Land Art

LANDART

LANDART

Robert Smithson (American, 1938–1973), Spiral Jetty, 1970, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, black basalt rock, salt crystals, earth, and water, 1,500 ft. long and approximately 15 ft. wide.

Born in Passaic in New Jersey, Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an artist who expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over fifty years his work, writings, and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown.

An autodidact, Smithson’s interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture and language spiral through his work. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural schemes, films, photographs, writings, earthworks and all the stops between. From his landmark earthworks to his ‘quasi-minimalist’ sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, detailed drawings and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson’s ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. By exploring the conceptual and physical boundaries of landscape Smithson raised questions about our place in the world that are profoundly urgent for our times.

In 1954 Smithson received a twoyear scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York City. Postwar Abstract Expressionism influenced the young Smithson, and the late fifties and early sixties found him immersed in the vitality and experimentation of the burgeoning downtown New York art scene. Smithson’s first solo exhibition, with emphasis on “expressionistic work,” took place in 1957 at Allan Brilliant’s gallery in New York. The artist’s peripatetic life took him to Rome in 1961, when George Lester offered him his first

solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester, where he explored quasi-religious subject matter. Smithson’s early paintings, drawings, and sculptures made between 1961 and 1963 were filled with references to concrete poetry, popular culture, and science fiction. Influenced by minimalism, in 1964

Smithson declared his quasi-minimal sculptures made from industrial materials of metal and mirrored plexiglass as his “mature” works, distancing himself from his early expressionistic paintings and drawings. In 1965 he exhibited these works at the American Express Pavilion, New York World’s Fair.

Smithson is best known for his earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970 Great Salt Lake, Utah), Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971, Emmen, The Netherlands), and Amarillo Ramp (1973, Amarillo, Texas). At age thirty-five, while photographing Amarillo Ramp, Smithson died in a small airplane accident, along with pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Robert E. Curtin. Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi completed Amarillo Ramp one month after his passing.

The ephemeral earthworks Asphalt Rundown (1969, Rome), Glue Pour (1969, Vancouver), Concrete Pour (1969, Chicago), and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970, Kent State) speak poignantly to issues of time and the human condition. Following the completion of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, his only earthwork outside of the United States, Smithson became increasingly interested in land reclamation projects and working with industry, a topic he first explored in 1966 in a series of unrealized plans for DallasFort Worth Airport.

Prior to this earthwork trilogy, Smithson created temporal entropic earthworks, made to have a finite life rather than transform over long periods of time.

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt at Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970.

SELECTED WORKS

Spiral Jetty Amarillo Ramp

Built at the mouth of a terminal basin rich in minerals and nearly devoid of life, Spiral Jetty is a testament to Smithson’s fascination with entropy. Its precarious location lends itself to the structure’s inevitable disintegration, yet its impressive size and deliberate shape command the surrounding landscape. Constructed from 6,650 tons of rock and earth, the spiral continuously changes form as nature, industry, and time take effect. Undoubtedly the most famous largescale earthwork of the period, it has come to epitomize Land art. Its exceptional art historical importance and its unique beauty have drawn visitors and media attention from around the world.

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill

In a sand quarry in the Northeastern Netherlands, Smithson has carved into the shoreline, flooding the resulting dikes to form an interlocking canal and jetty. At the sculpture’s center lies a single glacial boulder, while the hillside above features a winding spiral path - a manifestation of Smithson’s fascination with spirals and their elusive promise of a final destination. The work iterates the irreversible impact of industry - the land can never go back to what it was before - yet its hypnotizing beauty calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between nature and construction.

Constructed to emerge from the base of an artificial lake, Amarillo Ramp now lies in a dried-up basin, its original structure altered by erosion. It is Smithson’s final earthwork; while surveying the site in 1973, Smithson was killed in a plane crash alongside pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Robert E. Curtin. The sculpture was posthumously completed by Nancy Holt and artists Tony Shafrazi and Richard Serra. Overgrown with mesquite, its once-defined edges sloping into the earth, Amarillo Ramp is a solemn illustration of entropy. Continued efforts for its restoration and preservation as a ruin speak to the lasting impact of Smithson’s legacy.

Partially Buried Woodshed

This work fulfilled Smithson’s long-held desire to bury a building and allow for its decomposition. The abandoned woodshed was already in existence on the Kent State campus in Ohio. Smithson piled earth atop the structure until the center beam cracked. After the infamous shooting of unarmed student protestors by the National Guard, someone anonymously painted “MAY 4 KENT 70” on a horizontal beam in commemoration. The structure was partially burned down in 1975, causing further collapse. At present, all that remains of the piece is the concrete foundation and a large mound of dirt.

