What is: Land Art?
Ben Tufnell
‘Time, place, relativity, experience. These are the key concepts in Land Art.’
– Ben Tufnell
Curator and writer Ben Tufnell maps out a definition of Land Art, a creative practice associated with the broader conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Moving away from traditional media and the gallery, land artists set out to make work directly in the landscape, often using the natural materials they found there. But there were some notable divergences in the gestures and structures made by American and European artists of the period. Tufnell outlines these differences and the long-reaching and important legacy of the movement in our time of climate crisis.
Time, place, relativity, experience; these are the key concepts in Land Art.
Land Art is one aspect of a whole kind of matrix of revolutionary art practices that developed in the 60s, which we might call Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art is a way of making art that really prioritises the idea, and the process, over the finished object. So, instead of considering a carving made of marble, or a painting in oil on canvas, we think about processes, ideas, and how those are played out — not necessarily in the gallery. In the case of Land Art, these ideas are often played out in nature, in the landscape.
I think there’s a fundamental difference between Land Art as manifested in America in the 60s and 70s and what was happening in Europe at the same time. So, a lot of the American artists were using the great open spaces of the American deserts to make these huge experiential structures. But in Europe, where the landscape is much more worked over, it’s kind-of somehow more intensively historicised, artists tended to make much more ephemeral gestures. So that might be Richard Long simply inscribing a line across a meadow by walking backwards and forwards.
The idea that walking can be a way of making art is beautiful and revolutionary. What Long was interested in is making very simple gestures that carry great philosophical weight. To inscribe a line on the ground with footsteps is, in a way, registering your existence in the world, on the world. It’s a way of making something out of nothing. And there’s a beautiful poetry to that, I think. And this very simple gesture seems to me to say something about the way we touch and change the world with our presence.
Land Art has a long-reaching and important legacy, and a lot of the artists who first came to prominence in the 60s and 70s continue fascinating and innovative work, but there are also a number of younger artists who have taken inspiration from those earlier gestures.
Julian Charrière, a young Swiss artist, has made work in remote places around the world, often engaging in what might be called quite absurd or quixotic gestures. For example, he travelled to the Arctic, and using ice-climbing equipment, climbed onto a huge iceberg and then attempted to melt the iceberg using a blowtorch. Of course, as Charrière attempts to melt the ice it freezes again immediately. For me, the work is about the absurdity of the gesture. But the image of the artist standing precariously on this huge mass of ice, in the middle of an empty sea, is very moving. It says something about the contemporary condition of the climate and man’s place in the world.
And as we live through what may well be the late Anthropocene — the time of ongoing climate crisis — I think that an art form that draws our attention to the planet that we live on is of real significance and importance.
With thanks to
Studio Julian Charrière
Lisa Le Feuvre
Lisson Gallery
Parafin
Richard Long
Archive
Artimage
Getty Images
Holt / Smithson Foundation
Music
Audio Network
Freesound
Credits
Wide shot of sunlight flare through leaves
Strangetheatre / Getty Images
The Wack! Exhibition at MOCA. Mary Kelly’s ‘Post-Partum Document: Documentation I’
Lawrence K. Ho / Getty Images
[Post-Partum Document: Documentation I
Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts
Mary Kelly, 1974]
Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, Carmen Lamanna Gallery, November 1971
Ron Bull / Getty Images
Canova: Eternal Beauty, Palazzo Braschi
Archivio Marilla Sicilia / Mondadori Portfolio Getty Images
Visitors looking at the painting visitor looking at the painting ‘Olive Trees, Saint-Remy, June-July 1889’ by Vincent van Gogh at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland
NICHOLAS RATZENBOECK / AFP / Getty Images
MS AERIAL TU Shot of desolate desert
Smithsonian / Getty Images
A helicopter flies over desert
Aerial Filmworks / Getty Images
Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson, 1970
Great Salt Lake, Utah.
Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water. Coil: 1,500 ft long and 15 ft. wide.
Collection of Dia Art Foundation
Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni
© Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York
Exmoor National Park, aerial view over the moors and farmland
Gavin Hellier / Getty Images
Tracking shot through tall grasses in meadow
BBC Universal / Getty Images
A Line Made by Walking
Richard Long, 1967
© Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019
204 Somerset beach stones in 17 lines of 12 stones
Richard Long, 1972 – 73
Somerset beach stones
9 x 542 x 663 cm
© Richard Long
Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Muddy Water Circle
Richard Long, 1994/2013
Clay on black wall
Dimensions variable
© Richard Long
Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Julian Charrière attends his exhibition ‘All We Ever Wanted was Everything and Everywhere’ at Museo MAMbo, 2019
Roberto Serra – Iguana Press / Getty Images
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I
Julian Charrière, 2013
Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, Detail
Julian Charrière, 2013
Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories II
Julian Charrière, 2013
Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
Huge white mass of ice at Disko Bay during sunset
DigitalVision / Getty Images
Aerial of Greenland Arctic Glacier and icebergs
Spotmatik / Getty Images
Freesound contributors:
Onderwish
Eroika
NLM
Zarina Hashmi, ‘Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking’, Tate etc., 27 November 2013
Simon Grant and Nancy Holt, ‘Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in England, 1969’, Tate Etc., 25 June 2019
‘Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty’, Smarthistory
Julian Charriére, Official Website
‘Land Art’, Art Term, Tate
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