Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970)

Land art or earth art has existed for millennia. Materials such as rocks, sticks, soil, plants and so on are often used, and the works generally exist in the open and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. In most respects land art has become part of mainstream public art. I am especially interested in hill figures, turf mazes, stone-lined labyrinths and geoglyphs.

A hill figure is a large visual representation created by cutting into a steep hillside and revealing the underlying geology. It is especially designed to be seen from afar rather than above. In some cases trenches are dug and filled with rubble made from material brighter than the natural bedrock. The new material is often chalk, a soft and white form of limestone, hence the alternative name of chalk figure for this form of art. The creation of hill figures has been practised since prehistory and can include human (gigantotomy) and animal forms (cutting horses is known as leucippotomy) as well as more abstract symbols and, in the modern era, advertising brands.

Hill figures are common in England: examples include the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Uffington White Horse and the Long Man of Wilmington.

Turf Maze, Town of Saffron Walden, England (c1699)

Historically, a turf maze is a labyrinth made by cutting a convoluted path into a level area of short grass, turf or lawn. Some had names such as Mizmaze, Troy Town, The Walls of Troy, Julian’s Bower, or Shepherd’s Race. As a group they were (and still are) commonly known as “mazes”, although the terms “maze” and “labyrinth” are no longer considered interchangeable. Unlike a maze, which is an entertaining puzzle with many dead ends, a labyrinth is unicursal: it consists of one path which twists and turns but leads inevitably to the centre. In some turf labyrinths, the groove cut in the turf is the path to be walked (sometimes marked with bricks or gravel); more commonly the turf itself forms the raised path which is marked out by shallow channels excavated between its twists and turns.

In the past turf mazes were generally confined to Northern Europe, especially England, Germany and Denmark. Hundreds exist elsewhere in Scandinavia, Lappland, Iceland and the former Soviet Union, but their paths were normally marked out with stones, either on grass or on flat areas of bare rock. Some of these stone labyrinths are very ancient.

Geoglyphs are large (generally greater than 4 metres) drawings, designs or motifs produced on the ground, either by arranging clasts (stones, stone fragments, gravel or earth) to create a positive geoglyph (stone arrangement/alignment, petroform, earth mound) or by removing patinated clasts to expose unpatinated ground (negative geoglyph).

Nazca Monkey (200 - 700 CE)

I think the most famous negative geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines, gigantic geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, a high arid plateau that stretches 53 miles between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru. They were created by the Nazca culture between 200 BCE and 700 CE. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, and lizards. The Nazca lines cannot be recognized as coherent figures except from the air. Since it is presumed the Nazca people could never have seen their work from this vantage point, there has been much speculation on the builders’ abilities and motivations.

The largest geoglyph is the Marree Man in South Australia, a particularly unusual example of land art because the artist remains to date anonymous.

The so-called contemporary land art movement was launched in October 1968 by the group exhibition “Earthworks” at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February, 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the historic “Earth Art” exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca New York. I think the best known artist who worked in this genre was the American Robert Smithson, whose 1968 essay “The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of Modernism from social issues, espoused by the critic Clement Greenberg (whom I rather admire). Smith’s best known artwork, and probably the most enduringly famous piece of all land art, is “Spiral Jetty” (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and algae so as to form a long (1500 feet) spiral-shape jetty protruding into Great Salt Lake in Utah. How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water.

Pink Islands by Christo (1980-83)

Many of the artists associated with ‘Land art’ in the 1960s and 1970s had been involved with Minimalism and Conceptual Art but according to the critic Barbara Rose writing in ‘Artforum’ in 1969 had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. The sudden appearance of Land Art in 1968 can be construed as a response by a generation of artists, mostly in their late twenties, to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging environmental and women’s liberation movements. Much land art from this period was ephemeral in nature and now exists only as photographic documents.

Modern land artists have tended to be American, with other prominent artists in this field including Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Hans Haacke, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Alan Sonfist, and James Turrell. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. Projects by the artist Christo (who is famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric) have also been considered land art by some, though the artist himself considered this incorrect.

In 1998 a group of artists started a project in Amsterdam called Indoor Land Art Programme – ILAP, and had shows all over Europe. More recently, the artist Seth Wulsin has adopted Caseros Prison in Buenos Aires and its demolition as an art work that, while extending beyond land art, also bares many conceptual resemblances.

Contemporary Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers has created a series of geoglyphs around the world called The Rhythms of Life. The Rhythms of Life project is the largest contemporary land art project in the world – 10 sites in disparate exotic locations located from below sea level to altitudes of 4300 metres. Up to three geoglyphs (each up to 660 feet x 660 feet) are located in each site. By completion the project will have involved up to 5000 people (550 people worked in Bolivia, 852 people in Sri Lanka, and 1000 in China).

Glastonbury Tor, England (BBC image)

I love the timeless and monumental qualities of land art. I can imagine its reinvention a thousand times over during the course of history.

Some interesting books I read while writing this:

Andrews, Max (Ed.). Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook. London: RSA, 2006.

Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998.

Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Cook, Lynne and Karen Kelly (Eds.). Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.