Richard Long’s practice involves walking great distances in the wilderness, then pausing to make works referencing natural and cosmic phenomena experienced along the way. He uses walking, therefore, as both medium and measure, and his works act as a direct response to the world in which he lives. This way of working offers the potential to make sculpture anywhere and at any time, free from the constraints that can otherwise arise with producing art. Long leaves a mark or arrangement within an ever-shifting elemental terrain that exerts its own laws of regulation over the end result. This is his way of expressing ideas about time and space, and what it means to be human when removed from the cacophony of contemporary life. Long is considered one of the most important artists of his generation, and he has sited sculpture on all five continents, as well as in many of the world’s most significant galleries and museums.

Ina Cole: You were born in Bristol, where you continue to live and work and where you recently made Boyhood Line. Although you travel the globe to make work, is a personal sense of place important to you?

Richard Long: Yes it is, and Bristol has been important in that sense. Boyhood Line was placed along an existing footpath, and the shape took its form from the way that people walked to and fro across the grass over the years. I partly chose the location to have good sight lines and later realized it was only 50 yards from where I made Snowball Track—which was my first landscape

sculpture—and 100 yards from where I made England 1968 four years later. So, that whole territory—the plateau on the Avon Gorge, the gullies, screes, and caves—was my testing ground for the early works.

IC: In a sense, Snowball Track set the scene for works such as A Line Made by Walking and Rainbow. It seems you found your artistic language at a very young age and that this early experience still sustains your practice.

RL: I was still at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, but I wouldn’t say it set the scene: one has lots of insights with hindsight. Snowball Track was my first sculpture using the materials of the place. At that time, I was also interested in rainbows, and I’d followed a big rainbow in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya, which became part of this idea. By using colored powders to make Rain- bow on the banks of the River Avon at low tide, I brought foreign material to the place so you could argue, technically, that it wasn’t as pure as Snowball Track. As an art student, I was trying many different things, like all young artists do. I guess there came a point toward the end of my time at college when I realized the world outside was more interesting than the world of plaster casts and drawing classes inside the studio. Tides, weather, and places offered me far more potential to engage with the world.

IC : Can you trace these interests back to your childhood? Sometimes when one looks back, the strands of early activity seem clearer and can be followed right through life.

RL: I’m a product of a happy childhood, there’s no question of that. I was a city boy, but all of our family holidays were in the West Country—visiting my grandparents, who lived on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, or youth hosteling with my father. In a way, I’ve just followed my childhood pleasures into my professional life; I’ve made things I used to do as a kid part of my work—bouncing stones across rivers, building cairns, playing on the beach with pebbles. Even while growing up along the towpath in Bristol, I was amazed at how the river was sometimes so full and at other times completely empty. That was a great physical dynamic, a phenomenon that fascinated me. Yet simultaneously, I had the ambition to make art in new ways.

IC: You were taken on by Konrad Fischer in 1968, and most of your early exhibitions were abroad rather than in the United Kingdom. Did you have more empathy with artists like Carl Andre and Joseph Beuys than with the British avant-garde?

RL: In my last month at St Martin’s School of Art, I got a letter from this guy I’d never heard of, asking me to do an exhibition in his gallery. It was Konrad Fischer. It didn’t come completely out of the blue, however: a fellow student at St Martin’s had already exhibited in Europe and had put my name forward for a group show in Frankfurt in 1967. So, I sent a bundle of sticks over with instructions of how to make the sculpture for this group show. Konrad was an artist himself, and just on the evidence of seeing that one work, he offered me a show in his Düsseldorf gallery a year later. But that’s Konrad for you. He was great; he had a fantastic nose for art. After my opening, he said to me, “There’s this manifestation down in Amalfi in Italy; a new art movement called Arte Povera. Why don’t you get on a train and go check it out,” which I did. So that opened up a new world of Italian artists, who all became interested in my work. I was recognized abroad at least two or three years before people took an interest in my work in Britain, because the art world at that time was dominated by the Anthony Caro school of welding sculpture. In some ways, the British art world was independent and insular, but as soon as I went to Düsseldorf, I found a parallel world of experimental practice, like Joseph Beuys, whom I met for the first time in 1968. I found a much more avant-garde

“A sculpture, a map, a photograph; all the forms of my work are equal and complementary.The knowledge of my actions, in whatever form,is the art. My art is the essence of my experience,not a representation of it.”

