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LAND ART IN THE U.S.A.

A new study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the 'golden age' of land art - the 1960s - to the present day.

Fully illustrated, with a bibliography.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he's been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were 'the more compelling artists today, concerned with 'Place' or 'Site''. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith's vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith 'the agent of endlessness'. Smith's aesthetic became part of Smithson's view of art as a complete 'site', not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were 'in some way disrupted or pulverized'. He said he was looking for a 'denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty'.

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: 'I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation'. Smithson's theory of the 'non-site' was based on 'absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence'. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the 'non-site' and 'site' are both interacting. In the 'non-site' work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. 'The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container - the room'.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

The sequel to the acclaimed Made in Niugini, which explored in unparalleled depth the material world of the Wola comprising moveable artefacts, Built in Niugini continues Paul Sillitoe's project in exemplary fashion, documenting the built environment, architecture and construction techniques in a tour de force of ethnography. But this is more than a book about building houses. Sillitoe also shows how material constructions can serve to further our understandings of intellectual constructions. Allowing his ethnography to take the lead, and paying close attention to the role of tacit understandings and know-how in both skilled work and everyday dwelling, his close experiential analyses inform a phenomenologically inflected discussion of profound philosophical questions - such as what can we know of being-in-the-world - from startlingly different cultural directions. The book also forms part of a long-term project to understand a radically different 'economy', which is set in an acephalous order that extends individual freedom and equality in a manner difficult to imagine from the perspective of a nation-state - an intriguing way of being-in-the-world that is entwined with tacit aspects of knowing via personal and emotional experience. This brings us back to the explanatory power of a focus on technology, which Sillitoe argues for in the context of 'materiality' approaches that feature prominently in current debates about the sociology of knowledge. Archaeology has long been to the fore in considering technology and buildings, along with vernacular architecture, and Sillitoe contributes to a much-needed dialogue between anthropology and these disciplines, assessing the potential and obstacles for a fruitful rapprochement. Built in Niugini represents the culmination of Sillitoe's luminous scholarship as an anthropologist who dialogues fluidly with the literature and ideas of numerous disciplines. The arguments throughout engage with key concepts and theories from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, material culture studies, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy. The result is a significant work that contributes to not only our regional knowledge of the New Guinea Highlands but also to studies of tacit knowledge and the anthropology of architecture and building practices. Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies