Earthworks are modern sculptures, usually in large geometric configurations, made from theenvironment itself, that have a random quality that seems to question the impact of urbanism on the individual locale. In the United States, the Abstract Expressionist movement, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, led artists to create forceful, eccentric, and nonmetaphoric art. Earthworks artists add to these qualities a purpose, to bridge the technology of the urban environment and the rawness of pure nature, using materials new to art, such as rock, dirt, flotsam, and water. In this art, the sculpture is not only the object created but also the very process of creation. While creating pieces that were deliberately ephemeral in some cases and purposely durable in others, these artists kept meticulous records of their efforts and included those records as part of the art.
One example of an outdoor earthwork is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The sculpture itself, 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide, was built in 1970 near Ogden, Utah, in the Great Salt Lake. It is made of black rock, salt crystals, earth, and water red with algae. As part of the total piece, Smithson made a film of the process, telling about locating the site, ruminating about the history of the site, and detailing construction of the jetty and the resulting displacement of water.
Other earthworks and their artists show a similar concern for locale and history. Among them are Christo’s Running Fence (1972–1976) outside of San Francisco, California, for which a giant fabric fence was strung across miles of land, and Michael Heizer’s Compression Line (1968), a ditch 192 feet long and lined with plywood at El Mirage Dry Lake in California’s Mojave Desert. In 1971–1972, Dennis Oppenheim built Polarities. He took two drawings, one by his young daughter and the other by his recently deceased father, enlarged both on a map to a 500-foot scale, and then plotted the result with magnesium flares on Long Island. Aerial photographs accompanied the original drawings at the gallery showing.
Smaller versions of earthworks are suitable for gallery installation and use many of the same techniques but on a smaller scale. Smithson’s 1968 Non-Site: Franklin, N.J. is an aerial map of a suburb of New York City. The sculpture consists of a grid system laid out on an inclined plane that is overlaid with a map of Franklin, New Jersey. In five bins behind the photographs are ore rocks placed in layers that replicate the ore layers at Franklin.
