Did ya’ll know that there is an entire segment of Environmental
Art devoted to the earth? Literally! -Miss C.
15 Essential Works of Land Art, from Great Salt Lakes to Dusty
Fields of Lightning
BY ANDY BATTAGLIA
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.NANCY HOLT/©HOLT
SMITHSON FOUNDATION AND DIA ART FOUNDATION/LICENSED BY VAGA AT
ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/COURTESY DIA ART FOUNDATION, NEW
YORK
When the artists who pioneered what we now call Land art moved
beyond museums and galleries to the great outdoors, they entered a
world free of limitations and flush with earthy materials to use.
In place of white walls rising up around them were vast expanses of
space and forever-stretching horizon lines, and instead of things
like epoxy and paint, they turned to tools such as rocks and
dirt.
Though the lineage dates back centuries and even millennia, the
prime of Land art as a movement sits most squarely in the 1960s and
’70s, when artists ventured into deserts in the American West and
started drawing lines and carving into the earth. Part of the
motivation was to work outside the confines of an increasingly
commercialized art market, to make ever more enigmatic works that
couldn’t be commodified as objects. But the spirit behind ambitious
projects varied—all with an appreciation for the contemplativeness
of long stretches of time and a vital sense of adventure.
Below are 15 works that help tell the story of Land art as it
has expanded and evolved.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)The most iconic of
the major earthworks of the ’70s, Spiral Jetty (pictured
above) is a 1,500-foot vortex constructed with more than 6,000 tons
of basalt rocks spinning out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Robert
Smithson had been intrigued by the lake since he’d been told that
certain organism-infested waters in it could be, as he wrote, “the
color of tomato soup,” and among his many interests in the
sculpture itself was playing with the sense of scale. “Size
determines an object, but scale determines art,” he wrote. “A crack
in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called
the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of
the solar system.” Over the decades, the structure has come and
gone, changing through states of submersion or resting on dry land
as the lake itself expands and contracts. But it remains in place
and is open for visits, about a two-hour drive from Salt Lake
City.
Michelle Stuart, Niagara Gorge Path
Relocated (1975)Monumental yet fleeting—like a lot of Land art
that exists now only in the historical record—Michelle
Stuart’s Niagara Gorge Path Relocated was a 460-foot-long
roll of paper descended down a gorge that had been, per a
description in Stuart’s book Sculptural Objects: Journeys In
& Out of the Studio, “the original location of Niagara Falls at
the time of the last glacier approximately 12,000 years ago.” That
original location is now Lewiston, New York—seven miles from the
Falls’ current location and, back in the ’70s, the home of Artpark,
an important site for Land art that featured works by other artists
including Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt as well as a residency
memorializing Robert Smithson (after his death in a plane crash in
1973 while working on another Land art project in Texas).
Michelle Stuart, Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, 1975.©STUART
STUDIO ARCHIVE
Michael Heizer, Circular Surface Planar Displacement
Drawing (1970)Some people draw with pencils. Others—like
Michael Heizer at the height of his handsome dark-and-brooding wild
cowboy prime—draw with the tires of a motorcycle speeding across a
dry desert lakebed. That was his tool of choice for Circular
Surface Planar Displacement Drawing, a series of lines inscribed
into the earth in circles measuring around 900 by 500 feet. The
drawing dissipated in time, but the legend of its making lives on
in the legacy of an artist whose biking past is well-chronicled. As
Heizer said of his childhood in a New York Times
Magazine profile in 2005: “I didn’t have many friends. I
wasn’t a sports guy, a team player. The only sport I liked as I
grew up was riding motorcycles, and you do that alone.”
Walter De Maria, Yellow Painting/The Color Men Choose When
They Attack the Earth (1968)A curious inclusion in an
important early “Earthworks” exhibition at Dwan
Gallery in New York, Walter De Maria’s Painting (as
it was originally titled, before a later alteration) features a
small silver plaque bearing the words “The Color Men Choose When
They Attack the Earth” in the middle of a large canvas painted
bright yellow. Contributing a painting to a Land art show was an
impish move (“an act of ostentatious contrariness,” as Suzaan
Boettger wrote in her book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape
of the Sixties), and its color evoked the familiar hue of
Caterpillar-brand tractors and machinery used to make incursions
into the natural world.
