{"id":3566,"date":"2013-04-29T19:36:34","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T19:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3566"},"modified":"2019-11-21T15:36:03","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T15:36:03","slug":"this-land-is-their-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=3566","title":{"rendered":"This Land Is Their Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012)<\/span> <\/h4>\n\n\n\"\"\n

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974<\/em>. Exhibition organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, May 27\u2013September 3, 2012; Haus der Kunst, Munich, October 11, 2012\u2013January 20, 2013<\/p>\n

Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, with contributions from Tom Holert, Jane McFadden, Julian Myers, Emily Scott, and Julienne Lorz. Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974<\/em>. London: Prestel, 2012. 264 pp., 270 color ills., 197 b\/w. $60<\/p>\n

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974<\/em>, the bold title of the exhibition and catalogue organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on view there in 2012 and later at Munich\u2019s Haus der Kunst, evokes the grand ambitions of artists\u2019 environmental imaginations in the early 1970s. At the same time, its suggestion of an expansive sweep announces the aspirations of the exhibition\u2019s organizers, the MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser and the UCLA professor and author Miwon Kwon. Encompassing two hundred fifty works by more than ninety international artists\u2014most of whom have never in the art-historical literature been considered Land artists\u2014with a hefty accompanying catalogue, this project\u2019s composition and textual representation summon at the outset the scale and monumentality connoted by the term \u201cland.\u201d <\/p>\n

At MOCA\u2019s Geffen Contemporary, the view from the raised platform dividing lobby from exhibition was of a warren of white-walled open cubicles and, at the left, the mezzanine gallery. Below ran a large-screen projection of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely\u2019s controlled explosion in the Nevada desert of Study for the End of the World, No. 2, the sculpture made from odds and ends rummaged at Las Vegas scrap yards. Its date of 1962 is at least four years before the artists customarily associated with earthworks or Land art (first, the New York artists Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson; the London-based Richard Long, and Amsterdam-based Jan Dibbets; then other Americans including Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Charles Ross, Michelle Stuart, and James Turrell, among a few others) made their first works in, with, or directly atop soil, either in uncultivated rural terrain distant from those cities or, a few years later, on institutions\u2019 grounds. For the informed viewer, the placement of an assemblage work by a Nouveau R\u00e9aliste artist at the show\u2019s entrance signaled the organizers\u2019 intent that the field of Land art be not just expanded, but blown wide open. <\/p>\n

Thereafter, past a mural photograph of Isamu Noguchi\u2019s tangential 1947 Memorial to Man\u2014geometricized male facial features rising from a pebbly moonlike surface\u2014a clear route through the installation\u2019s dense forest of chambers, shelves, and cases vanished. Photographic documentation, drawings, films, and videos represented environments, constructions, or performances originally produced outdoors; some gallery-scale works, often made originally in temporary formats of impermanent matter, were reconstructed. No wall texts announced sectional groupings. Nor was there, on the wall or in a handout, a curatorial statement of intention, a rationale for the exhibition\u2019s chronological parameters (an indistinct beginning and an early termination at 1974), or a contextualization of the work in relation to the social and political tumult and influential cultural changes strongly associated with those years. Instead, a paragraph of material explanation and art-historical biography followed most works\u2019 wall labels. (These texts, along with a photograph of every work on view, are fully reproduced in the catalogue\u2019s annotated checklist, making it a useful resource.) Thereby, the exhibition\u2019s meaning was atomized to individual acts. <\/p>\n

