Earth Art

In winter and spring 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Open Plan, an innovative five-part exhibition comprised of a mix of new and historic projects. The iterations progressed with a definite rhythm; austere projects with sober, restrained palettes alternated with more ebullient and colorful selections. Distributing curatorial authority, Open Plan united an ensemble cast for the following program: A sonic work by Andrea Fraser, curated by Scott Rothkopf and Laura Phipps; a painted environment created by Lucy Dodd, curated by Christopher Lew; projected photographs by Michael Heizer, curated by Donna De Salvo, Melva Bucksbaum, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro; an exhibition of Cecil Taylor’s documents, curated by Jay Sanders and Lawrence Kumpf, accompanied by performances by the jazz musician; and a presentation of a filmic FBI file by Steve McQueen, curated by Donna De Salvo with Christie Mitchell.

In offering an alternative to dominant readings of entropy in Robert Smithson's practice, Amelia Barikin and Chris McAuliffe show how the figure of the 'time crystal' in his works acts as a radical metaphor for endlessness, and as a visualisation of static, frozen time. Chapter from catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition 'Robert Smithson: Time Crystals' at the University of Queensland Art Museum and Monash University Museum of Art, Australia, in 2018. https://shop.monash.edu/robert-smithson-time-crystals.html

​This research paper seeks to cultivate an anthropogenic focus on Ana Mendieta’s “​earth-body” works in the ​Silueta Series ​(1973-1980). I will argue that ​Mendieta’s ​Siluetas convey the ​connection between the human form with the natural world, of which we are all a constituent. ​Through a detailed formal analysis of selected works from the Silueta Series, I will explore how her works embrace and expand on the vocabulary of a deep bond between human and non-human life. Furthermore, on a broader scale and in relation to other artists who used the land as their material in an art context, I will delineate ​how art can help to constructively rework and re-engage with the Anthropocene. In order to contextualise, I will discuss both the conceptual Land Art movement and also the ecofeminist movement that both emerged during the time she produced the majority of her Siluetas​, ​as these are the two most common categories her art has been ascribed with. By positing Mendieta’s “earth-body” works in comparison to another Land Artist, Michael Heizer, I will argue that the rhetoric and incentive behind Mendieta’s artworks are more ecologically conscious in comparison. This comparison is relevant to my study as it will align with the concept of ephemerality and the trace of humans on the earth, as the works I chose by Heizer are made to be permanent, whereas Mendieta’s were intended to be ephemeral.

The following essay provides a brief historic overview of the tendencies of the 1960s and 70s that have challenged ideas associated with art making, aesthetic categories and location. It was first conceived as a keynote address at the inaugural symposium opening the international summer school Alps Art Academy and its resulting exhibition Art Safiental in the heart of Swiss Alps.Together with newly founded Institute for Land Art and Environmental Art (ILEA), they aspire to revisit the question of what it means, in the cultural-political landscape of today, to make and to encounter Land art.

This paper appeared in: Johannes M. Hedinger and Hanna B. Hölling, eds., Landscape: Institute for Land and Environmental Art, Berlin: Vexer Verlag, 2019.

The emerging subdiscipline of ecological aesthetics
concerns the aesthetic appreciation of the world in its
entirety, including both the natural and built environments,
and is consequently the broadest category of
aesthetics. This area of study emerged as a distinct
field in the latter half of the twentieth century, although
its historical roots may be traced to eighteenth century
British and Scottish theories of natural aesthetics, especially
their treatment of the picturesque in landscape
painting, which culminated in Kant’s analysis of the
beautiful and sublime in nature. During the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, aesthetic theory tended to
focus almost exclusively on artworks and other objects
of human design. But encouraged by increasing concern
with environmental issues among philosophers
and the general public, a new interest in the aesthetics
of nature and its relationship to the built environment
has emerged over the last several decades. Ecological
aesthetics today incorporates studies of the aesthetics
of nature, including natural objects and larger wholes
such as ecosystems, gardens and landscape architecture,
environmental and earth art, architecture and
urban planning, and the relations between the different
modes of aesthetic appreciation appropriate to these
different domains. This extension of aesthetic consideration
to both natural and built environments has led
to a reconsideration of traditional aesthetic categories
and of central tenets of aesthetic theory.

