WALTER DE MARIA

De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959 and moved to New York in 1960. His early sculptures from the 1960s were influenced by Dada and other modern art movements. This influence led De Maria into using simple geometric shapes and industrially manufactured materials such as stainless steel and aluminum – materials which are also characteristic of Minimal art. In the mid 1960s, he became involved in various artistic activities. His piece, "Cage", for John Cage, was included in the seminal 1966 "Primary Structures"
exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York.

He appeared at happenings, composed two musical works (Cricket Music, 1964; Ocean Music, 1968), and produced two films (Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert; Hardcore, both 1969). He was also the drummer in the New York rock group The Primitives and an artist/musician collaborative group called The Druds, a precursor to The Velvet Underground for a short time.

From 1968 he produced Minimalist sculptures and Installations such as the Munich Erdraum of 1968. He realized Land art projects in the deserts of the southwest US, with the aim of creating situations where the landscape and nature, light and weather would become an intense, physical and psychic experience. After De Maria, the notion of the work of art is intended to make the viewer think about the earth and its relationship to the universe. The artistic practice of De Maria is connected with Minimal art, Conceptual art, and Land art.

The Lightning Field (1977) is De Maria’s best-known work. It consists of 400 stainless steel posts arranged in a calculated grid over an area of 1 mile × 1 km. The time of day and weather change the optical effects. It also lights up during thunder storms.

MICHAEL HEIZER

Michael Heizer was born to a family of geologists and archeologists leading him to a fascination with mysterious sites marked by evidence of ancient technology such as the shifting of huge stones.

In awe of these primitive efforts, Heizer was inspired to make his own markings on the earth. With 'Double Negative' (1969-1970) he carved out an enormous trench 30 feet wide, 50 feet deep and a third of a mile long in a straight line across the Virgin River mesa in Nevada. Possibly his most fully realised creation was 'Complex One' (1972) in Hiko near Nevada. It is an enormous pile of earth sandwiched between two triangles made from reinforced concrete, with large concrete beams inflecting the structure.

Measuring 140 feet long and 110 feet wide, the construction was massive. Robert Hughes in his American Visions describes 'Complex One' thus; "[It] recalls... the enigmatic structures left behind by America's various nuclear and space programmes, which by the 1970s were already beginning to seem an archeology of the Age of Paranoia."

Heizer's contributions to 'Land Art' were just a few of the many works by artists working during the Sixties who saw their earthwork schemes as a reaction to traditional gallery art and the material gain signified by institutions. Inspired as they were by primitive structures, the movement can be seen in line with hippie culture in the move away from developing technology to embrace the beauty of nature. The irony is that as the land artists including Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Mary Miss as well as Michael Heizer, enforced their grand creations upon the environment with such bravado that the natural beauty of their surroundings was often destroyed in favour of the artist's need to make a statement.

DENNIS OPPENHEIM

Dennis Oppenheim, a key figure in the US Land Art movement, is an influential international artist who for five decades has created sculpture, installations, interventions, performances, actions, happenings and photographic works. His work is characterised by a constant shifting of style and ceaseless creative output. Trees: From Alternative Landscape Components, a flamboyant large-scale work, will be on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 30 January 2010, and is both the first time that sculptures by Oppenheim have been on display at YSP and the first time this work has been shown in the UK.

Trees: From Alternative Landscape Components (2006) comprises a highly artificial landscape formed of fluorescent trees, fake hedgerows, seemingly genetically modified flowers and the Trees, which have branches laden with a range of curious domestic artefacts including baths, toilets, sinks, dog kennels, dustbins, plastic chairs and parts of fences. This installation was created for the 2006 exhibition Alternative Landscape Components: A New Land Art at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, New York and three outdoor locations across the city.

As with much of Oppenheim's earlier work, the Trees act as a dialogue, this time between the natural and artificial landscape and as a comment on the act of creating environments. The first location for this work, the seemingly natural environment of Central Park, was purposefully designed and manipulated by man. Similarly, the Bretton estate, home to YSP's 18th century rolling landscape, was originally a carefully designed private pleasure ground and now, as a open air gallery, provides a contrasting backdrop to Oppenheim's installation. Oppenheim also explores the mechanisms and communication of how artistic ideas are formed - the emotions we experience as the viewer and how involved we become in the work. His work often uses an element of risk or humour in order to fully involve the viewer and communicate his experience of the creative process.

ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson remains one of the most influential and original artists whose voice has had a major impact on artists of his generation, and continues to do so today. His complex ideas took root in many forms: drawings, projects and proposals, sculpture, earthworks, films and critical writings. Smithson's provocative and seminal works, made in the mid-sixties to early seventies, redefined the language of sculpture.

He was one of the founders of the art form known as earthworks or land art, and is most well known for the Spiral Jetty, 1970, located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. This monumental earthwork was inspired in part when Smithson saw the Great Serpent Mound, a Pre-Columbian Indian monument in southwestern Ohio. The earthworks were a radical departure from making formal objects situated in a gallery setting. The Spiral Jetty embodied one of his goals which was to place work in the land rather than situated on the land. Smithson's earthworks defined an entirely original notion of landscape. Dissatisfied with the status quo, Smithson did not limit himself to any one form or style of art. He moved beyond modernism's hermetic tendencies by abandoning formalism, rules and traditional art materials. Smithson's oeuvre, as an artist and writer, defied convention and produced works that could not be easily categorized. He utilized non-traditional art materials such as language, mirrors, maps, dump trucks, abandoned quarries, hotels, contractors, and earth to produce his radical sculptures, photographs, films, and earthworks.

Beginning in 1964, he emerged with minimal-like structures that veered away from minimalism's closed systems. Robert Hobbs stated "Smithson was not strictly a minimalist. He used the vocabulary of minimalism... clean geometric forms, industrially fabricated parts, the look of objectivity.. as a way of pointing out the weaknesses of systems and networks," (Robert Smithson: Sculpture, Robert Hobbs, Cornell University Press, 1981). One such work that exemplifies these early investigations is Enantiamorphic Chambers, a wall work that structurally has two identical chambers that incorporate mirrors. Smithson has said of this piece "If art is about vision, can it also be about non-vision...it's form is a bi-polar notion that comes out of crystal structures...two separate things that relate to each other. ...in Enantiamorphic Chambers, there is...the indication of a kind of dialectical thinking that would emerge later very strongly in the Nonsites."
Importantly, Smithson stated when interviewed by Paul Cummings that "Enantiamorphic Chambers freed me from all these preoccupation's with history; I was dealing with grids and planes..empty surfaces. The crystalline forms suggested mapping".

Embodied in all of Smithson's endeavors was his interest in entropy, mapping, paradox, language, landscape, popular culture, anthropology, and natural history. This is evident in works he created such as Heap of Language, King Kong Meets the Gem of Egypt, Enantiamorphic Chambers, A Nonsite - Pine Barren's New Jersey, Yucatan Mirror Displacements, Partially Buried Woodshed, Asphalt Rundown and Spiral Jetty.

Entropy, was a theme that consistently ran throughout Smithson's art and writings. He explored his ideas involving decay and renewal, chaos and order with what came to be known as his Nonsites and Earthworks. Smithson spoke at great length in interviews and essays on entropy and his notion of time. In Entropy and the New Monuments he wrote "...the urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy" and that "entropy is a condition that is moving toward a gradual equilibrium". Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, Kent State University, Kent State, was a piece Smithson created on site during an invitational arts festival. He located an abandoned woodshed and poured earth on to the structure until it cracked. This work is a prime example of Smithson's visualization of entropy and time, leaving it to be "subject to weathering, which should be considered part of the piece". This quote is from a statement Smithson signed when he donated the work to Kent State University.

Smithson developed a significant body of work that engaged complexity and oppositions: nature/culture (Aerial Map-Proposal for Dallas - Fort Worth Airport), language as material (Heap of Language), space and time (Spiral Jetty Film), monuments and the anti-monument (earthworks such as the Spiral Jetty), displacement and landmark (Map of Broken Glass, Atlantis). Mirrors were major elements in Smithson's early structures and continued to play a major role in his later Nonsites and Displacements, begun in 1968. He said, "mirror in a sense is both the physical mirror and the reflection" it is "a concept and abstraction"... a displacement "of properties".

