PUBLICATIONS

Issue 40 - Winter 2006

A Brief History of Land Art

Land Art uses the biggest canvas of all: the surface of the earth. It also uses the most abundant material for large scale work: earth, rock and mud. A much misunderstood art movement that flourished briefly in the 1970's continues in various forms today. It has come within the realm, to a certain degree, of landscape architects and designers. Arran Henderson argues that Land Art still has things to say.

In one sense, nothing could be easier to understand than Land Art. The giant 'Earthworks': carved into canyons and mountains; enormous ditches, mounds, craters; long lines of placed stone and rock. This is neither the most subtle nor esoteric art movement of the 20th century.

Naturally, the history and theoretical underpinnings of Land Art are more complex. In America especially, Land Art was a close relation to - and in many ways carried on from - Minimalism. Minimalism alienated many because it extinguished precisely what many most cherish in art - the hand of the maker. When sculptors turned to industrial materials and processes to present blank statements of form and mass, gone was the brush stroke, the charcoal, the line of colour. Yet this was a brief moment where sculptors posed the simplest questions, those of most elemental concern to sculpture.

By stripping away all surface information, detail and texture, Minimalism focuses on whether or not the perception and meaning of art comes, as we subconsciously assume, through the canvas or marble, or in fact largely from the viewer. The minimalist Robert Morris put this proposition most succinctly, with his large mirrored cubes, reflecting back the spectator.

On a more fundamental level, it forced the viewer to question their physical relationship to a piece, in stark physical terms. Its bulk and yours? Its shape and yours? Richard Serra's work, for example, is concerned with balance, with weights and equilibrium; ideas of scale, and of gravity. Although these precise, very formal artistic concerns are of no interest to most lay people, they are of key importance to all people involved in the design and placement of great masses; to sculptors; to architects and, potentially, to landscape designers.

On the bald page many of these ideas now seem banal, but at the time they excited many practitioners, and once we surmount the suspicion and hostility of looking at a pile of bricks or earth, the ideas begin to flow.

Land Art grew out of this same set of sculptural concerns. Michael Heizer, the son of archaeologists, used an enormous canyon in New Mexico to carve out Double Negative. This work is essentially two huge pieces of canyon side removed.

These 'negatives' face each other across a chasm. Although the work asks the same formal queries posited by minimalism, we may find our urge to "humanise" at work. Standing in one of these isolated depressions, staring across at an unreachable opposite across that abyss, perhaps at another person, many have read a kind of existential longing into Heizer's work.

Other land artists built huge mounds, ramps of earth. One work involved piling soil onto a wooden building until the roof caved in. Another artist filled an entire New York city apartment full to the ceiling with clay.

Land Art clearly uses the biggest canvas of all - the surface of the earth. It also uses the most abundant material for large scale work; earth, rock and soil. It is generally sited in remote and grand locations. By its very scale, it puts us in mind of ancient cultures of history and prehistory, Mayan, Cambodian, Egyptian and pre-Celtic.

The great earth works of the ancient past provided obvious models for land artists, especially the mystic or astronomical significance of such sites, which were often celestial observatories with particular orientations. Stonehenge, as the land artist Robert Smithson remarked, is essentially a giant clock. Because of this link to ancient sites, the Land Art movement was particularly concerned with orientation, sight lines, and site specificity.

Smithson, who died young in a plane crash in 1973, remains perhaps the most interesting of land artists. His writings, sketches and essays reveal an artist obsessed by the ancient, the arcane and esoteric. If it were not for Smithson's erudition, and his wry sense of the absurd, then his writings as well as his work would be of keen interest to new-age types today. Instead Smithson is known as the author of the most iconic work of all Land Art.

Spiral Jetty [1970] sits in a salt lake in bleak Utah, so remote as to be almost inaccessible in this glaring bright, scorched and ruined landscape. The setting appealed to Smithson's notions on entropy. Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all energies dissipate, and thus all physical objects must eventually, inevitably, be reduced to their lowest state. The artist saw this as applying to cultures, thought systems, and whole civilisations.

Not for Smithson the minimalist grammar of cube and block. He chose the most richly laden symbol of many cultures, from Newgrange and pre-Colombian Mexico onward: the spiral.

Spiral Jetty is just that; a line of rocks and mud bull-dozed together. It projects from the lake shore, then spirals inward to a pointless end. As the critic Robert Hughes has observed, the spiral form is "so archaic it could be associated with anything from viruses to salt crystals, whirlpools, serpents, and snail shells and scrolls to nebula in outer space. That it could attract such a traffic jam of symbolic references was of, course, part of Smithson's design".

