Land Art

About

In the late 1960s a number of artists left the studio for deserts, fields and shorelines, working with earth, rock and water. In the American West the scale was often huge. Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969–70) cut two trenches into a Nevada mesa, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973–76) aligns four concrete pipes with the solstice sunrises and sunsets in Utah, and Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977) sets 400 steel poles in a grid in New Mexico. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) coils into the Great Salt Lake.

British artists often took a lighter approach. Richard Long and Hamish Fulton make walks the work, recording them in photographs, maps and text, while Andy Goldsworthy arranges leaves, ice and stones into forms that decay. In 1982 Agnes Denes planted and harvested a field of wheat on landfill in Lower Manhattan. Many are known mainly through photographs.