US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

Why did landscape and site became important in late-60s and early-70s U.S. art?

Horacio Ramos

U.S. artists interest on landscapes and off-gallery sites had been read by critics and historians as

a political response to the art systems fetishism.1 The purpose of this paper is to show that, in

the case of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, two artists most commonly associated with

what has come to be known as the Land Art movement, the turn to site and landscape was not an

anti-institutional gesture, but a negotiation with aesthetic ideas and display practices brought by

minimalist sculpture. To trace this shift, I will use as evidence two works that Heizer and

Smithson presented at the exhibition Earthworks (fig. 1), established later by critics as the

seminal moment of the Land Art movement,2 and compare them with two of their previous

works, and with three works by Robert Morris and Barnett Newman from the same years.

In October 1968, art dealer and gallerist Virginia Dwan coordinated the show Earthworks

in her New York gallery.3 Until then, the gallery was known mostly for presenting minimalist

works. At least since 1967, Smithson and other artists represented by the gallery were interested

in developing an exhibition out-doors. After attempting unsuccessfully to secure land in New

Jersey for that purpose, Dwan would remember later, the alternative was to do something in the

1
This reading was influenced by critic Lucy Lippard, who in 1973 included Land Art artists in her overviews of
dematerialized art. See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object since 1966 to 1972
(Berkeley: University of California Press, [1973] 2001): 19, 34, 44, 57, 78, 87ff., 250. Jennifer Roberts and Julian
Myers had read Smithsons and Heizers works, respectively, as responses to social contexts. See Jennifer L.
Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Julian Myers,
Urban Grounds: Earth beneath Detroit, in Ends of Earth: Land Art to 1974, exh. cat., ed. by Philip Kaiser and
Miwon Kown (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012): 129-49. Gallerist Virginia Dwan also
maintains that idea. See Virginia Dwan: On Changing Boundaries, in Ends of Earth., 93.
2
Another important Land Art exhibition, although less discussed by scholarship, was Earth Art (Andrew Dickson
Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, February 1969).
3
The show, which went from October 5 to 30, also included works by Carl Andre, Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria,
Stephen Kaltenbach, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, and Dennis Oppenheim.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

gallery that pointed to the land.4 Beyond the mythologies created years later, the 1968 show did

signify a shift for both Smithson and Heizer. To explain this process, first, I will argue that

Smithson wanted to expand Donald Judds literalist ideology by adding references outside of the

sculptural specific object. Then, I will suggest that Heizer continued the tendency, exemplified

by Newman, of proposing an unconventional sense of monumentality for which the gallery space

was not enough. In sum, I will argue that the shift to landscape and site was the result of a

dialogue with minimalist sculptures ideas and display practices.5

More than Specific Objects

For Earthworks, both Morris and Smithson employed dirt and organic materials, an

unusual gesture for a space that until then usually displayed mostly geometric sculptures made

with industrial materials. Smithsons Non-site (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968) (fig. 2) was the first

on a series of projects with that he developed during that year. The work consisted on, on the one

hand, a group of five painted wooden bins of different sizes that looked like incomplete isosceles

triangles (fig. 3), and on the other, a photographic reproduction of map mounted on a mat board

and arranged as a pyramid (fig. 4), a set of photographs, and a descriptive typescript. The bins,

also grouped as a pyramid, contained limestones collected as samples from ore deposits near

the Franklin Furnace Mines.6 The edges of both the bins and the map were cut with lines inspired

by the straight lines used in maps for establishing the borders between regions.

4
See Virginia Dwan, in Ends of Earth., 93., 94.
5
Rosalind Krauss argues that Heizer and Smithsons works continues the project of decentering started by
modernist sculpture and developed by minimalism. Krauss analysis is phenomenological and focuses in bodily
experiences. See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: The Viking Press, 1977): 279 ff. For
this paper, instead, I am focusing on how Smithson and Heizer responded to minimalist sculptures rhetoric, whether
by opposing to the idea of literal objects, or by exploring large-scale monumentality.
6
For an overview of Smithsons sculptural work until 1981, see Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, exh.
cat. (Ithaca: Cornell University Pres, 19181).