Some years after its completion Spiral Jetty disappeared following rising water levels in the lake. Given his views on entropy, this is an irony that would have pleased its maker. Today the work periodically resurfaces. Debate focuses on how feasible, or inevitably, how appropriate, work on conservation might be. Smithson's influence on other artists continues to grow, more than 30 years after his death.

Despite its usually large scale, Land Art has the advantage, for artists at least, of using materials [soil, earth, rock] that are not only vastly abundant, but free. This has a democratic effect. Compared to say, bronze casting, a notoriously difficult and expensive process, Land Art can be made on the cheap.

I live opposite Bull Island, or Dollymount Strand, in North Dublin, a 3-mile long spit of sand dunes and grass. One windy April in 2000, I cajoled 12 friends to come out and dig. I knew from previous visits and mapping the location of a picnic table, long buried by the shifting sand dunes. Over six or seven hours we shifted several tons of sand, creating a half crater, and revealing the long-vanished table and benches.

I created a film to mark the event, which later formed the centre piece of my graduation show from NCAD. It went on to exhibit in the RHA, the Sculpture Society of Ireland and elsewhere. I don't know what this work meant - it resembled archaeological dig, yet the artifact was recent. It illustrated some ideas I cherished, about the island as a kind of gigantic drawing board. It may have also been a sort of tribute to Smithson. In any case it remains possibly still the work I am proudest of, without ever knowing why.

Land Art had a heroic flourish in its early years. Its massive scale and primal materials appealed to an American sense of the epic, while British Land Art, perhaps because of the urban nature of that country, tended towards a kind of romanticism.

At the time, and since, some have criticised the great American earth works of Smithson and Heizer for being bombastic, even environmentally destructive, huge bulldozed interventions in the landscape. Yet Smithson's work in particular, while rejecting notions of a pristine or "innocent" landscape, was still concerned with the rehabilitation of ruined sites, such as old mines and quarry works. The larger-scale work of landscape architect Steve Martino, which he presented at the GLDA seminar two years ago, could be considered in this tradition.

Despite the schematising of critics and curators, art movements do not fall into neatly defined categories. Nobody can say where one ends and another begins, nor when.

Two of the best known British succesors to the movement are Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long [who had a show running at Lismore Castle this summer]. But are they land artists? I suspect the Americans of the 1970's would have found them too whimsical for the romanticism that runs through their work. Yet Goldworthy works in the land, and it forms both the subject and the materials for his work. Likewise, Richard Long the same. His long wanderings and poetic musings carry the 'taint' of romanticism, as some might see it. Yet again, the earth provides the inspiration and the raw material for his work.

The most revered land artist today is the American James Turrell, often called a light and space artist. Turrell is a Quaker, a rancher and a pilot who studied science and mathematics at university. His early work focused on light, colour and perception, with a keen scientific understanding of the psychological mechanisms of optics and perception.

For the last many years Turrell's great project has been the transformation of an entire volcano into an art work.
The Roden Crater project is located near Flagstaff, Arizona. It is an extinct volcano, now being transformed into a massive earthwork of tunnels, elliptical chambers, and a perfected rim.

The Roden Crater, as David Cohen expresses it, 'is designed for enhanced contemplation of the heavens, a kind of natural telescope that will use the laws of perception in lieu of lenses'. Turrell's work focuses on both the contemplation of the sublime, as well as on the act and nature of contemplation itself.

You don't have to go to Arizona to see Turrell's work. The Irish Sky Garden at Lis Ard was an ambitious project near Skibbereen in Cork that aimed to create a series of earthworks; spaces to contain and frame the landscape, viewer and sky. Due to difficulties, Turrell had to withdraw and he later severed all connection with the project. Nonetheless one major piece remains. It gives a glimpse of what might have been.

Land Art continues and evolves as part of a broad spectrum of contemporary arts practice, and has become the realm of, to a certain degree, landscape architects and designers. Paradoxically, given Land Art's Minimalist godparents, Turrell's intelligent and reflective spiritualism may be its savior. Roden Crater is, physically speaking, the largest ever art project in history. The best is yet to come.

Arran Henderson is an artist, journalist and filmmaker based in North Dublin. He writes on urban history and design for Totally Dublin magazine among other publications.

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