When it emerged in the sixties among the crush of several other art movements (Pop Art, Minimalism, among others) Land Art came to be an anti-gallery artistic offshoot that straddled the domain between architecture and sculpture. It had no manifestos nor schools nor leaders and it was not quite a movement; the artists who were involved with it were also involved in other types of arts. Land art was labelled as modern ‘sculpture’ but its versatility and introduction of new concepts and visual materials made it difficult to ascribe it to one field or term. Later on, the term “Earth Works,” coined by Robert Smithson came to use, but Earth Works only refers to works that use earth while Land Art is an all-encompassing umbrella that includes
…show more content…
Similarities between it and his most iconic and probably the best known work of Land Art, Spiral Jetty, are evident. Spiral Jetty (1970) is a work that came only a short time before GSM (1971) and we see Smithson’s use of the same motif, the spiral. The spiral is the whole work. It is anchored to the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in the Utah desert with a meters-long straight tail that winds into the counterclockwise curvatures of the spiral. The spiral was planned for months in advance and required a team of many to bring to it to conception and thousands of tons of basalt rock, boulders, salt crystals and mud. Smithson chose the location for its stark, desolate quality and also for the features of the lake, which turns bright red seasonally due to the salt and bacteria that thrive in it. However, along with Great Serpent Mound, the Spiral Jetty is reminiscent of the Nazca lines found in Peru. Nazca lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs that have been found in the arid and isolated areas and usually depicted figures of animals, flowers and geometric shapes. They were made by digging up shallow lines of rock and pebble to reveal the layer of soil underneath, which was usually a different color from the topsoil. Spiral Jetty’s spiral form is the first aspect that resembles the lines, the …show more content…
That is because, they might not be symbolic as such in the Western world today, but he essentially appropriated places of death in his works. He took cues from these monumental places and decontextualized and unpurposed their functions. They commonly use earthly materials in a communal environment and even though Smithson’s was made with modern machinery, bulldozers and such, both were the collective efforts of specialized planning and tools and the hands of many people. Other similarities include the use of a scale so big it requires an aerial view to properly see the whole piece as one, something which some European colonizers concluded as evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Americas. Smithson even appropriated the way monumental works had been seen since after the invention of the camera; his works are available to many only in two dimensional form so viewers only ever receive a skewed and biased version of the works. But something Smithson does is he humanizes his monuments; Spiral Jetty, Broken Circle and Spiral Hill, all consider direct relationship to the human scale. They are intended to be walked on and invite human participation in full-scale space. Come full
Similarities between it and his most iconic and probably the best known work of Land Art, Spiral Jetty, are evident. Spiral Jetty (1970) is a work that came only a short time before GSM (1971) and we see Smithson’s use of the same motif, the spiral. The spiral is the whole work. It is anchored to the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in the Utah desert with a meters-long straight tail that winds into the counterclockwise curvatures of the spiral. The spiral was planned for months in advance and required a team of many to bring to it to conception and thousands of tons of basalt rock, boulders, salt crystals and mud. Smithson chose the location for its stark, desolate quality and also for the features of the lake, which turns bright red seasonally due to the salt and bacteria that thrive in it. However, along with Great Serpent Mound, the Spiral Jetty is reminiscent of the Nazca lines found in Peru. Nazca lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs that have been found in the arid and isolated areas and usually depicted figures of animals, flowers and geometric shapes. They were made by digging up shallow lines of rock and pebble to reveal the layer of soil underneath, which was usually a different color from the topsoil. Spiral Jetty’s spiral form is the first aspect that resembles the lines, the …show more content…
That is because, they might not be symbolic as such in the Western world today, but he essentially appropriated places of death in his works. He took cues from these monumental places and decontextualized and unpurposed their functions. They commonly use earthly materials in a communal environment and even though Smithson’s was made with modern machinery, bulldozers and such, both were the collective efforts of specialized planning and tools and the hands of many people. Other similarities include the use of a scale so big it requires an aerial view to properly see the whole piece as one, something which some European colonizers concluded as evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Americas. Smithson even appropriated the way monumental works had been seen since after the invention of the camera; his works are available to many only in two dimensional form so viewers only ever receive a skewed and biased version of the works. But something Smithson does is he humanizes his monuments; Spiral Jetty, Broken Circle and Spiral Hill, all consider direct relationship to the human scale. They are intended to be walked on and invite human participation in full-scale space. Come full