Wikipedia

Land art

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

Land art or earth art is a form of art which came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s primarily concerned with the natural environment. Materials such as rocks, sticks, soil, plants and so on are often used, and the works frequently exist in the open and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. Many of the works were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as photographic documents. Already in the thirties Isamu Noguchi was going beyond the traditional concept of sculpture. In 1941 he made a design for Contoured Playground. His influence on contemporary land art and environmental sculptures is evident in many works today. actionism in romania The movement was inspired mostly 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 Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

Alan Sonfist is the pioneer of an alternative approach to working with nature and culture that he began in 1965 by bringing historical nature back into New York City. According to the critic Barbara Rose writing in 'Artforum' in 1969 she herself had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. 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 historic "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. 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 feet) 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, 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 Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. Some projects by the artist Christo (who is famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric) have also been considered land art by some, though the artist himself considers this incorrect, as explained on his web page. Joseph Beuys' concept of 'social sculpture' influenced 'Land art' and his 'Eichen' project of 1972 to plant 7000 Oak trees has many similarities to 'Land art' processes.

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 Smithson in a plane crash in 1973 the movement lost its figurehead and petered out. Turrell continues to work on the Roden Crater project. In most respects 'Land art' has become part of mainstream Public Art.

In 1998 a group of artists started in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) a project called Indoor Land Art Programme - ILAP, and had shows all over Europe.

More recently, the artist Seth Wulsin has adopted Caseros Prison in Buenos Aires and its demolition as an art work that, while extending beyond land art, also bares many conceptual resemblances.

One particularly unusual example of land art is the well known Marree Man in South Australia which is both the largest, and unique because, despite this, it came into being without any witnesses whatsoever to its presumably extensive creation activity and no artist(s) have either laid claim to the work or ever been identified![1][2]

African land art has become world renowned over the last decade, largely through the work of South African land artist Strijdom van der Merwe.

Contemporary Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers has created geoglyphs around the world called 'The Rhythms of Life'.

Rhythms of Life

The “Rhythms of Life” project is the largest contemporary land art project in the world – 10 sites – in disparate exotic locations (located below sea level and up to altitudes of 4,300 meters). Up to three Geoglyphs (each up to 660 feet x 660 feet) are located in each site. By completion the project will have involved up to 5000 people (550 people worked in Bolivia, 852 people in Sri Lanka, and 1000 in China. “Rhythms of Life” sites containing large scale Geoglyphs (land sculptures) are complete in Bolivia, Israel, Chile, Sri Lanka, Australia, Iceland and China, which are part of a chain of 10 sites created around the world. Outside the City of Melbourne, in Geelong, a “Rhythms of Life” site was commissioned in association with the Commonwealth Games 2006. In China the “Rhythms of Life” walls stretch 2.1 kilometers. Individually and together the Geoglyphs form a unique art work stretching around the world, titled “The Rhythms of Life”. They are optimistic symbols about life and regeneration – connecting people with history and heritage. The title, the “Rhythms of Life” is derived from Rogers’ early bronze sculptures [3].

Literature

  • 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
  • Gilles A. Tiberghien: Land Art. Ed. Carré 1995
  • Jeffrey Kastner, Brian Wallis: Land and Environmental Art. Boston 1998 ISBN 0-7148-4519-1
  • Udo Weilacher: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ISBN 3-7643-6119-0
  • Max Andrews (Ed.): Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook. London 2006 ISBN 978-0-901469-57-1
  • Amy Dempsey: Destination Art. Berkeley CA 2006 ISBN 13-978-0-520-25025-3
  • Sonfist, Alan (2004). Nature: The End of Art. Florance, Italy: Gli Ori,Dist. Thames & Hudson. pp. 280p. ISBN 0615125336.
  • John K. Grande: New York, London. Balance: Art and Nature, Black Rose Books, 1994, 2003 ISBN 1-55164-234-4
  • Edward Lucie-Smith (Intro) and John K. Grande: Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists, New York 2004 ISBN 0-7914-6914-7

Contemporary land artists

Open-air museums and sculpture sites

  • FOAM Finnish Open Air Museum - Finland , [24]
  • International Museum of the open-air Sculpture, "Europos Parkas", Vilnius, Lithuania, [25], [26]
  • Penttilä Open Air Museum POAM - Finland , [27]
  • Le vent de forets - France , [28]
  • OPAM Open Air Museum, Sculpture Park Drechtbanks - Holland , [29]
  • Kemyel Crease Sculpture project, [30]

See also

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