What is called earth art (also "land art," "environmental art," or "earthworks") blends into the kind of thing that Christo has been doing for many years. Part 1 is about the big works, but there is also a great deal of medium and small-scale earth art. Let's look at two different approaches: one is working with rock and soil and land—earth in its ancient elemental sense—and the other is working with stones.
Elemental Earth Art
The first approach is typical of the giant earthworks in Part 1. At the small scale it's less common and less clear cut. Standard sculpture is taking a block and removing what's not the sculpture, or building it with clay or metal. So if an artist, like Laura Dalton at Cincinnati University, goes to an outcrop in the woods and festoons it with string as in her 1994 work "Slip," can we call it sculpture? Or if someone like Andy Goldsworthy, noted for his work with sticks, leaves and ice, digs a hole in the earth and frames it with stones, is he then an earth artist, or an elemental artist who happens to be working in earth? He is wildly popular, probably because he studiously avoids these fussy questions. So do the sculptors at Sandworld.com.
Richard Long is a maker of Six Stone Circles and similar works. The reference there, though, is clearly to ancient British culture rather than geology. And John Maine has worked on the large scale in his Chiswell Earthworks, but the statement seems to reflect the land's form rather than its geologic history.
Ian Hamilton Finlay has possibilities: His noted Little Sparta sculpture farm indicates a deep connection with land and soil. And the notorious episode of 1978, in which he withdrew from an exhibition in Scotland declaring that the absence of the exhibition would be the exhibition, suggests that the great mute gesture like "Spiral Jetty" or "Opus 40," featured in Part 1, is not beyond him.
But among these culturalists, surficialists and conceptualists, the insight of the artist, as usual, appears to be cordoned off from that of the scientist.
Perhaps wry, postmodern attitude is better. Take the virtual photography made by Wim Delvoye, featuring casual scraps of text manipulated so they appear to be carved in colossal stone letters on mountainsides. Is a work like "Time to go. catch you later, A." about pathos, bathos, or the punchline to a trilobite joke, pasted on a geological marquee?
The Art of the Stone
Another approach to earth art is picking up stones and using them ready-made. Andy Goldsworthy has done striking temporary pieces with cut and uncut stones. Celeste Roberge's "Rising Cairn," one of my favorite sculptures, makes a powerful statement with only a little more work. (See it in the illustrations to part 1.) Both artists are using stones as generic, interchangeable elements. But what of the stone itself, in its unique individuality? Anyone who ever pocketed a favored rock knows that stones can be very special. "Earth artists" seem to have a more nuanced outlook that is leery of this simplistic insight. An exception is Ben Boothby, who is focused steadfastly on paintings of beach pebbles, close up.
The Japanese, for their part, have taken that insight and cultivated it. So it is that they are masters of the traditional art of suiseki, the practice of finding and presenting natural unworked stones that induce tranquility, repose, balance—Zen rockhounding.
Suiseki can resemble mountains, temples, strange or familiar animals or plants, abstract concepts like grief, or maybe just plates of food. (For more, start from this extensive links page. California, home of so many other Japanese cultural transplants, has its own suiseki master, Felix Rivera.)
While we're here, let me single out computer artist Fred Casselman for his unpretentious "Sacred Stones," worth hanging on any desktop. Casselman also has on his site a moving study of landscape, "Heaven and Earth," based on an image blending sea and land. Every field geologist cherishes special times outdoors, and to me there is a true essence of these moments in this purely digital work.