Lacking the structuring guidance customarily provided in museum exhibitions, the viewer was left to wander and wonder about the best way to absorb the panoply of what appeared to be every radical or somewhat clever machination with natural elements undertaken by artists through the mid-1970s. Almost. The exhibition did not acknowledge the absence of work by two titans of Land art, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer; the curators wrote in the catalogue that these artists \u201chave insisted that their work is only \u2018out there\u2019 and therefore declined to participate in this exhibition\u201d (30).1<\/a><\/sup> Jannis Kounellis and Harvey Fite were also missing.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In fact, like invitees whose absence from a party is talked about all night, De Maria\u2019s and Heizer\u2019s decision not to exhibit garnered them more frequent and extensive pictorial and textual representation in the catalogue than any other artist. They are not just mentioned as relevant historical figures: Tom Holert discusses work by both; Jane McFadden analyzes work by De Maria; Julian Myers\u2019s essay centers on a work by Heizer; essays by the Germans Laszlo Glozer, a critic, and Julienne Lorz, a Haus de Kunst curator, do not analyze their country\u2019s manifestations of Land art but focus on works the two American artists produced in Munich; and the artists\u2019 patron Virginia Dwan praises them and paraphrases their ideas. <\/p>\n

Thus, the revision the curators seem to have in mind is of the historical stature of Smithson. The number of major monographs and exhibitions focusing on Smithson and the manner in which he is discussed in his\u00adtories of this movement make him the predominant Land artist in the literature; certainly he articulated the genre most actively in essays and interviews. Yet his work is only tangentially incorporated into the history presented in the book. That would have been appropriate if the curators had acknowledged Smithson\u2019s prominence in the development of Land art and declared it irrelevant to their own emphasis. But without that, his contributions appear slighted and, cued by Kaiser and Kwon\u2019s insupportable accolade of Heizer\u2019s Double Negative as \u201carguably the most iconic piece of Land art,\u201d deliberately so (11). With a claim like that, both appearing in their first paragraph and so easily refuted by simply counting on Amazon the number of texts on and book cover illustrations of Smithson\u2019s Spiral Jetty, far greater than those of any other work of Land art, the informed reader gets an uneasy sense that however much we acknowledge the impossibility of absolute objectivity, something other than impartial scholarship is in play.<\/p>\n

While the overall structure of the labyrinthine installation was difficult to discern, works originally exhibited in the Dwan Gallery\u2019s Earth Works show (October 1968) in New York, and in Willoughby Sharp\u2019s Earth Art exhibition (February 1969) for Cornell University\u2019s Andrew Dickson White Museum were roughly arranged together. These were interspersed with works such as Ross\u2019s Solar Burn series (1971), which had been in neither show. Nothing revealed the rationale for the corner wall behind Morris\u2019s Earthwork AKA Untitled (Dirt) pile beinguniquely egg-yolk yellow. Understanding that anomaly required a historian\u2019s esoteric knowledge: De Maria, in designing The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, selected the vivid hue of Caterpillar earth-moving equipment for his \u201cdelegated painting\u201d that in Earth Works hung behind Morris\u2019s twelve-foot-diameter mound of soil, pipes, felt, and grease.3<\/a><\/sup> Thus the yellow\u2019s allusion cunningly circumvented De Maria\u2019s absence.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Another curatorial decision that called for explanation: women artists, representing different artistic generations and working in a range of styles (Aycock, Judy Chicago, Denes, Holt, Patricia Johanson, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, Miss, Maria Nordman, Yoko Ono, Stuart, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles) were almost entirely grouped at the back of the hall, diagonally opposite the entrance. Was that a nod to a chronological understanding of this genre\u2019s development? Neither Earth Works nor Earth Art included a woman artist; in my book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, I discussed the omission of women from 1960s shows, but noted their increasing involvement in the field by the 1970s. While Aycock is represented in Ends of the Earth by works made 1971\u201373, Mendieta by performances 1972\u201374, and Ukeles by symbolic actions in 1974, it would have been more consistent with the show\u2019s revisionist aim to integrate earlier works by women, such as Chicago\u2019s Atmospheres performances (1967),Holt\u2019s Stone Ruin Tour, Cedar Grove (1968), Jonas\u2019s silent film Wind (1968), and Stuart\u2019s late 1960s earth-lined pine boxes titled Earth Diptych, among contemporaneous works by males. Also undermining revisionist aims, the catalogue texts do not analyze at any length works by female sculptors (except, tangentially, Niki de Saint-Phalle, wife of Tinguely).<\/p>\n

