Land Art: A Complete Guide to Landscape, Environmental, Earthworks, Nature, Sculpture and Installation Art

by William Malpas

LAND ART A fully illustrated guide to land and environmental art. For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks. ? This new book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site - Hans Haacke's Conceptual art - Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks - Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks - Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, - Robert Morris's environments - Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field - David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments - Hamish Fulton's walks and words - Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles - Richard Long and his art of walking - Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures - Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes - Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions - Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads - Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures - and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre. Here are towers, stars, stones, pools, tunnels, pipes, maps, chasms, ladders, mounds, scars, mirrors, cones, furrows, mazes, circles, hills and gardens. ?

376 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2007