An examination of how environments are represented across media forms and how they mediate cultural practices. Media forms include landscape painting, nature photography, art installations, music, video games, science fiction, comics, podcasts, and eco-cinema. Cultural practices include romantic, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions, engaging with indigeneities, nationalism, environmentalism, settler colonialism, and warfare. The following ideas are braided through the course: the Environment in Media (or aesthetic framing of "nature"), Media for the Environment (such as advocacy for preservation), Environment as Media (found forms as vessels of meaning), and Media as Environment (immersion, etc.).

Mud has been used in art as either a material similar to paint, as a sculptural element, or refigured to be the work itself, which shows how versatile mud is as a material. In this essay, I examine three works that use mud as a material and interpret how mud contributes to their meaning. These works are Mud Muse (1968-1971) by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, Firth of Forth Mud Arc (2007) by English artist Richard Long, and Cuban artist Ana Mendieta's Silueta Sangrienta (1975). Although they differ visually as well as formally, and use mud in disparate ways, I argue that mud in these works has an inherently phenomenological aspect that are essential to all three.

The desert boomed in the years around 1970. And not just because images of the desolate surface of the moon recorded the existence of a new desert. It was more because the colonization of the extraterrestrial desert was accompanied by the terrestrial deserts impacting emphatically on the imaginings of a global popular culture. In the late 1960s the desert became the construction site for spectacular earth works that artists like Robert Smithson carried out, preferably in the deserts of California, Nevada and Utah. But the cultural location in which deserts positively exploded was the cinema. Once again the desert played its part as a semantically ambiguous heterotope of emptiness, death, temptation, revelation, but also of origin, purity, purification. Deserts and desert-like landscapes as cinematographic-psychological sign complexes are analysed through the following productions: »Zabriskie Point« (1970) by Michelangelo Antonioni, »Spiral Jetty« by Robert Smithson (1970) and »La Région Centrale« by Michael Snow (1971).

Entering the Circle - Journey of a Shamanic Artist is a (3) year (2012-2015) long endeavor in esoteric experiences related to the creation of art through the use of dreamwork, shamanic poses/journeys, rituals, religious specialists and media exploration, resulting in a body of spiritual work with the intention of creating a meaningful and personal life healing experience for both artist and viewer.

Doğadaki İz: Yeryüzü Sanatı Kitap Açıklaması
Doğa Sanatı niteliği altında toparlanmış sanatsal çalışmalar iki düşünce çerçevesinde irdelenebilir. Birincisi, sanatsal malzeme ile doğaya uyumlu çalışma ve ikincisi, doğadan sanata aktarma. Doğaya uyumlu çalışma, "Sanat doğa içindir." Düşüncesi altında doğal olarak sanatsal şekil verme yolunu seçmektir.
Yeryüzü eserlerinde doğa, sayfiye olarak adlandırılmanın ötesine geçer ve bu sıradan tanımı aşar. Herşey topraktan gelir. Endüstriyel malzemeler, şeylerin içindeki doğayı keşfetmek için bir deneydir. Kaynağından çok uzaklaşmış malzemelerin içindeki doğayı bulmak zordur. Doğa temasının çağdaş ve geçer sanatsal görselliğin altında, teknik - ekonomik, fakat yoğun olmayan bir olguyu gizlediği konusu tartışılmaktadır. Fakat gerçekte, yeni arazi resimleri, doğanın yalnızca fragman olduğunu, teknik gelişmenin ve endüstri toplumunun çevresinin bozma gerçekliğini, kendini yineleyen, aldatıcı, yıldırıcı ve sürekli artan yıkıcılığını gündeme getirmektedir.
Toprak sanatı, fiziksel olarak manzarayla ilişkiye girdiği kadarıyla, ekolojik olarak nötr olamaz. Ekolojik politikalar toprak sanatının sonradan edinilmiş bir yönüdür. Gezegenimizi anlamamıza aracılık eden ekoloji gibi, ekolojik sanat olarak da tanımlayabileceğimiz arazi sanatı, toprak sanatı, hava sanatı, çevresel sanatta da başlıca amaç, insanın çevresindeki organik yaşamla bütünleşmesidir. Bu nedenle, doğa sanatı eylemlerinde dört elementin, hava, ateş, su ve toprağın, yeniden keşfedilircesine sık sık kullanıldığına tanık oluruz. Doğa sanatı, materyalist toplum olarak mantığımızın mizacına ters gelen manevi değerlere yeniden yönelen ilgiyi besleyerek, bozulabilir denge içindeki bitki, hayvan ve insanı kapsayan bir ekolojinin farkına vardırmaya ve çevre için saygıyı aşılamaya yardım eder. Havanın kaprislerine heykeli teslim ederek, bir sanat galerisini hiç dolaşmamış olan insanlar üzerinde bile yeni ve sağlıklı bir ilgi oluşturacak işleve sahiptir.