Connemara Sculpture, Ireland, 1971

Connemara Sculpture, Ireland, 1971

art world in Europe, and I also met other artists like Carl Andre. He took my work back to New York, so the next show I had after Düsseldorf was there. All the support in my early days was from other artists who found the walking and the lines in fields interesting. I had photographs of the work—like A Line Made by Walking or England 1968—which I took to Düsseldorf and Italy, so the medium of the photograph was very important in spreading the word.

IC: You then went on to travel across every continent on earth, seeking unoccupied terrain in which to make work—mountains, deserts, shorelines, grasslands. Some of these landscapes are breathtakingly spectacular.

RL: Wild, empty landscape—that’s my love. Every sculpture I make is an emotional response to being there at that moment. It doesn’t make me unique, but maybe I was one of the first artists to somehow use the world as one place. I was just trying to seize the potential of the grandeur of the world by going to these big empty landscapes, because that’s what the world looks like if you seek it out. Theoretically, I felt that I could go anywhere as an artist to make art. Also, I’m of a generation for which it was possible to do that with hardly any money. For example, I hitchhiked across Route 66 and bought a ticket to fly to Nairobi for almost nothing. Being out in the world makes me optimistic; the world’s a vast, empty place, and nature is very strong.

IC: When you’re in a massive, open expanse with only the sky above and the

ground sweeping out for miles in front of you, your response seems to be to make something minimal and primarily influenced by the natural geometry of what you see.

RL: I’d say I bring the geometry of an avant-garde, minimal artist to the place I’m in. I bring the intellectual baggage of an artist from the Western world to a place in the middle of Mongolia, for example. But then, when I’m in that place, I use the materials of the place.

Every place in the world is different, so even though I might be repeating circles, every circle is different. The archetype of the circle emphasizes the cosmic variety of everything, and this gives it its power, beauty, understandability, and resonance.

IC: You take what the landscape offers, in a sense.

RL: And it offers so much. I’ve discovered a fantastically rich territory to make work—meaning the world and everything in it. It’s like when I made a flint line in Roche Court near Salisbury: during the couple of days I was there, a half-tame buzzard was hanging around.

IC: Your text works often seem to summarize the stimuli that pervade your senses when you’re walking through a landscape. Words are always chosen and positioned very carefully.

RL: Of course, like I choose my stones and my places carefully. The text works are another strategy I have for making my work. They’re usually about a very particular idea: Slate, Granite, Sandstone, Limestone, Chalk is about the geology of a route; Lifedeath identifies what is living and dead on a walk; Human Nature Walk depicts human intervention versus the animal kingdom; and Tsunami Walking was a commission to commemorate the tsunami in Japan. The text works often describe a walk, an idea about a walk, or the story of a sculpture. If I’m carrying a stone in my pocket and placing it on the road as I’m walking from day to day, it’s more practical to tell its story with words than to photograph it.

Every work in the landscape is absolutely a meeting place of who I am and the topography, characteristics, and beauty of the place.

Brownstone Circle, New York 2000

White Quartz Ellipse, New York 2000

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973-76), Great Basin Desert, Utah, Concrete, steel, earth, Photograph: Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spanned concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions.

Born in Worcester in Massachusetts, Holt grew up in New Jersey. She graduated with a degree in biology from Tufts University, Massachusetts in 1960. Later that year she moved to New York City where she met the artist Robert Smithson; the two were married on June 8, 1963. The places Holt lived remained important to her: New Jersey is the site of Stone Ruin Tour (1967), Pine Barrens (1975), and Sky Mound (1984-); and Massachusetts the location of Underscan (1973-74) and Spinwinder (1991). Her earliest exhibitions were in New York: the first group presentation Language III at Dwan Gallery in 1969, and the first solo in 1972 at l0 Bleecker Street. In 1968 Holt made her first journey to the American West.

The Great Basin Desert, Utah is where her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973-76) is located. In 1995 Holt made Galisteo, New Mexico her home.

Holt was attentive to language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. In the mid 1960s she worked as an assistant literary editor at the magazine Harper’s

Bazaar, and in 1966 began creating concrete poems and textbased works of art. A year later she extended her exploration of language from the page to the landscape with her Buried Poems and Tours, where she guided friends to sites with written scores. In 1968 this mapping of language onto site was conducted through film and photography, in 1969 through video, then audio in 1971. Holt’s interest in the page returned in the artists’ books Ransacked (1980) and Time Outs (1985), in her own writings, and in her editorial work—which includes the first edition of The Writings of Robert Smithson (1979). She went on to trace the systems of the cosmos, the functions of the built environment, and the human mapping of landscape. Photography was an essential medium for Holt; it enabled “vision to be fixed” and visual perception to be focused. Her early photoworks Trail Markers (1969) and California Sun Signs (1972) used seriality to create visual poems. Photography led Holt to create “seeing devices” to draw attention to visual perception and place with her Locators. Comprising T-shaped industrial piping to be looked through with one eye, the Locators first focused on views in and from her studio, expanding into the landscape with Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972). In turn, the Locators led to her earthworks Sun Tunnels and Hydra’s Head (1974),

