Place-specific art

Art, artifice and artificiality are posed as efforts that distinguish “man” from “nature” - and in fact, much of the human-created world effects this separation. Is there a way to create images and objects with/in natural systems? Is there an art that is not (or not only) about nature, but that is situated deeply within it?

Lucy Lippard (1997) notes that “Of all the art that purports to be about place, very little can be said to be truly of place” (p. 20, emphasis original). Ubiquitous landscape paintings announce the death of nature (as explored in “The Apocalypse”) or screen it from view.

This landscape is a detail from Hog Heaven, mural painted over the outside of Farmer John’s hog rendering plant in Vernon, California by Hollywood set designer Les Grimes, 1957-1968.

Beyond depicting the landscape, contemporary artists have proposed or constructed art as a means to address damaged ecologies. A difference between site-specific art and place-specific art is clarified by comparing two of these projects.

Figure 8: Michael Heizer, Water Strider of the Effigy Tumuli Sculptures, 1983-85. Photographed in 1985 just after construction and seeding. Compacted earth, 685 x 80 x 14 ft. Buffalo Rock State Park, Ottawa, IL. Photo by D. Gorton/Onyx from Beardsley 1989.

In 1983 well-known earthworks artist Michael Heizer was commissioned by the Ottawa Silica Company and State of Illinois Abandoned Mine Reclamation Council to create site-specific artwork on a landscape that mining had destroyed. Heizer designed and built five enormous earth sculptures in stylized shapes of indigenous wildlife, with reference to the 5000-year-old effigy mounds built by Native Americans in the area.

Heizer’s project, while site specific, was not place-specific. The project was very contentious locally because the mounds replaced a popular recreation area, generating much local opposition to the project. Its appropriation of Native American sacred and ceremonial imagery was problematic. The mounds never revegetated in the poisoned soil, and they have largely eroded. Heizer’s project has become infamous in discussions of ecological art, an example of what Walking artist Richard Long refers to when he describes monumental land art as a megalomaniac American invention involving bulldozers and the control of nature (Lippard, 1997, p. 188).

Working with an almost-opposite aesthetic, Salt Spring Island artist Diana Lynn Thompson created an Ephemeral Art project on public beaches in the summer of 2003. Images were created of raked sand, stones and shells. Every afternoon or evening the work would be washed away as the tide came in.

Thompson (n.d.) writes of this project: “A significant component of Gesture was the time spent tending and caretaking each place. I began each day by walking the length of the chosen beach and picking up debris - mostly plastic bags, scrap metal, glass shards and styrofoam. Sometimes I picked up globs of tar, syringes and items that could be dangerous or unhealthy for children or animals to encounter. It felt like a healing gesture to do this.”

Whereas earth art like Heizer’s involves the imposition of monumental designs on the landscape, Thompson’s process involves “giving the land itself time to speak” (Lippard, 1997, p. 188). Listening to the site is key to her work: “I used this time [of picking up garbage] to try to understand the beach and to perceive what was happening there on that particular day - the distribution of seaweed, the way the beach had been rearranged by the tides, and how people and animals were using it. I didn't begin to work until I was able to gain some insight into what would be appropriate on that beach on that particular day. That insight comes with being there, taking time and giving full attention to what was around me.”

Working with found materials and temporary installations, Thompson’s first intention is to “do no harm.” She sees her work as a gift to the beaches she loves and to the humans who happen upon it. The images are gestures of connection between humans and the landscape. The gestures seem significant, yet what they signify is indeterminable, inviting an altered relationship with the earth.

Heizer’s effigy mounds wash away in the rain, as Thompson’s gestures are washed away with the tide, revealing water’s agency and power. Both projects are addressed to the repair of damaged landscapes; both invite recognition of human limits. Is Thompson’s aim to “do no harm” a sufficient ambition for place-specific art? Or is there an art that can physically transform and restore local ecologies, with roots in the cultural and ecological specificity of place?

Lucy Lippard (1997) writes of the opportunity for place-specific art: “The potential of an activist art practice that raises consciousness about land, history, culture and place and is a catalyst for social change cannot be underestimated, even though this promise has yet to be fulfilled. … As envisionaries, artists should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant culture’s rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythical and cultural dimensions of ‘public’ experience, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historical constructions of place. The dialectic between place and change can provide the kind of no-one’s-land where artists thrive” (p. 19).

NEXT: Collaborative Aesthetic

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