The ground of Earthworks: Genesis and contexts, 1966--1968.
Item
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Title
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The ground of Earthworks: Genesis and contexts, 1966--1968.
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Identifier
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AAI9976880
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identifier
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9976880
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Creator
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Boettger, Suzaan.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gail Levin
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Landscape Architecture | Architecture
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Abstract
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Earthworks epitomized the art and spirit of the late 1960s. These telluric works of art both embodied and disrupted contemporary conceptions of art, nature, society, and their relationship. This first analysis of this earliest genre of contemporary Land Art, Earthworks, demonstrates this by both presenting its artistic lineage and situating that development within the several contexts of individuals' biographies and the social, political and cultural and economic changes in the nineteen-sixties. Chapters on major American artists who made transient environmental works of naturally-occurring materials analyze their different stylistic approaches: Carl Andre/Minimalism; Michael Heizer/the Western spirit; Sol LeWitt/Conceptualism; Robert Morris/Anti-Form; Claes Oldenburg/Happenings and monumental public art; Dennis Oppenheim, an ambitious Californian in New York; and Robert Smithson/anti-formalism. These paths came together in the genre's debut exhibition, "Earthworks" at the Dwan Gallery, New York, October 1968, examined as a microcosm of Earthworks and its critical response. The two conventional rationales for Earthworks are addressed as paradoxical: the view of earthworkers' usage of this debased material in rough wilderness terrains as a pastoral sensibility motivated by ecological sympathies, and the gallery presentation of these works, often dealer-funded, as oppositional to the art market. On the contrary, it is earthworks' evocation of "entropy"---their powerful manifestations of a lack of harmony with either nature or culture---that stimulated viewers' reactive projections of the regenerative forces of nature onto these earthen creations. Secondly, the patronage of dealers and collectors not only enabled the creation of specific earthworks, but the genre "Earthworks" itself to develop. Also recognized is the artistic, nationalistic, and sexist chauvinism that resulted in this exhibition's both lack of women artists and absence of other Americans and Europeans (Iain Baxter, Jan Dibbets, Harvey Fite, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Pino Pascali).;Thereafter, I discuss significant international exhibitions in 1969 featuring earthen materials, and briefly describe two monumental land projects of the late 1960s, Heizer's Double Negative and Smithson's Spiral Jetty. These again display earthworkers' conflicted behaviors toward the natural environment, which fused with ambivalent responses to the anti-institutional position of much of late- sixties culture, and materialize both the era's desire for regeneration, and even more so, its social fragmentation.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.