Land art

• 1. Introduction

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  Land art took a pile of rock, earth, and algae and pushed it 1500 feet into Great Salt Lake in northern Utah. The piece was Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, made in 1970. Some years it vanishes underwater. Other years the lake gives it back. No collector could hang it on a wall, and that was the point. This was an art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, known variously as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks. It pulled artists out of the gallery and into soil, vegetation, and water found on-site, often far from any city. Why would artists abandon the museum for a salt lake? What did they hope to build by making art that nobody could buy and that nature itself might erase?

• 2. Leaving The Gallery

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  Land art was not something that could easily be turned into a commodity, and its makers wanted it that way. They rejected the museum and the gallery as the setting for artistic activity. In their place they developed monumental landscape projects, works beyond the reach of transportable sculpture and the commercial art market. The concerns at the center of the movement were twofold: a rejection of the commercialization of art-making and an enthusiasm for an emergent ecological movement. Its beginning coincided with a popular rejection of urban living and a fresh enthusiasm for the rural. Tangled into these inclinations were spiritual yearnings about the planet Earth as home to humanity. Even while shunning the gallery, artists kept one foot in it. Because the works were often inaccessible, photographic documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery and shown there.

• 3. Roots And Influences

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  Herbert Bayer built a Grass Mound in Aspen, Colorado, in 1955, making him one of the first earthworks artists. The formal movement that followed drew on far older traditions of hill figures and geoglyphs. The Litlington White Horse in East Sussex is a 20th-century example, cut into the hillside through a subtractive method that reveals the natural chalk beneath. Its form is dictated by the slope of the downland, and it requires ongoing maintenance to stop the surrounding vegetation from reclaiming the image. Land art was inspired by minimal art and conceptual art, and by modern movements such as De Stijl, Cubism, and minimalism. The work of Constantin Brâncuși and Joseph Beuys fed it too. Isamu Noguchi's 1941 design for Contoured Playground in New York City is sometimes read as an important early piece, though Noguchi never called his work land art. He simply called it sculpture. The 1960s Earth art also recalled much older land works: Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Native American mounds, the Nazca Lines in Peru, and the Carnac stones, often evoking the spirituality of such archeological sites.

• 4. A Movement Names Itself

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  In 1967, the art critic Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times, declared the first Earthwork to be done by Douglas Leichter and Richard Saba at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 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 that year and the emerging environmental and women's liberation movements. A group exhibition called Earthworks opened in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the Earth Art exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The roster included Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker. Thomas W. Leavitt directed the exhibition. Gordon Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Sharp to help the artists carry out their works on-site.

• 5. Smithson And The Salt Lake

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  Robert Smithson wrote an essay in 1968 titled The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects. It gave the movement a critical framework, a reaction to what he saw as Modernism's disengagement from social issues, represented by the critic Clement Greenberg. He was perhaps the best known artist in the genre. His Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust, also from 1968, shows land art living inside a gallery rather than outdoors. It is a pile of gravel beside a partially mirrored gallery wall, and its concentration on raw materials gives it an affinity with minimalism. That same use of materials traditionally considered unartistic or worthless ties land art to Arte Povera. The Italian Germano Celant, founder of Arte Povera, was among the first curators to promote land art. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973. With his death the movement lost one of its most important figureheads and saw a prominent decline.

• 6. Mapping The Land Artists

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  Land artists tended to be American. Among the prominent figures were Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, Peter Hutchinson, Ana Mendieta, Charles Ross, and James Turrell. The Western United States proved a significant location, its open frontiers and deserts treated as canvases and testing beds. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art to that point, reshaping the earth around the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. The most prominent non-American land artists were the British Chris Drury, Andy Goldsworthy, and Richard Long, along with the Australian Andrew Rogers. In 1973, Jacek Tylicki began laying blank canvases and paper sheets in the natural environment, leaving nature to create the art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, famous for wrapping monuments, buildings, and landscapes in fabric, have had some projects called land art, though the artists themselves considered that incorrect. Joseph Beuys's concept of social sculpture influenced the field, and his 7000 Eichen project of 1982, a plan to plant 7,000 oak trees, shares much with land art processes. Rogers's Rhythms of Life project forms a chain of stone geoglyphs around the globe across 12 sites, reaching altitudes up to 4,300 m, with individual geoglyphs ranging up to 40,000 sq m.

• 7. Money And Patience

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  Walter De Maria's Lightning Field of 1977 was commissioned by The Dia Art Foundation, a sign of how American land artists worked. They relied mostly on wealthy patrons and private foundations to fund costly projects, or were commissioned by them. With the sudden economic downturn of the mid-1970s, and with land art never being marketable in the commercial art trade, those funds largely stopped. The works themselves took a long time to complete, and many remained unfinished. Charles Ross still works on the Star Axis project he began in 1971. James Turrell continues on Roden Crater. Michael Heizer completed his work City in 2022. Over the decades land art has become part of mainstream public art, and the term is sometimes misused to label any kind of art in nature, even pieces conceptually unrelated to the avant-garde work of the pioneers.

• 8. To Preserve Or To Let Go

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  Alan Sonfist took an alternative path, bringing historical nature and sustainable art back into New York City. His most inspirational work is Time Landscape, an indigenous forest he planted in the city. He created other Time Landscapes elsewhere, including Circles of Time in Florence, Italy, and a work at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum outside Boston. According to the critic Barbara Rose, writing in Artforum in 1969, Sonfist had grown disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery-bound art. Adam Weinberg, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, told ArtNet that Sonfist's ecological message feels more timely now than ever, saying we need solutions to climate change not only from scientists and politicians but also from artists. The environmental ideals of the 2010s and 2020s can run against the intent of some land art simply to exist within the environment, subject to natural forces of entropy, as the Spiral Jetty does. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, working with the Dia Foundation, stewards the Jetty and curates programming around it, including a Family Backpacks program. One observer warned that the impulse to rescue and preserve it defines it as fine art like nothing else, joking that someone may want to cover it with a plastic bubble-dome. The same writer noted a further irony: with nearby oil-drilling upsetting artists and eco-activists, preserving the unnatural jetty has become a wedge against extracting natural earth from the ground. The Fly Ranch exhibition of 2021 pointed forward, building art pieces that doubled as animal shelters, small-footprint solar farms, planters, and water cleaners.