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Placing Artworks in the Land
From an archaeological point of view what is most significant about contemporary environmental art is that for the first time since prehistory earthworks and sculptural forms are being placed in the landscape. For many environmental artists making the work becomes part of a process of reinterpreting its surroundings, elements and processes in the natural world. In this movement away from the confined institutional spaces of museums and galleries a new and highly specific relationship to place is being asserted in which concepts become materialized through the transformation of materials usually found in place. In the tradition of landscape painting landscapes are viewed as if through a window bordered by a frame. The illusion of perspective associated with this tradition creates an even stricter perceptual frame. And the act of framing in Western culture is indelibly associated with the notion of the picturesque. But to really see the landscape one must go through the window, feel the land and bodily experience the place. Environmental art is neither sculpture nor architecture but nonetheless retains aspects of both. The materials used have a mass and volume. Along vertical or horizontal planes they weigh on the ground and may be inserted within it. On canvas the artist can choose the point of view or perspective on the landscape, the light, the colours and textures and these become fixed. In environmental art control of all these parameters is lost. The work is constantly changing and so does its perception. This encourages self-reflection on our relationmship with, and experience of, the work. The initimate knowledge of raw materials and processes which underpin Goldsworthy's work cannot be derived from scientific abstractions but occur through the intimacy only possible through engagement in and observation of the world.
Time as well as space becomes embodied within environmental art, in a multiple sense. Time is present not simply in the production of the art but in the act of encountering and experiencing it: travelling to the site, the duration of the visit, the hour of the day, the season of the year, and so on. Experiencing the art thus involves a phenomenological synthesis of anticipation, perception and memory. Our appreciation of the work becomes anchored in the landscape and the process of walking to the site, the horizon it stands against, the colour of the earth or vegetation, the position of the sun in the sky and qualities of light create meaning. Time also has the effect of decomposing environmental art from the moment of completion: earth erodes, ditches silt, leaves rot, blooms loose their colour. For some environmental artists documenting this process is also part of the work rather than leaving it frozen in time through the photograph taken on completion. Just as the piece of environmental art changes so does the surrounding landscape. Time and change become an intrinsic part of our experience of both.
For many environmental artists the impermanence of their works is a strategy to combat an emphasis on precious commoditized objects in our culture. The setting of the work in a space without studio walls physically and conceptually limiting creative possibilities, provides a new background and a new set of references. The object is no longer self-sufficient and self-referential. While traditional sculpture is something to be looked at, many earthworks can be walked in, the viewer is inside rather than outside the work, in and of the place that has its own history and character. The primary means of documenting the existence of much environmental art is the photograph, sometimes in combination with plans, drawings and sketches. This is usually both a way of remembering the art work and an integral part of the project. De Maria's Lightning Field reaches its artistic culmination when lightning strikes one of the rods and the photograph is the only means of testimony to the event. What one chooses to document for posterity in environmental art is what Smithson (1972: 231) calls the non-site. He draws the following distinctions and suggests the site and the non-site exist as a dialectic. The former expands experience, the latter contracts:
open limits - closed limits
series of points - array of matter
outer coordinates - inner coordinates
subtraction - addition
indeterminate certainty - determinate certainty
scattered information - contained information
reflection - mirror
edge - centres
some place (physical) - no place (abstract)
many - one
SITE - NON-SITE
The land or ground from the site is placed in the representation e.g. photograph, drawing, map or plan (Non-Site) displayed in the gallery or book. The modes of experiencing each are entirely different. The non-site cannot substitute for the site. It is its domestication and transformation. The three dimensional and the two dimensional trade places. As one moves between site and non-site large scale becomes small and small scale becomes large. A point on a map expands to a land mass, a land mass contracts to a point. The non-site is a contained image with borders, the site is scattered over space, can be entered rather than contemplated. These distinctions that Smithson draws are an excellent way of contrasting a phenomenology of experience of the site and its experience through modes of visual representation. In the latter one cannot feel and therefore one cannot truly understand. It is clear that the non-site does not represent or signify the site. A dialectic between site and non-site necessarily occurs in the interpretation of environmental art because, in many cases, the reality can only be constituted as an image and the usual hierarchy of object (primary) and its representation (secondary) necessarily collapses. The object may no longer exist as the source for the image, the representation cannot be grounded in presence.
Environmental art is not primarily an art of the landscape, it is a situated art involving a complex of relationships between work and concept, work and text, work and its representation (usually photographic), work and place, work and the materials manipulated which are themselves bearers of meaning, work and space. The form created is thus at the centre of a node of relationships serving to articulate them. What then is in the work and what is outside of it becomes consistently blurred. The work spills out beyond itself and is throughly mediated.
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