A Journey Through Land Art
From avant-garde artists in the sixties to Coachella Valley’s Desert X.
99 Blue spheres aligned for the Stellar Axis installation by Lita Albuquerque during her expedition to the Antarctica.
Photo: Jean de Pomereu
How many times, almost as a joke, have we questioned an artwork claiming that "we could have done it ourselves"? I must confess that in my case, it has been more than once. And it is precisely after this premise, when we are immediately led to doubt if the fact of being exposed in a museum, a gallery or any other cultural institution, automatically turns any given object into art. The answer is as debatable as it is diverse, but one thing is certain: in recent decades, art has found its way to break with imposed categories by society and escape to alternative spaces and many times, expand to untouched places by men. Welcome to the territory of Land Art.
When it comes to an artistic movement, I think that it is never easy to specify one single and official start date. But many would say that when talking about Land Art, it all started, (ironically) in the late sixties New York, when the mass commercialization of art made countless of avant-garde artists to rebel against the biggest cultural institutions and emancipate their work by settling down —mostly illegally— inside SoHo’s decaying buildings. This not only set the origin of what would later become the cradle of New York’s emergent art, but also the beginning of a strong relationship between the artwork and its spatial context.
We start today’s name dropping with Brian O'Doherty (a.k.a Patrick Ireland, his alter ego), a conceptual artist and art critic who was one of the first to apply the term "alternative space" through his series of essays published in Inside The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1976), where he questions the exclusivity of galleries displaying contemporary art. In 10 Downtown 10 Years (1978), the British art critic, Lawrence Alloway, consolidated the idea with "the use of studios as exhibition spaces, the temporary use of buildings under construction and artist collectives". This is how the streets of the Big Apple were taken over by brand new organizations dedicated to revive forgotten urban spaces, from kitchens in art centers (The Kitchen, 1971), public schools in Long Island (PS1, 1976), and abandoned factories in Coney Island.
With this preamble, we can understand how artists started to detach from the practices previously imposed by museums and galleries by literally "unframing" their work and breaking the limits of what, at that time, was considered an “accepted aesthetic”. The result? A trend that escaped the big cities and now expresses itself through installations created in a specific context and space.
Land Art, also known as Environmental Art or Earthworks, is essentially all art made in / involving one / or created with elements taken from a natural landscape.
For a better understanding, Robert Smithson, a representative figure of this trend, introduced the “Sites and Non-sites” theory, where he states that while the “site” can be visited and traveled, thus becoming a journey or an immersive experience, the “non -site” is exclusively where the information is contained. Seen through his works, the gigantic Spiral Jetty sculpture created in 1970 from more than 5,000 tons of black basalt in the Utah desert is the “site”, while his iconic temporary mirrors represent the “non site”, being the museum where the container agent was installed. Does this mean that one work is more or less "Land Art" than the other? Not precisely, because as one was designed and executed to alter and incorporate itself into a natural landscape, the other took elements of it to recreate a smaller representation, inside a museum.
Another pioneer artist was Nancy Holt, who, through her large-scale installation (and one of my favorites) Sun Tunnels (1973-1976) in Utah, embraces a game of lights and shadows with four concrete tunnels in cross shape. Although it may seem as if the pieces were randomly arranged in the middle of the Great Basin Desert, it is actually a work perfectly planned and aligned to the sunrise and sunset hours corresponding to the summer and winter solstices. Each structure in this "immense human-scale desert space" as Nancy calls it, has small holes that represent the stars of four constellations: Capricorn, Columba, Draco and Perseus. If it wasn’t because of Sun Tunnels, there would probably be no reason to visit this place in the Great Basin Desert, but that is exactly the intention of Land Art. Donald Judd —minimal artist also known as the man who converted Marfa,Texas into the new hotspot for contemporary art— explained it years later in the first catalog for Chinati Foundation:
“It takes time to install a job carefully. This should not be discarded. Art is fragile and part of it should be placed and not moved anymore. Somewhere, a piece of contemporary art must exist as an example of what art and its context were meant to be. "
Donald Judd (1987)
By this point, you may have realized that there is no pattern for Land Art. There will be things that you can look at and listen to, and some others that you can walk and touch, and just when you think you have figured everything out, something totally different can emerge. Something like Time Landscape by Alan Sonfist, who in the 1960s occupied a rectangular plot located in Lower Manhattan to plant and bring back vegetation that was once native to the city in pre-Columbian times.
Or Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, who portrayed how ephemeral human condition can be with a series of performances where she captured her silhouette in various places in Oaxaca, Mexico. Sonfist's installation is still visible today, while Mendieta's installation, had to be documented, otherwise, they would have been lost forever.
In contrast to the large-scale structures and immersive experiences that predominated in the United States at this time, Europe was differentiated by more subtle and temporal concepts. The most representative example that comes to my mind is A Line Made by Walking by Richard Long, an English sculptor and photographer who after walking down the same path several times through a Wiltshire field, left a mark in the grass that later on, he photographed. As simple as the result may seem at first glance, it was a work that reflects a broad analysis of relativity and temporality. And once again, it was thanks to the role of photography that people were able to see it.
A movement or a trend?
There have been many critics and art historians who have totally dismissed Land Art as an art movement, classifying it as a trend. But, isn't a trend just a wave that leaves a mark within a specific period of time or space? Today, Land Art is as present as in the decades that saw it emerge and now we can witness its evolution.
Surely you have came across more than once with Desert X, an exhibition in the Coachella Valley. This installation in strident colors of Sterling Ruby and the trampolines of Manal AlDowayan have made thousands of people travel to the south of California in the past few years. I’m sure you’ve heard about Lita Albuquerque and her expedition to Antarctica and the North Pole for the assembly of giant blue spheres (Stellar Axis, 2006). Or Julian Charriere who scaled an iceberg in Iceland to melt small pieces of it with a gas torch for eight hours resulting in the impressive photo series The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013).
Although it is true that photography and video will continue to play an elementary role for the preservation of art, have you thought about how social media helps us connect with an infinite universe of new ideas? Sixty years ago it was the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power, events that shaped creative processes. What are the events that today define the art of our times?
What impact will the COVID-19 outbreak have on art spaces from now on? Will outdoor areas and natural landscapes increase as a new way of displaying art? Can Land Art empower us to rethink the value of our environment? Can we see it as a call to action?
I believe that Land Art as a medium of expression, is now more than ever an incessant wave that is taking us to unexplored places and is making us wonder if we are part of them or just separate agents.
“Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.” Robert Smithson