A meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time transform the meaning of site-specific art In the decades after World War II, artists and designers of the land art movement used the natural landscape to create monumental site-specific artworks. Second Site offers a powerful meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time alter and transform the meanings-and sometimes appearances-of works created to inhabit a specific place. James Nisbet offers fresh approaches to well-known artworks by Ant Farm, Rebecca Belmore, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson. He also examines the work of less recognized artists such as Agnes Denes, Bonnie Devine, and herman de vries. Nisbet tracks the vicissitudes wrought by climate change and urban development on site-specific artworks, taking readers from the plains of Amarillo, Texas, to a field of volcanic rock in Mexico City, to abandoned quarries in Finland. Providing vital perspectives on what it means to endure in an ecologically volatile world, Second Site challenges long-held beliefs about the permanency of site-based art, with implications for the understanding and conservation of artistic creation and cultural heritage.

HE past does not change; it cannot, for what has happened T cannot be undone. Yet how are we to understand what has happened? Our perspective on it lies in the present, and is subject to continual change. These changes, made in the light of our new knowledge and new experience, call for fresh evaluations and constant reconsideration. It is now one hundred fifty years since the death of Immanuel Kant, and this, the third volume of Tulane Studies in Philosophy is dedicated to the commemoration of the event. The diversity of the contributions to the volume serve as one indication of Kant's persistent importance in philoso phy. His work marks one of the most enormous turns in the whole history of human thought, and there is still much to be done in estimating its achievement. His writings have not been easy to assimilate. The exposition is difficult and labored; it is replete with ambiguities, and even with what often appear to be contradictions. Such writings allow for great latitude in interpretation. Yet who would dare .to omit Kant from the account? The force of a man's work is measured by his influence on other thinkers; and here, Kant has few superiors. Of no man whose impact upon the history of ideas has been as great as that of Kant can it be said with finality: this 5 6 TULANE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY is his philosophy."