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

Beyond the use of geometric shapes for the bins, Smithsons non-site constituted a depart

from the type of work that he had been developing in previous years. After years producing

paintings and collages, his career took off when he started producing, around 1963, in the

language of forms associated with Minimalism. In April 1966, he exhibited in Primary

Structures (The Jewish Museum, New York). Later that year he signed a contract with Dwan that

led to his first solo show at her gallery in November.7

In his solo show, Smithson presented Plunge (1966) (fig. 5), a set of ten medium-size

identical metal sculptures. The use of industrially produced materials, the geometric delineating

of their surfaces, the installation of the objects directly on the floor, and the seriality of the way

they were displayed were in tune with the method of an artists associated with Minimalism such

as Donald Judd. In his widely-read essay Specific Objects (1965), Judd contested critic

Clement Geenbergs idea that sculpture should negate its mundane materiality and gravity, and

exist as a mirage.8 For Judd, sculpture should distance from painting and embrace its

specific and literal materiality.9 Literalness, Judd believed, could be achieved by

employing seriality, geometric shapes, and industrial materials.

Robert Morris also aimed at liberating sculpture from representation, but disagreed with

Judds ideology.10 Influenced by composer John Cage, whose scores variated in relation to

chance, the environment, and the audience, Morris was interested in exploring the relationship

between his sculptures and the conditions of the environment.11 In December 1964, he presented

7
On Smithsons strategic turn to Minimalism, see Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits
to Art (Berkeley: University of California Press): 119-132
8
Clement Greenberg, The New Sculpture [1948-58], in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1961): 144.
9
Donald Judd, Specific Objects, Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 94.
10
E.C. Goosen, The Artist Speaks: Robert Morris, Art in America 58 (May 1970), 111.
11
See Branden W. Joseph, Robert Morris and John Cage: Reconstructing a Dialogue (1997), in Robert Morris:
October Files 15, ed. Julia Bryan-Wilson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013): 137-51.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

a solo show at Green Gallery, consisting of seven light gray plywood sculptures. Seeing

individually, Untitled (Cloud) (1962) (fig. 7) would suggest nothing more than its literal

materials. Hung from the ceiling and installed next to similar pieces that were resting against the

wall or extended themselves across the gallery floor (fig. 8), the work produced a different effect.

As critic Michel Fried noted, the phenomenological experience of navigating these objects was

not unlike being crowded, by the silent presence of another person.12

For Fried, who built upon Greenbergs ideas, Morris theatricality was problematic

because it broke with the a-temporal pressentness that sculpture should have. Morris by

contrast, wanted the spectators to walk around and through his sculptures. In fact, he altered the

positions of his sculptures for each show, to produce diverse experiences. Smithson had a similar

attitude regarding his Plunge and the pieces of his A-Logon series (1966-67), which he installed

both in the floor and hung in the wall. An installation shot of Plunge (fig. 6) shows how, in the

context of the gallery, the upper section of the works expanded beyond the base as if they were

in motion, provoking an intrusive experience like the one described by Fried.

Around 1967, Morris exploration with environment would take a new shape. His

geometric monoliths would dissolve into environments in which he scattered industrial and

organic materials. In the 1968 show Earthworks, Morris presented Untitled (Dirt) (1968) (fig. 9),

a mound of soil, rocks, and industrial debris collected from New York surrounding environs.

