Earth art movement
The Earth art movement, emerging in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, represents a transformative approach to large-scale sculpture that integrates the natural environment as a fundamental material. Rooted in the avant-garde movements that flourished between the two world wars, artists began to explore nontraditional materials and abstract forms, departing from conventional figural representations. Key to this movement is the concept that sculptures can exist outside traditional gallery spaces, which challenges the notion of art as a collectible object and emphasizes an egalitarian perspective.
Notable works include Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," a monumental spiral structure extending into the Great Salt Lake, and Dennis Oppenheim's "Branded Mountain." The movement also features significant contributions from Christo and Jeanne-Claude, known for their dramatic interventions in the landscape, such as the "Running Fence" in California. Many original earthworks have faced natural erosion, leading to their existence primarily through documentation. The Earth art movement reflects a broader cultural shift, emphasizing collaboration and the incorporation of labor in the creation process, echoing corporate influences in the art world of the 1970s.
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Subject Terms
Earth art movement
Identification An artistic movement featuring large-scale sculptures that directly utilize the raw materials or features of the natural landscape
During the 1970’s, the earth art movement, also called earthworks, represented an alternative approach to the traditional, object-oriented artworks found in art galleries and museums.
The earth art movement developed in the United States during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as a significant new form of large-scale sculpture. The origins of earth art can be understood as arising from the many experimental forms of art that proliferated between the two world wars of the twentieth century. In particular, the tendency of many avant-garde artists to work with nontraditional materials (such as welded steel) prompted later sculptors to move away from the traditional figural works associated with public art and to experiment with novel, abstract forms. These new sculptures were often intended for display in an uncluttered landscape setting, and this fact also played a role in moving artists toward considering the natural environment itself as a material for sculpture.
Earthworks, by their very nature, elude classification as objects of art and, being uncollectible, make a powerful statement about art as an egalitarian conceptual enterprise. The earth art movement literally and figuratively moved art away from the rarified “white hallways” of the galleries and museums. The raw physicality of these works often recalls the primal mystery of neolithic ritual structures, such as Stonehenge in southern England.
The best known among the earthworks that have become icons of the movement is Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson. Located on the shore of Great Salt Lake, Utah, Spiral Jetty takes the form of a rocky spiral ramp that extends 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. Also notable from this period are Dennis Oppenheim’s Branded Mountain (1969) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-1970), the latter consisting of a pair of enormous rectilinear slots cut across Mormon Mesa in the Nevada desert. Many of the original earthworks of the 1970’s later succumbed to natural erosion and came to exist only in documentation photographs.
The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude became especially notable for their collaborative monumental works involving the wrapping-up or draping of large natural and artificial landmarks, such as Valley Curtain (1970-1972) hung across Great Hogback Gorge in Rifle, Colorado. Other works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude include wrapping a section of the Australian coastline in one million square feet of fabric (1968-1969) and the twenty-mile Running Fence (1972-1976) erected in Big Sur, California.
Impact
Earthwork artists create by directing the specialized labor of others and, in this respect, function much as executive directors, rather than as solitary artisans. This trend reflected one of many subtle inculcations of the corporate paradigm into American art of the 1970’s.
Bibliography
Cumming, Robert. Art: A Field Guide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Smolucha, Larry. The Visual Arts Companion. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.