I am very excited to see what develops over the next two days in the workshop proper as well as the expanded space of the workshop created by this blog. As I will unfortunately not be able to discuss it in my presentation this afternoon, I thought I might post a fantastic quote from William C. Lipke's essay, "Earth Systems," which appeared in the Earth Art exhibition catalog. I believe it to be one of the best descriptions of what these artists were doing. He wrote,
"The artists', in their concern with natural materials and processes, use earth both as a means to expression (as a material) and as a means of expression (as a medium)...Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done."
Marin Sullivan
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Earth Art Conference 1969
Cornell University's Society for the Humanities and the Department of Art hosts the 40th Anniversary conference celebrating the February 1969 Earth Art Show. The conference held on October 17th and 18th entitled "Earth Art to Eco Art" will feature many special guests among them, Thomas Leavitt, former museum director and Dennis Oppenheim, artist participant. For more information contact mea4@cornell.edu.
To make an official post
- stop by the blogging station any time during the conferrence.
To add a comment
- follow the link under each post.
Live Video Streaming on October 17 to 18
Cornell Earth to Eco in Cornell Chronicle
Earth Art History
Earth Art Conference 1969
1 comment:
Nice quote. Expanding on this, Dennis Oppenheim observed in 1992 that minimalism had its limits, the impetus for artists to move beyond it, to expand their domain, was through phenomenology.1 In other words, where minimalism posed a challenge to the traditional distinction of sculpture as a genre was on the level of perceptual consciousness. Within this line of thinking, artistic vision becomes in a sense absorbed into the broader realm of pre-reflective, bodily sense-experience, implying that all embodied, lived experience is necessarily aesthetically qualified. If Richard Long could turn a walk, or stones he arranged into art, and if Oppenheim could make ice, water, the action of cutting, and the result of the action, into an artistic practice, then the line between what is and is not art becomes difficult to deconstruct. Therefore, what surfaced from landart, is an art object that is full of movement and ever-changing in accordance with its environment and its beholder, or, as Smithson so eloquently phrased it: ‘the refuse between mind and matter is a mine of information,’ and ‘the mind and things of certain artists are not ‘unities,’ but things in a state of arrested disruption.’2 Thus, a major contribution of landart is that it no longer seem relevant to ask ‘is it art?’ but rather, ‘is it good art?’
1.Alanna Heis, in her interview with Dennis Oppenheim, from ‘Another Point of Entry: Interview with Alanna Heiss,’ Dennis Oppenheim: Selected Works 1967-90, P.S. 1 Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1992, p.140.
2.Robert Smithson ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,’ (1968) pp. 211-215, in Kastner,
Jeffrey and Wallis, Brian (Eds.) Land and Environmental Art, London and New York, 2001, p.213.
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