A Nonsite - Pine Barrens, New Jersey, winter, was Smithson's first Nonsite. It was constructed in 1968, in a remote area of southern New Jersey. On looking for sites he stated "I began in a very primitive way;..started taking trips in 1965; certain sites would appeal to me more--sites that had been in some way disrupted...pulverized. I was really looking for a denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty...when you take a trip you need precise data& I would often use quadrangle maps; mapping followed traveling" (from Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson). Smithson's Nonsites were radical in both idea and construction. The nonsite was map, a 'landmarker'. These pieces were constructed primarily from natural materials he chose from remote, unpopulated areas, or the ruins of collapsed buildings. The materials from this site were brought into the gallery, placed in constructed bins, with maps or situated within mirror formations.

The Nonsites, created a dialectic between the outdoors and indoors, and were examples of Smithson's explorations into sight and its simile - site, displacement and location. Literal and allegorical, the Nonsites confounded the illusion of materiality and order. The mirrors functioned to order and displace, to add and subtract, while the sediments, displaced from its original site, blur distinctions between outdoors and indoors as well as refer the viewer back to the site where the materials were originally collected. Lawrence Alloway has stated in his essay Sites/Nonsites, from the book The Writings of Robert Smithson, "the relation of a Nonsite to the Site is also like that of language to the world: it is a signifier and the Site is that which is signified".

Conceptually the Displacements differ from the Nonsites. Displacements were works that incorporated mirrors or structures made from natural elements temporarily sited in the land, such as Yucatan Mirror Displacements, 1969, Mirror Displacements (Brambles), England, 1969. These works were never intended to be permanent pieces as Smithson had said in Fragments of a Conversation , "I don't leave the mirrors there. I pick them up. It's different from the site/nonsite...It's another level of process that I'mexploring. A different level of containment".

Smithson developed a wide variety of photographic works - none of which dealt with traditional composition or conventional image making. One such work, Spiral Jetty Film Stills, 1970, is a three-paneled composite photowork of black and white images that were taken during the making of the Spiral Jetty. Other photographic works incorporated collage with text or maps. Smithson also produced a unique body of photographs that were based on his Displacement pieces called Slideworks, the format of which is 35mm slide transparencies. These photographs are simultaneously artwork and document and are not a formal rendering of the landscape in traditional photographic terms. Like the materials in the Nonsites, the images themselves become displacements. Oolite Island, Sunken Island, both 1971, Yucatan Mirror Displacements 1-9, 1969 and Hotel Palenque, 1969-72 are some examples of Smithson's Slideworks.

In 1970 Smithson moved his work outside of the gallery walls to concentrate entirely on earthworks such as the Spiral Jetty, Partially Buried Woodshed, Amarillo Ramp. At this time a small group of artists were engaged in reformulating their ideas of art in relationship to the land. These endeavors in the land enabled Smithson to explore chaos and order-how natural forces such as wind, rain, heat and cold, would effect the work over time. Nancy Holt, Smithson's wife and an artist in her own right, has said of the Spiral Jetty... "In its scale and ideas, this sculpture embodies the spirit of some of the great monuments of past civilizations yet it is wholly contemporary in concept and execution".

The earthworks enabled Smithson to deal with his concerns regarding art in the land, while simultaneously producing an artform that was non-commercial, existing outside of the traditional viewing spaces. It could not be owned or seen easily. The earthworks, with the exception of Emmen Hill / Broken Circle, which was constructed in a public area in Holland, are known by most only through photographs. After Smithson's plane crashed while photographing the site for Amarillo Ramp, Philip Leider, who published Smithson's writings in Artforum, stated that "Smithson died in the midst of a meditation on nature and art as original as any since Cezanne".

The rich legacy of Smithson's contributions as a writer and artist remains an unending source of inspiration. Lawrence Alloway notes in his essay Site/Nonsite, 1981, that when Smithson wrote A Sedimentation of the Mind, he (Smithson) "explicitly aligns geological change with the process of thought....landscape, then becomes analogous to the human condition or at least of our communications" and that Smithson in his writings and in his work "acknowledged complexity and contradiction as a working condition".

Smithson's influence on future generations is unquestioned, as is evidenced by the number of continuing essays, new publications, and numerous exhibitions both group and solo currently planned for the artist.

HAMISH FULTON

Hamish Fulton was born in 1946 in London England, he is a "Walking artist" and photographer.