The unexplained spatial contiguity of chronologically or conceptually disparate works illustrates the installation\u2019s eclecticism. Some artists were grouped according to their appearance in canonical Land art exhibitions, and others by gender or nationality, by formal or procedural similarity such as pile-making, or by pragmatic technical needs such as large projection spaces. The sheer variety of materials, procedures, and intentions regarding international sculptors\u2019 incorporation of earth, air, fire, or water into their art between the late 1950s and the early 1970s that seems to have stymied a clear curatorial narrative also thwarts the viewer\u2019s comparative comprehension. Was one to understand from the installation\u2019s lack of categorical or thematic structures that everything on view in Ends of the Earth is ipso facto Land art? Viewed historically and stylistically, some is prior sculpture, some is proto\u2013Land art, some performance with natural matter, and some, such as that by the Slovenian OHO Group, distinctly Land art but just as obviously, downright derivative of Long and Oppenheim. Consequently, the curatorial process itself uncannily demonstrated Hal Foster\u2019s observation, \u201cIn its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Fortunately, the catalogue aids in making sense of Kaiser and Kwon\u2019s achievement in curatorial hunting and gathering. First, the tome is gorgeous. It is well designed overall and in the balance of text and white space on each page. Its selected bibliography, annotated checklist, and annotated chronology of exhibitions and events, including exhibition rosters, major published reviews, and significant dates in individual artists\u2019 oeuvres, are valuable resources. There\u2019s that yellow again, albeit a bit more tawny, on the thick end-papers and even more prominently as the font color used for the cover, a striking contrast to the rich gray tones of the cover\u2019s vintage photographs. The front pictures a 1967 road trip taken by Los Angeles\u2019s favorite son Edward Ruscha, along with Patrick Blackwell and Mason Williams. The back cover shows a sign planted in the Nevada desert by Tinguely, reading \u201cEnd of the World.\u201d Together, the cover images evoke the Western perspective enclosed within\u2014and, as neither Ruscha or Tinguely is a Land artist and they have probably rarely if ever participated in the same exhibition, the show\u2019s eccentricity. <\/p>\n

In their introductory essay, \u201cEnds of the Earth and Back,\u201d Kaiser and Kwon assert four claims \u201cthat counter the most common myths associated with Land art\u201d (19). The first of these, \u201cLand art is international,\u201d corrects the historical understanding retrospectively articulated in this catalogue by Glozer that in the 1960s Land art was \u201caccepted as a largely ur-American phenomenon of new art\u201d (176), a notion perhaps still held by the public, but not by scholars of the genre.6<\/a><\/sup> More precisely, the curators demonstrate that artists\u2019 work in or with natural matter and related (if mostly tangentially) to Land art was much more international\u00be extending far beyond the East Coast\/Western European hegemony of contemporary art\u2014than anyone has previously discussed. American artists represented a little over half the roster of Ends of the Earth. Eight artists were from the United Kingdom; seven from Germany; five each from Italy, Japan, and South America; four each from France and Israel, and three from the Czech Republic, among other places. (In her essay \u201cAlong the Way to Land Art,\u201d McFadden analyzes intermedia work with earth by Nouveau R\u00e9aliste, Fluxus, and Group Zero artists, deftly establishing the exploratory vivacity and social complexities of the early 1960s.) The great number of far-flung instances of artists\u2019 work regarding land or made with natural materials in the 1960s and early 1970s that the curators discovered prompts two basic questions. First, can these instances be attributed to diffusion from art-world centers, or do they constitute discrete geneses? Second, in either case, what are the reasons for this avalanche of earthworks? What specific ideas during these years united these \u201cheterogeneous practices\u201d and \u201cdiverse artistic objectives\u201d (Kaiser and Kwon,18)?<\/p>\n

