Land art

also: Earth art · Earthworks · Environmental art

movement 1960s-present United States United Kingdom

Land art - also earth art or earthworks - emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in the United States and Great Britain, when artists rejected the museum and the commercial gallery as the place where art happens. Working with the materials of the earth itself - soil, rock, vegetation, water - they built monumental, often remote projects that could not be bought, shipped, or hung; what returned to the city was usually photographic documentation. The movement grew from minimal and conceptual art and from the politics and ecology of the late 1960s, and its founding moments are named exhibitions: Dwan Gallery's 'Earthworks' in New York (1968) and Cornell's 'Earth Art' (1969). Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) remains its emblem. With Smithson's death in 1973 and the mid-1970s downturn, funding dried up, yet major projects - Turrell's Roden Crater, Heizer's City, Ross's Star Axis - continue to this day.

Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005.
Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005.Public domain (credit: Sculpture: Robert Smithson 1938-1973 Image: Soren.harward at) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Site-specific interventions in remote landscape, inseparable from their place
  • Earth as medium: soil, rock, vegetation, and water worked directly on site
  • Monumental scale, often beyond transport and the reach of the art market
  • Photographic and film documentation carries the work back to the gallery
  • Simple geometric forms - spirals, trenches, mounds, grids - writ large on the land
  • Embrace of time, weather, and entropy: works may erode, flood, or disappear

Key figures

  • Robert Smithson (1938-1973) — Leading theorist and maker of earthworks; Spiral Jetty (1970) is the movement's emblem
  • Michael Heizer (b. 1944) — Carver of monumental negative forms in the Nevada desert (Double Negative; City)
  • Walter De Maria (1935-2013) — Minimalist turned earth artist; The Lightning Field (1977), commissioned by Dia
  • Nancy Holt (1938-2014) — Land artist of celestial alignments; Sun Tunnels (1973-1976) in Utah
  • Richard Long (b. 1945) — British artist whose walking pieces (A Line Made by Walking, 1967) opened the field

Example works

Sources

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