Trace in Nature: Earth Art Book Description Artistic
works collected under the nature art quality can be viewed within the framework of two thoughts. First, work in harmony with nature with artistic material, and secondly, transfer from nature to art. Nature-compatible work, "Art is for nature." It is naturally to choose the way of artistic shaping under the thought.
In the works of the earth, nature goes beyond being called a country and exceeds this ordinary definition. Everything comes from the ground. Industrial materials are an experiment to explore the nature within things. It is difficult to find the nature in the materials that have moved too far from the source. It is discussed that the theme of nature hides a technical - economic, but not intense phenomenon under contemporary and contemporary artistic visuality. But in reality, new land paintings bring to the agenda that nature is just a trailer, the reality of disrupting technical development and the environment of industrial society, its self-repeating, deceptive, deceptive and ever-increasing destructiveness.
Earth art cannot be ecologically neutral, as far as it physically intercourses with the landscape. Ecological policies are an after-found aspect of earth art. Like the ecology that mediates our understanding of our planet, the main goal of land art, earth art, aerial art, environmental art, which we can define as ecological art, is to inteteence with organic life around man. Therefore, in the acts of natural art, we witness that four elements, air, fire, water and soil, are often used as if they were rediscovered. The art of nature, as a materialistic society, feeds the interest that re-turns to spiritual values that go against the temperament of our logic, helping to recognize an ecology that encompasses plants, animals and people in a destignable balance and instill respect for the environment. By delivering the statue to the whims of the weather, it has the function to generate a new and healthy interest even on people who have never visited an art gallery.

"Over the last 100 years, since the dawning of the modernist era in the 19th century, there have been major developments in the fields of art practice and theory, altering the course of art history. Changes that occurred in the late 1960s saw the emergence of a conceptual era of art, in which the emphasis and value within art altered; an art object's value was no longer inherent within that object. Rather value was applied through cultural context and what the artworks means. This is particularly evident in the growing environmental art movement. Environmental art is an expansive movement that involves an artistic process or artwork where the artist actively engages with the environment. It is a widely diverse discipline encompassing small personal works, including earth/body art and performance, to permanent, large-scale works. Through specific themed chapters, this thesis aims to establish some of the ways the paradigm of environmental art has evolved since its beginnings in the 1960s. This will be achieved through investigations of three dominant themes and forms of interaction, within environmental art. This thesis focuses on the areas of environmental art that clearly illustrate key concepts in the movement. It explores concepts within feminist art, linking with Ecofeminism; presents investigations into large-scale environmental projects, the most prominent examples of the movement, and lastly, examines works that interact with the idea of ephemerality and the changing role of the gallery.

* An excerpt from this thesis is available from http://jade-wildy.suite101.com/definition-of-environmental-art-with-some-of-the-different-types-a273040

Or you can access the full version from the link below."

Hyper-sensitive about my Canadian settler history amidst a culture that remains complicit in the ecological extraction and devastation of Indigenous land at home and abroad, I have come to recognize how the art world is part of the capitalist machine that contributes to the material excess that colonizes living and shared landscapes.  Particularly critical of land-based art practices that deny the multi-species ecologies and histories of sites and art about the anthropocene that carries forward colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and resource  perspectives and approaches to land, my comprehensive exam set out to answer, “Given a requirement for truth and reconciliation, what does it mean for settler-identified artists to contribute to redressing the altered and diminished ecology of sites that symbolize, honor and amplify colonial histories?

Specifically proposing to speculate on unmaking the colonial aesthetics and ecological sterility of lawns found at settler and militaristic historic sites such as Fort Henry, this paper explains how my comprehensive exam;  exploring the science of trees and climate change in conjunction with the political realities of decolonization, reparation theory and non-representational theory, produced a number of conceptual paradoxes, practical difficulties and calls to action for self-identified white settler artists to unmake themselves from pursuing ecological research, remediation and presentation in public and academic spheres.

