Nature has nothing to say to us. . . . This snub is particularly rough on people from the city.
TOM SHERMAN, OFF-KILTER: TALKING TO NATURE (2002)
One of the boldest contrasts between land art and today’s eco art is where and in what circumstances we typically encounter the work. Since its inception in the 1970s, eco art has often been urban and frequently seen indoors. Land art was regimented by its creed of separation, whether or not this meant a physical removal from art-world centers. By working directly with and on the land, as I have suggested, much of this work famously sought to sever what its advocates thought of as deforming ties to the city—with its gallery system, its model of the heroic artist in the studio, the medium-specific formalism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, its musty monumental sculpture in public spaces, its traditional art materials and finish in sculptural work—and to depart especially from the landscape genre, which, as we have seen, was frequently figured as the Luddite past. In both North America and Europe, land art involved resistance to these older norms and often a physical relocation, practices that accorded authority to remote siting and ephemerality. While simple dichotomies between apparent opposites are rarely accurate in the contexts of land art, relocation away from and resistance to established art-world patterns promised benefits: buying into potent myths of exploration and wilderness, occasionally a connection to early environmentalism, moving outside the museum or gallery and thus (it was claimed) its economic and aesthetic value systems. Michael Heizer stated ca. 1968, “One of the implications of earth art might be to remove completely the commodity-status of a work.”1 Land-art practices were always varied and not always telluric in orientation: photo documentation, in galleries and magazines, of otherwise invisible or temporary work was a critical analogue of—not a cipher for—site work, as was Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty. Published artwriting was also central. Willoughby Sharp, curator of the momentous Earth Art exhibition in 1969, said in 2006, “Yes, Avalanche was a publication, a catalogue, a curatorial effort that replicated a show without an exhibition. Avalanche was the exhibition itself. . . . It was a better exhibition than . . . ‘Earth Art.’”2
The term “land art” was first used not just for a TV presentation in Germany in 1969 by Gerry Schum, who had been inspired by the Earth Art exhibit at Cornell, but also as what the producer/curator conceived as a TV gallery (Fernsehgalerie). More clearly in retrospect, what land art largely did (as part of or in concert with other tendencies in art at the time, especially conceptualism and feminism, as a perusal of Lucy Lippard’s touchstone Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 shows) was to complicate and render dialogic—rather than remove—the connections and disconnections between the ostensible poles of landscape and land, city and country, studio and open ground, sculpture and what Rosalind Krauss called the “expanded field.” Even when we refine the “get-out-of-town” stereotypes of land art with counterexamples—Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass Displacement (1971) and Walter De Maria’s two earth rooms (1968 in Munich, 1977 in New York City) were both urban displays; Earth Works was a gallery show—contemporary eco-art practices operate under different auspices and are frequently sited differently.3 I discuss a number of these departures in turn and then look at pertinent examples more closely in two case studies.
REMOTENESS, EPHEMERALITY, AND THE ECO MONUMENT
Two qualities of siting common in land art—remoteness and ephemerality—can be compared productively with related strategies in eco art. Where land art was to be situated was a central debate at the inception of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The two priorities could be emphasized independently, or in an example such as Walter De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing of 1968 in the Mojave Desert, they could overlap.4 In 2005 Anne Wagner returned to an authoritative discussion of the issue among Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson, a conversation that was based on interviews in 1968 and 1969 and originally published in Avalanche magazine’s first issue, fall 1970.5 Oppenheim claimed that his gallery work was separate from what he did outside this setting. Smithson doubted this possibility, stating that “you’re probably always going to come back to the interior in some manner” (243). Insisting on the site-specificity of his work, Heizer seemed uninterested in any relationship with the gallery. My purpose is not to expound the already well-understood relationships between land art and the gallery and the city but instead to investigate further eco art’s assumptions about and departures from these compass points.
Wagner adds statements by Nancy Holt to the original published dialogue and then returns to it “because their testimony [that of Holt, Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson] registers the emergence of a set of problems and issues that have not gone away. They speak to the complex new spatialization of art since the ’6os and to the resultant complications of where and what the artwork is” (248). That these points of reference remained significant forty (and now fifty) years after land art’s beginnings is also witnessed by a roundtable discussion published in the same summer 2005 issue of Artforum that published Wagner’s rehearsal. Convener Tim Griffin remarks on the appearance in the 2000s of work purposefully placed in (supposedly) out-of-the-way locales (following a propensity opposite to that with which I began chapter 1, in which landscape is brought indoors). “This development,” he claims, “demands some comparison to work made by previous generations, such as the Land art of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, on the one hand, and the travels of artists like Bas Jan Ader or Hamish Fulton on the other.”6 As Brian Wallis had done in observing this tendency in his 1998 survey of land art,7 Griffin slants the ensuing conversation among prominent curators and artists by assuming that land art is a historical precedent and the recent work a series of returns. A range of opinions is offered on exemplary examples, including Tacita Dean’s audio piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), Olafur Eliasson’s indoor and outdoor spectacles (fig. 1), Pierre Huyghe’s Antarctica project, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s initiative called The Land (in which the latter two artists were participants). Claire Bishop and Pamela M. Lee distinguish between land art and some contemporary examples in which remoteness serves as a sign or cause of the art’s “aesthetic” reception and projects with a social purpose. Their illustration of the latter is Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), performed near Lima, Peru. Overseen by Alÿs, hundreds of volunteers with shovels moved a sand dune a small distance. The site was not inaccessible geographically or of great moment aesthetically. Since the purpose was not to remediate the terrain but to create what Alÿs deemed “land art for the landless,”8 the project focused on disenfranchised people and what we could call the inaccessibility of opportunity represented by access to land. Yet it is worth recalling that physically and conceptually, if not in its stated purpose, this performance has a precedent in land art, Richard Long’s comparatively quiet and hermetic Thousand Stones Moved One Step (1976) and cognate works. Extending the conversation, Lee states, “A colleague of mine recently told me about a new genre of literary theory called ‘eco-criticism.’” As we saw in the conversations that form Landscape Theory (2008), eco art had not yet become the focus of discussions in the mid-2000s, however much artists were producing work with this emphasis. Land art’s relationships with eco art are of course not its only important coordinates. From today’s perspective, however, eco art cannot be fathomed apart from its complex and ongoing interactions with land art, but that does not necessarily make it the “new Land art,” as Lee calls it in the Griffin text, any more than Smithson’s revisions of the landscape conventions were designed to establish a new picturesque, as we saw in chapter 1.
Oppenheim acknowledged in the conversation discussed by Wagner (243) that Smithson’s dialectic of site/nonsite is not only central to his work and that of other land artists, it is in addition a paradigm of the relationships between remoteness and ephemerality and even those between eco art and land art. In his usual expansive way, Smithson linked the site/nonsite pairing deployed in the Earth Works exhibition in New York in 1968 with Spiral Jetty. In a lengthy interview conducted in 1972 for the Archives of American Art, he stated, in reference to the inception of his own work in this foundational gallery exhibit, that the physical “landscapes of New Jersey . . . embedded themselves in my consciousness at a very early date.” At the Dwan Gallery, A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey (1968) therefore “reflected the confinement of the gallery space. Although the non-site designates the site, the site itself is open and . . . unconfined. . . . Then the thing was to bring these two things together. . . . To a great extent that culminated in the Spiral Jetty” (295). Overturning the emphases of earlier landscape depiction yet again in the Avalanche text, Smithson claimed that “in a sense the non-site is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or the edge” (249). This temporal and material inversion also parallels the procedures of preposterous art history that I have adopted. In Smithson’s entropic universe, it makes little sense to draw up lists of opposites. Site and nonsite flip, depending on our vantage point. “I began to see things in a more relational way,” he stated in 1972 (296). We could say the same of many other works in the Dwan show. Carl Andre’s documentary wall photos of his work in Aspen, Colorado, from the previous summer insist on a gallery/nongallery relationship yet posit neither as primary. Sol LeWitt’s Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value takes the documentation of ephemerality to an extreme by displaying photographs of his ritualistic burial of a handcrafted sculpture in the Netherlands. As LeWitt said of this object, it “was not visible—but known.”9 These examples might seem to stand in contrast with Robert Morris’s Earthwork (1968), which was a completely, if iconoclastically, present pile of urban detritus placed in the center of the gallery. While the sculpture is not dialectical in Smithson’s manner, it takes on a site/nonsite relationship with Morris’s other work and that of the other artists in the exhibit because he also made secluded pieces with which it can be compared and because it is unitary amidst the various doublings in this exhibition.
