In 1979 art critic Rosalind Krauss wrote her seminal article "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," which situates various works of art within a paradigm that extends the standard taxonomy of art as sculpture and painting. Born out of the relationships between architecture and not-architecture, landscape and not-landscape, Krauss' categories of site-construction, marked sites, axiomatic structures, and sculpture provided a new framework for these works. This framework speaks clearly of the interdisciplinary nature of the pieces she discussed, in which art melded with architecture and landscape. Much of the work explored by Krauss has come to be known as Earthworks, a term usually credited to artist Robert Smithson, or Land Art, the term artist Walter De Maria uses to describe his work.
Krauss' work is important as it sought to schematize a broad field of work as a genre of sculpture, and lend it new legitimacy within art history and criticism. Recent and growing interest in the field is evident through the publication of numerous works investigating the phenomena of Land Art, most notably John Beardsley' s Earthworks (originally published in 1984, revised second edition 1989), Gilles Tiberghien's work reviewed here, and the monographs of many of the individual artists most frequently associated with the field, such as Michael Heizer, Richard Long, and Robert Smithson. The enormous growth of interest in this body of work, which, at its most important phase of development lasted no longer than ten years, is puzzling. Reasons for the attention can most likely be attributed to the shift in emphasis of various design disciplines toward process over product, and a growing intrigue with natural process and entropy, all of which figure prominently in works of Land Art.
Like Krauss, Gilles Tiberghien finds postmodern underpinnings to the work discussed in his book Land Art. For Tiberghien, the assessment of the work as an important bridge to postmodernity stems not from the critique used to describe the work, as in Krauss' article, but from the questioning and transformations of modernism that the work exhibits. In deference to Krauss' interest in defining an "expanded field" for study of these liminal works, he states that the aim of the book "is not to review the artistic practices that could be classified as Land Art. It is rather to define a moment of contemporary history that appears exemplary, in certain respects, in that it is situated at the turning point between modernism and that which contested it, battled it, indeed, and ultimately replaced it." (p. 16) As such, the book is a somewhat historical account of the field, focusing primarily on works created in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Although the works chosen for study fall into this temporal frame, Tiberghien's examination of them is organized thematically rather than chronologically. By organizing the material in this way, he is able to weave a discussion of a core group of works through the varied themes of artistic and theoretic influence, media, and representation, with a few chapters dedicated to each.
Tiberghien is most convincing in the three chapters devoted to the artistic and theoretical context out of which Land Art emerged. The first, entitled "Minimalism and Beyond," explains the various influences of minimalism, constructivism, and the increasing role of theory to the production of art in the early 1960s. Tiberghien cites projects by artists Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt as strongly influencing early examples of Land Art. Works by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Ad Reinhardt illustrate the growing importance of art theory to the making of art. These artists' words and writings, as well as those of the critics of their day, gained an importance almost on par with the work itself. It is within the context of this related work that Tiberghien quotes art critic Harold Rosenberg writing of the art in the 1960s, and Land Art in particular: "Today, chance itself cannot prevail against the potency of aesthetic recollections. In art, ideas are materialized, and materials are manipulated as if they were meanings. This is the intellectual advantage of art as against disembodied modes of thought, such as metaphysics." (p. 17) As such, Tiberghien classifies the art of this period, and Land Art in particular, as "conceptual art," where the artist's and critic's words are necessary to the observer's comprehension of the work.
The other two chapters devoted to the examination of influences, entitled "Inorganic Sculptures" and "Near and Distant Landscapes," explore Land Art's relationship to landscape, both as a context for art and a discipline bearing influence upon earthwork projects. In the first, Tiberghien explains the questioning of the gallery space as the privileged forum for the display of art, which propelled artists to engage the vast spaces of landscape, as both forum and medium. Influenced by the colossal architectural and sculptural works of ancient Egypt and Mayan Central America, and their relationships with the landscape, various Land Artists began to work with mass on an enormous scale that the venue of architectural space simply could not accommodate. The monolithic work of Michael Heizer ("Complex I" and "Complex II") and Robert Morris ("Observatory") stand as prime examples of such efforts, and prompt Tiberghien's discussion of relationships of size and scale in such monumental undertakings.
