![]() ![]() and beyond who did not make monumental land works in remote sites, which restricts the movement to a handful of artists. We’re going beyond that by including many artists in the U.S. “It is often described as a post-minimal sculptural expression, but this is limiting. “Land Art has not been properly defined,” says Philipp Kaiser, MOCA senior curator and organizer of the show. Also being highlighted are the movement’s social and political aspects during its early years of artistic experimentation. The exhibition treats Land Art as a media practice as much as a sculptural one, focusing on how language, photography, film and video have served as an integral-not secondary-part of its development. “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,” which opened this month and runs through August 12, seeks to broaden the definition of Land Art with works by over 100 artists from the United Kingdom, North and South America, Japan, Israel, Iceland, and Eastern and Northern Europe. Now, more than 40 years later, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LAMOCA) is presenting a more comprehensive view of this movement with the first large-scale exhibition of its kind. These and other seminal works of land art are associated with that meteoric moment in time, when revolution was transforming American society on all levels and a group of pioneering artists risked a radical new path. Perhaps the most famous of all earth works, the Jetty has been submerged for a good portion of its lifetime, due to changing water levels, but periodically emerges. In 1970, Robert Smithson completed Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long and 15-foot-wide spiral of rocks, mud and salt crystals that juts into the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. ![]() Subject to the shifting whims of nature, some of these works were short-lived, preserved only in photographs, drawings, video and film, ironically subverting the original intention of their creators to remove art from the galleries and museums.Īmong the first earth works were De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing (1968), two parallel chalk lines that temporarily extended for two miles across the Mojave Desert in California, and Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), a pair of still-extant 50-foot-deep, 1,500-foot-long dynamited trenches on a remote mesa near Las Vegas. Yet they also drew from minimal and conceptual art, such as Italian Arte Povera, which exalted crude, humble materials, and the social sculpture of the German avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys. They charted an arresting intersection between the temporal and divine, often recalling ancient monumental land works such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Native American mounds and the Nazca Lines in Peru. These bold new experiments played with light and space, perception and the passage of time. Made of natural materials including rock, soil, sand and water-sometimes combined with industrial materials such as concrete, metal and asphalt-many of the early earth works from the late 1960s to early ’70s sprang up in the open deserts of the American West. Taking vast, remote landscapes and the ephemeral conditions of nature as their sculptural canvas, these and other artists staged their own protest by rejecting traditional sculptural forms and practices, rigid modernist theory and the commercial confines of the museum-and-gallery system to create frequently massive land art works that heightened awareness of our relationship with the earth and challenged accepted definitions of art. And the Virginia Dwan Gallery in New York City mounted a radical new exhibition called “Earthworks,” featuring artists such as Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer. The first man would soon walk on the moon. Civil-rights marches, the women’s liberation movement and anti-war protests were raging. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |