Land Art - William Malpas

A fully illustrated and complete guide to land and environmental art.

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

This new book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site • Hans Haacke's Conceptual art • Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks • Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks • Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, • Robert Morris's environments • Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field • David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments • Hamish Fulton's walks and words • Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles • Richard Long and his art of walking • Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures • Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes • Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions • Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads • Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures • and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

Here are towers, stars, stones, pools, tunnels, pipes,maps, chasms, ladders, mounds, scars, mirrors, cones, furrows, mazes, circles, hills and gardens.