But what of Smithson’s reference to Spiral Jetty? Constructed in 1970 at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, it is for most people still inaccessible economically or physically. While Smithson sought out a site distant from the New York and Los Angeles art worlds of Virginia Dwan, his patron, he chose this location in part because of its proximity to the Golden Spike National Historic Site, which commemorated the joining of the western and eastern spans of the transcontinental railway on May 10, 1869. He also valued the traces of industry at this spot, the remnants of now largely inconspicuous but occasionally reenergized oil exploration.10 The work is remote, yet not. Spiral Jetty is, on the one hand, both large and durable: it partakes of geological time. On the other hand, it is famously in flux, partially disappearing under water for decades soon after its completion and, now that it is above water level again, changing in color constantly thanks to the crystallization and microscopic life forms born of the saline conditions of the Great Salt Lake. It is ephemeral in its multiplicity and flux, but not. It also exists as a physical structure, a film, and an essay. As the most discussed example of land art, even though relatively few people have visited the site, it is also constantly present in photographs and art discourse. Spiral Jetty in all its instantiations is thus paradigmatic of the complex dialectic of the remote and ephemeral in land art.
Many tactics were used to make land art ephemeral, whether within or beyond the gallery. In contrast to its role in Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands, discussed in chapter 2 (fig. 27), mapping can be a vehicle for ephemerality and even invisibility. Iain Baxter founded the N.E. Thing Co. in 1966 in Vancouver (NETCO, as it is also called, was legally incorporated in 1969), which he co-administered with Ingrid Baxter until 1978. NETCO produced a plethora of landscape-related conceptual art with a strong ecological inclination, including photographs of piles of lumber and other “natural” products or, in North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1) of 1969 (fig. 28), lines on maps that trace network communications that existed for only the time it took to send and receive messages with a then-important new technology, the telex machine.11 Since 1978 Baxter has produced numerous other works dealing with environmental and consumer issues. In 2005 he changed his legal name to Iain Baxter&, adding the ampersand to his surname to underline the power of “and.” Douglas Huebler, Nancy Holt, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bill Vazan—among others—also produced map works that explored both the conceptual and the telluric dimensions of the earth. If the N.E. Thing Co. example seems only to suggest ephemerality, we should remember that the Baxters were careful to trace the physical existence of telegraph lines between cities, to acknowledge the physical system of cables, poles, etc., that carried the messages. Claes Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument (also called The Hole, 1967) was a performative creation of a negative space, a visible absence presented on a Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, in clear view of Cleopatra’s Needle and the Metropolitan Museum. Suzaan Boettger has noted that Oldenburg’s earthwork was orchestrated as part of an exhibition called Sculpture in Environment, curated by Sam Green, who had mounted a similar exhibit in Philadelphia.12 Anti-monumentality, negative space, radically simple materials, even a morbid reference to the increasing body count from the war in Vietnam (the excavation clearly resembles a grave)—all were part of this work. Another strategy was to curtail access to work temporally, as at Paul Maenz’s group exhibition 19:45–21:55, seen (briefly) at the Galerie Dorothea Loehr on September 9, 1967. This was an international and communal exhibition that included Jan Dibbets from the Netherlands and Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, and John Johnson from the United Kingdom, alongside German artists Bernhard Höke, Konrad Lueg, Charlotte Posenenske, and Peter Roehr. Dibbets’s contribution invited direct participation as visitors walked through the sawdust that bounded the ephemeral negative space of his installation in the gallery courtyard.13 Some works connected the conceptual and the material, such as Long’s, for which the artist sent twigs by mail and instructions to have local ones gathered and displayed to bring places in England and Germany together. Long was one of the first artists to work ecologically. “In Long’s work,” as Lucy Lippard has stated, “transience and ephemerality are no longer accidental features of a certain type of artmaking but have come to occupy its very core.”14
To extend this discussion of the relationships between eco art and land art through the double lenses of ephemerality and remoteness, I want to circle back to the connections between land, land use, and the proprietary component of landscape as a genre by considering Dennis Oppenheim’s canonical Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop (1969; fig. 29), Agnes Denes’s equally legendary Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (1982), and more recent work by John Gerrard that moves the landscape implications of agriculture into new dimensions (fig. 30). Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop is a composite of photographs that record Oppenheim’s planting and harvesting of a grain crop in a farmer’s field in the Netherlands in 1969. The two works—Directed Seeding and Cancelled Crop—were temporally separate but were also combined by the artist into a third work in this collage and described in the text segment affixed to it. Oppenheim described the careful layout of Directed Seeding in these terms: “The route from Finsterwolde (location of wheat field) to Niece Schnapps (location of storage silo) was reduced by a factor of 6X and plotted on a 154 × 267 meter field. The field was then seeded following this line.” He adds this description for Cancelled Crop: “In September the field was harvested in the form of an X. The grain was isolated in [its] raw state, further processing was withheld. The material is planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of withholding it from a product-oriented system. Isolating this grain from further processing (production of food stuffs) becomes like stopping raw pigment from becoming an illusionistic force on canvas.”15 In 1969 he augmented the all-important concluding simile about painting: “This project poses an interaction upon media during the early stages of processing. Planting and cultivating my own material is like mining one’s own pigment (for paint)—I can direct the later stages of development at will.” The mining metaphor helps to explain Oppenheim’s conceit that short-circuiting the capitalist system of production and marketing by withholding the wheat from further refinement and sale is analogous to curtailing the development of another primary material, pigment, in a highly refined process, painting. In creating this negative value, his work is comparable to Oldenburg’s Hole and to the experience of invisible sites in Smithson’s coeval work. Oppenheim’s protest is partly about the marketing of studio-made art, the gallery system that so many land artists resisted. He directs his disapproval specifically at what was in the art world, in the aftermath of abstraction’s hegemony, still seen as conventional: illusionism. Whether or not Oppenheim had landscape painting in mind—as Smithson did on his way to his tour of Passaic, discussed in chapter 1, for example—he was clearly offering a three-dimensional and less permanent alternative, one that included an “abstract” X on the physical landscape. His mining metaphor also doubles our attention to his work on the earth, to what Oppenheim calls “terrestrial art” as opposed to that of the city and studio, which he pithily designates “loft art.”16
FIG. 28 N.E. Thing Co., North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1), 1969. Collage, 45.5 × 60.9 cm. By kind permission of the artist.
FIG. 29 Dennis Oppenheim, Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop, 1969. Finsterwolde, Holland. Wheat field, harvester, 462 × 801 ft. Reduced route configuration from Finsterwolde to Nieuwe Schans plotted on a field 154 × 267 m and used to dictate seeding pattern for common wheat (April 1969). The cultivated media from the two diagonal cuts is isolated from further processing. This raw material is to be packed in 25 lb. bags (September 1969). Photodocumentation, 60 × 40 in. Photo: Dennis Oppenheim Estate. © Dennis Oppenheim.
Looking back from the perspective of eco art and today’s fascinations with “new materialisms,” Jussi Parikka’s theorization of the “geology of media” finds a precedent in Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop. “We need to track the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they become media,” Parikka claims, by imagining “the literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals.”17 As I show at the end of chapter 5, Simon Starling’s One Ton II of 2005 (see fig. 62) does exactly this with regard to traditional photography. Oppenheim’s statement and his photo work expand what landscape could be in the realm of Krauss’s notion of the “marked site.” The patterns on the ground are in the country, though the photo collage is city, gallery, and publication oriented. Ironically, given the scale and temporary presence of the seeding-and-harvesting project, it is this originary work that is ephemeral. In 1969 Oppenheim was aware of what he called this “paradox,” given that critics’ idea of the “timeless object” is “of a solid form of rigid matter that will live through the ages. I think . . . timeless art . . . is gong to be this new seemingly ephemeral, process-oriented work.” Because “they involve outdoor areas,” he elaborates, “they involve an ecological kind of framework which . . . can reiterate almost a constant, never-ending change.”18 An environmental or truly terrestrial art, Oppenheim believes, takes artists “out of the studio . . . widening our boundaries until we’re faced with the fact that we are just a very small speck.”.19 I examine his profound engagement with boundaries and borders further in chapter 5.