Confronting these questions seems not to have been the curators\u2019 intention, which they describe as \u201can epistemological inquiry that returns to both artistic and curatorial activities in the 1960s and 70s to glean the conditions that contributed to the favorable promotion of Land art as a viable new art category\u201d (19). This \u201cmeta\u201d art history\u2014an intra-art inquiry into artists\u2019 and curators\u2019 conceptualization of land art and its presentation in exhibitions, with minimal extra-art cultural or historical contextualization\u2014explains the presence of statements by curators and historical accounts of exhibitions in Detroit, Munich, and Tel Aviv. However, the aim of telling how Land art became a \u201ccategory\u201d needs more direct analysis of contemporaneous artistic theories and practices than is offered in this volume. They link the 1974 endpoint to Artpark\u2019s commissioning of outdoor sculptures in Lewiston, New York, and to the exhibition Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, the first retrospective Land art survey, which \u201cmarked Land art\u2019s full institutional arrival,\u201d as the curators remark in a footnote (31). But that show didn\u2019t take place until 1977.7<\/a><\/sup> Overall, their argument for using exhibition dates and \u201cinstitutionalization\u201d to establish an endpoint for Land art and their exhibition is too vague, and is mostly provided in footnotes. Their adoption of 1974 as their cutoff date not only contradicts history but weakens their own argument, as it precludes recognition of the impact of institutional and agency funding in the production of significant works of Land art subsequently initiated, completed, or still in process by Aycock, De Maria, Heizer, Holt, Miss, Morris, and Turrell. <\/p>\n

Kaiser and Kwon\u2019s second assertion, \u201cLand art engages urban grounds,\u201d dismisses a simplistic \u201cmyth of Land art\u2019s antipathy to the city\u201d by asserting, reasonably, the relational duality between urban and rural (21). This is dynamically demonstrated in Emily Eliza Scott\u2019s essay, \u201cDesert Ends,\u201d which reveals the American desert not as unmarked purity but, for example, \u201cin addition to allowing Tinguely to \u2018build as big\u2019 and \u2018destroy as violently\u2019 as he wanted, operated most precisely as a restaging ground for the mediated atomic tests the artist intended to critique\u201d (82). This deeply researched and compellingly written treatment adds necessary recognition of concurrent political history. Another engrossing essay, by Myers (like Scott, a distinct authorial identity from whom we can look forward to reading more), uses the Detroit location of Heizer\u2019s Dragged Mass Displacement, commissioned in 1971 by the Detroit Institute of Arts, as an opportunity to range widely over the terrain of the urban\/desert dyad. Writing in a poetically allusive voice, Myers observes, \u201cEarthworks were marked by their dream of an elsewhere where some stand against the urban, the social, the human might still be made. . . . But this was a dream from which the artists are always waking: the reality of the modernized desert was always looming\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

Third, \u201cLand art does not escape the art system\u201d (22). Again\u2014so true! This was evident as early as 1971 when Dave Hickey complained, \u201cWhy have the national art magazines both overrepresented and misrepresented the earthworks movement and its related disciplines, choosing to portray them as a kind of agrarian Children\u2019s Crusade against the art market and museum system, when this is obviously not the case?\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> All of the texts here implicitly validate this assertion. But as historians and critics continue to misconstrue sculptors\u2019 spatial desires to \u201cget out of the gallery\u201d simply as a rejection of the art world\u2019s mercantile system\u2014a look at artists\u2019 gallery associations indicates otherwise\u00beit would have been beneficial if the curators had offered an essay directly countering this clich\u00e9. <\/p>\n

