The Greening of Art

The Greening of Art
CZAEE SHAH

Starting especially in the late '60s, art needed to look new, nonconformist and not at all complacent. There was a growing discontent with its institutions the public museums and the commercial galleries and a growing disaffection with traditional forms. It was not a matter of improving art, but of making another type of art altogether. The result of this unease was the birth of what came to be called `Conceptual Art'.

A number of American artists began operating outside the white-walled gallery spaces of Soho, making works with everyday objects, photographs, videos and live performances. Amid this climate, Michael Heizer, Water De Maria and Robert Smithson created works in the deserts and mountains of Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. They used diggers and caterpillar trucks to create chasms in the earth or to construct huge ramps. The result was an enormous expansion of art, in which landscape, earth formation, horizon, weathering and erosion all became real materials. `Land Art' quickly came into being with the idea of sculpture as place rather than object.

These artists were not depicting the landscape in painting or in photography, but were choosing to enter the landscape itself, to use its materials and work with its salient features its scale, its vistas, its essentially horizontal character, its topography and its human and natural history, and became heavily dependent on engineers, construction crews, earth moving equipment and even aerial survey plans. In most of the major examples of "earthworks", as these large projects in the wilderness have come to be known, the pilgrimage through the lost landscape to the site was an important aspect of the work itself. The archetype of earthworks of this period was Robert Smithson's `Spiral Jetty'. This was, as its name suggests, a spiral projection, 1,500 linear ft of black basalt, limestone rocks and earth that curled into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Almost from the moment of its creation in 1970, it acquired legendary status.

The most famous of all earthwork artists is the Bulgarian-born Christo. His many ambitious projects include wrapping buildings, surrounding islands with floating plastic skirts and fencing in miles of coastline and inland hills. His `Running Fence' done in 1972, was an 18-ft high, 24-1/2 mile long line of fabric panels that ran across Sonoma and Marin countries, just north of San Francisco, traversing private ranches, interesting 14 roads and a highway, passing through the middle of town and descending into the ocean.

Richard Long, another artist, `intervenes' in the countryside, mainly by walking through it and indeed, he has made walking his own highly economical means of transforming land into art. Along the way, he expresses his ideas about time, movement, and place by making marks on the earth by plucking blossoms from a field of daisies or by rearranging stones, sticks, seaweed or other natural phenomena. With these, he effects simple shapes, straight lines, circles, spirals, zigzags, crosses and squares that he documents with photographs. A token of human intelligence is left on the site. A walk is one more layer, a mark laid upon the thousands of other layers of human and geographic history on the surface of the land.

What began as relatively isolated episodes in the great deserts of the American West in the '60s with the experience of the site and its real geological matter as art, has today expanded into a wide range of activities Environmental Art, sited sculptures and most important of all, a new and truly Public Art, with a reintegration of the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and landscape design with the aim of creating the best possible public environment. Whatever the nuances of their particular approaches to nature, artists, along with architects, are providing dramatic proof that landscape is one of the primary forums of cultural expression where social and environmental, as well as aesthetic values, are articulated.