Holt was equally interested in the built environment as she was natural and celestial landscapes. Whether emanating from the stars or plugged into electricity grids, the perceptual qualities of light fascinated her. The room-sized installation Holes of Light (1973) used switching electrical light and Mirrors of Light (1973-74) a theater spotlight and mirrors to materialize light reflections and bring awareness to the body in

Bottom Image: Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973-76), Great Basin Desert, Utah Concrete, steel, earth, Photograph: Nancy Holt

Top Image: Holt filming Sun Tunnels with her Bolex 16mm film camera, 1976. Photograph: Lee Deffebach

“As soon as I got to the desert, I connected with the place. Before that, the only other place that I had felt in touch with in the same way was the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey, which only begins to approach that kind of Western spaciousness.”

“I feel that the need to look at the sky—at the moon and the stars—is very basic, and it is inside all of us. So, when I say my work is an exteriorization of my own inner reality, I mean I am giving back to people through art what they already have in them.”

space. Similarly the Visual Sound Zones (1972-79) heighten consciousness of space. These audioworks describe interior spaces in detail, such as John Weber Gallery and PS1: locations at the heart of 1970s experimental art.

In the 1980s, Holt’s exploration of systems moved to the fabric of the built environment with functional sculptural installations she termed System Works. Using standard industrial materials designed for heating, ventilation, lighting, drainage—as well as the raw materials of fossil fuels and waste—the System Works are connected to internal architectural organs.

“The electrical systems light, the heating systems heat. The drainage systems drain, the ventilation systems circulate air […]

Dark Star Park

In 2010-12 the retrospective Nancy Holt: Sightlines surveyed her five decades of art making, accompanied by a monograph edited by Alena J Williams, published by University of California Press. Nancy Holt passed away in New York City in 2014. From 1973 until 2014 she cared for the Estate of Robert Smithson, whom she married in 1963. In 2014 Nancy Holt willed Holt/Smithson Foundation into being. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson transformed the world of art and ideas. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops their distinctive creative legacies.

30 Below

Commissioned for the 1980 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, 30 Below is a 30-foot, open-ended tower made of 10,000 locally-sourced bricks. The upper openings and arches at the base run north to south, while the side openings run east to west—aligned to the North Star. “I am putting ‘centers of the world’ wherever I go,” Holt stated. 30 Below is both an anchor, grounding perspective along the cardinal directions, and a channel, connecting the subject with unadulterated views of sky. Its formidable structure lends itself to longevity, a testament to Holt’s continual fixation on time and duration.

Holt designed Dark Star Park in concert with the development of the site as a whole, integrating landscaping and sculptural features to encompass the neighboring building and adjacent traffic island. Concrete spheres are interspersed throughout the park, visible through tunnels, reflected in pools of water, and framed in the carved-out hole of another sphere. Every year on Dark Star Park Day people gather to watch the shadow alignment. The shadows cast by the concrete spheres and the steel poles align with asphalt shadow patterns on the ground at 9:32 AM on August 1—the anniversary of the land’s acquisition by William Henry Ross in 1860. Dark Star Park contemplates the physical and ideological structures of land ownership while quoting the cosmos.

Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings

Two circular, concentric stone walls, augmented by arched entryways and round openings, are secluded on the grounds of Western Washington University. Depending on one’s position and proximity, the walls’ openings create myriad shapes and perceptions of space. Views change with the fluctuations of light and weather, the fog and rain typical of the Pacific Northwest altering the stones’ substance and obstructing visibility. It took 1,400 hours to erect Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings—in her writings on the work, Holt muses on its existence as a concrete testament to the ephemeral concepts of time and labor.

the sculptures are exposed fragments of vast hidden systems, they are part of open-ended systems, part of the world.”

semitemos tneloiv

Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, Gelatin silver print

Ana Mendieta’s art was sometimes violent, often unapologetically feminist and usually raw. She incorporated unusual natural materials like blood, dirt, water and fire, and displayed her work through photography, film and live performances.

“Nothing that she did ever surprised me,” Mendieta’s sister, Raquelín, told The New York Times in 2016.

“She was always very dramatic, even as a child — and liked to push the envelope, to give people a start, to shock them a little bit. It was who she was, and she enjoyed it very much. And she laughed about it sometimes when people got freaked out.”