Earlier that year, Morris had published in Artforum an essay entitled by the editors Anti-form,

which would become the term for this type of project.13 As with his previous works, the piece

aimed at expanding the phenomenological possibilities in the gallery context. Artist Allan

Kaprow noted, however, that the work resisted geometry but not form itself, since it followed an

12
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum 5, n. 10 (June 1967): 128-130.
13
Robert Morris, Anti-Form, Artforum 6, n. 8 (April 1968): 33-35.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

internal rhythmic composition.14 Indeed, far from aiming at dematerialization, Morris stated

that he was aiming at unitary form or gestalts that would provide bodily effects.15

While the 1968 Earthworks show meant for Morris a repetition of earlier explorations,

for Smithson it constituted the materialization of a new method. As critic Lawrence Alloway

noted, Smithson grew disinterested in repetition and sculpture when he started using text and

photography.16 Smithsons interest in developing projects with diagrams, maps, and photographs

was developed in the context of his work as artist-consultant for an architectural firm since

July 1966. That experience prompted an interest beyond specific objects, and onto off-gallery

spaces.17 This interest was contemporaneous to minimalist sculptor Tony Smiths description

(1966) of his liberating experience in a built environment outside of the art system.18

Crucial for this shift was Smithsons own conceptualization of the term non-site. For his

projects, he proposed a dialectic between the site (the place from where the documentary or organic

materials were extracted) and the non-site (its representation in the gallery through documents and

organic materials).19 The rocks in the gallery were from a site, but by being removed from there,

they complicated that relationship and became also specific objects. Their raw quality was

emphasized by their contrast with the crafted containers that hosted them (fig. 3). Also, the

14
Allan Kaprow, The Shape of the Art Environment: How Anti Form is Anti-Form? Artforum 6, n. 10 (Summer
1968): 32-33.
15
Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, Part I [1966], reproduced in Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered
Daily. The writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993): 7. Morris work fits better in
Krauss phenomenological reading than Smithsons or Heizers. See Krauss, o.c., 279.
16
Lawrence Alloway, Robert Smithsons Development, Artforum 11, n. 3 (November 1972): 52-61.
17
For a detailed overview of Smithsons architectural projects, see Mark Linder, Nothing less than Literal:
Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004): 133-71. For Smithson opposition to Judd,
see Robert Smithson, Donald Judd [1965], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996): 6.
18
Interview with Samuel Wagstaff reproduced in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed.
Charles Harrison, Paul J. Wood (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003): 760.
19
Robert Smithson, Dialectics of Site and Nonsite, in Gerry Schum, Fernsehaustellung / Land Art, Television
Gallery (Hannover: Fernsehgalerie, 1969). See also Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty [1972], in Robert Smithson:
The Collected Writings, 152-53.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

fragmented map emphasized the fallacy of attempting a true depiction of the site (fig. 4). Finally,

the photographs he presented offered a de-romanticized vision of the rural landscape. By these

means, Smithson aimed at producing a dialectic that would erase the difference between non-

site and site, a bipolar rhythm between mind and matter20. The dialectic was in no way

dematerialized, since it depended on the non-site elements (rocks and photography).

Smithsons de-romanticized use of photography was conscious, and had been previously

explored in his visual travelogue Passaic (1967). 21 His use of photography was different from the

use of that medium by other artists in the show.22 Michael Heizer exhibited a six-foot-tall backlit

transparency that portrayed a romanticized deserted landscape (fig. 10). Probably thinking on this

type of image, Dennis Oppenheim claimed that photographs of earthworks were ripping a thing

thats going with a certain force out and throwing it back to the dormancy of a rigid form of

communication, a situation he described as the gallery syndrome.23 More than a political claim,

he was questioning a certain use of photography. It would be nave, however, to consider Heizers

work less critical than Smithsons. While Smithson aimed at dialectical images, Heizer

consciously explored the possibilities of scale that photography allowed.

