CENTER, Colorado — I’m standing in a fallow field on the edge of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. To the east, the Great Sand Dunes rise against the mountains.
Tourists venture to this stretch of alpine farmland for the rugged beauty and sandhill crane migrations—and now, perhaps, for the art: This desolate plot is a new piece of land.
Its creator, the French artist Marguerite Humeau, 36, thinks a lot about extinction. She sees “Orisons” as an act of healing. The name means “prayers” in Old English. At 65 hectares, according to the information board at the end of the dirt road, it is “one of the largest earth works created by an individual artist to date.”
“Orisons” comprises many small things: steel and rope hammocks in the abstract shape of crane wings; adobe brick benches; dozens of tiny kinetic sculptures based on the seeds of the hardy plants that cover the field. But the land itself is the work.
Earth works are a subgenre of the category of outdoor sculpture and performance known as land art. “People still think of land art as primarily an American phenomenon, with a few white male artists doing big projects in the Southwest,” said Miwon Kwon, an art historian and professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The Ends of the Earth,” the retrospective she co-curated with Philipp Kaiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2012, challenged these and other preconceptions.
Land art is at a crossroads. New projects and new looks at historical ones indicate a disposition toward a holistic understanding of the land, in which this genre plays a role—from the high-concept landscaping of Humeau; to Kevin Beasley’s intricate critiques of property rights and power; to “Groundswell,” an exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, about women making land art since the 1960s.
“The Marlboro Man scenario, or the archetype of the artist in general as a heroic, stressed and anguished figure, has been widely challenged even if it persists in certain quarters,” Kwon said. “But that was a product of his own historical, cultural and political moment.”
Jody Pinto, 81, is one of the 12 artists in “Groundswell.” Pinto defines land art as “your body on the earth.”
This relationship can take ecological, sculptural, legal and even urban forms. “It’s not out there,” on some remote plain, he said. “It’s where you live.”
On Governors Island, New York, tree artist Sam Van Aken established “The Open Orchard” in 2022. The 102 fruit trees were created by grafting scores of cherry, peach, almond and other fruits that once filled the metropolis.
You can see lower Manhattan between the branches. When the fruit ripens, you can pick it.
You wouldn’t call this sculpture or performance—but the land art precedent fuels symbolic and conceptual approaches to land like Beasley’s in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he purchased and transformed an overgrown plot of land into an urban garden.
Agnes Denes, 92, was at the forefront of the genre. “Groundswell” will include documentation of several of her projects, including 1968’s “Rice / Tree / Burial,” in which she chained trees, buried haikus, and planted two-tenths of an acre of rice in Sullivan County, New York.
“The land art that was done before has to do with artistic selfishness, with wanting more space,” Denes said.
Artists are approaching the future of land art and the future of the earth with more humility.
By: TRAVIS DIEHL
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6898185, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-19 19:20:09
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