By ARNIE COOPER
Ends of the Earth:Land Art to 1974
The Geffen Contemporary,
Museum of Contemporary Art
Through Sept. 3Los Angeles
If you're a detail person, the first thing you'll notice about "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the missing start date in the show's title. Senior curator Philipp Kaiser and co-curator Miwon Kwon insist the omission was intentional. Ms. Kwon, a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that "we chose not to put a beginning date into the title of the show, since Land Art emerges through many different strains of art practices and one could locate multiple moments of its 'beginning.'"
The Noguchi Museum, NY. /Soichi Sunami
Isamu Noguchi's proposed 'Memorial to Man,' aka 'Sculpture to Be Viewed From Mars' (1947). The nose alone was to be a mile long.
You might also wonder why what the accompanying catalog calls the "first large-scale museum exhibition on Land Art" includes work only through 1974. It's not as if the genre, in which the landscape is treated as a giant canvas and the resulting artworks are not only linked to it but express it, dissolved in the mid-1970s; the noted British Land artist Andy Goldsworthy was still in college at that time. But the curators wanted to feature projects created before the Hirshhorn Museum's exhibit "Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects" established the category in 1978. "This show," Ms. Kwon says, "is about early experimentation."
The cutoff date was also an important milestone for the genre. In 1974, New York's Dia Art Foundation was established to support visionary large-scale projects. Consider Robert Smithson's mammoth "Spiral Jetty," constructed in 1970 from basalt rock and earth at the Great Salt Lake's northeastern shore and donated to the Dia by Smithson's estate in 1999. The 1,500-foot-long coil was covered by water soon after its construction but re-emerged after the millennium, allowing visitors to walk between the spirals.
This brings us to the oft-asked question—repeated in an essay written by Mr. Kaiser and Ms. Kwon for the exhibition catalog—"How can you bring monumental artworks that are continuous with the earth in remote locations such as the deserts of Nevada, Utah, or New Mexico into a gallery space?"
The very simple answer: You can't. "We don't even try," Ms. Kwon says, referring to another colossal work, Michael Heizer's 1969-70 "Double Negative," two 250-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nev. Totaling 1,500 feet in length, this immense earthwork is visible by satellite. But you won't see even one image of it at this show. Ms. Kwon says, "We don't want to engage in the common effort made by museums to represent the work with documentary photographs." Her statement is ironic given that "Double Negative" is part of the MOCA collection, a fact that inspired Mr. Kaiser to propose "Ends of the Earth."
However, as Mr. Kaiser is quick to note, every project is different. "For example, 'Double Negative' is out there and we respect the fact that you have to drive to see it," the curator says. "But Robert Smithson took a different approach, establishing the system of the site and the nonsite." Mr. Kaiser is referring to the fact that Smithson conceived of three manifestations of his piece: not only the actual spiral in Utah but a 35-minute film and an essay, both included in the show.
Despite such distinctions, Land Art is frequently equated with larger-than-life endeavors constructed in the American Southwest. But, Ms. Kwon says, "it's not all about monumental, macho guys with bulldozers and dynamite in the desert." The show, which seeks to shatter many misconceptions about the genre, has re-created numerous smaller works: Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison's 5½-by-8-foot "Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1" (1970-1971) contains live plants—munched on by an actual pig before the opening. And Alice Aycock's "Clay #2" (1971)—another re-creation—contains 16 4-foot squares of cracked clay, inspired by Ms. Aycock's visit to Death Valley in 1969.
Another misconception is that Land Art is antiurban. Robert Morris's "Earthwork" is a 2,000-pound pile of dirt made up of earth, brick, steel and industrial scraps from the New York area. The work originally appeared in 1968 at "Earthworks," the first group exhibition of the genre, which took place at Virginia Dwan's Gallery on 57th Street. The show also presents Swedish pop artist Claes Oldenburg's film "The Hole," depicting his 1967 performance piece "Placid Civil Monument," in protest of the Vietnam War. The 10-minute film shows gravediggers fashioning a 6-foot wide, 3-foot deep hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Perhaps more significantly, "Ends of the Earth" aims to shatter the assumption that Land Art is chiefly an American enterprise. The show's 200 works spotlight more than 100 artists from 17 countries in South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia as well as the U.S.
Consider the two international works visible immediately upon entering the gallery. Playing directly in front of you is the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely's 1962 antinuke film, "Study for an End of the World," a 22-minute piece shot in the desert outside of Las Vegas near an atomic-bomb site. The now grainy film, which appeared on the weekly television news program "David Brinkley's Journal," depicts choreographed explosions of junk found in scrap yards around Las Vegas.
To its left is French artist Yves Klein's "Región de Grenoble (RP10)," a 2-by-3-foot work simulating a relief map of the Earth utilizing his patented "International Klein Blue." It was "the artist's vision," Ms. Kwon says, "to claim a color that exceeds territorial boundaries and divisions." Back in 1957, Klein theorized that the entire planet was blue—an idea confirmed by the first human in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who declared, "The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing." No surprise then that Mr. Kaiser says Klein had declared the entire planet a work of art.
Not that all of these projects could actually be realized. The exhibit includes Jean-Michel Sanejouand's proposal for a cultural park development on top of Mount Vesuvius, as well as the Italian architectural collective Superstudio's plan for a gridded superstructure to wrap around the globe. Mr. Klein wasn't kidding about the planet as artwork, a perspective that is evident in one of the show's most provocative pieces, Isamu Noguchi's 1947 proposal "Memorial to Man." The 15-by-34-foot photograph, which appears to be of a massive earthwork sculpture in the sand, contains a face whose nose was to be one mile long. Mr. Noguchi wanted the image to be visible from space "informing others that an intelligent life form once had existed on our planet."
Ms. Kwon says: "Although we do not assert an origin point for Land Art, Noguchi's works are the earliest in the show. 'Memorial to Man,' also known as 'Sculpture to Be Viewed from Mars,' presages many aspects of Land Art as it will develop in the 1960s—the scale of his vision; using land as material and means to articulate commentary on man's relation to earth and cosmos; the importance of the extra-human viewpoint; the coming together of the primitivistic and the futuristic. Utopic and dystopic at once."
Mr. Cooper is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif.
via online.wsj.com