Their fourth claim, \u201cLand art is a media practice as much as a sculptural one\u201d (27), put forth by Holert in his essay \u201cLand Art\u2019s Multiple Sites,\u201d points to an overlooked aspect of much of this work. The curators\u2019 highlighting of the distinction of media viewed \u201cnot so much as a representational surrogate for \u2018the work,\u2019 but as a relay or extension of it\u201d (30) is one of their most illuminating contributions to how Land art is viewed, and Holert\u2019s essay provides convincing evidence.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the interviews with and statements by historical figures give voice to those who enacted this history. But roughly forty years after the events they recount, the recollections by those who have given numerous interviews and read others\u2019 nar\u00adratives are hardly more \u201cprimary\u201d than his\u00adtorians\u2019 syntheses of the archives. Here, the rewards of reading first-person accounts are undermined by the absence of editorial acknowledgment of the inconsistencies that arise. Sharp boasted of his own exhibition, \u201cPerhaps the most important thing about the Earth Art show was that it was the first exhibition to really trust artists to deliver work and to do that at the museum, in situ\u201d (38). In his ensuing remarks, it is clear Sharp meant that the artists would \u201cdeliver the work\u201d by making it on site from indigenous matter, as they did. Still, that \u201cfirst\u201d would be a surprise to readers of the following interview, in which the artists\u2019 representative and sometime dealer Seth Siegelaub recalls an outdoor show he helped organize ten months prior, and remarks, \u201cCarl [Andre] . . . had traditionally often worked from materials that he found wherever his works were made\u201d (62). Both are mistaken. At that point, Andre had done such a thing only once, and not by finding materials but by having metal pieces fabricated in D\u00fcsseldorf instead of shipping completed work there for his solo show with Konrad Fischer in November 1967. The Andre show to which Siegelaub refers would be his outdoor debut; his Joint resulted from Andre\u2019s discovery, according to Charles Ginnever, the sculptor and then director of the Windham College gallery in Putnam, Vermont, the site of Siegelaub\u2019s show, that \u201che could buy a ton of mulch hay for $50,\u201d the amount Ginnever allotted each artist.9<\/a><\/sup> Yet neither of these was the first occasion of the curatorial practice of transporting the artist, not the art, to produce work on site.10<\/a><\/sup> In his account in Ends of the Earth, Siegelaub doesn\u2019t mention Ginnever, and neither do the editors.11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Sharp also misstates the circumstances of the removal of De Maria\u2019s rectangular carpet of earth that the artist made on the evening of Earth Art\u2019s opening, inscribing the soil with the words \u201cGood Fuck.\u201d In transcribed remarks that Kaiser and Kwon edited from an oral-history video (Sharp died in 2008), he states that \u201cas soon as [the Cornell museum director] Tom Leavitt saw that and realized that there were kids at the opening as well as the president of Cornell, they cordoned off the room . . . and the next day, the piece was swept up and dispersed\u201d (39). Observant readers will note that Good Fuck is pictured opposite the first page of Sharp\u2019s text in Ends of the Earth, in a clipping from the Ithaca Journal dated February 22, 1969, that does not mention the room having been closed off or the work removed (36). Flipping back to the catalogue\u2019s annotated chronology, the show\u2019s opening is listed as February 11 (250). A different account of the removal of De Maria\u2019s work is Leavitt\u2019s (and mine): \u201cWhen a few days [after the opening] Leavitt informed De Maria that the museum planned to close off that room during an elementary school group\u2019s visit, the artist withdrew from the show. Heizer, presumably acting in solidarity, withdrew from Earth Art at the same time.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Two pages are devoted to large photographs of Dwan as a youthful gallery owner, the sole woman socializing with two sets of six men (25, 55). Dwan\u2019s autobiographical essay offers a dealer and patron\u2019s testimonial that De Maria, Heizer, Ross, and Smithson are the \u201chigh priests of Land art\u201d and expresses sympathy for the difficulty in realizing \u201ca comprehensive museum exhibition about Land art without their blessings\u201d (93). This vintage conception of artistic genius seems in contradiction with the exhibition\u2019s international and trans-stylistic aims. Also, Dwan asserts that she \u201cmust also espouse the sentiments of De Maria and Heizer that the photograph is not the work\u201d (95). Not only is this an unnecessary refutation of an obsolete axiom, but also, the elusive artists already negated their refusal to participate in this endeavor by allowing images of works to be included in its catalogue. And Holert\u2019s insight that \u201cin the case of Land art, the popular magazines not only functioned as media of reactive reception but also routinely acted as (not always welcome) coproducers of the phenomenon\u201d (100) persuasively challenges the idea of discrete antinomies of Land art and its media representation. (Unfortunately, neither Dwan nor other writers here extend their recognition of the importance of private patronage in getting these distant and large works done to acknowledging Robert Scull\u2019s prescient funding of De Maria\u2019s and Heizer\u2019s prior projects. Scull funded Heizer\u2019s contribution to Dwan\u2019s Earth Works show, from which he also purchased De Maria\u2019s painting.)<\/p>\n

