Land Art in the U.S.A.

LAND ART IN THE U.S.A.

A study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the ‘golden age’ of land art – the 1960s – to the present day.

This book explores all of the major American land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, as well as European land artists working in North America. The book includes chapters on James Turrell and his vast volcano site – Michael Heizer’s Mid-West earthworks – Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks – Robert Morris’s environments and observatories – Walter de Maria’s Romantic Lightning Field and Earth Room – Dennis Oppenheim’s concentric snow circles – Alice Aycock’s mysterious underground mazes – Mary Miss’s sunken pools and pavilions – Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures – and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre. And Europeans such as: Hans Haacke’s Conceptual art – Richard Long and his art of walking – Andy Goldsworthy’s natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures – and Christo’s wrapped buildings and islands.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714053. 328 pages.

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EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he’s been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site æsthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were ‘the more compelling artists today, concerned with ‘Place’ or ‘Site”. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith’s vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith ‘the agent of endlessness’. Smith’s æsthetic became part of Smithson’s view of art as a complete ‘site’, not simply an æsthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were ‘in some way disrupted or pulverized’. He said he was looking for a ‘denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty’.

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: ‘I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation’. Smithson’s theory of the ‘non-site’ was based on ‘absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence’. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the ‘non-site’ and ‘site’ are both interacting. In the ‘non-site’ work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. ‘