MARKING THE SPOT: A wooden stake in a hydrogen bomb impact site,
part of a project by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
(CLUI Photo Archive and LAND/ART / May 26, 2009)
part of a project by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
(CLUI Photo Archive and LAND/ART / May 26, 2009)
A full page review of LAND/ART appeared in last Sunday's LA TIMES (August 16). In "The Shifting Nature of Earth Artists," Susan Emerling argues that land art used to be a practice of monumental terms and scale, but 50 years later, it has evolved into forms with "more low-key aspirations."
From Bill Gilbert's Matter of Fact: Walk to Work, to Basia Irland's ecologically based riparian restoration "performances" on the Rio Grande, to the CLUI's temporary "Landscape Exhibit Unit" located at the intersection between New Mexico's nuclear past and present and its high-tech industries, Emerling traces the reflections of this evolution in LAND/ART's festival of coordinated exhibitions, lectures, symposia, film screenings, blogs, public installations and site-specific sculptures.
She concludes that today's land/earth artists want their audiences to "take away a new perception of the Earth and their place in it."
While contemporary land art works may be less "macho and heroic" than those of the first generation of land artists, artists' aspirations to shift how we humans see and live in relation to Earth are no less monumental.
Basia Irland's "receding/reseeding." Photo by Claire Long
From Bill Gilbert's Matter of Fact: Walk to Work, to Basia Irland's ecologically based riparian restoration "performances" on the Rio Grande, to the CLUI's temporary "Landscape Exhibit Unit" located at the intersection between New Mexico's nuclear past and present and its high-tech industries, Emerling traces the reflections of this evolution in LAND/ART's festival of coordinated exhibitions, lectures, symposia, film screenings, blogs, public installations and site-specific sculptures.
She concludes that today's land/earth artists want their audiences to "take away a new perception of the Earth and their place in it."
While contemporary land art works may be less "macho and heroic" than those of the first generation of land artists, artists' aspirations to shift how we humans see and live in relation to Earth are no less monumental.
Basia Irland's "receding/reseeding." Photo by Claire Long 
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Hello SMUDGE,
ReplyDeleteThis was actually a reported story not a review; some of the views you attribute to me were actually those of the artists.
Susan Emerling