The strongest discussion Tiberghien presents under the theme of influence, and the only one in the book that suggests interdisciplinarity, is that of the connection between the tenets of Land Art and those of the picturesque, as formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Citing Robert Smithson as the primary figure who drew inspiration from the writings of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin, Tiberghien explores the similarities of the two fields in terms of their interest in movement, in texture as revealed in nature, and in the passage of time. Gilpin's On Sketching Landscape , which describes how travelers might illustrate their travel notations so as to keep a visual record of their journeys, is compared to the Land Art artists, following Jack Kerouac, as they do the same in the deserts of the American West. In Smithson's article "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," reproduced in its entirety in the appendix, Smithson describes a legacy of understanding landscape as both material and process. That legacy, begun by Price and Gilpin, was inherited by Frederick Law Olmsted as seen in his design of Central Park where the park is not a static entity or paradise recreated, but rather, is built of artifice and intended to transform over time.
Smithson saw in Olmsted's movement of ten million horse carts of soil and confrontation with civic bureaucracies, a "Promethian" figure that he closely allied in spirit with the new Land Artists.
While not as strong as those of the first theme, Tiberghien's discussions of the second theme of the book involve illuminating inquiries into the principle media which define work as Land Art: the site and time. In the first of these chapters, "The Land and the Site," Tiberghien explores the importance of the site to each artist, looking also at the way that land itself--rock, sand, soil, organic and volcanic deposits--becomes the medium in which the works are created. Projects as diverse as Gutzon Borglum's sculpture at Mount Rushmore, Michael Heizer's "Double Negative"--two enormous subtractive slots carved into the Mormon Mesa--and paths worn in the Nazca desert of Peru by Richard Long, speak to an array of methods employed in Land Art. A discussion of works such as Robert Smithson's "Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, Robert Morris' untitled work in King County, Washington, and Michael Heizer's "Effigy Tumuli" raise the issues of Land Art as it serves to mitigate human disturbance of the land in quarries and areas devastated by mining operations.
In the second chapter, "Time at Work," Tiberghien presents a less comprehensive discussion of projects that incorporate aspects of time either directly, as subject matter, or indirectly, as the context in which the work operates. Examples such as Dennis Oppenheim's studies of time lines as articulated in the landscape, Michael Heizer's "Five Conic Displacements," which registered time's changes upon the conic holes carved into the ground, and again the walks of Richard Long, seem to engage aspects of time in a manner which seems superficial after Robert Smithson's writings on these themes. Projects such as Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels," Charles Ross' "Star Axis," and Robert Morris' "Observatory," all mark their placement within the universe by articulating the locations of solstice and equinox, or in Ross' work, the ever evolving orbits of Polaris, and therefore utilize time indirectly as a context in which the work operates. These projects in particular have become the hallmark of replication in lesser examples of Land Art.
The last theme that Tiberghien investigates is that of the role of representation in Land Art. In two non-consecutive chapters, "Maps and Inscriptions," and "The Limits of Representation," the author explores various aspects of the relationship between representation and Land Art. The first chapter discusses maps as an underlying vehicle for the theoretical discourse of Land Art, marking or predetermining the route of Long' s walk, relating a series of Smithson's"Site/Non-site" pieces, or providing documentation to one of Christo' s works. As Tiberghien explains, the use of maps is another way of moving out of the gallery to explore a new space for art: "these artists' maps do not exist to allow us to find ourselves in them, quite the opposite; their aim is to lose us, to isolate us within the singular experience of the art...Cartography shifts art's geography, which is never where one believes it to be; one must reconstruct, based on available information--maps, in this case--what these do not provide. In creating a new conceptual space, these artists attempt to restore to works of art a space of their own." (p. 92) In describing the limits of representation in Land Art, Tiberghien points to the importance of the work's representation as the mode in which most people know the work, through either photographs or film, rather than experiencing the piece firsthand. Operating in such a way, the representation acts as a surrogate, the net effect of which is to make works seem like equivalent objects and allow for what Lucy Lippard has called the dematerialization of art.
By focusing his discussion on a core group of early Land Art works, Gilles Tiberghien has provided an excellent exposition of the nature of the pieces in question, and of the most important issues surrounding our understanding of them. Perhaps overshadowing the text of the book in impact, the very complete photographic documentation is especially commendable. With many projects illustrated with drawings, sketches, construction photographs, and images of the completed works, Tiberghien has managed to capture much of design process of these efforts as well as their products. The inclusion of three important articles in the appendix, along with maps detailing the location of the projects and a fairly complete bibliography, gives the reader an excellent starting point for further study. The greatest weakness of the book is its lack of theoretical stance. While Tiberghien broaches the question of how these projects relate to modernity and postmodernity, he never fully develops his thesis, nor does he speculate on their relevance to the contemporary condition or on future directions which the work might take. Despite these shortfalls, what Tiberghien has written is a strong overview of a field that has the potential to inform practice from a wide spectrum of design disciplines. The wealth of information and documentation he provides, in textual, graphic and photographic form, makes his work a significant contribution to the existing literature.