Asked to pay special attention to land-based artists’ responsibilities to involve Indigenous perspectives, this paper also revealed how researching, citing and building relationships with Indigenous persons for the purpose of economic or academic gain brings about many other ethical issues unresolvable through parameters and procedures outlined by Graduate Research Ethics Board and exasperated through graduate study timelines, graduate funding parameters, hierarchies of scholarship and academic silos of learning still firmly rooted within individualistic modes of knowledge acquisition and academic performance.

Overview and assessment of Virginia Dwan as gallery owner (1959 Los Angeles - 1971 NYC), patron and promoter of adventurous art by several male artists, notably Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Charles Ross.

Useful background for the exhibition, "From Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971"  National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 30, 2016–January 27, 2017 
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2016/from-los-angeles-to-new-york-dwan-gallery.html

This paper examines the relationship between artworks by popular members of the Earthworks (land art) movement of the 1960s/70s and sound art, particularly sound installation, by underscoring the role of time, place, and the sublime in both media.

The forces of Nature are both powerful and subtle, creative and only destructive in terms of our limited human perspective. A significant symbol of healing and power, Nature teaches us the importance of the Creator, equilibrium, order, beauty, peace, creation and creativity.
Nowhere is the life-death-life cycle more pertinent than in Nature – where our presence and actions are sometimes signaled as red flags.
These pictures were taken in December 2006 and January 2007 on my family’s farms Achtertuin and Koets near Kamieskroon, South Africa. A first exploration of “sculpting the land”, all these images, except the red flag installation, were created by natural materials. The land, riverbeds and rocks became my canvass, and peacock feathers, dry thorn tree branches, abandoned finch nests and rocks became my brush. The intention was to create images and leave it exactly where it was found and created to whither away as times goes by, and the life-death-life- cycle continues uninterrupted.

Curated by Amelia Barikin and Chris McAuliffe, Robert Smithson: Time Crystals was the first exhibition in Australia dedicated to the work of American artist Robert Smithson (1938–1973). Best known for his radical land art of the 1960s and early 1970s, Smithson is now widely recognised as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Based on intensive archival research, the project generated a new understanding of Smithson’s approach to time that challenged the dominance of entropy in existing scholarship on his practice. Presented at UQAM and MUMA with the support of the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Title: Undoing as Activism: A Movement towards SLOW ART In response to Dr. Julian Haladyn's 1 call for papers on Accelerated Art / Accelerated Culture, Undoing as Activism, in contradiction to Steven Shaviro's 2 writing, suggests global capitalist systems, including the world's over saturated art market 3 , has already been pushed "to its most extreme point." 4 Hailed 5 to find a counterpoint to the 24/7 6 reality of being a maker and a consumer, this paper highlights the work of Sharon Kallis, Katie Patterson and Peter von Tiesenhausen; three environmental artists who have chosen to develop sustainable, preventative and reparative methodologies. While presenting case studies that offer alternatives to the accelerationist aesthetics of biennale's, art fairs and Instagram, analysis offered outlines how caring, researching, collecting and classifying become acts of undoing that can inspire other artistic practices to conceptually and materially develop at an increased rate so as to redress the immediacy of human's ecological crisis. Titre du résumé: Défaire comme activisme: un mouvement vers le SLOW ART Pour répondre à l'appel du Dr. Julian Halaydan pour des soumissions sur l'Art accéléré / la culture accélérée, le démembrement de l'activisme, en contradiction avec l'écriture de Steven Shaviro, suggère que les systèmes capitalistes mondiaux, y compris le marché de l'art sursaturé du monde, ont déjà été poussés à leur maximum. Célébré pour trouver une harmonie à la réalité 24/7 d'être un artisan et un consommateur, cet article met en évidence le travail de Sharon Kallis, Katie Patterson et Peter von Tiesenhausen; trois artistes environnementaux qui ont choisi de développer des méthodologies durables, préventives et réparatrices. Tout en présentant des études de cas qui offrent des alternatives à l'esthétique accélératrice de la biennale, des foires d'art et d'Instagram, l'analyse proposée souligne comment les soins, la recherche, la collecte et la classification deviennent des actes de défaire qui peuvent inspirer d'autres pratiques artistiques à se développer conceptuellement et matériellement à un rythme accéléré afin pour redresser l'imminence de la crise écologique humaine.