While part of the effect of Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding and Cancelled Crop in their en plein air, European specificity was to move outside the gallery system, more important historically, I believe, is that these works and their photographic progeny stretched beyond the art world or, if we prefer, forced the art world to think about systems of land use and include such spatial and administrative factors in a new definition of non-object-based and in this case socially minded practice. Oppenheim is pressed in the 1969 interview to talk about Burnham’s systems theory; unlike Haacke with respect to Rhine Water Purification Plant (see fig. 3), however, he only acknowledges the connection and does not run with it on a theoretical plane. In resisting not only art-world protocols of what counts as art (“loft art”) but also the long-standing tendency to move from land to land ownership to a narrow interpretation of what it means to create value in the definition of landscape in art, however, Oppenheim greatly augments the material and conceptual possibilities of land art. More than most land artists in the 1960s and 1970s, he took a political stance on the environment. Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop and its cognates reveal a capitalist system of exchange through their purposeful resistance. In exposing land use and its consequences in this manner, this work can be seen to engage with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape depictions of agricultural enclosure laws, for example,20 and to anticipate the multifarious landscapes in the United States whose use is recorded and analyzed most notably today by the Center for Land Use Information.21
Agnes Denes evolved her practice of “eco-logic” coincident with the work of Oppenheim and other land artists. Warning of the woes of the Anthropocene decades ago, Denes wrote in 1993,
[F]or the first time in human history, the whole earth is becoming one interdependent society with our interests, needs and problems intertwined and interfering. The threads of existence have become so tightly interwoven that one pull in any direction can distort the whole fabric, affecting millions of threads. A new type of analytical attitude is called for, a clear overview or summing up. . . .
Rice/Tree/Burial, first realized in 1968, was a manifesto that announced my commitment to ecological and environmental issues, human concerns and philosophic thought. It was also the first exercise in Eco-Logic, a complex of site-oriented artworks that brought together philosophical concepts and ecological concerns.22
Nowhere is this principle more graphically displayed than in Wheatfield—A Confrontation. Her description of the complexity of this project is itself a complex iteration of site:
Early in the morning on the first of May, 1982, we began to plant a two-acre wheatfield in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty.
The planting consisted of digging 285 furrows by hand, clearing off rocks and garbage, then placing the seed by hand and covering the furrows with soil. Each furrow took two to three hours.
Since March, over two hundred truckloads of dirty landfill had been dumped on the site consisting of rubble, dirt, rusty pipes, automobile tires, old clothing, and other garbage. Tractors flattened the area and eighty more truckloads of dirt were dumped and spread to constitute one inch of topsoil needed for planting.
We maintained the field for four months, set up an irrigation system, weeded, cleared out wheat smut (a disease that had affected the entire field and wheat everywhere in the country). We put down fertilizers, cleared off rocks, boulders, and wires by hand and sprayed against mildew fungus.
More symbolic than conceptual and even more extensive than Oppenheim’s earlier intercession in the capitalist system, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, in the shadow of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, occupied land that was then worth 4.5 billion dollars yet was kept empty by real-estate speculators. Denes concludes in a darkly prophetic way: “After my harvest the two-acre area facing New York harbor was returned to construction to make room for a billion-dollar luxury-complex. Manhattan closed itself once again to become a fortress, corrupt yet vulnerable.”23 Wheatfield—A Confrontation’s “eco-logic” deploys the strategy of ephemerality in several ways. The wheat was tended through a summer season, and the project reverberated for several years after the harvest, but as a monument to so much of what Denes finds wrong, it remained finite. The economic system that she resists is largely invisible but articulated in this work. Like Oppenheim, however, Denes has striven to convert the fleeting to the lasting. Showing symbolically that this land could be used for more than making money, as it was in Manhattan’s past, Denes has since restaged Wheatfield’s planting, harvesting, and attendant community interaction several times. Versions of the project—her challenge “to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns”24—traveled from the heart of world commerce to twenty-eight other cities worldwide from 1987 to 1990, sponsored by the Minnesota Museum of Art’s International Art Show for the End of World Hunger. Beginning with Rice/Tree/Burial in the late 1960s, she has in addition created time capsules as part of her work. She considers her massive Tree Mountain project (1992–96)—commissioned by the Finnish government at the first Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992—to be a “Living Time Capsule.”
FIG. 30 John Gerrard, Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009. Simulation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Simon Preston Gallery, New York.
John Gerrard calls his hypnotically artificial virtual-reality simulations of buildings “portraits,” but they are in “landscape” format and often engage with issues of land use and how land comes into eco art. Given that they exist only as files to be projected in a gallery or viewed on a computer screen, chances are that we will experience them in landscape format too, and likely indoors. Two of Gerrard’s works link provocatively with Oppenheim’s and Denes’s interventions into the agricultural system. Both Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009 (fig. 30) and Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015—to overgeneralize strategically—graphically show what art does now in the vast spaces of the United States after land art heroically claimed the West. Though we never see a living thing in the panoramic tour around Sow Farm, the five massive buildings that we circumnavigate typify industrial farming today. Fascinated by what takes place in the Oklahoma landscape, Gerrard returned to produce Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma), in which he went to great lengths to picture one of Google’s “data farms.” While he does not announce a political program in the way Denes and Oppenheim did, it is apparent that reflection on mass consumption, industrialization, and digital surveillance informs these simulations. He states, “to me, the landscape—dotted with farms and oil fields—also represents the global trend of unrestrained, mass consumption.”25 Sow Farm shows the flat and largely uninflected landscape of the former Dust Bowl region, a quality of neutrality that is heightened by the suppression of detail in the simulation program used to make the work. The camera circles the equally nondescript buildings we see, moving counterclockwise quite quickly under neutral lighting. We notice linear ranges of telephone poles, suggesting a road near the farm. An unused piece of equipment that looks like a loading ramp enters and leaves our purview. We come to a large open depression in the earth; from a distance, it looks like Michael Heizer’s Munich Depression of 1969, but more regular. Not only does it turn out to be full of water—a waste pond?—but it also functions as an abject reflecting pool for the five apparently identical buildings. There is no sound, no narrative, but life inside is hinted at in details such as the slow rotation of a fan vent along our path. This is a working farm, the infrastructure behind the seemingly magical appearance of food in urban stores. As N.E. Thing Co. does with their mapped telex triangle (fig. 28), Gerrard reminds us both that the agricultural system is abstract and that it occupies space and uses material resources. The unmodulated pan that Gerrard presents is also comparable with the quietly breathtaking opening sequence in Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, which presents an eight-minute (though seemingly endless) tracking shot of the inside workings of the enormous Cankun factory in Xiamen City, Fujian, China. Both sequences are remarkably calm, allowing us to take in the massiveness and implications of what we see. This is terrestrial art in the twenty-first century. Where Baichwal’s shot is dramatic, however, Gerrard’s unfolding sequence is relentlessly banal.
Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) of 2015 shows similarly monolithic and characterless buildings from the outside. This time, however, the “crop” is data, a resource extracted, cultivated, stored, analyzed, and protected in a Google “server farm.” Accustomed to harvesting images from Google’s various sites at will, Gerrard wanted to visualize the hardware too. He asked, “what does the internet look like?”26 Because Google would not allow the artist access to images of the site, he hired a helicopter and photographer to take the twenty-five hundred photos that were in turn rendered into this simulation. Ephemeral in the extreme, the Internet is at once pervasive and invisible. Gerrard here brings it down to earth by showing us its materiality, how demanding this network is on earthly resources—cooling systems are prominent—and therefore how entwined it has to be with other social and economic systems. Farm encourages us to think about Sow Farm in ways that augment both works. In a data, or server, farm, the livestock in Gerrard’s earlier Oklahoma “landscape” are merely data, information to be manipulated. It was this fiduciary metamorphosis that was lampooned by Gilligan and Ackers in Deep Time (fig. 12) with propositions such as “swap a tree for a bee.” We never see Sow Farm’s animals, and we cannot see data. Just as the term “farm” describes a new form of husbandry, so too “landscape” is repurposed. Yahoo Answers provides a good example: “The result of data farming is a ‘landscape’ of output that can be analyzed for trends, anomalies, and insights in multiple parameter dimensions.”27
The Internet that Gerrard intimates in Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) might be thought of as what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” with an emphasis on the object.28 Morton defines his now much-used concept: “The objects we ignored for centuries, the objects we created in the process of ignoring other ones: plutonium, global warming. I call them hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are real objects that are massively distributed in time and space. Good examples would be global warming and nuclear radiation.” It appears that he is invoking the discourse of the sublime so powerful in landscape painting, updating it for transplantation into the present. But because for Morton the sublime was a bounded discourse both theoretically and in its material presentations—whether linguistic, theatrical in de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon (which can be translated as “image of nature”), or of course in paintings—this is not Morton’s sense of the hyperobjects of today. “Hyperobjects are so vast, so long lasting, that they defy human time and spatial scales,” he asserts. “They wouldn’t fit in a landscape painting.”29 As we saw in chapter 1, Morton sees the tradition of such framing as an attempt to control experience by achieving distance. “No landscape is big enough or long lasting enough to enclose hyperobjects in its frame. Hyperobjects have finally done what decades of avant-garde experimentation have been unable to do,” he continues; “they have broken forever the aesthetic frame separating the viewer from the viewed and producing the aesthetic effect of distance, which Walter Benjamin called aura.” The sublime also errs by remaining stubbornly anthropocentric, whereas hyperobjects “humiliate the human.”30 Morton wants our thinking and artistic practices to move beyond such frames, but I would argue that in his zeal to see the future of hyperobjects, he has underestimated the degree to which the many discourses of landscape in the theories and presentations of the sublime from the eighteenth century to the more recent machinations of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, have grappled with the closely analogous issue of presenting the unpresentable. It is simplistic to suggest that landscape is simply about distancing and framing as control and that we can easily jettison the concept. We might oppose a good deal of the land art from the later twentieth century to Morton’s polemic. Did not the land artists’ storied flight from the gallery and their direct involvement with materials rather than representations explicitly break “forever the aesthetic frame separating the viewer from the viewed,” to use Morton’s words? He has forgotten or ignored art’s recent history.