The lack of editorial annotation of the inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and omissions in these personal accounts impairs this volume\u2019s scholarly credibility. In their own essay\u2019s notes, Kasier and Kwon do augment the television producer Gerry Schum\u2019s association with the term \u201cLand art\u201d by acknowledging De Maria\u2019s prior use of it (17).13<\/a><\/sup> But throughout, the reader has no way of determining whether the editorial silence regarding the discrepancies between the various historical and scholarly accounts should be attributed to lapses in historical knowledge, to a blindness to others\u2019 directly pertinent scholarship, or to the attitude (increasingly seen in political discourse) that first-person subjectivity trumps factual accuracy. The curators\u2019 leniency is consistent with their free interpretation of the genre of Land art\u2014expanding it in the exhibition to reveal relevant work by numerous international sculptors as well as to include artists whose practices are chronologically or procedurally outside the customary domain of Land art, such as Yves Klein, Adrian Piper, and Lothar Baumgarten; compressing it in the catalogue to focus on Tinguely, De Maria, and Heizer; and stopping it before almost all of the major works of Land art were erected.<\/p>\n

Lastly, there\u2019s an elephantine lacuna in this project\u2019s handling of earthen matter and natural processes. The aspect most fundamentally uniting these artists is their involvement with land and biotic matter, e.g., earth. This word is an age-old synecdoche for wider \u201cnature\u201d as both place and process, yet the artists\u2019 use of and cultural consciousness in relation to it is not addressed. An essay contrasting the onset of social and political environmentalism in the 1960s with the common artistic practice of using land and earthen material as cheap, hardly monitored expanse and malleable dirt would have confronted issues crucial to both then and now. For those viewing this exhibition in California, the state that leads the nation in the stringency of environmentally beneficial regulations (its other venue, Germany, is another world leader in that regard), and during a summer of wildfires in Colorado and New Mexico, flooding in Minnesota, and drought in the Midwest leading to the desiccation of the nation\u2019s corn crop, the titular convergence of the words \u201cearth\u201d and \u201cends\u201d might conjure the climatological catastrophe in process. Actually, the prominence of Tinguely\u2019s \u201cEnd of the World\u201d sign on the catalogue\u2019s back cover can be taken to signal this project\u2019s political unconscious\u2014the recognition that consequent to climate change, the end of our experience of land as we have known it really is at hand. If the latent had become manifest, the curators could have also begun correcting art history\u2019s scanty engagement with ecocriticism.[14. For reference, see Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination<\/em> (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005); The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency, <\/em>ed. Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper (Hamilton, NJ: ISC Press, 2012); Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Third Text <\/em>120, spec. issue \u201cContemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,\u201d ed. T. J. Demos (January 2013). Notably, the institutional pioneers exhibiting such work are largely European; the exhibitions include, among many others, Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969\u20132009<\/em> (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009),and Greenwashing Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities<\/em> (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2009). No major American museum has organized a comparable exhibition; important recent surveys at smaller venues include Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art<\/em> (Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2005\u20136), and Weather Report: Art and Climate Change<\/em> (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007). Curators, as forces of culture, are needed to help show which way the wind blows. <\/p>\n

On behalf of the College Art Association, Erica Hirshler, chair, and jurors Andrea Bayer, Phillip Earenfight, Lisa Saltzman, and Anne Woollett selected Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974<\/em> as recipient of the 2013 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for distinction in museum scholarship.<\/p>\n

