Clip; Sátántangó, by Béla Tarr, 1994
Peter didn’t have quite enough faith to walk on the water with Jesus. Google image search.
Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969, Mormon Mesa, Overton Nevada, 50 feet deep; 1,500 feet long.
Going back to the claim that aerial shots are capable of offering comprehensive views of environmental sculptures, it has been suggested plausibly that works of land art extend beyond their immediate site, to the entirety of the remote spaces travelled in order to visit them. It is in this spirit that critic Michael Kimmelman has referred to land art as ‘the art of pilgrimage’ and art historian Suzaan Boettger has argued that, from an experiential point of view, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, 1969, could be said to begin in Las Vagas, where most visitors start their journey to the piece.
Francesco Gagliardi, Performance, Land Art, and Photography, MAP #23
The reason performance is often shot (photographer, filmed, videoed) in ways that encourage us to overlook the impact of spatial selectivity is, to a large extent, the result of an implicit subsumption of perfromance art by a visual arts tradition, rather than by the tradition of performing arts. More specifically, it is the result of an implicit, albiet paradoxical, equation of the performing body to the autonomous modernist object - an identification that is often reaffirmed through photographic framing. Attention to formal composition may help to understand the mutual imbrications between certain ways of photographically framing the performing body, the inclusion of performance in the visual arts tradition, and critical accounts of performance and body art in identifying the artist’s body as the ultimate site of the work.
Francesco Gagliardi, Performance, Land Art, and Photography, MAP #23
In relation to photographic mediation, performance bears a striking similarity to land art. This is especially evident in the case of the many works often claimed as part of the land art canon that take on performance’s defining character: ephemerality. Think of Dennis Oppenheim’s Cancelled Crop, 1969, or Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, 1967, the performative character of which is further accentuated by its explicit indexical reference to a performing body. As far as physical appearance is concerned these works, just like performance, entirely depend on photography (and film and video) for their continued existence.
Francesco Gagliardi, Performance, Land Art, and Photography, MAP #23
Often, after my work has been executed, it doesnt want to be executed again. By existing, it truncates the reasons for doing it. Thats why I’ve jumped around a lot in my career. I’ve often wondered how these serial artists can do it! How can Sol [LeWitt] sit down on another day and do another one of those drawings? My God!
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim, Cancelled Crop, 1969
(A) The route from Finsterwolde (location of wheat field) to Niece Schnapps (location of storage silo) was reduced by a factor 6x and plotted on a 154 x267 meter field.
(B) The field was then seeded following this line. In September the field was harvested in the form of an X. The grain was isolated in its raw state. Further processing withheld. (The material is planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of withholding it from a product- oriented system. Isolating this grain from further processing (production of food stuffs) becomes like stopping raw pigment from becoming an illusionistic force on canvas.)
East/West Promenading, Nov 2010
Nov 2010
Gait abnormalities, google image search