Morton runs a similar argument about the concept of nature: the idea is both worn out and deleterious to our futures, he argues in Ecology Without Nature. Granting all his concerns, we should be wary of throwing the history out with the ideas of nature and the sublime, which is one likely effect if we abjure such concepts today. Like that of landscape in its various permutations, the discourse of the sublime is not necessarily spent. Given the imponderable scale of what we see in Gerrard’s farm scenes, the sublime is instead a category that we might want to reinvoke and update. Frances Ferguson makes this point forcefully: “The theory of the sublime does not, as is frequently thought, intimate a kind of aesthetic appreciation that would be a substitute for action. Rather, it provides a model of what it’s like to feel that the world is posing a problem to all of the usual ways we have of conceiving of our actions.”31 Gerrard’s animations may lead us to a sense of the sublime as overwhelming magnitude, Kant’s “mathematical” type. For most, however, Sow Farm and Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) and cognate works are too commonplace in what they show to be thought of as sublime. As in the industries with which they engage, much remains hidden. The tedium of the buildings more likely leads to an experience of bathos, that bottoming out or sense of baseness that is thought to be the antithesis of the sublime. Clearly there is no connection between what we perceive here and the desired moral uplift that was part of the formula for the sublime in nature that Kent Monkman, for example, replicated and parodied by recirculating Bierstadt’s landscapes of Yosemite. Bathos suggests a fall from ideals, a degeneration, but also profundity. It is a venerable category that provides resources for the articulation of eco art now.
In a literary tradition initiated by Alexander Pope’s essay “Peri Bathous” in 1727—a rejoinder to “Peri Hypsous,” the ancient text on the sublime attributed to the first-century C.E. author Longinus—bathos is a rhetorical strategy that promises a corrective to the enthusiasms of the sublime by returning to earth in all senses.32 Gerrard’s farm sequences set up an oscillation between the hopes of the sublime and their descent into bathos, one that turns on another connection between the contemporary realities of Gerrard’s Farm and earlier landscape discourses, the notion of the “commons.” The commons were shared land resources, which were systematically privatized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today we hear references to the “digital commons” and the “digital landscape” without making the connection to the privatization of data and communications that Gerrard alludes to in reproducing Google’s server farm. Calling Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) “a postmodern pastoral,” Gerrard claims that he wants the urban, “London public to be more aware of these sites, as it is here [in the city] that we consume their work. In . . . Farm there is a more ambiguous sense as it is not clear if we consume the products of this Farm, or are consumed ourselves.”33 The Internet has, since its inception, been described as a free and open commons resource; this idealistic characterization is put in doubt by Gerrard’s work. In picturing both the infrastructure and the fate of the digital commons, Farm stands in contrast to (but in fruitful conversation with) Cornard Wood (1748), Thomas Gainsborough’s nostalgic portrayal of what remained of the agricultural commons in mid-eighteenth-century rural Suffolk. As Ian Waites explains, parliamentary legislation that forced “the enclosure of operable fields [by private interests] was largely completed before 1700, but many areas of woodland waste [as shown here] remained in common well into the eighteenth century.”34 The locals’ commons prerogatives are on display in Gainsborough: they contentedly gather wood, graze animals, take a drink from a stream, etc. The economy of this landscape is evident too: we may imagine a narrative progression in which laborers take what they have foraged to the town seen in the distance, to their homes and to market. Harmony among peasants, animals, and the land prevails in this painting’s ideal world. Even the large, dark, and empty swampy part of the landscape shown to the right of the canvas hides no sublime threat, no lurking banditti, as in Salvator Rosa’s seventeenth-century images, for example. The concord presented by Gainsborough is that of a thriving pre-Anthropocene ecosystem, soon to be erased.
Without suggesting that Gainsborough, let alone Gerrard, had Pope in mind, the following passage from “Peri Bathous” (in which he describes his contemporaries’ sacking of ancient texts) has a contemporary resonance: “though it is evident that we never made the least attempt or inroad into their territories, but lived contented in our native fens; they have often, not only committed petty larcenies upon our borders, but driven the country, and carried off at once whole cartloads of our manufacture; to reclaim some of which stolen goods is part of the design of this treatise.”35 Farm is superficially anodyne, yet in our post–Edward Snowden times, reminders of the mere extent of personal information housed and tilled in this and many other companies’ and governments’ facilities is chilling to many people. Banality can lead to the sense of defeat characteristic of bathos. Gerrard’s animations are failed landscapes in the sense that Charles Harrison described as impossible under the protocols of modernism that Art & Language’s forays into the landscape genre sought to dismantle: “The promised paintings would be endowed with a kind of superficial complexity and glamour. . . . They would not be realizable as modern paintings suitable for a modern museum—or not, at least, unless modern culture were to be transformed in such a way that bathos and irony became its representative modes, so that the modern was revealed as a mere ruination of its own supposed attachments.”36 How does eco art get to this point, at least when it adopts a nonameliorative stance? Ferguson holds on to a new ethics of the sublime as an explanation: “What climate change criticism presents for us is an ethics in which we take action neither positively nor by not acting. It is a sublime ethics in which we are held by the problem without having any immediate outlet in action.”37 This ethics could as easily be one tinted with bathos, a condition that “may signal not only a degraded consumer world but also an aesthetic that critically reflects it while eschewing the easier consolations of kitsch and pathos.”38
Land artists frequently made their work both phenomenologically present at a remote site and experientially absent, even imperceptible to most viewers. This elusive doubleness sounds like a good description of the concept of nature so closely involved in conceptions of land and landscape held by its artistic interlocutors. Land artists referred to nature constantly. While I am not suggesting that with their frequent recourses to transient, remote, or even imperceptible work, they uniformly intended to emphasize the impossibility of defining, envisioning, or fully grasping nature, I would propose that eco art takes our human relationship to nature as its theme more consistently than its predecessors did and often consciously underlines the impossibility of adequately representing this concept. The urban versus remote sitings of such work also remain in play. Two pertinent examples are the intervention NATURE (2009; fig. 31) by Sean Martindale and the humorous but telling video Off-Kilter: Talking to Nature (2002) by Tom Sherman.
FIG. 31 Sean Martindale, Curbed Concepts: NATURE, 2009. Intervention, Toronto, Ontario. Salvaged cardboard, letters 4 ft. high × 1.5 ft. deep × variable width. By kind permission of the artist.
Sherman’s short video is a jewel of perfectly timed commentary about the lack of communication between humans and nature. It says much while appearing to be amateurish and feigning the mutual inscrutability of nature and humans. The opening shot is of a flat landscape with a river, but the screen is soon filled by a spiky wildflower, broken off at the stem and held unsteadily by a human hand. Before the narrator speaks, we hear the sound of a car passing by at speed and notice a tall lamppost in the sky behind the plant. We are in the country, it seems, but not far from the city. Sherman’s deadpan narrative begins at this point. “It’s hard to have a conversation with nature”—the assumed purpose of having the plant on camera—“because nature doesn’t talk back.” “We find we’re just talking to ourselves, or more accurately, we’re talking to each other,” which of course the video does. “Nature has nothing to say to us,” he continues. “This snub is particularly rough on people from the city.” At this point the close-up of the plant’s “head” opens to show that we are in a parking lot. There’s a truck parked and a road, across which Sherman and his prospective interlocutor then walk (as so many land and eco artists have walked). As they cross, watching another car pass, the message shifts from “nature doesn’t care” and “we can’t possibly understand its otherness” to “nature speaks through sign language: once you crack the code, you’ll find that nature has a lot to say.” On cue, a dog chained to a house that they approach starts to growl and bark, wagging its tail as if to demonstrate nature’s puzzling semiotics. Sherman then rests the plant on the hood of a parked car and concludes, “Nature can be frustrating, especially for city people.” About this and his other four “Off-Kilter” videos he writes:
These video recordings remind us of how far the world has tumbled out of balance. Our relationship with nature is screwed up, big time. Our excessive use of languages and technologies continues to drive a wedge between us and the wild animals and plants. We look to nature for companionship. We try to talk to nature in nature’s own language, to form new relationships with the animals and the plants and the earth between our toes. We take a wildflower for a walk across the road. We’ve tried all kinds of crazy things, but so far, nature hasn’t talked back.39
Neither urban nor suburban, and certainly not “wild,” Off-Kilter is set in a liminal zone that suggests the inevitable interaction of humanity and what we call nature.
