From the upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s emerged a new, and deeply politicized, art movement, one which took its cues from environmentalism, feminism, and anti-colonialism: Land Art. Visually marked by abstraction, Land Art (or Earth Art, as it is otherwise known) deals with the raw materials of the earth: dirt, stone, sand, foliage. Its artscapes are often (though not always) monumental in size, dwarfing the viewer and forcing a reconsideration of the relationship between the spectator and art object—which, in the context of Land Art, means: between the human and its environment. How does Land Art, embedded in nature, offer a more holistic vision of artistic creativity and reception? How does it cut against more traditional, and triumphalist, narratives of artistic singularity and genius? And how, in a capitalist, settler-colonial context, does Land Art connect to broader questions of land use, private property, domination, and commodification (of both art and nature)? What becomes of art’s function when the art object itself is a feature of the land?
In this course, we will examine the Land Art movement through the art of Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell, alongside contemporary work by Indigenous artists such as Post Commodity, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Colleen Cutschall, Edward Poitras, and Allen Michelson. Selections from Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie’s Place in Research will offer a methodological supplement to our art historical inquiry; while an engagement with Lucy Lippard’s landmark Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory will offer insight into the ways Land Art blurs the modern boundary between art and life. We will take up the questions posed by Land Art in our own time of environmental crisis, embattled sexuality, and imperial adventures, searching for new ways of talking and thinking about the imbrication of environmental, sexual, and racial subjugation by redistributing signs and symbols in time and space.
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