The definitive survey not only of Land Art but also of contemporary environmental art, featuring exquisite photographs of site-specific works in spectacular locations around the world. Essential reading for both art enthusiasts and anyone concerned with the environment, the book is the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated book on the subject.
The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by the vast uncultivated spaces of the desert and mountain as well as post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved the earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo's Running Fence or Walter de Maria's Lightning Field. Journeys became works of art for Richard Long while Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta immersed their bodies in the contours of the land.
This book traces early developments to the present day, as artists are exploring eco-systems and the interface between industrial, urban and rural cultures.
Survey Brian Wallis discusses the key artists, works and issues that define Land Art historically, as well as its later ramifications.
Works This book fully documents the 1960s Land Art movement and surveys examples of Environmental Art to the present day. Earthworks, environments, performances and actions by artists ranging from Ana Mendieta in the 1970s and 80s to Peter Fend in the 1990s are illustrated with breathtaking photographs, sketches and project notes.
Documents Jeffrey Kastner has compiled an invaluable archive of statements by all the featured artists alongside related texts by art historians, critics, philosophers and cultural theorists including Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Burke, Guy Debord, Michael Fried, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy R Lippard, Thomas McEvilley and Simon Schama.
Jeffrey Kastner, based in New York, is a writer on art and culture. Senior Editor of Cabinet magazine, he is a former Senior Editor of ARTnews, and Contributing Editor of Art Monthly. As well as lecturing on art in America and Europe, Kastner has contributed reviews and essays on contemporary art and popular culture for numerous magazines, including Artforum, Art & Design, Flash Art, The Economist and frieze.
Brian Wallis is Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York. As well as curating, he has taught Critical Theory at Yale University and was McCracken Fellow at New York University. Wallis has authored and edited numerous books on contemporary culture, among them Art After Modernism (New Museum/David Godine, 1984), Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT Press, 1986) and Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995). In 1996 he curated the exhibition 'Counterculture: Alternative Information from the Underground Press to the Internet' at Exit Art in New York. Wallis was formerly senior editor of Art in America and a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, where he organized serveral exhibitions including a Hans Haacke retrospective in 1986.
