Overview

In the late 1960s, artists got tired of the “white cube” of the gallery. They wanted to make art that was too big to be bought, sold, or hung on a wall. They went out into the deserts of Utah and Nevada and used bulldozers as paintbrushes. They turned the Earth itself into a canvas.

Core Idea

The core idea is Entropy. Robert Smithson, the most famous Land Artist, was obsessed with how things fall apart. Nature erodes everything. By building massive structures in the wilderness, they were creating a dialogue with geological time. The art isn’t just the object; it’s the process of the object slowly disappearing back into the earth.

Formal Definition

An art movement in which the landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is often site-specific (it only makes sense in that one place) and ephemeral (it is meant to change or disappear).

Intuition

Imagine a painting that changes every time it rains. Imagine a sculpture that is 1,500 feet long and made of black basalt rocks. You can’t just “look” at it; you have to walk on it. You have to travel to a remote location to find it. It turns art viewing into a pilgrimage.

Examples

  • Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970): A 1,500-foot-long coil of rock and earth extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Depending on the water level, it is sometimes submerged, sometimes visible, sometimes covered in white salt crystals. It is a barometer of the climate.
  • Lightning Field (Walter De Maria, 1977): 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid in the New Mexico desert. The “art” is not the poles, but the experience of being there during a storm when lightning strikes them.
  • Wrapped Reichstag (Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1995): They wrapped the entire German parliament building in silver fabric. It transformed a symbol of heavy political history into a light, ghostly object for two weeks.

Common Misconceptions

  • It’s eco-friendly: Not always. Smithson used heavy machinery and moved tons of earth, which some environmentalists criticized as damaging the landscape.
  • It’s just gardening: It is sculpture on a monumental scale. It deals with abstract concepts like time, gravity, and space.
  • Site-Specificity: The idea that the artwork belongs to its location. If you move Spiral Jetty to a museum, it ceases to be art; it becomes just a pile of rocks.
  • Ephemeral Art: Art that is designed to be temporary (like Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures made of ice or leaves).
  • The Sublime: The Romantic idea of nature as terrifyingly vast and beautiful. Land Art revives this feeling for the modern age.

Applications

  • Landscape Architecture: Modern parks and public spaces are heavily influenced by the forms and philosophy of Land Art.
  • Climate Activism: Contemporary artists use Land Art techniques to draw attention to melting glaciers or rising sea levels.

Criticism / Limitations

  • Accessibility: Because the works are in remote deserts, only the wealthy (who can afford the travel) get to see them. Most people only see them as photos in books.
  • Colonialism: Going into the “empty” desert often ignored the fact that Indigenous people lived there and considered the land sacred.

Further Reading

  • Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. 1996.
  • Kastner, Jeffrey. Land and Environmental Art. 1998.
  • Tiberghien, Gilles. Land Art. 1995.