His initial work concerned the experience of walking but in the last twenty years Fulton has painted more directly on exhibition walls. Author and writer of books and essays. His wall installation "A 21 day coast to coast walking journey". Japan 1996 at the John Weber Gallery, NY incorporates the concrete poetry format and his earlier work A Seven day walk in the mountains Switzerland early summer 1984 was the inspiration for the 'fulton' Visual poetry form.

Emerging in the late 1960s alongside artists including Richard Long and Gilbert and George, Hamish Fulton’s work began to explore new possibilities for sculpture and for a direct relationship between landscape and art, shifting the focus from the resulting art as an object on to the experience of the landscape. With influences ranging from American Indian culture to the subject of the environment itself, Fulton began to take short walks and take photographs to document the experiences of these walks.

After a monumental journey walking 1,022 miles from John O’Groats to Lands End Fulton made walking the sole subject of his art claiming to then make “only art resulting from the experience of individual walks”. He believes that each walk has a life of its own, and this cannot be rendered into a physical artwork; as the artist says “an artwork may be purchased but a walk cannot be sold”.

Fulton undertakes these walks by himself and so is the only person to directly experience them; however the images, photographs and text allow viewers to engage with the artist’s experiences.

Born in London in 1946 Hamish Fulton studied at St Martin’s College of Art, 1966-1968, and the Royal College of Art, 1968-1969, both in London and has had numerous solo shows at various institutions, amongst them Tate Britain and Kunst Museum, Basel, and has exhibited internationally including shows in New York, Tokyo and Munich. Fulton’s work is also kept by collections ranging from the British Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

RICHARD LONG

Art as a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.

Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking.

Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers.

His first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also his own path, going 'nowhere'. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, his intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed his own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for him to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in his work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.

Walking also enabled him to extend the boundaries of sculpture, which now had the potential to be de-constructed in the space and time of walking long distances. Sculpture could now be about place as well as material and form.

He considers his landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'.

Over the years these sculptures have explored some of the variables of transience, permanence, visibility or recognition. A sculpture may be moved, dispersed, carried. Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture. On a mountain walk a sculpture could be made above the clouds, perhaps in a remote region, bringing an imaginative freedom about how, or where, art can be made in the world.

PROCESS ART

"Process Art" is a trend within various neo-avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 60s. It suggests that the aesthetic of process provides a useful way of re-thinking Bürger's problematic central idea of the reintegration of "art" and "life" as a goal of the avant-garde. Process art calls for a re-ordering and re-thinking of these categories in that the stability of "life" (as action) and "art" (as object) is challenged or put into play. The paper reads Frank O'Hara's poetry as self-consciously working in "the gap" between art and life (as Robert Rauschenberg once put it), and thus complicating Bürger's oversimplified theory.

Process art emphasises the “process” of making art (rather than any predetermined composition or plan) and the concepts of change and transience, as elaborated in the work of such artists as Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Keith Sonnier. Their interest in process and the properties of materials as determining factors has precedents in the Abstract Expressionists’ use of unconventional methods such as dripping and staining. In a ground-breaking essay and exhibition in 1968, Morris posited the notion of “anti-form” as a basis for making art works in terms of process and time rather than as static and enduring icons, which he associated with “object-type” art. Morris stressed this new art’s de-emphasis of order through nonrigid materials, pioneered by Claes Oldenburg, and the manipulation of those materials through the processes of gravity, stacking, piling, and hanging.

Process artists were involved in issues attendant to the body, random occurrences, improvisation, and the liberating qualities of nontraditional materials such as wax, felt, and latex. Using these, they created eccentric forms in erratic or irregular arrangements produced by actions such as cutting, hanging, and dropping, or organic processes such as growth, condensation, freezing, or decomposition.




















Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969. Nine chromogenic prints from 35mm slides, 24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm) each . Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Edythe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda Fischbach, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cindy Johnson, Barbara lane, Linda Macklowe, Brian McIver, Peter Norton Foundation, Willem Peppler, Denise Rich, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger, Ginny Williams, Elliot K. Wolk 99.5269. © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
















Belts, 1966–67. Vulcanized rubber and neon, 72 x 300 x 20 inches (182.9 x 762 x 50.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection 91.3863. © 2009 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Attilio Maranzano