LAND ART
A fully illustrated and complete guide to land and environmental art.
For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.
?
This new book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site • Hans Haacke's Conceptual art • Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks • Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks • Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, • Robert Morris's environments • Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field • David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments • Hamish Fulton's walks and words • Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles • Richard Long and his art of walking • Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures • Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes • Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions • Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads • Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures • and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.
Here are towers, stars, stones, pools, tunnels, pipes,maps, chasms, ladders, mounds, scars, mirrors, cones, furrows, mazes, circles, hills and gardens.
?
A new book on land art. Featuring all the major land artists of the past 30 years, such as Robert Smithson, Christo, Robert Morris, Walter de Maria, David Nash, Richard Long, Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt and Carl Andre. A study of tunnels, walks, stones, pools, furrows, ladders, cones, stars, hills, water and steam. For Mircea Eliade, sacred acts create a emythic centrei. As art is a sacred act, the creation of an artwork can be seen as the creation of a sacred place or mythic centre. The piece of land art (the boulder, hole, pillar, stone circle) is an obvious form of a mythic centre. Making (land) art can be seen as a sacramental experience - essentially one of a sacralization of life and living things. It is like the Australian Bushmenis alchuringa experience, mythic dream-time and mystical participation with the earth and with life. In the alchuringa of the Australian aborigines the world is sung into existence (a notion also found in Western occultism, in the emusic of the spheresi of hermetic philosophy).* As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, esong is existencei, where art is life itself, and making art is not a commentary eabouti life, but is life itself.This notion of art = life is the foundation of much land art.
As James Turrell said in 1987, the goal was not to turn an experience into art, but eto set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experienceO not taking from nature as much as placing you in contact with iti.* The Arte Povera artist, said Germano Celant, has echosen to live within direct experience, no longer the representativeO he aspires to live, not to seei . Chapters on land artists such as Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Christo, Michael Heizer, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. All of the major practitioners of land and environmental art are discussed, as well as the key concepts and themes.