Despite its range of placement and presentation across media, land art was beholden to a number of imperatives that partially controlled where it would be seen and the forms it would take. An analogy is the sway held by the categories of the sublime and the picturesque in the eighteenth century over later landscape norms. Remoteness, ephemerality, and city/country are three of these parameters in 1970s land art in both Europe and North America. While Smithson’s site/nonsite pairing can always short-circuit simplistic binaries of city versus remoteness and the like, such dichotomies were always prominent. As Wagner points out, they have not gone away. Their recurrence, I believe, registers in interests expressed in land art today by ecologically minded artists. Eco art seems less bound to the main alternatives of the 1970s, though as I claim in the next chapter, its frequent presence in institutions—whether buildings, events, or social systems—that support the breathless global exchange in contemporary art suggests that new paradigms rule.
Sean Martindale’s Curbed Concepts: NATURE (2009; fig. 31) is a simple work with extensive ramifications. The artist constructed six large block letters from cardboard. With them he spelled “NATURE” on the curb of his own residential street on recycling pickup day. He placed them out very early because he did not want to call attention to himself but instead sought to watch people’s unscripted responses to what they encountered on this street during the day. The hidden video camera that he placed across the street picked up an extraordinary range of behavior. When the waste-management collection truck drives by in the early morning light, NATURE is casting bold shadows. The truck does not stop. Martindale knows its cycle: the crew will not pick up on his street until afternoon. A car goes past the work, then backs up on the one-way street and stops in front of NATURE. We cannot see the passengers, but they must be interested and are perhaps taking photos. A man carrying shopping bags saunters into the frame. He has to walk on the road to get around the sculpture, and he does so slowly, as if puzzling out the obstacle. Some people come back to look several times during the day. Martindale edited these serendipitous reactions into a video version of the work. He sees the piece as an experiment in public art, one in which the artist has to let go of expectations.
Not unlike Eliasson and Horn in their surveys of local opinion for The weather project and Library of Water, though less formally and on a minimal budget, Martindale asked people what they thought of the piece. One neighbor reported that he saw NATURE from his apartment that morning and took its presence as an epiphany, since his roommate had been urging him to recycle more conscientiously. And what did the recycling collectors think? Martindale gave them both a reason to leave the sculpture on the curb—it was very well made and slightly over the regulation size for collectible recyclables—and a reason to process it, since cardboard is recycled. We see their reaction close up: they load NATURE into their truck. In a moment too perfect to script, their machine cannot compact one of the blocky letters and spits it back out onto the street. The men throw it in again and drive off. Martindale’s more vivid description: “after sitting on the curb for just over six hours, [NATURE] was eventually [picked up], unceremoniously thrown in the back of a city recycling vehicle, and crushed on site.”40 It might seem like the intervention or experiment—Martindale’s descriptors—was over at this point, but the out-of-frame, lingering effects of the piece suggest otherwise. The person who thought the letters were meant expressly for him as a sign to reform his ecological behavior, Martindale later discovered, talked about the experience for weeks. The artist also learned that a woman living nearby, Sara Torrie, an artist whom he had not previously met, documented the work photographically. She took it upon herself to talk with the recycling men about what they were doing. Martindale later invited her to show her flipbook version of the experiment with his video record.
If ecology is the scientific and humanistic perspective that studies the interactions between organisms and their environment, then Martindale’s is an ecological artwork purposefully sited in the city. People seemed to intuit that it was ephemeral. It was low-tech, made of recycled materials, and destined by civic ordinances to disappear within a few hours. Nature is not represented or pictured here in the typical mode of a landscape painting. Neither is the impossibility of its representation presented, as in the category of the sublime. The work is postconceptual to the extent that nature is presented as language, as a concept. What Martindale catalyzed was a conversation about nature in the city, at home and on the street. “I presented the word NATURE as something literally constructed, made by human hands and consisting of materials already processed by our machinery,” he claims. “My intent was to elicit contemplation and dialogue around the meaning of NATURE for all who engaged with it.” Watching people construe the meaning of the letters and work, he realized the extremes of the “conversation” that was unfolding. Many people in his neighborhood do not read English; would their understandings of “nature” therefore be different? Speaking of his art practice in general, he claims, “My continuing goal is to engage around ecological and social issues in the urban environment. Opening, highlighting and interrogating agency within these shared spaces is central to this aim. I look for materials, systems and infrastructures that are misused, underused or wasted. I present possibilities, provisional alternatives.”41
Martindale’s and Sherman’s works suggest that nature is the ultimate global and local concern. They do not make any direct reference to land art and seem unfettered by the questions of where and how to intervene to ameliorate the circumstances they reveal. Their eco-art perspectives exemplify the process I call “articulation.” But what of contemporary practice that makes explicit reference to land art? It is an obvious but overlooked fact that most of the originary land artists are alive and working today or have only stopped making art very recently. Baxter&, Beaumont, Denes, the Harrisons, Patricia Johanson, Sonfist, Ukeles—all are active. Brookner, Holt, and Oppenheim died only in the past few years but had also continued to make work cognate with that they pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s. The exception, Smithson, was born in 1938 but died in a plane crash while surveying his Amarillo Ramp in 1973. While a detailed consideration of the adaptations these artists and others of their generation have made in their work with the earth in the past fifty or so years is beyond the scope of this book, these ongoing practices are axiomatic in a study of how eco art has evolved and underline the point that eco art has not replaced land art in a teleology of approaches. The reference points of remoteness and ephemerality, of relocation and resistance, that I have adumbrated are germane to the two case studies to which I now turn. Heizer’s monumental Levitated Mass (2012; fig. 32) could not be more prominently placed in an urban setting, the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), but I argue that the installation remains governed by an ethos of remote origin and timelessness characteristic of Heizer’s approach to the earth as authority. Roni Horn’s equally ambitious Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2), by contrast, is in a small-town former library in Iceland. In archiving and memorializing even more remote glaciers in that country, as I argue in detail, Horn is not bound to the appeals of distance, whether geographical or temporal. Where Heizer’s monument, like his ongoing City project, is designed to outlive the human species on the planet, her work claims an ecological urgency in the present.
FIG. 32 Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012. Diorite granite and concrete, 35 × 456 × 212/3 ft. (10.67 × 138.98 × 6.6 m), weight 340 tons. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by Jane and Terry Semel; Bobby Kotick; Carole Bayer Sager and Bob Daly; Beth and Joshua Friedman; Steve Tisch Family Foundation; Elaine Wynn; Linda, Bobby, and Brian Daly; Richard Merkin, M.D.; and the Mohn Family Foundation; and dedicated by LACMA to the memory of Nancy Daly. Transportation made possible by Hanjin Shipping Holdings Co., Ltd. (M.2011.35). Photo by Tom Vinetz. © Michael Heizer / Triple Aught Foundation.