Maya Lin, Storm King Wavefield, 2009.JERRY L.
THOMPSON/©MAYA LIN/COURTESY PACE GALLERY
Maya Lin, Storm King Wavefield (2007–08)A rolling
field of would-be watery waves made with earth and grass is a
surreal sight at the storied Storm King Art Center in Upstate New
York, where 500 acres of Hudson River Valley idyll are devoted to
enormous sculptures of different kinds. The work relates to two
other similar wavefields (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Miami,
Florida), but this one is the largest—with seven waves stretching
400 feet from side-to-side and rising in forms between 10 and 15
feet tall. The effect of walking among them—riding them, so to
speak—is magnificent.
Andy Goldsworthy, Kelp thrown into a grey, overcast sky,
Drakes Beach, California (2013)Andy Goldsworthy has done a
wealth of work in the great outdoors (like Maya Lin, above, he has
an amazing stone wall at Storm King Art Center that winds around
trees and even extends under a pond). But there’s a special
elegance and simplicity in the wonder evoked by a series of
photographs for which he threw seaweed into the air and captured
their curvy, curly shapes in suspension. It turns out that kelp,
wind, and gravity can conspire to draw lines as stimulating as
those of the best draftsman.
Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line (1988)Richard Long
works with rocks and mud—and lots and lots of walking. An
emblematic early work from the ’60s involved grass patted down in a
line by the artist’s feet in motion, and for Dusty Boots Line,
he kicked stones in the Sahara Desert away to clear a path in the
middle of a landscape in which he did all sorts of other stuff
during a fruitful journey in 1988. As Long himself said on the
occasion of a retrospective in London: “To make art only by
walking, or leaving ephemeral traces here and there, is my freedom.
I can make art in a very simple way but on a huge scale in terms of
miles and space.”
Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969.MICHAEL
HEIZER/©MICHAEL HEIZER/COLLECTION OF MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART,
LOS ANGELES
Michael Heizer, Double Negative (1969)One of the most
pulverizing and poetic earthworks of all, Double
Negative is a monumental gash in a mesa 80 miles north of Las
Vegas. To execute the work, a one-square-mile plot of land was
purchased by the art-dealing patron Virginia Dwan (who didn’t know
the purpose of the acreage when she bought it for $27,000 and later
paid reportedly $40,000 more for construction). Heizer then dug out
240,000 tons of earth on either side of an abyss that was
bifurcated by empty space in the middle. “That was metaphysics,”
Heizer later said in the 2015 documentary Troublemakers: The
Story of Land Art. In the same film, he held forth more on the
subject of Land art: “You can’t trade this thing. You can’t put it
in your pocket. If you have a war, you can’t move it around. It’s
not worth anything. In fact, it’s an obligation.”
Druga Grupa, Giewont (1970)Accusations of
ego-mongering and megalomania were not rare during the rise of Land
art, and the Polish artist collective Druga Grupa sent up the
sentiment with a wry masterpiece of an unusual sort: an ambitious
and meticulously documented earthwork that was fake. The plan was
to cut into Giewont, a peak in the Tatra mountains in Poland, and
charts and ideas for other cuts (into the 14th-century Wawel Castle
in Krakow, for instance) were proposed. But as art critic Martyna
Nowicka wonders in an exhibition catalogue devoted to Druga Grupa,
in the context of the “mockery and swindle” integral to the group:
“Does it sound like an insane footnote to the history of Polish
performance art?” Indeed, it does.
Druga Grupa, Giewont, 1970.JACEK MARIA STOKLOSA/COURTESY
CRICOTEKA
Bill Beckley, Washington’s Crossing (1969)Playing with
how earthworks in faraway places were often experienced only by way
of photographs and documentation, Bill Beckley built a sort of
bridge between Land art and so-called “narrative art,” a
conceptually minded style in which story was paramount. In 1969, he
went to the location of George Washington’s famous crossing of the
Delaware River during the Revolutionary War and repeated the action
while pouring white paint behind him. But as he chronicled: “As I
went, the current took me under, and I lost not only the paint but
also the camera I was using to document the work. I realized then
that all I had left was the story.” (A fun fact followed, though,
when Beckley soon after staged a photograph of himself wearing a
powdered wig and Washingtonian garb—“my first and last selfie,” as
he later described it.)
