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NARRATOR: You're out in the world,
exploring a part of the immensely varied landscape
of our dear planet Earth, freed from your desk or whatever
in life chains you.
You marvel at the beauty, the grandeur,
the unfathomable immensity of it all.
You reflect on humankind's ability
to control the landscape and dramatically fail
to control it.
It's a multi-sensory experience, being
in the outdoors, with visual input, of course,
but also with plenty to hear, touch, taste, and beyond.
Our world has dimensionality, and it's always changing, too.
Why, oh why anyone feel the urge,
the hubris to put art out here?
What kind of an art can thrive in the presence of such
a formidable costar as Earth?
This is the case for land art.
We tend to think of art as primarily belonging
to the indoor realm, to museums, galleries, to our homes,
and places we congregate.
Sure, there are murals and sculptures here and there,
but even when art is outside, it's
still framed, bolted to a pedestal or a concrete slab,
perched next to a fancy building,
or nestled within a manicured sculpture park drafting,
off the reputation of the institution
to which it's tethered.
This framing helps divide these objects
from the other, lesser objects that surround you and tell you
that what you're looking at is special, authentic, rare,
and valuable.
Beginning in the late 1960s, an increasing number of artists
started questioning this kind of separation and framing of art,
leaving the city and making stuff out in the world.
Sometimes it involved putting new material out
into the world, like Robert Smithson's temporary mirror
displacements, and sometimes it entailed taking material away,
like Michael Heizer's immense excisions from a Nevada mesa.
Some of the projects were monumental and long lasting,
like James Turrell's ongoing Roden Crater, and other times
light and ephemeral, like Richard Long's A Line
Made by Walking, where he walked back and forth across a meadow,
drawing in his way a line of flattened grass.
People started to call these things earth art, earthworks,
environmental art, or land art, catchall terms
for a wide range of activities that were not
an organized movement but were certainly
a noticeable tendency.
We're going to call it land art, and we'll
define it as art that is made within or atop or involving
a landscape, or art that is made from materials
drawn from the landscape.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all art is technically
made from natural materials, but we have to work from somewhere.
Let's just agree that it's a spectrum,
and this is more land art than say, this.
But there's a lot in between.
And of course, humans have been making dramatic marks
on the landscape since prehistoric times.
Across cultures and centuries, people
have made highly site specific gestures,
drawing lines, building mounds, and erecting
massive geometric earthworks.
But just as each of these stem from vastly different
motivations, the artists who made land art since the 60s
have done so with specific and differing approaches.
It's said that a visit to the pre-Columbian Great Serpent
Mound in Ohio inspired Robert Smithson's best known work,
Spiral Jetty.
In 1970, he and two assistants moved nearly 7000 tons
of earth, basalts, and boulders into the form
you see here, projecting into Utah's Great Salt Lake.
It became submerged in 1972 and stayed that way
until drought caused it to reemerge 30 years later,
but that's precisely what attracted him to the site.
Drawn to the concept of entropy, Smithson
explored in this work and others the reality
that an artwork is never fixed and experiences decay
from the moment it's made.
He also theorized the relationship
between a site out in the world and what
happens in an art gallery.
In a series he called Nonsites, Smithson brought materials
like rocks from a specific place into a gallery
and put them into shaped bins, positioning them
next to a wall map indicating where the material originated.
For Smithson, the site was that natural location,
and the non-site was its reprocessed,
contained state in the gallery.
So in other words, and using examples
Smithson never did, actual Yosemite Valley in California
would be a site, and then Albert Bierstadt's 1865 painting,
Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, is the nonsite.
Smithson wrote, "the relation of a Nonsite to the Site
is also like that of language to the world.
It is a signifier and the site is that which is signified."
Many artists at the time were trying to escape these terms
and break free from the museum or gallery.
Making work out in and with the landscape
was a way to do just that.
Nancy Holt's sun tunnels in Northwestern Utah
stemmed from her motivation to allow visitors
a way to experience the vastness of the land
while also meeting the human desire for containment.
Four concrete tunnels are arranged
in an open X, aligned with the rising and setting
of the sun on the summer and winter solstices.
Holes pierced through the tunnels
represent the stars of four constellations,
to provide a sense of connection to the universe
and also allow light to filter through and create changing
patterns and shadows throughout the day.
Holt's work, and that of many working in the landscape,
depend heavily on photography, film, and video
to document it in its various unchanging states,
and also allow people to see it who can't get to it.
Sometimes, the documentation was the work,
as in the land interventions of Ana Mendieta, whose haunting
Silueta series saw her inscribing female forms,
sometimes hers, into a range of natural sites.
She created her marks and then photographed them
or filmed them on Super 8, with only herself
or a handful of others as witness.
The way the body moves through space was of great concern
to many land artists, who often blurred the boundaries
between art and architecture.
In 1979, art historian Rosalind Krauss
wrote an essay trying to make sense or at least begin to
of land art, as it relates to the category of sculpture.
Whereas modernist sculpture, which
had its origins in the tradition of the monument,
could maybe once be seen as the thing that was not landscape
and not architecture, with all this wacky new installation
and land art at the time, perhaps sculpture
would now be better understood as being
part of a structureless diagram or an expanded field
that she proposed might look like.
This is pretty impossible to parse,
but that's kind of what she was getting at, working
to complicate and break up the firmly divided categories
for art that had ruled the day up until then.
Art in a gallery was isolated from the outside world,
which in the 1960s and 70s was rife with conflict.
The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements and Second Wave Feminism
were easier to forget within the white cube.
As art critic Barbara Rose wrote in 1969,
"a dissatisfaction with the current social and political
system results in an unwillingness
to produce commodities which gratify and perpetuate
that system.
Here the sphere of ethics and aesthetics merge."
The 70s saw the birth of the modern environmental movement,
and land artworks also addressed a number
of ecological concerns, not just out in the desert,
but firmly in civilization, as well.
For his work Time Landscape, Alan Sonfist
replanted an abandoned rubble strewn lot in Manhattan
with plants indigenous to the island,
recreating what might have existed there
before it was settled.
The work sought to connect urbanites
to their city's natural heritage and bring light
to the seemingly runaway train of development.
It's still there, by the way.
Agnes Denes cleared the rubble from a landfill
further downtown, planted a two acre wheat field,
maintained it for four months, and harvested
a yield of healthy wheat just blocks
from Wall Street and the World Trade Center.
The work took place on hugely valuable land,
and called attention to the choices
we make in managing and mismanaging our resources.
Land art opened up a whole new way of working with place,
kicking off a trend in art that remains
strong of paying attention to the particularities
of a site, its geology, its ownership, its histories,
its present.
Whether in a dense city or out in the middle of nowhere,
everything everywhere is site specific,
and land art strips away those framing mechanisms
to help us realize that.
The best of land art makes it impossible to forget where
you are and sets into relief your surroundings
with a clarity that jolts you out of the one thing
after anotherness of everyday life.
Land art at its best helps us map our location in the world,
and in time.
It's often inconvenient, and it cannot be rushed.
It must be walk through and around,
and revisited at different times of day and in varying weather.
But in this, the age of the Anthropocene,
in which we acknowledge the extent to which humans
are actors on the natural systems of our planet,
it's land art that is perhaps best suited
to help us contemplate our complicated relationship
with nature.
Are we part of nature or separate from it?
Do we make nature or does it make us?
What is the right way to live here on Earth?
What kinds of structures and places and systems
do we want to build?
What is conquest and what is cultivation?
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Special thanks to our Grand Master
of the Arts, Indianapolis Homes Realty.
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check out our page at patreon.com/artassignment.
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