CASE STUDY 4: GENERATION(S) AND THE GENRE OF LAND ART IN MICHAEL HEIZER’S LEVITATED MASS
Michael Heizer was born in 1944. Since 1967 he has produced an extensive body of large-scale work that is often remotely sited in the southwestern United States. Some early work was designed to be temporary, but his later predilection is for what he thinks of as timeless permanence, work that outlasts our human civilization and is a monument to it. However much he eschews the categories “land art” or “earth art” for his work—claiming to be unique in all ways, to the extent that he refused to participate in the most extensive recent reconsideration of land art, Ends of the Earth, seen at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2012–13—as the catalogue to this exhibition amply shows, his projects are habitually and fruitfully discussed in these terms. Levitated Mass arrived at LACMA after an eleven-day journey from the desert in Riverside County, California, a “progress” that turned into a media event. It was officially opened to the public on June 24, 2012. As one report has it, “Heizer had his eye on this giant granite boulder for 20 years and finally acquired the money and technique to have it paraded like a captured beast to the museum. In fact this 105-mile night-by-night journey was a key component of the work. The rock’s transport from a Riverside quarry through Long Beach onwards to the LACMA site on Wilshire’s Miracle Mile near the La Brea Tar Pits constitutes what we might call civic processional art.”42
Relatively remote nature is here extracted from the land and brought to the city, a common pattern now. At 340 tons, the granite boulder in Levitated Mass is reputed to be one of the largest rocks moved in recent times. It is related to his best-known work, Double Negative (1969–70), which is cut into a mesa near Overton, Nevada, formally as well as in scale. The boulder of Levitated Mass seems magically poised over a 456-foot-long, 15-foot-wide concrete slot 15 feet deep where the boulder sits. Visitors thus promenade beneath the levitating mass, potentially appreciating both nature’s dimensions and the human technologies that balance the piece for their delectation. Not surprisingly with an artist of such consistent purpose as Heizer, his new work is expressly linked to his land-art past. He had been looking for just the perfect rock since 1968, when he proposed a cognate boulder-suspension work for the 1972 Munich Olympics site. Like other ambitious proposals for this event, including Walter De Maria’s Olympic Mountain Project (1970), the project was not realized. A Heizer sculpture titled Levitated Mass (1982), however, is part of a fountain on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The LACMA project is also related to Complex One of his City development in the Nevada desert in that “it is a reversal of issues; since the earth itself is thought to be stable and obvious as ‘ground,’ I have attempted to subvert or at least question this. To remove and lower the grade around an object made of earth and placed on the earth, would possibly make the remaining earth a pedestal, visually.”43 His search also invokes a much longer history and temporality, not only of geology but also of the long-standing human manipulation of megaliths, in which lineage he sees this project. He has updated this level of ambition with statements such as “As long as you’re going to make a sculpture, why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge?,” which, perhaps because of its memorable bombast, is the tag line on a website devoted to Heizer’s projects.44
LACMA director Michael Govan reminds us in a highly polished video from 2011 previewing the Levitated Mass project that his institution commissioned Heizer’s work to reflect the “ancient tradition . . . of moving monoliths to mark a place.”45 For both artist and museum director, this resonance adds to the appeal of the installation. Heizer is, after all, the son of Olmec archaeologist Robert Heizer. Govan’s presentation begins in a noisy quarry choked with the invasive earth-moving equipment that Richard Long and others criticized American land artists for using back in the 1960s. Purposefully or not, this sequence feels like a Hollywood remake of the construction sequences central to the film Spiral Jetty; ironically, the full-length film about the making of Levitated Mass, directed by Doug Pray (2013), largely does not. Stepping out from behind Heizer’s boulder in the quarry, Govan goes on to make a more controversial claim: that there will not be “a single child or a single adult from Los Angeles . . . or near and far who won’t want to experience this beautiful sculpture.” “Experience” is the word; visitors will come not just to see an artwork but to sense the marvel of the giant rock lifting over their heads as they proceed along the ramp under it. Does it become a sculpture where it rests in the quarry, or as it stands ready for transport on the purpose-built rig that carries it to Los Angeles, or only when installed at its new site, suspended in front of the museum, where, according to Govan, the installation will then mark the multicultural center of Los Angeles? One gets the sense that despite Heizer’s personal reclusiveness and emphasis on secluded work, collective human experience is what christens a piece of earth as a work of art. I do not doubt the popularity of this and comparable works. Many artists stage marvels now by bringing “nature” indoors. I have noted Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2003; see fig. 1), in which he re-created the sun and mist inside to the delight of more than two million visitors. But there is a crucial difference between Eliasson’s and Heizer’s programs. Eliasson’s sun and atmosphere were purposefully and obviously artificial and temporary. They were “constructed” for interaction and supplemented by the artist’s characteristic emphasis on the social nature of the project, which he underlined by placing in London taxis surveys about the weather. Heizer’s is a “real” boulder, a remarkable specimen now absent from the California desert but still outside and still displayed as an element of nature. Levitated Mass moved a mountainous rock to the city but largely sidesteps questions about how and where we understand the concept of nature these days, a concern that is central to Eliasson’s work in general.
Dichotomies and connections between isolated forms, remote settings, and public spectacle are common in Heizer’s work. In Isolated Mass of 1968, for example—one of his Nine Nevada Depressions—Heizer incised a trough in a loop to form an “island” in the earth. The sculptural shape that he created is isolated in the way that the entire work is out of the way in the desert. His incendiary Dragged Mass of 1971, on the other hand, saw Heizer’s earth-moving machinery drag a large boulder across a lawn at the Detroit Institute of Arts until it ploughed up a large amount of displaced soil. Like a speeded-up glacial erratic, the boulder was embedded in the site, and indeed in the consciousnesses of outraged visitors, until it was removed soon after. While unintentionally temporary, it was decidedly urban in its locale and in its violence, as was noted at the time. Both works are again what I would call articulations of nature. They stand behind Heizer’s 2012 Levitated Mass by setting parameters for an extracted element’s placement in and relationship to its site. The megalith has been removed—might we say “uprooted” to underscore the violence?—from the quarry and placed outdoors at LACMA, but the site for the artwork has changed from a Detroit lawn to a huge earthen platform. Into this perfectly flat and calm surface, Heizer has cut an equally perfect geometrical depression and finished its concrete surfaces to exacting standards of precision. The edges and shadows are hard and clear. Like its elaborate earthquake-resistant supporting structure, the megalith itself has been carefully cut on the bottom so that it will sit securely on its large supporting feet, which are in turn fixed to the ramp’s walls at their highest point. Nothing is left to chance. Despite its affiliations with Heizer’s other work, Levitated Mass finally seems to refer only to itself and to visitors’ all-important experiences of it. If you were alone under the rock, you would see the boulder, the sky, the ramp, and perhaps flashes of green foliage at the ends of the incision, period. Govan suggests that you would experience your own emotional levitation as the boulder seemed to float above you. Perhaps. But one might also feel that the boulder has been ripped from its source in a replay of land-art stereotypes from the 1960s and that it remains threateningly precarious.
Before I turn to a divergent example of contemporary art’s relationship with the earth, Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water, it is worth discussing briefly a serendipitous event that boldly, if temporarily, disturbed the stillness of Levitated Mass: Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective seen at LACMA in 2014–15. Except for fragments from Untilled, which were installed on an outdoor patio, this was a closely choreographed indoor exhibit. Several of Huyghe’s intriguing aquarium works were included—most significantly, in this context, one that appeared to hold a submerged boulder of considerable size. The piece presented a perfect underwater ecosystem: seen again on the roof of New York’s Metropolitan Museum later in 2015, for example, the habitat supported eels and shrimp. The display was odd because it was small compared to the large faux-lava boulder it housed and because the boulder was suspended, an aquatic version of Magritte’s L’anniversaire (1959), which shows a boulder completely filling a room. Whether by chance or as sly commentary, this tank was placed at LACMA in such a way that one could, from one side, also see the prominent peak of Heizer’s mass levitating outside the gallery window. In a magnificent riposte to Levitated Mass, Huyghe’s rock really does float, suggesting that it is not a rock at all, not a transplanted piece of guaranteed nature. No longer isolated, the twinned boulders became one of many things to be seen, actants in a landscape that included parts of other works by Huyghe, the canine mascot Human parading past with her handler, nearby palm trees, and buildings across from LACMA. Huyghe’s statement about Untilled quoted in chapter 1 is again pertinent, not only to his exhibition but to an understanding of Levitated Mass: “I’m interested in the vitality of the image, in the way an idea, an artifact, leaks into a biological or mineral reality. It is a set of topological operations. It is not displayed for a public, but for a raw witness exposed to these operations.”46 From the perspective of Huyghe’s boulder, Heizer’s theatrical work at LACMA looks like anachronistic land art.