Charles Ross, Star Axis.CHARLES ROSS/©ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY
(ARS), NEW YORK
Charles Ross, Star Axis (1971–ongoing)Charles
Ross’s Star Axis is an astrologically aligned observatory
and architectonic sculpture in New Mexico, where stars light up
endless night skies. Ross has worked with light in different ways
(including works involving spectrums and “solar burns” for which he
lights materials afire by focusing sunlight through glass), and for
decades, he’s been constructing an enormous masterpiece that rises
11 stories high. When it opens to the public (with a projected date
in 2022), different tunnels and chambers will showcase certain
cosmic alignments—such that, in one of them, “the viewer can walk
through layers of celestial time, making directly visible the
26,000-year cycle of precession, Earth’s shifting alignment with
the stars.”
Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings (1968)Annual Rings, for
which Dennis Oppenheim drew large concentric lines into an icy
covering over a waterway, draws on notions of time in trees and
snow. By scaling up the patterns of rings that show a tree’s age,
the artist—as a description of the work from the Metropolitan
Museum of Art explains—“enlarged the patterns of the tree’s growth
and, by shoveling pathways in the snow, transposed the annual rings
to the frozen waterway that divides the United States and Canada
and also divides their time zones.” By playing with the notion of
boundaries between space and time, Oppenheim, the Met suggests,
“opened to question the relative values of the ordering systems by
which we live.” Or as the artist himself said in an old issue
of Avalanche magazine around the time: “Let’s assume that
art has moved away from its manual phase and that now it’s more
concerned with the location of material and with speculation.”
Nancy Holt, Up and Under, 1987–98.©HOLT/SMITHSON
FOUNDATION, LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARS, NEW YORK
Nancy Holt, Up and Under (1987–98)The creator of a
number of works of Land art (including her well-known Sun
Tunnels in northwestern Utah), Nancy Holt took to a former
sand quarry in Finland for Up and Under, a corkscrewing series
of tunnels covered in grass, and aligned in relation to the North
Star. Pools of water reflect the sky above, and gatherings of earth
from different locations around Finland figure in the grounds. As
suggested on the website for the Holt/Smithson Foundation (Holt was
married to Robert Smithson, of Spiral Jetty fame): “The
work provides a terrain ripe for sensory experience and conceptual
musing alike.”
Donald Judd, 15 Works in Concrete (1980–84)While many
of Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures are defined by their
meticulous measurements and fine fabrication, 15 Works in
Concrete is rough-and-tumble by comparison. The large boxes
(each playing with measurement and certain exactitudes of
arrangement, to be sure) live outside in the wilds of Marfa, Texas,
with dry desert brush and rabbits running all around. And they
serve as a foil of sorts to Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill
aluminum in a nearby artillery shed, all of those works, by
contrast, gleaming and clean and bright. The 15
Works were made with early funding and support from the Dia
Art Foundation (also responsible for other Land art works like
Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and Robert
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which the foundation has overseen
since 1999). As Marianne Stockebrand wrote in an essay about Judd’s
grand ambitions in Marfa, “Both Dia and Judd shared ideals that
were rooted in the Renaissance, ideals that they were not afraid to
measure themselves against, be it on a philanthropic or artistic
level.”
Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977.JOHN CLIETT/©THE
ESTATE OF WALTER DE MARIA/COURTESY DIA ART FOUNDATION, NEW YORK
Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (1977)The most
otherworldly Land art work of all is The Lightning Field, an
array of 400 silver rods standing on end in a flat expanse of
desert ringed by mountains in New Mexico. Being there is an
intensely sensory experience, with a stay required overnight (in a
cabin that sleeps six visitors, who register in advance). And
everything changes with the passage of time in the still but
dynamic landscape, fluctuations in sunlight making the poles appear
to be invisible when not burning with fiery flares of yellow and
orange. Whether or not lightning strikes can come to feel beside
the point of an experience that is no less wondrous without it, and
venturing back out into the world at the end of a stay can leave a
person changed. As Walter De Maria explained, “Isolation is the
essence of Land Art.” But so, too, is communion—with all things and
all fellow forces in an environment that even the most attentive of
us can spend forever apprehending and appreciating anew.