To See a Forest for the… Artistic Possibilities
I completely missed Earth Week, as it seems that environmental groups are not fans of putting up event flyers, for some reason. So for my post this week I have some interesting pieces of Land/Earth Art, or “Earthworks” as pioneer Robert Smithson called them.
Rising with the environmental movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s in America, Land Art was trying to move against the throwaway culture of commercialization. Modern art was swiftly moving away from preconceived notions of what art is and where art must be. The artists who created Earthworks were using the land not as inspiration (a la Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church) but as medium. Most of these works were ephemeral and designed not to last; what we have remaining are photographs.
1500’ long and 15’ wide, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson may be the most famous piece of Land Art. It was made in 1970 from mud, salt crystals, and rocks, located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Truckloads of materials were dumped into the lake. Smithson’s art was particularly interested in entropy, and the concept of spiral that would change appearances over time is evidence of that. For a long time the jetty was mostly submerged in the lake due to rising water levels. When it fully reemerged a few years ago, crystalized salt had given the spiral a white glow.
In 1968, Smithson wrote an essay entitled “The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” published in Artforum. The piece gave the Earthworks movement its voice, and although some artists had been making art out of and utilizing the earth before Smithson, he is considered to be the pioneer. In addition to his land artwork, Smithson wrote essays, made films, drew, and sculpted. He died young, with plans for many new projects left unfinished. Describing the monuments and new artwork that were being created around the world, Smithson wrote in his essay “Entropy And The New Monuments”: “They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.” Pieces of Earth Art are certainly against the ages, and against time, as they are pieces of art created specifically not to last. Artists involved in Earthworks were rebelling against the museum as final goal of art, but you can see some of these pieces in collections today thanks to photography.
The Guggenheim in NYC has some of Robert Smithson’s Photoworks, notably slides from the Yucatan Mirror Displacements (one is pictured above). Smithson strived to place art and make art within the natural world, and to make time and entropy the focus of a movement. Unfortunately, he was killed in a plane crash at the age of 35; he greatly impacted the Earth Art movement and still has a strong following today.
Conceptual art, minimalism, and cubism all influenced land artists. In 1969, artist Michael Heizer created a piece of land art that was not an addition to the landscape but a taking away. 240,000 tons of displaced rhyolite and sandstone in the Moapa Valley, Nevada make up Heizer’s piece of art entitled Double Negative. The two trenches together are 30’ wide, 50’ deep, and 1,500’ long. Heizer is quoted saying; “There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.” Double Negative is essentially two trenches cut into the desert (hence the title), divided by a mesa edge. The piece brings up the obvious question of “what is art?”, as well as the contemplation of the earth as art. Does the taking away of large quantities of stone make a piece of art, in the same way that the putting together of large quantities of stone makes a sculpture? The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles owns Double Negative, and it is accessible by any strong four-wheel drive vehicle.
More contemporary artists have shifted from using the earth itself as both medium and installation, and have constructed environmental works with other materials and installed them on the land. Nancy Holt, known for public and installation art, created Sun Tunnels between 1973-76. A desolate part of the Great Basin Desert in Utah is home to her four massive tunnels, which are constructed into an X shape and are aligned to either the sunrise, sunset, winter or summer solstice. Each tunnel is 18’ long and 9’ in diameter. Bringing “the sky down to earth”, each tunnel has a unique configuration of holes that display different constellations for the viewer standing inside.
These very public works make them difficult to own or claim. They are part of no time and no place, “against the ages” as Robert Smithson would have liked. In stark contrast to the very ordered curation of art pieces in museums like the MOMA or the Met, these Earthworks can be viewed only after making a long trek out into the desert; some Earthworks can no longer be seen at all. I haven’t been to any of these sites, but fortunately we have aerial photography that captures the shifting of the pieces. There have been Land Art pieces constructed in Europe, but the vastness of the American West has made that an ideal spot for the Earth Art movement. The landscape in this area is stunning in itself, but hopefully I can get a chance to visit some of these sites that amalgamate human achievement and natural beauty.