This type of art mouvement is called Land Art, which uses organic components or places the work outside in different environments to engage with nature in a certain manner. The environmental art or earthworks was originated in the 1960s and it grew in popularity over the next decade. Just like the readymade earlier in the century, it redefined the idea of what a piece of art might be, although it also increased the limits of artwork when it came to the material applied and the location of it. Even though in a designed setting, the essential features of land art was usually its monumentality and its location in a local surrounding, it was also very similar to conceptual art since the preparation and the pictures that were implemented along with the final outcomes could often be displayed in an artistic environment, regardless of whether the work itself was not.
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Robert Smithson - One of the Major Contributors of Land Art
Robert Smithson was one of the major contributor of the Land Art mouvement who changed his work in 1964, when his art caught the attention of people and when it was related with those of the Minimalists. He first started his job as a painter in which he was influenced by the Expressionist artists of the central area in New York City. His new career at that time started to employ a variety of materials to create 3D architectural pieces of art that lead to a number of 'non-sites' works, where stones and soil gathered from travels to a particular region were placed in the exhibit as artworks. Those were often paired with maps, containers, mirrors, glass, and neon colors.
Robert Smithson's artworks
An environmental artwork completely built out of dirt, salt crystals, and basalt rocks on the northearn coast of the Great Salt Lake next to Rozel Point in Utah in April 1970. This earthwork is a 1,500-foot-long (460-meter) anti-clockwise spiral extending from the lake's shore.
Smithson cut into the shoreline of a sand quarry in the northeastern Netherlands, flooding the resulting dikes to create an interconnected canal and jetty. A solitary glacial boulder rests in the sculpture's center, while a looping spiral path winds up the slope above it. This design element reflects Smithson's obsession with spirals and their illusive promise of an ultimate destination. Although the land can never return to its previous state due to the irrevocable effects of industrialization, its mesmerizing beauty begs for a reconsideration of the link between nature and construction.Originally designed to rise from the bottom of a man-made lake, Amarillo Ramp is currently located in a dried-up basin, with erosion having changed its original composition. It was Smithson's last artwork who unfortunately died in a plane crash in 1973, along with pilot called Gale Ray Rogers and a photographer named Robert I. Curtin, while surveying the site. Richard Serra, Tony Shafrazi, and Nancy Holt later on completed the sculpture after his death. Amarulo Ramp is a somber example of entropy, its once-defined sides that are now sinking into the earth due to overgrowth of spiny tree. The fact that restoration and ruin preservation works are still underway attests to the enduring influence of Smithson's legacy.
Nancy Holt - Another Major Contributor of Land Art
Nancy Holt was a well-known American artist who specialised in public sculpture, installation art, and land art. Holt also worked in other media, such as film and photography, and wrote books and articles about art throughout her career. The Holt/Smithson Foundation was established in 2017 to continue the creative and investigative spirit of her and her husband Robert Smithson's works, who developed innovative methods of exploring our relationship with the planet over their careers, largely by pushing the boundaries of monumental earthwork and sculptural practise. She began her artistic career as a photographer and video artist, and it was from this perspective that she approached her later earthworks, which were conceived as devices for tracking the positions of the sun, earth, and stars, as well as relating these celestial elements to a fixed point on earth.
Nancy Holt's artworks
Holt's massive Sun Tunnels looms along the horizon in a remote valley of Utah's Great Basin Desert which can be seen from over a mile away. The four concrete structures are forming a cross and they have specific positions to form the sun as it rises which also sets during the summer and winter peak. There are small holes in the concrete that are arranged to cause projections of grouped stars along the inside of tunnels like Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn, the last one occurs through sunlight and their patterns brightening up the vision of the spectators. Dark Star Park was created by Nancy Holt which incorporated sculptural and landscape elements to surround the building and the nearest island. She used concrete spheres that are scattered around the park, visible through tunnels, mirrored in deep water areas, and formed by another sphere's carved-out hole. On Dark Star Park Day which happens every year, people come along to watch the shadow alignment. On August 1 at 9:32 a.m., the anniversary of the land's acquisition by William Henry Ross in 1860-the shadows caused by the concrete spheres and the steel poles align with asphalt shadow patterns that is on the ground. While estimating the cosmos, Dark Star Park ponders the physical and ideological constuction of property.
