ABSTRACT
In October 1968, the Dwan Gallery in New York, acknowledging a trend that had been brewing for some time, presented an Earthworks show with exhibits by Andre, Heizer, Morris, Oldenburg, Oppenheim, Smithson, and others. Early the following year, an Earth Art exhibition was held at the Andrew Dickson White Museum, Cornell University, at which the artists, including Europeans, did actual outdoor projects, as well as indoor installations, thus establishing one of several alternatives to the art-commodity system (others include street art, performance, and video). Earth work constitutes a kind of direct dialogue with nature; some of it is arrogant, scarring the land, but more often there is a balanced give and take. Robert Smithson, who died so cruelly young in an air crash while working on his Amarillo Ramp, preferred to construct his pieces in areas that had been ruined or exhausted, virtually recycling them, as in his famous Spiral Jetty at Great Salt Lake, Utah. Like the earth work itself, his Spiral Jetty film is one of the classics of its genre. His numerous essays, poetic, scientific, provocative, dense, have been compiled and edited by his widow, the artist Nancy Holt: The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York, 1979.