CASE STUDY 5: “GLACIAL REVERIES”; RONI HORN’S VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER
Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2) is a dynamic collaboration of sculptural elements, words, and social interactions sited in a former library in Stykkishólmur, a town of about a thousand people on the west coast of Iceland. The work’s most visually striking component is titled Water, Samples, twenty-four floor-to-ceiling transparent glass columns that display water taken from Icelandic glaciers. Library of Water was sponsored by the British organization Artangel.47 In a press release celebrating the one-year anniversary of the writers-in-residence program hosted at the Library, it was reported that the ice for Horn’s library columns was gathered from “glacial tongues,” the geological term “glacial tongue” referring to an elongation of a glacier, usually into a body of water, which creates an interface between ice and water. The term mirrors the imbrication of geology and speech in the installation: Horn’s exploration of the liquid and frozen properties of water is intertwined with an extensive attention to language in the installation. As I have noted, interplays between the physical world and language in many forms were a crucial part of land art, whether in the mapping practices of Oppenheim or the theories and drawings of Smithson. The obsession with language in land art is also part of a broader turn at this time that Craig Owens famously construed in 1980, in “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” as definitive of postmodernism. Undergirding this “forest of water,” as Horn has called this zone of water-and-sediment-filled columns to accentuate its particular spatial presence and how we move through it, is a fifteen-hundred-square-foot rubberized floor, into which are inscribed “weather words” in both Icelandic and English. Called You Are the Weather (Iceland), this element of the installation scatters adjectives ranging from the banal to the extreme. “Warm” and “fierce,” for example, describe people and weather equally. She has made several versions of this work, each with a specific place descriptor (You Are the Weather . . . New York, Munich, London). Her titles also purposefully double those of other works that may look quite different, in this case, the hundred-photo sequence You Are the Weather (1994–95), in which the same woman was photographed in different aqueous locales.
Crucial to Horn’s art making are these subtle local differences and the extensive experiential and philosophical implications raised in the distinctions between even two elements in one work (Things That Happen Again [1986–91], for example).48 A third component of the installation echoes the building’s original role as a library. Weather Reports You presents seventy-six transcribed interviews with local people about the weather in Iceland. It is housed in a contiguous listening and reading room in which one can also peruse Horn’s many artist’s books. The library is dramatically situated on a promontory over the town, overlooking the sea like a lighthouse. To maximize this setting, Horn enlarged the windows of the original structure to allow a sense of two-way permeability and connection to the weather and to civic affairs. By implication, the words also reach beyond these walls to the outside weather and the human interactions that generated them, sources readily visible through the large windows of the library building.49
Vatnasafn / Library of Water was conceived as a place for collaboration and ongoing community involvement; it remains a gathering spot in the town. The work’s commitment to collaboration around language is accentuated by a writer-in-residence program. The acclaimed poet Anne Carson was the resident in 2009, living in a small apartment directly underneath Horn’s installation. The poem she wrote during that time, in collaboration with her husband, Robert Currie, is titled “Wildly Constant” (2009; the title emerges from her citation of Horn in the poem). A copy of the published poem is deposited in the Library of Water, enclosed in a glass case and thus imitating Horn’s transparent columns. To the extent that ecology is about relationship—the delicate reciprocity among environment, life form, and inanimate material—the collaborations in the Library of Water orchestrate a full artistic ecology. An important dimension of this ecology is the relationship between language and the earth. How should the human understanding of environment express itself? We have witnessed centuries of mastery, exploitation, and commodification. By contrast, an ecological perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness must begin not just with human language as description, classification, and archiving but also with listening. Does the earth have its own language, and if so, how and where does it become audible? If glaciers had tongues, what would they say? To hear this language would necessitate cultivating a different kind of ear, one attuned not just to metaphor and mind but also to its insistent materiality, as we witnessed in Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the Sound of) in chapter 2. If the human mind can contain sediment, as Smithson imagined in “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), or behave as rock and stones do, then the earth’s deposits might themselves fashion a comprehensible language, one that in turn opens new ways of conceiving an ecological and creative relationship to both the earth and the human intellect. In the Library of Water, Horn and Carson hone our senses to listen to the earth’s voice and also to the delicate idiosyncrasies of each other’s language.
Vatnasafn / Library of Water offers a powerful meditation on the intersection between weather and the emotional, phenomenological, and psychic aspects of meteorological experience. The improbability of archiving Iceland’s glaciers in a library couples the inexorable changes in the earth’s body with the desire to order, catalogue, and preserve. The library was a repository of books, a house of reading. How do we make sense of Horn’s impulse to translate massive, shifting fields of ice into forms that will render them legible and domesticated, into language both visual and spoken? The display of columns shares with Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17) a tragic need to document the earth. That the glaciers, recorded in a transmuted state in the luminous columns, melt and are converted into water and sediment, figures their passing. They can no longer move and crack, mutating in what the scientific lexicon calls “disarticulation,” a word that can refer as easily to detaching chunks of ice as to unjointing language. Given that several of the glaciers that Horn archives have since melted and disappeared, her work, Rúrí’s, and Carson’s are profoundly elegiac. Liquefied remnants are memories of glaciers.
“When you’re talking about water, aren’t you really talking about yourself?” Horn asks. “Isn’t water like the weather that way?”50 Libraries and archives offer only the illusion of containment, of understanding. In “Wildly Constant,” Carson imagines a library of “melted books” in which the sentences stream over the floor and “all the punctuation” settles “as a residue.” A vivid image of her own radical dismantling of punctuation and form in her poetry, her vision also speaks to Horn’s artistic method. Horn’s columns are lit from above to highlight the different degrees of transparency and sedimentation that characterize individual glacial samples. Dissolution and reconstitution are at the heart of these women’s work. These techniques are summoned through fragmented figures and voices that haunt their works: for Horn, Robert Smithson and Emily Dickinson; for Carson, classical literature in general and Anna Freud and Marcel Proust in “Wildly Constant.” Dismantled books release knowledge and memory, freeing Horn and Carson to reconfigure them into new forms.
Vatnasafn can be understood as “a modern Gesamtkunstwerk relevant to both a local and global audience, comprising a sculptural installation, a community arts centre and an accumulation of oral histories.”51 Mark Godfrey has described the work as “an apt culmination of [Horn’s] books because central to the volumes and to the Library are ideas of becoming and of being placed.”52 In its scope and complexity, the library collects this and many of Horn’s preoccupations, especially her fascination with text. But it is also essential to see Vatnasafn / Library of Water as a generative work: more than a repository, culmination, or an ultimate artistic expression, it is a living archive that magnifies ecological concerns and relationships. One key to the library’s potent expansiveness is what Horn vaunts in Emily Dickinson’s poetry as “mutability of content.”53 Closely tuned reverberations of Carson’s poem extend Horn’s installation to a conception of the encyclopedic, in Godfrey’s apt term, never toward a closed or definitive record. “I’m not interested in the kind of discovery which explains or resolves why things are the way they are,” Horn insists. “It seems to me that the question is the answer, and that’s the space I want to entertain. The work that is most meaningful to me doesn’t attempt to be definitive.”54 Like water in its endless flow, the work “is the extreme opposite of exclusive.”55 Horn underscores this point in her choice of materials, media, and working processes.
Roni Horn’s work as a whole enjoys a high level of critical response. Commentators have noticed affinities between her work and Smithson’s. Astute as always, Briony Fer makes a point of downplaying these correspondences and emphasizes instead a less expected but well-documented connection between Horn’s library and Donald Judd’s extensive work in Marfa, Texas. She also reveals parallels between Horn’s interest in site and Agnes Martin’s preoccupation with the desert.56 Fer argues that these predecessors’ deep and long relationships to the places that inspired their work, like Horn’s bonds with Iceland since 1975, are different in kind from “Smithson’s more hallucinatory musings on passing through . . . landscapes (without stopping there too long).”57 Fer’s is a valid critique of Smithson’s habit of moving impatiently from site to site, though it is important to recall that his peripatetic activities were central to the passage to a “post-studio” art-making practice that he helped to establish in the 1960s.58 To extend Fer’s point, and as Caroline Jones also cautions, we should be wary of the effects of his seductively poetic prose, which deposits metaphor upon metaphor. Yet this habit has purpose too, and there is an argument for lingering with Smithson to form a matrix for interpreting Horn’s work. Fer’s caveats notwithstanding, Smithson’s significance for subsequent artists working with the earth is unparalleled. In Jones’s estimation, for example, “Smithson’s essays constructed meanings for his productions and mapped out the terrain for new work (literally changing what would be seen as art in the world).”59 Horn’s elaborate installation in Stykkishólmur draws deeply on Smithson’s machinations with language and the earth.
Smithson coined the phrase “glacial reveries” in his seminal 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind” in an attempt to evoke what he believed were the alliances between mind and matter over an extended, geological time frame. “One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion” (100), he claimed, a process of entropic change that was for him not one of irrevocable disintegration but rather one of “sedimentation,” of material and ideational deposit and remainder. Smithson relished the paradoxes of apparent binaries and confounded their oppositions: “the earth is built on sedimentation and disruption,” he wrote in what can be described as an extensive prose poem, and there is “cerebral sentiment” (106, 100). As a counterpoise, he projected “a world of non-containment” (102) in which sites and nonsites, materials and minds, twin and repeat one another across a critical, material gap. Doubling here is not about choice between two options but instead refers to extension. The immaterial and telluric, words and images, individuals and sites, not only operate analogously but also interact physically in an endless metamorphic and material spiral. He consolidated these views in his site/nonsite practices such as A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey of 1968, in which neither the rocks taken from the physical site nor their refined display and photographic documentation in an urban, “nonsite” gallery installation take precedence. Crucially in the context of Horn’s installation, the nonsites also contain text. Smithson also developed the principle of collaboration among, rather than division between, media in Spiral Jetty by working across its three mutually constitutive forms: the earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, the film from the same year that records the earthwork’s construction and posits its relationships to natural history and to the intricacies of editing, “bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material,” as he described it in the third form, his essay of the same title (1972).
If Smithson’s earthworks and words lie beneath or temporally behind Horn’s Library of Water, it equally subtends the dynamics of fragmentation in Carson’s “Wildly Constant.” To examine how Horn and Carson work together in the Library of Water, it is instructive to see their work as an elaboration of Smithson’s “world of non-containment.” His passions in “A Sedimentation of the Mind”—for “mental weather,” the “climate of sight,” “melting, dissolving . . . surfaces” (108–9)—illuminate three crucial dimensions of the Library: first, the centrality of “sedimentation” as a physical and mental process; second, the insistence on the integration and equivalence of land and language (of “words and rocks” in artistic processes, as he puts it here [107], and a collaboration he frequently explored, beginning with the drawing A Heap of Language [1966], where a mountain is formed of synonyms for the word “language,” and the essay “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to Be Read” [1967]); and third, on the most general plane, the refusal and subversion of binding definitions and boundaries, a practice of dissemblance and dispersion common to Smithson, Horn, and Carson.
Smithson calls for a new type of art in the opening paragraph of “A Sedimentation of the Mind”: “A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist,” he muses. “To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched” (100). Horn gives a full reply with Vatnasafn / Library of Water, in what she affords critically and visually through the collaboration of poetry and art installation and, more specifically, by deploying a particular sense of “punctuation.” Again it is Smithson who alerts us to this technique. In “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” of 1967, an important early publication, he expands on the transformative qualities of conceiving punctuation as topography, of melding language and landscape. Artist Tony Smith is the point of departure, as he is in “A Sedimentation of the Mind”: “Tony Smith writes about ‘a dark pavement’ that is ‘punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights.’” The key word is “punctuated.” In a sense, the “dark pavement” could be considered a “vast sentence,” and the things perceived along it, “punctuation marks”: “. . . tower . . .” = the exclamation mark (!) || “. . . stacks . . .” = the dash (–) || “. . . fumes . . .” = the question mark (?) || “. . . colored lights . . .” = the colon (:). Of course I form these equations on the basis of sense data and not rational data. Punctuation refers to interruptions in “printed matter.” It is used to emphasize and clarify the meaning of specific segments of usage. Sentences, like “skylines,” are made of separate “things” that constitute a whole syntax. Tony Smith also describes his own art in terms of “interruptions” in a “space-grid” (59). Here again is what I call “articulation.”
Library of Water is a place for engaged reverie. James Lingwood, codirector of Artangel, writes, “At the heart of the initial proposal and the realised project was Roni’s idea to renew the building as a place both for quiet observation and reflection [and] for community gatherings of different kinds. She imagined Vatnasafn / Library of Water as ‘a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light.’”60 Horn provides a map of the library’s glacial sources, a key that is of special interest to Icelandic visitors, she reports, not least because several of the rivers of ice have literally disappeared since the opening of the installation in 2007. For Horn, as it was for Smithson, a “glacial reverie” can be troubling. Glaciers enact an ever-faster sense of geological change that we cannot normally see, a glimpse of entropy. In preserving remnants of the glaciers, the Library of Water is an elegy for loss and an acknowledgment of the transformative but not exclusively destructive effects of time conceived on a geological scale. It is in You Are the Weather (Iceland), under our feet and in our line of sight as we walk through the installation, that language emerges most emphatically in Vatnasafn. While the columns of glacial water are themselves mute, the words strewn on the floor speak of the flow of what Smithson called “mental weather,” that potent compendium of descriptors of the human and nonhuman. In her poem, Anne Carson pictures the chaos that results from breaking the glass structures: sentences stream over the floor of the library (threatening to leak into her apartment in the basement below, we might imagine). Some visitors will be able to comprehend both the Icelandic and English terms (Horn supplies a glossary in the adjacent reading room); others might experience the inscrutability of a foreign language and extend this sense of intrigue or frustration to the larger context of what Horn might have us ponder in the library. The columns of water can be construed as vertical sentences, but this syntax is unnatural for them. No longer functional, sedimented punctuation marks collect in the bottom of the glass columns. Like the waterfalls in Rúrí’s Archive, glaciers cannot be preserved inside; only a memory of them can be archived.
The terms Horn borrows from her witnesses’ remarks on weather and emotion are scattered among the glass columns. Serendipity rules the inevitable comparisons that viewers can make in this space, the many sentences we can construct or fragments beyond our grasp. The weather or a person may be “unpredictable” or “oppressive,” for example. Or the connection might stand in the ironic space between a word and one of the glacial samples, as when we read the word “clear” next to a sedimentary sample that is opaque.61 Both the alterity and the familiarity of the earth’s languages undergird these social or national differences. As Tom Sherman emphasizes in Talking to Nature, it is difficult to fathom nature’s semiotics. It is the situation Horn presents in the library that is “opaque.” As in Carson’s reckoning with the runaway sentences and punctuation, our reactions can be more or less articulate, more or less comprehending. The floor in the Library of Water can be conceived of as a poem, verse without punctuation. If prose (for Smithson) or poetry (for Carson) is a dynamic enterprise into which the reader also enters, then visitors can supply the punctuation and syntax with their movements through the forest of columns. Horn has captured glaciers within a space and a system in part meant to archive knowledge, savoir. She has done so indoors, in an institution, the library, but importantly not in an art gallery per se. From the plane of medium and technique to that of worldview, Horn typically eschews definitions and leading narratives. This approach again pairs her fruitfully with Robert Smithson. In her collaboration with Carson around Vatnasafn / Library of Water, she broadens his commitment to “a world of non-containment.” By locating her Library of Water in a remote fishing village, she eludes the protocols of big-city museum going.
In Iceland and globally, water is political. Asked about environmental issues and Library of Water on the occasion of her retrospective at Tate Modern in 2009, however, Horn initially let James Lingwood respond for her. The project was “never specifically couched in terms of addressing an environmental crisis,” he claims, to which Horn adds, “I was thinking more about Walter Benjamin than I was about global warming.”62 But her verbal footnote is only partly serious; this deflection and her overall subtlety should not be mistaken for a lack of principle. Horn goes on to describe her acute concern for water resources in Iceland, noting that the reserve seems to be so plentiful that Icelanders generally have “difficulty in recognizing” the obvious threats to this bounty as glaciers melt and hydroelectric projects are initiated in the isolated Highlands of central Iceland so important to Rúrí’s Archive (see fig. 17). Horn has spoken out publicly in newspaper editorials about the foolishness of such plans.63 It is not that she is separating her political and aesthetic beliefs and practices but rather that she avoids didacticism in Vatnasafn as much as she proclaims the epistemological value of art in her writings. If expectation is a limitation, she guarantees that visitors to her installation can begin with open minds. Though it preserves the memory of melting glaciers, the Library of Water is not necessarily—or not only—an ecological work. Horn’s is a radical ecology that insists on acknowledging its root sense, oïkos, a multiplex home that we all inhabit.
Heizer’s Levitated Mass and Horn’s Library of Water are monumental in divergent ways. Although it presents a magnificent piece of the earth, Heizer’s work has little to do with nature or ecology. The artist has no intention of making an environmental statement. And why should he? As a contemporary earthwork by one of the originators of the genre, Levitated Mass remains consistent with the rhetoric of remoteness that was key to that movement, even if the work is placed in an urban setting. Horn shares ambition with Heizer. Library of Water is a more multifarious and nuanced work, except perhaps in terms of the technology necessary to install it. Horn’s vantage on land art is that of the next generation. While the connections with Smithson’s theory of site/nonsite and especially of noncontainment are manifest, Horn is little concerned with land art. Her predilection is to look simultaneously to a deep past—glaciers—and to the future. That humanity cannot in any adequate way archive a glacier is one lesson in Vatnasafn / Library of Water. Yet as she implies by likening the library to a lighthouse, the work seeks to be a beacon, a call to act differently toward the planet in the present and future.