Suzaan Boettger, a New York City\u2013based art historian, critic, and lecturer, is an associate professor at Bergen Community College, New Jersey. The author of Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (University of California Press), she contributed a text on \u201cThe Impetus of Ethics\u201d to the forthcoming Artists Reclaim the Commons: New Works, New Territories, New Publics, ed. Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer (International Sculpture Center, May 2013). Her book in process is Climate Changed: Contemporary Artists\u2019 Environmentalism.<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Directly experiencing those two artists\u2019 work \u201cout there\u201d requires MOCA visitors to drive 689 miles from the Geffen to Quemado, New Mexico, for De Maria\u2019s Lightning Field<\/em> during the months of the year that it is open (the guest cabin sleeps six, and visitors are driven to it and sequestered for a stay of approximately twenty-two hours) or 331 miles to Overton, Nevada, if one has a four-wheel-drive vehicle that can surmount the mesa of Heizer\u2019s Double Negative, <\/em>which, despite the absence of its pictorial representation in the MOCA show, MOCA owns. However, De Maria\u2019s and Heizer\u2019s work is extensively illustrated \u201cin there\u201d\u2014in the exhibition catalogue. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. On Fite\u2019s work, see Donal F. Holway, \u201cSculptor Nearing an End of Massive 40-year Task at Abandoned Quarry,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, August 3, 1968, 27. The article appeared two months before the Dwan Gallery Earth Works<\/em> exhibition. See also my own book, Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press),147. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Toby Kamps, a curator at the Menil collection, which now owns the De Maria painting, told me that MOCA color-matched its yellow installation walls with the painting. Kamps e-mail to the author, August 10, 2012. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. De Maria actually was in the show if one counts his film Two Lines Three Circles on the Desert <\/em>(1969); it was among the artists\u2019 films in Gerry Schum\u2019s Land Art<\/em> broadcast in 1969 and was shown on a monitor at the MOCA exhibition. James Nisbet e-mail to the author, August 2, 2012. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Hal Foster, \u201cIntroduction to Questionnaire on \u2018The Contemporary,\u2019\u201d October<\/em> 130 (Fall 2009): 3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. See, for example, Maura Coughlin, \u201cLanded,\u201d Art Journal<\/em> 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 105, where she writes, \u201cBoettger also writes a European presence back into the groundbreaking group shows.\u201d See also John Beardsley\u2019s Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape <\/em>(New York: Abbeville, 1998); and Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art<\/em> (1998; London: Phaidon, 2010). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects<\/em> was organized by John Beardsley for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and traveled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the Seattle Art Museum. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Dave Hickey, \u201cEarthscapes, Landsworks, and Oz,\u201d Art in America<\/em> 59, no. 5 (September\u2013October 1971): 48. I discuss similar issues in my book Earthworks<\/em>, 207\u201325. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. Charles Ginnever, in an unpublished interview by Suzaan Boettger, August 4, 1994. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. For predecessors to this procedure, see Boettger, Earthworks,<\/em> 83 and 270 n42. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. Siegelaub was more expansive in an unpublished interview with me, December 10, 1994. In saying that the artists \u201clooked around and made work from whatever they want to with what was already there,\u201d Siegelaub mischaracterizes the artists\u2019 deliberate interaction with local materials, which was planned in advance. For a detailed account of the exhibition, see Boettger, Earthworks<\/em>, 80\u201384. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. Boettger, Earthworks, <\/em>165. Regarding De Maria, Leavitt stated amiably, \u201cIt was a very fine piece, actually . . . made sense when you understood the context . . . it seemed to be also a gesture against art public and museum stodginess, and so on.\u201d Leavitt, unpublished interview by Boettger, June 8, 1994. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. Heizer, whom Kaiser and Kwon quote, is mistaken in attributing De Maria\u2019s use of the term to 1967; it was 1968, regarding De Maria\u2019s Munich Earth Room, <\/em>AKA 50 M3 (1,600 Cubic Feet) Level Dirt\/The Land Show: Pure Dirt\/Pure Earth\/Pure Land<\/em>, at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, September 28\u2013October 12, 1968. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Suzaan Boettger<\/p>\n

    Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974<\/em>, the bold title of the exhibition and catalogue organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on view there in 2012 and later at Munich\u2019s Haus der Kunst, evokes the grand ambitions of artists\u2019 environmental imaginations in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3668,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}