Land Art and Earthworks
Land artists left the gallery for the desert and the salt flat, shaping earth, rock, and water at the scale of the landscape itself. Works like Smithson's Spiral Jetty exist in remote sites, change with weather and time, and reach most viewers only through photographs.
Definition
Art made in and from the landscape, using earth, rock, and natural materials at large scale, often in remote sites and subject to natural process and decay.
Scope
Covers the Earthworks and land art movement: large-scale interventions in the landscape, the use of natural materials and processes, the relation to entropy and time, and the dependence on documentation. Treats art made in and of the land; gallery-bound installation is handled in sibling topics.
Core questions
- Why did land artists move out of the gallery into the landscape?
- How do natural materials, weather, and entropy shape earthworks over time?
- How does the remoteness of land art change how it is experienced and known?
- What is the relation between an earthwork and its photographic documentation?
Key concepts
- earthwork
- site and nonsite
- entropy
- natural materials
- the remote landscape
- documentation
Key theories
- Site and nonsite
- Smithson distinguished the remote 'site' of an earthwork from the 'nonsite' of maps, samples, and photographs brought into the gallery, theorizing the relation between the landscape work and its documentation.
- Entropy and natural process
- Land art embraces decay, erosion, and entropy, so that the work changes with time and weather rather than being preserved in a fixed, permanent state.
History
Land art emerged around 1968-70 in the United States, with artists such as Smithson, Heizer, De Maria, and Holt making large interventions in deserts and remote landscapes, partly in reaction against the gallery and the art market. Smithson's writings theorized site, nonsite, and entropy, while later surveys by Beardsley and Kastner extended the field into environmental art.
Debates
- Monumental intervention versus ecological care
- Whether large earthworks that reshape remote landscapes are a profound engagement with nature and time, or an environmentally heavy imposition at odds with the ecological sensibilities of later environmental art.
Key figures
- Robert Smithson
- John Beardsley
- Jeffrey Kastner
Related topics
Seminal works
- smithson1968
- beardsley1998
- kastner1998
Frequently asked questions
- What is land art?
- Land art, or Earthworks, is art made directly in and from the landscape using earth, rock, and natural materials, often at vast scale in remote locations; emerging around 1970, it took sculpture out of the gallery and into the environment itself.
- If a work is in a remote desert, how do people see it?
- Most viewers experience land art through photographs, film, maps, and texts rather than in person; Robert Smithson called the gathered documents and samples a 'nonsite,' treating the relation between the distant work and its representation as part of the art.