Larger than the White Cube

For Earthworks, Heizer showed a photograph of Dissipate 2 (1968) (fig. 10), a group of

five rectangular trenches, lined with concrete, that he excavated in the Black Rock Desert, at the

20
See Earth [conversation], in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 187.
21
Passai. See Roberts, Mirror-Travels, XXXX.
22
The show included photograph of Sol LeWitts Buried Cube Containing and Object of Importance but Little
Value (1968); Herbert Bayers Gras Mound (1955); Carl Andres Log Piece (1968) in Aspen, Colorado; Claes
Oldenburgs film The Hole (1967); and Heizers Dissipate 2 (1968).
23
Dennis Oppenheim, March 29, 1969, in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler,
Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner, ed. Patricia Norvell and Alexander
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 23.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

bed of the Jean Dry Lake (Nevada). Dissipate 2 was the second on a series of nine linked

interventions shaped as loops, faults, depressions, and troughs that Heizer undertook that year

on a 520-mile line of the Nevada desert. These excavations consolidated a vein of work

relatively recent.24 When Heizer moved to New York in 1966, he was still producing large

panels, made on Masonite or raw canvas, and painted one or two colors.25

His monochromatic Negative Painting (1966) (fig. 11) consisted on four geometric

pieces, each folded in the middle on a pointed edge of 45 degrees. On the wall, Heizer located

the two large ones at the same level, and the small ones on the top and bottom, producing an X

in the negative space between the four. Read in the context of Minimalisms heyday in which

it was produced, the X at the center suggested that the pieces literal materials were not

representing anything beyond a negation. Heizer described this type of paintings as objects in

the wall, and some of them were a foot and a half thick. 26 Since 1967, Heizer employed some

of his negative paintings as diagrams for geometric excavations in Sierra Nevada. 27 Parallel

to that, he developed a series of fugitive sculptures in the Mojave Desert, which consisted in

environments of dispersed organic and industrials not dissimilar to Morris anti-forms. It was

this year that his work was noticed by art collector Robert Scull, who would sponsor his

Dissipate 2, and Virginia Dwan, who would invite him to participate in Earthworks.

Formally, the rectangular shape of Heizers Dissipate 2 is not dissimilar from the

geometric shape of Morris Untitled (Cloud) (fig. 7). Unlike that work or Smithsons Plunge (fig.

5), however, Heizers work did not seemed invested in producing what Fried called the silent

24
For an overview of Heizers work until 1984, see Barbara Heizer, Chronology, in Michael Heizer: Sculptures in
Reverse, exh. cat., ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art): 96-108.
25
Interview with Julia Brown, in Michael Heizer: Sculptures in Reverse, 8.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

presence of another person. Heizers depressions were not volumes that invaded the

spectators body. They were negative invaded the environment. As he would put it, his works

were a scar of a kind, an intrusion on nature Its as though a surgeon took and exploratory cut

of a mesa to show its inwards.28 Furthermore, installed in Earthworks exhibition, the large

photograph did not aim at a disruptive experience, but to a romanticized one.

For his photograph (fig. 11), Heizer arranged the take so that the horizon approached the

compositions upper edge, making difficult for the viewer to gauge the trenches real sizes.29

That type of take, employed by Heizer and other artists during those years, aimed at offering a

romanticized vision of the vast landscape, while augmenting the scale of the work in the site.

Heizer was aware of his aesthetic decision. He developed a conceptual distinction between size

(the actual dimension of his works) and scale (the imagined dimension in their reproduction).30

Critic Lucy Lippard noted this effect, and commented that aerial photography was the major

sculptural invention of the 60s. For her, photographic takes from above changed the focus from

sculptures verticality (a trope for both Greenberg and Judd), towards horizontality.31

Heizers preoccupation with scale should be read in relationship with contemporaneous

exhibitions of minimalist sculptures, such as Primary Structures (1966), and Scale as Content

(Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C., November 1967).32 Indeed, what now looks like the peak

of Minimalism was perceived back then as the heyday of exhibitions of large-scale sculptures.33

28
Bruce Jay Friedman, Dirty Pictures, Dig? (Yes, Dig), Esquire, May 1971, 114, 116.
29
On Heizers photographic composition, see Giles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (Paris: Carr, 1993): 24ff.
30
Interview with Julia Brown, in Michael Heizer: Sculptures in Reverse, 1984, 13.
31
See Lippard, Introduction to 557,087 [1969], reproduced in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds.
Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1999), 179.
32
See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press): 163 ff.
33
Among many: Contemporary American Sculpture (Whitney Museum of American Art, 6 April-27 May 1966);
Primary Structures, (The Jewish Museum, 27 April-12 June 1966); American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles
County Museum, Spring 1967); and Sculpture in Environment, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts
and private sponsors for parks in New York city. In contrast to what happened whit other tendencies in the 1960s,

