December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
Site-specific outdoor art is generally known as land art. Although humans have made outdoor constructions since prehistoric times, the practice of making pure art in this way dates from the late 1960s.
One of the first practitioners was Michael Heizer (1944–), a Californian artist who began to make simple ephemeral works in the desert, often consisting of groups of geometric trenches dug into the desert floor. These would be photographed and the resulting documentation displayed in a gallery or museum. Heizer was quickly joined in this kind of enterprise by Walter De Maria (1935–2013), Robert Smithson (1938–1973), and a host of other artists.
Perhaps the most famous piece of land art is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a structure ...