Earth art is a worthy thing, whether it's big-scale (as in Part 1) or human-scale or even conceptual (as in Part 2). I applaud artists of any kind who feel drawn to the mineral kingdom. But the notable land artists seem to veer into land-use art instead, or landscape architecture, instead of referencing the natural artistic effects displayed, for instance, at the Badlands National Monument. Also, the line can get fuzzy between earth art, New Age kitsch, and magic-stone hoohah.
Art/Geology Trespassers
Is there no earth artist who has really set a foot in the geologist's territory? I think that Allan McCollum counts; a recent project of his involved fossil dinosaur footprints—"Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah." An interview with McCollum is good reading on art as well as people and rocks, and it includes images of the work. In researching the subject, he glommed onto an article in a scholarly collection, Dinosaur Tracks and Traces: "It seems to be a reference to abstract expressionism, and I really laughed when I found it. It also happens to be a great text about dinosaur tracks."
I like that guy.
And in fact a trained Earth scientist has made art on a grand scale—real Earth Art without the verbal baggage, enjoyable by people of all levels of sophistication. That would be Michael Wallace, who sheathed part of Albuquerque's Calabacillas Arroyo with concrete made to look like sedimentary rock beds. The "formations" even include artificial fossils, what Wallace calls anacroliths, arranged in proper stratigraphic order from the Mesozoic pentaceratops to the Cenozoic rhinoceros (an animal that evolved in North America) and the Pleistocene sabertooth tiger.
The topmost beds include human artifacts from various prehistoric and historic eras, and there is a blank bed to represent future history. Schoolkids have created "fossil" skateboard wheels to be installed in the modern-day layer. In this way Wallace puts human and geologic history together in the same mural. The city flood-control authority funded the work, and the Albuquerque Journal said the agency's director hopes this might start a trend of taking urban structures like roadways and clothing them with outfits from the local geology. Awareness of art and awareness of place would truly marry with science.
Art/Geology Collaborations
I would love to see more crossings of the boundary between art and geology. Seldom, it seems, does an artist actually sit down with a geologist. Oh, maybe a big earthworks project consulted a geomorphologist to prevent problems with erosion. But I have a notion that two people of vision, one with a sketchbook and one with a field notebook, could enjoy sharing an afternoon picnic on a hillside, waving their hands as they discuss what they see in front of them.
Something like that did in fact happen in one case, the great nuclear storage dump known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), in New Mexico. A group that included a geomorphologist and an artist set out to study just how to mark the site until its contents are safe, in ten thousand years. That amount of time—about the length of today's Holocene Epoch—is big enough for a geologist to take notice. The geomorphologist, Victor Baker, worked out what kinds of structure would endure, and the artist, Jon Lomberg, explored how monuments can warn away future visitors, even if English is long forgotten. The grim, ingenious designs that resulted are on the Web, as is the group's whole report.
But enough sitting at the screen—the student of Earth Art wants to walk! Nothing beats a stroll on the beach, especially if you happen to be on a beach near San Francisco where Jim Denevan is creating his geometric large-scale temporary artworks, scratched in the sand, as articulate as a deep breath and just as good for the head.
PS: The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (Cal-Earth) is a practical offshoot of the earth art school aimed at building low-cost housing from soil. What makes it earth art is the rhetoric surrounding it, reminiscent of Dr. Bronner's soapy sermons. But Cal-Earth's structures, like the Rumi Dome, are undeniably beautiful too.