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

In her review of Scale as Content, Lippard discussed Barnet Newmans Broken Obelisk (1963)

(fig. 12), a 26 high Cor-Ten steel piece consisting of an inverted obelisk balanced on the top of a

pyramid. Critics usually focused on how the apparently precarious balance between the pyramid

and the monolith. For her, however, more interesting was the obelisks broken ragged top

edge. The sculpture could only function outdoors, because a selling would constrict its

monumentality.34 Moreover, Broken Obelisks monumentality was better understood when

installed in front of Mies van der Rohes Seagram Building in New York (fig. 13).

Newmans work was located at Seagram plaza as part of Sculpture in Environment

(1967), an exhibition of minimalist sculptures in New Yorks public spaces.35 According to

Lippard, it was there that Broken Obelisk showed its primitive monumentality36 (which

contrasted with Rohes modernist building), evidenced in the crumbling aspect of its broken

top, and in the ragged effect produced by using Cor-Ten steel. Heizers works of this time could

be read in relationship with this primitivist vein of monumental sculptures. Heizer constantly

invoked as an inspiration his childhood encounters with Precolumbian monuments in the open

space while visiting Mexico and Peru with his father, archeologist Robert Heizer.37 In fact, his

incisions in the ground were not dissimilar to the trenches of archeologist excavation. Also, in

open-air projects such as Displaced/Replaced Mass (1969-77) and Levitated Mass (1969-2012),

he would locate ragged and broken monoliths inside rectangular depressions.38

Minimalism counted with the support of museums and local institutions, prompted by the economic stability of the
period. On this context, see Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, 147ff.
34
Lucy Lippard, Escalation in Washington, Art International, January 1968, 42.
35
For Lippard, Newmans work was the only first-rate work, while the others looked like evicted furniture. See
Lucy Lippard, Beauty and Bureaucracy, The Hudson Review 20, n. 4 (Winter 1967-68): 652.
36
Lippard, Beauty and Bureaucracy, 653-54.
37
Interview with Julia Brown, in Michael Heizer: Sculptures in Reverse, 1984, 10.
38
For a reading of Heizers work in relationship with public sculpture and Precolumbian references, see Luis
Castaeda, "Doubling Time," Grey Room 51 (2013): 12-39.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

Tony Smiths revelation at the New Jersey Turnpike could be understood in

relationship to Smithsons need to go beyond literalism, but it could also be read as a need of a

special type of monumentality like Heizers.39 Smithson and Heizer, however, were invested in

different aesthetic projects. While Smithsons non-sites used organic materials, maps, and

photographs for challenging Judds ideology, Heizers depressions used photography and

excavations for achieving a sense of monumentality like Newmans.

In the context of the 1968 Earthworks show, artist Allan Kraprow noted that although

Morris anti-forms claimed to be more invested in developing new phenomenological

experiences, in the end they were made to be shown in a rectangular gallery, reproduced in a

rectangular magazine, in rectangular photographs40. For their part, both Smithson and Heizer

were aware of the dialectic between their projects and their photographic reproductions.

Smithson approached photography critically, through fragmentary images and a conscious game

with the idea of non-site. Heizer consciously used photography (the non-site) for

emphasizing the monumentality of his works on site.

Conclusion

The projects that Smithson and Heizer developed in the following years would continue

exploring the aesthetic strategies that they develop in the context of the 1968 exhibition.

