Land Art

In October 1968, an exhibition called “Earth Works” opened at the Dwan Gallery in New York. Within a few years, artists were heading out into deserts, lakes, and open wilderness. In 1969, Michael Heizer moved 240,000 tons of earth from a cliff face in Nevada. In 1970, Robert Smithson built a spiral of basalt rock 460 meters long in Utah's Great Salt Lake — Spiral Jetty. The motive was to make something that couldn't be sold. Something you couldn't buy, couldn't move, couldn't hang on a wall. Stepping outside the market was supposed to mean stepping into freedom. What happened next carries a quiet irony, though. The works themselves may not have sold, but the photographs, the drawings, the documentation did — and it was galleries and patrons trading in those that ended up supporting the artists' careers and legacies. The same system the movement tried to escape was the one holding it up from outside. Spiral Jetty now appears and disappears with the water level of the lake. Its owner, the Dia Art Foundation, photographs it every year to keep a record of whatever state it's in.