This paper addresses an intriguing intergenerational encounter between Micha Ullman (b. Tel Aviv 1939), one of Israel's most prominent senior artists, and Ronen Sharabani (b. Tel Aviv 1974), a young media artist. The two artists' otherwise divergent practices converge in their use of sand and red earth as their primary media. The paper brings Mieke Bal's concept of migratory aesthetics and Jill Bennett's phenomenological approach to trauma-related art to bear on Ullman's fragile earth installations and perforated sand tables, and on Sharabani's projections of Virtual Reality onto sand. Also addressed is Sharabani's series Vitual Territories (2019), in which digitally manipulated views from Google Earth probe geographical sites that resonate with migratory histories. The paper traces two main trajectories upon which the oeuvres of Ullman and Sharabani interface. The first category, "treacherous sands", relates to installations involving sand tables and other containers of soil. In turn, the category of "fragile traces" addresses installations that feature various architectural ground plans modeled in sand. In these installations, sand is the quintessential terra infirma. At the same time, however, the paper proposes that through the haptic appeal of the medium of sand, these installations counter the pervasive anxiety of shifting ground with an augmented sense of bodily presence.

Voluntary work represents an important cultural example in changing the behavior of the individual and society. However, voluntary work has been a platform to start from in the advancement of the intellectual and developmental levels in general. It is considered as an important part of the individual's education that contributes in developing the individual's and collective capacities and offering services concerning a great deal of different fields. Lately, different art directions have appeared. They emphasize the importance of the collective voluntary work. These directions claim that having such works within different disciplines may create interactive and reciprocal relations that help in building goals, which can push them to higher unexpected levels. They also can achieve educational and intellectual interactions investing the artistic creations under the field of voluntary work. The current research 'Employing the Project Lesson in the Development of Voluntary Work of the Students of the Department of Artistic Education' is written in the pursuit of the above points.
This paper contains four chapters. The first chapter includes the problem of the study, its importance and the aims, which are embodied in the recognition of the impact of the project lesson in developing the voluntary work. Chapter two, however, includes two sections. The first section focuses on the art of earth and the second explains the meaning and definition of voluntary work. The third chapter deals with analyzing the samples. Finally, chapter four includes the ending results.

Since the late 1960’s the increased significance of context within the creation and exhibition of artworks has ensured that a greater emphasis is being placed upon the physical, social and mental space that works now occupy. Permanent public artworks have been seen to change a society’s sense of a given space. Impermanent works that have a definitive installation and de-installation timeline have also been seen to have a similar effect. Ephemeral environmental artworks however do not possess this same definitive beginning and end.

These fleeting works are often process oriented as they evolve in and subsequently devolve within their given space. As the process rather than the object is often of primary importance this tends to blur the spatial and temporal boundaries of the work. This ambiguity in terms of the works existence can alter the social perception of the space that it inhabits. As these types of works are intended to change and devolve with time there can also be a development in terms of the social connection to the space.

For an object-oriented artist change to their final creative workings may be detrimental. In contrast artists whose focus is more towards process have the opportunity to incorporate this change as an element within the work. In terms of works in the public realm this allows the audience a multitude of return visits as the work’s form changes. In this instance the returning visitor is not only establishing a relationship with the work but also the space within which it exists. The development of this social connection with a given space through the vehicle of an ephemeral environmental artwork is not necessarily limited to the tangible existence of the art process’ form.

Unlike permanent, solid works designed to withstand the rigours of time, ephemeral environmental works exist within time’s cycle. They are not intended to be a massive imposition within a space but rather an element of that space that will pass. This brevity of life when coupled with a lack of any formal de-installation process means that the works departure is more like the gentle passing of a life. Unlike the finality of removing work from a site, devolution allows the work to evolve into something else. In this case the intent of the artist and thus the original work may be lost but the constituent elements of the work can remain. This also allows for the continued evolution of society’s connection to that space through that work.

Illustrative to this I will review the developing sense of connection with a specific space that has grown with the devolution of an ephemeral environmental artwork in western New South Wales. Begun in 2001, the work entitled ‘Bone Circle / Bone Fire’ has considerably devolved. With this devolution however there has been a development in the significance of the space for the small community that uses the area.