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Earthworks can sometimes present a number of contradictions within itself. The effort to create a history or an object on a large landscape, on a large scale seems almost futile. I feel like a lot of sculptors within this movement when it began were trying to escape the confines of the gallery, and the commercial nature of art that was rising in the 60s. Michael Heizer, one of the first earthworks artists whose work began in the Nevada Desert, wrote then that “the position of art as a malleable barter-exchange item falters as the cumulative economic structure gluts. The museums and collections are stuffed, the floors are sagging, but the real space still exists.”
That real space is the actual world—the world that artists used to be responding too, but then began to turn inward.
But there is still this insistence in the artist’s nature that they want to be remembered, they want to be recorded, they want to be documented. It is an affirmation of what is worthwhile—so photographs are taken of the work and then, once again, brought back into the gallery. There is an element of separation—in that the gallery viewer will not ever experience the actual land—but the aspect of photography presents an issue that I am trying to deal with in my own sited sculptures.
I’m not sure if I should think of photographs as documentation or a furthering of my intent. Photographs are meant to preserve something precious, or hold onto a memory. Andy Goldsworthy’s photographs preserve a specific moment—but they do not undermine the fragility of his work, or the ephemeral quality of his work. Rather, his photographs enhance that nature because there is a subtle brilliance to them.
But I am not working in order to create an interesting photograph later down the line, I am trying to work with the environment around me and create something raw and vulnerable that can be taken away through natural means or the force of someone walking through it or treading upon it.
Earthworks are interesting to me because there is a sensibility that wants to worship the forces of nature and give into them—but there is also a struggle to want to preserve a precious object. To preserve what is made—even if it is made of leaves and dirt—because of the time spent making it. And when it lasts, it becomes a record of one person’s mark upon a space, upon a real space. It cannot be bought and then removed and placed into a museum or gallery, which is a less than real space—a space that people walk into with certain expectations that are met easily because paintings and sculptures are presented in a specific readable way. There is no mountain with a line of rocks traveling up it within the gallery. When earthworks begin to travel into the gallery, it presents a question: Why return?
In one of Richard Long’s pieces, his rambling line travels from hillside and into gallery—a more convincing turn. But to leap from outside to inside, to just place earth or earth elements within a gallery is almost a joke in itself—it is returning to the sagging floors, but with something more raw then finished, something more elemental than manipulated.
To turn to the most natural elements as an artist is a challenge, but it is undeniably innate—the earth is always present, always under our feet. It is there waiting to be shaped, only to fall back into its original state at some point or be turned by natural forces into a newer state.
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