Earth art, also known as land art or earthworks, is an artistic movement that involves the creation of works in nature using both natural and man-made materials. To create sculptures and other pieces from the landscape, rock, soil, and water are mixed with materials like metal and concrete. Rather than placing art in a specific location, this type of art makes a work out of the landscape. Robert Smithson is a prominent figurehead and one of the movement’s most representative artists.
The movement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. Land artists were opposed to what they saw as art’s artificiality and commercialization. Earth art, which aimed to create large-scale landscape projects, was non-transportable and difficult or impossible to display in a traditional museum setting, so it was thought to be immune to the influence of the commercial art market. Many of the pieces are ephemeral, created outside of developed areas and left to deteriorate, change, and disintegrate over time.
Despite the traditional gallery’s negative reputation, earth art can be displayed in a commercial setting. Photographs of the original work are frequently displayed, but earth artists also create small installation pieces. The most influential projects are usually those that take place outside and reveal a fascination with both science and nature.
Many of the projects are massive in scale and can be found across the US, Europe, and Africa. Large images or geoglyphs that can be seen from afar are drawn in sand or created with stones. Giant boulders emerge from the ground as heads, and visitors are greeted balls made of tightly packed logs. Land art often necessitates the use of earth-moving equipment.
The spiral-shaped jetty created Robert Smithson in 1970 is probably the most famous piece of earth art. Smithson arranged earth, rock, and algae in a long spiral shape to make his jetty protrude into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The amount of the piece that is visible at any given time is influenced the changing water levels. Smithson also made works that could be displayed in a gallery, such as his 1968 work “Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust.”
The group exhibition “Earth Works” at the Dawn Gallery in New York in 1968 is widely regarded as the start of the earth art movement. One of the announcement cards for the exhibition was written in sand. That same year, in his seminal essay “The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Smithson provided a critical framework for the movement, arguing that earth art was a reaction to Modernism’s disconnect from social issues. Smithson’s death in a plane crash in 1973 took the movement’s most prominent thinker and figurehead with him.
The earthworks movement has its origins in minimal and conceptual art. The majority of land artists are men from the United States, such as James Turrell, Michael Heizer, and Carl Andre. Two well-known female earth artists are Nancy Holt and Alica Aycock. Andrew Rogers of Australia, as well as Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Drury of the United Kingdom, are influential non-American land artists.