms applied to a type of art that uses earth, rocks, soil, and so on as its raw materials. 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.