Smithsons most iconic work, Spiral Jetty (1970) is a 1,500-foot-long spiral created with

materials found on site, at Rozel Point (Great Salt Lake, Utah). For Heizers most iconic work,

Double Negative (1969-70), bulldozers moved 240.000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone from two

sides of a valley wall in Mormon Mesa (Nevada), leaving a negative space in between. Both

39
Interview with Samuel Wagstaff reproduced in Art in Theory, 760.
40
Kaprow, The Shape of the Art Environment, 32-33.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

projects were sponsored by Virginia Dwan.41 Because of their relationship with landscape and

site, they seem to demand the viewers on site bodily experience. However, since they are

extremely difficult to access, their public life largely relies on their documentation. As critic

Dore Ahston observed about Land Art: The orchid in the jungle does not go unseen. If it is not

actually seen, it is photographed, reproduced, talked about, documented ad absurdum.42

Art scholarship and criticism has emphasized a politized reading of Land Art as a

movement that opposed commoditization and institutionalization. Since their inception, however,

Heizer and Smithsons ambitious projects needed collectors, patrons, dealers, and museums.43

Furthermore, the artists were invested in their projects public presentation and distribution.

Smithson not only was not opposed to museums, 44 but in fact he cared about offering complex

and critical presentations of his projects. For instance, he produced an essay and a film as

constitutive parts of the Spiral Jetty project. Heizer, for his part, prohibited the reproduction of

his on site works in publications and shows, except for those he could supervise.45

Heizers gesture should not be read as anti-institutional, but more in relation to his

interest to control how his work is depicted. In 2012, he installed his Levitated Mass (fig. 14), a

21-foot-high rock excavated from Californias Jurupa Mountains, in the outside walls of the Los

Angeles county Museum of Art. The piece (conceived for the first time in 1969) played with

41
On Spiral Jetty, see Roberts, Mirror-Travels: 114-139. On Double Negative, see Philipp von Rosen, Michel
Heizer. Outside and inside the white cube (Mnchen: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 2005, 41-66).
42
Dore Ashton, Exercises in Anti-Style: Six Ways of Regarding Un, In, and Anti-Form, Arts Magazine 43, n. 6
(April 1969): 45-47.
43
In 1985, Heizers Double Negative (1969-70) was donated by Virginal Dwan to the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles. In 1999, Dia Art Foundation acquired Smithsons Spiral Jetty (1970) from the artists estate.
44
Smithsons view on museums was less cynicalor in any case, more dialecticalthan Kaprows. See What is
a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson [1967], reproduced in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, 43-51.
45
In addition to Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse (1984), he also supervised the publication of: Michael Heizer,
exh. cat., ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997); Michael Heizer: Altars, exh. cat., ed. Kara Vander
Weg (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2015).

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

negative space in a similar way than his Nevada Depressions, Displaced/ Replaced Mass

(1969-77), and Double Negative; and a previous version had been installed in 1982 at Madison

Avenue (New York).46 Heizers massive 2012 sculpture, in the middle of the museum, suggests

that his previous works were prompted neither by a rejection of the institution nor by a need of

dematerialization, but as a negotiation with the available exhibition options of the late-1960s. By

the 2010s, the institutional possibilities were larger.

The purpose of this paper was to show that Smithson and Heizers works were not

politicized critiques of the commoditization and institutionalization, but negotiations with

Minimalisms theories and display practices. While Smithsons use of site and photography was

a way of complicating Judds literalness by adding references beyond the specific object,

Heizers use of landscape and photographs was a strategy to produce an unconventional sense of

monumentality also explored by Newman. Far from aiming at dematerialization, they both took

advantage of the materiality of the land and its documentation. Other aspects could be explored

as the causes of the turn to the land by these artists, and other artists equally relevant for what

now has come to be called Land Art could be mentioned.47 For this paper, I tried to understand

the turn to the land and the site as an aesthetic negotiation with Minimalisms rhetoric.

46
See Michael Heizer: Sculptures in Reverse, 48.
47
I have not mentioned, for instance, the Americanist rhetoric that both Heizer and Smithson maintained. Also, I
have not mentioned how artists such as Walter De Maria, Christo, and Jeanne Claudes works were also attempts to
collaborate with experts beyond the art system, such as engineers and constructors.

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 US Art 1960-1990 Final Paper

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