Once Dominated By Macho Men And Dynamite, Land Art Came To Life Through Women’s Work

When Beverly Buchanan set out to create a monumental work of land art in Macon, Georgia, the foreman of her rigging crew put his hardhat on her head and promised to treat her “like a woman moving furniture”. He thought he was doing her a favor. Brushing off the slight, Buchanan expertly directed the workers to position four enormous concrete footers from an abandoned restaurant in a configuration that looked accidental yet perfectly punctuated the forested grounds of Macon’s Museum of Arts and Sciences.

The year was 1979, and land art, like building construction, was strongly dominated by men. A decade earlier, Michael Heizer had famously blasted the Nevada desert with dynamite to create Double Negative. And in 1970, Robert Smithson moved six thousand tons of black basalt to form a fifteen-hundred-foot-long coil at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Works such as Double Negative and Spiral Jetty were intended to indelibly imprint the artist’s genius on landscapes treated as tabulae rasae. As a form of creative expression, land art was both innovative and effective. But macho one-upsmanship limited its expressive range and conceptual potential.

With works such as Ruins and Rituals, Buchanan was one of several dozen women who intuited other possibilities for the burgeoning art form, not because of their gender but at least partly on account of their nonalignment with expectations of manliness. As a major new exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center shows, these female artists significantly expanded the purview of land art and helped foster the transition to the environmental artworks that are so vital today.

Ephemerality is one of the qualities that female land artists embraced when most men were still focused on vicarious immortality. One stand-out was Lita Albuquerque, an artist whose early works were more fleeting than dusk. Albuquerque colored vast landscapes with nontoxic pigments. Her first work in this medium, Malibu Line (1978), was simply a shallow trench, forty-one feet in length, perpendicular to a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Filled with ultramarine pigment, the indentation in the land connected earth with sea and sky until wind blew the pigment away.

Two years later, Albuquerque significantly expanded her work, enlisting a group of students to “dance” a pigmented spiral into the desert floor. More than six hundred feet in diameter, Spine of the Earth was as monumental in scale as the land art of Albuquerque’s male colleagues, but only for an instant. It stood in stark contrast to the durability of Spiral Jetty – built to have the durability of urban infrastructure – charting a path that lasted only for as long as it was being made.

The performative nature of Albuquerque’s art, which manifested a relationship between the land and the artist, was also pursued by other women of her generation. Some of the most vigorous work, and certainly the most intimate, was created by Ana Mendieta, whose body was at the center of her practice. In 1974, Mendieta lay down in a hole in the ground and had herself covered with sod. Her breath subtlely moved the grass, showing Earth as a living being while simultaneously situating her own being within Earth’s encompassing vitality.

Grass Breathing endures only in documentation of Mendieta’s performance. At the opposite extreme are works made of concrete, none more famous than Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76). Eighteen feet long and nine feet tall, these four gray tubes rest on the floor of the Great Basin Desert, oriented to encircle the sun on the horizon during the winter and summer solstices. Holes drilled in the tunnels align with the constellations. In other words, the Sun Tunnels are instruments to focus the attention. They should not be regarded as a sculpture, but rather as conduits. The real subjects of Holt’s work are the stars, the Sun, and Earth. As heavy as they may be in physical terms, the tunnels are conceptually weightless.

Beverly Buchanan’s work in concrete is also paradoxically light. In her case, the lightness is achieved by the suppression of intentionality. The concrete footers have the appearance of ruins that only coincidentally enhance the aesthetic experience of the woods in which they’re situated. In other words, they’re not noticeable in the way that sculpture typically calls attention to itself. The relationship between figure and ground is effectively inverted. The land art recedes such that the landscape stands out.

This inversion of figure and ground, also evident in the work of Holt, Mendieta, and Albuquerque, is the essential turn from land art to environmental art. Their work is not to be found in the works that bear their name, but rather in the places where the works are situated and the act of being in those places.

Land is no longer the medium for making art; the art lives in relation to the landscape.