This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

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    Earthworks

    Key decade: 1970s

    Terms: Earthworks, Land Art

    1. Sources/ stimuli
      1. Minimalism's interest in the situation of the observer and site of the artwork
      2. Postwar civil engineering: superhighways, airports,
      3. New views of the earth from space (Apollo missions, 1968 "Whole Earth" photo)
      4. neo-primitivism (neolithic burial mounds, menhirs, lingams, monoliths, Nacza lines, ritual paths, etc.)
    2. Practitioners (most had a "Minimalist" phase)
      1. Robert Smithson – New Jersey
        1. Named "Earthworks" in 1968 essay (from science fiction novel)
        2. Self-taught naturalist, geologist, theorist, critic, poet, as well as artist
        3. Theoretical impact:
          1. Conscious of "post-modern" and "post-studio" position
          2. theorized Site/Non-Site relationship
          3. nascent post-structuralism: "I'm interested in the apparatus I'm being threaded through"
        4. Mythic status: dead in airplane crash by 1973
      2. Robert Morris (again)
      3. Nancy Holt (Smithson widow) – paleolithic geometries
      4. Walter De Maria – search for sublimity
      5. Michael Heizer – "the alternative to the absolute city system" (or its surrogate?)
      6. Dennis Oppenheim – ephemeral land art
      7. Christo ("and Jeanne-Claude") – social work
    3. The California variant, "poets of light" (just my name for these guys)
      1. Robert Irwin
      2. James Turrell

    Slide List

    Smithson Site/ Nonsite usually 1967-69
    Smithson Spiral Jetty 1970 (film, photograph, Salt Lake earthwork, collage, mental image...)
    Morris Observatory Flevoland, Holland 1971
    Holt Sun Tunnels, NW Utah desert 1973-76
    De Maria Mile-Long Drawing, Mojave desert 1968 (also figures in Minimal, conceptual, "process" art)
    De Maria New York Earth Room Manhattan 1977
    De Maria Lightning Field, Quemado, New Mexico 1977
    Heizer Double Negative, Virgin River Mesa, Nevada 1969
    Heizer Complex 1, Central East Nevada 1972
    Oppenheim Directed Seeding, Finsterwolde Holland 1966
    Christo Valley Curtain Project, Rifle Gap, Colorado 1970-72
    Irwin scrim piece 1970s
    Turrell Skyspace 1980s
    Turrell Roden Crater in process (unpictured)

    Smithson, Purgatory, 1959
    Smithson, Untitled (Hexagonal Center), 1963
    Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970

    Smithson described the works he made before Minimalism as "preconscious." Yet I argue for profound continuities between the early work and the later earthworks. You can read more in my book, but here's a summary view:

    Formal continuities:
    a section of the nested hexagons serve as the basis for the geometricized spiral that constitutes Gyrostasis and underlies Spiral Jetty.

    Theoretical continuities:
    Dialectics -- a self-conscious opposition (between thesis/antithesis, leading to synthesis) that operated in the "cartouche drawings" and carried forward into Site/Nonsite and finally into the earthworks.

    Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic, 1967
    Smithson, Site/Nonsite work: Slate from Bangor, PA, 1968, 1970

    Smithson mobilized his chosen mode of dialectical thinking in such late 60s works as these -- the first a group of photographs and texts crafting a visit to the urban peripheries of New Jersey, and the second part of a conceptual "Site" and "Non-site" pairing between places far from the gallery (the Site) and the minimal gallery installation (the Non-site).

    Smithson, Spiral Jetty (stills), 1970
    Smithson, Proposal for Bingham Copper Pit, 1973

    Think about your experience of the Spiral Jetty film. How does it foreshadow the work Smithson hoped to do in industrial pit mines?