In the 1973 short film “Moffitt Building Piece,” Mendieta and her sister captured the reactions of strangers who walked by a puddle of pig’s blood that Mendieta had spilled outside her apartment. Some stared and most walked around the mess. Eventually someone washed it off the sidewalk. To Mendieta, the recording offered a thought-provoking experiment on people’s indifference to violence.

Mendieta’s stature as an artist was never fully recognized in her lifetime. She died in 1985 at 36; her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was accused of

pushing her out of a window of their 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village but was acquitted of murder charges.

As an immigrant, Mendieta felt a disconnect in the United States. The trauma of being uprooted from her Cuban homeland as a girl would leave her with questions about her identity and make her more conscious of being a woman of color.

These questions would echo in her work, which explored themes that pushed ethnic, sexual, moral, religious and

political boundaries. She urged viewers to disregard their gender, race or other defining societal factors and instead connect with the humanity they share with others.

In this way she gained footing as an ambitious and audacious artist. Writing about a retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2004, the New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that “if not naturally fearless,” Mendieta “used fear well, transmuting a

profound sense of psychological and cultural displacement into an experience of merging with the natural world and its history through art.”

Ana Maria Mendieta was born into a middle-class family in Havana on Nov. 18, 1948. Her father, Ignacio, was a prominent political figure who ran afoul of Fidel Castro’s government; her mother, Raquel, was a chemistry teacher.

She and her sister attended a Roman Catholic school on the island before their parents sent them to the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a secret program run by the church with the aid of the State Department to smuggle thousands of children out of Cuba in the early days of Castro’s regime. The experience would leave Ana, who was 12 at the time, and Raquelín, who was 14, with a feeling of loss as they moved through group and foster homes in Florida and then in Iowa. Mendieta would not see her mother for 5 years, her father for 18.

She found refuge in painting and pursued her interests in the arts at the University of Iowa, where she studied under the German artist Hans Breder, who made video and performance art and encouraged students to move back and forth across artistic frontiers. Mendieta adopted those forms and added her own style, mixing elements of performance, body and land art into one work, then capturing it through photography or Super-8 film.

In 1973, while she was in college, Mendieta learned about the on-campus rape and murder of a nursing student named Sarah Ann Ottens. Her outrage over the incident drove her to stage one of her most confrontational and violent pieces, “Rape Scene.”

Sandwoman 1983, gelatin silver print Imágen de Yágul, 1973, © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection

For the piece, Mendieta upended her apartment, covered herself with blood and tied herself to a table to recreate the aftermath of brutal sexual assault. She invited an audience to the made-up crime scene, where she remained bent over the table with blood dripping down her legs and pooling at her feet as they discussed the incident. Photographs of the scene are still displayed in museum exhibits around the world, most recently at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year.

“There’s a way in which her work is about performance,” Catherine Morris, a senior curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the museum, said in a telephone interview. “It’s about theater. It’s about kind of capturing moments through various forms of documentation. And she takes all of these things to the world at large that might not be considered fine arts. She turns them into something intelligent, harrowing and emotional.”

Mendieta exemplified this best through a series called “Siluetas,” or “Silhouettes,” which focused on sculptured figures made out of earthy materials like grass, flowers, branches and mud and incorporating themes like creation, faith and womanhood.

In one of her best known “Siluetas,” “Imagen de Yagul” (“Image from Yagul”) from 1973, Mendieta incorporated her body into the piece by lying down nude in an old neglected stone tomb in Mexico. She then strategically placed white flowers over her, as if they were growing out of her body. In all, about 200 pieces make up the series, which she worked on throughout the 1970s and early ’80s.

Moving to New York City in the late 1970s, Mendieta quickly found a community of fellow artists, including Andre, a sculptor who, like Mendieta, often worked with natural materials. She married him in 1985 despite a tempestuous relationship.

The circumstances of Mendieta’s death later that year remain a mystery. What is certain is that she plunged from her apartment window in the early hours of Sept. 8, and that her husband was charged with her murder.

Over three years of court proceedings, Andre denied the charges. He said that he and Mendieta had argued about his recognition in the art world as surpassing hers. When he walked into their bedroom, he said, she was gone and the window was open. But a passer-by who testified said he had heard cries of a struggle. Andre was acquitted for lack of evidence.

“The making of my ‘Silueta’ in nature keeps the transition between my homeland and my new home,” she once said. “It is a way of reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature. Although the culture in which I live is part of me, my roots and cultural identity are a result of my Cuban heritage.”

Creek, 1974 The Estate Of Ana Mendieta Collection

Robert Smithon

Richard Long

Nancy Holt

Ana Mendieta