Uncommon Ground

I visited an exhibition this week that, in a strange sort of way, brought to my mind the debate over Andreas Gursky's photograph and whether it was art (see October 13 entry).

The display was at the National Museum, Cardiff, and featured British 'land art', in which artists used the actual substance of the landscape itself as their medium. It was at its peak in the 1970s.

For me, the question again was 'are the exhibits actually works of art?' and was prompted by the fact that British land art was so much smaller in scale to that produced elsewhere in the world that many of the original works no longer exist.  For example, Richard Long's 'A Line Made By Walking' involved him walking a straight line in a field over and over again until the grass was flattened. The exhibition featured a photo of this line. The line itself is long gone.

By contrast, land art elsewhere in the world has been on a huge scale. For example, in Australia Andrew Rogers created a 'geoglyph' of a flying creature that was so big, the creature had a wingspan of 100 metres and more than 1,500 tonnes of rock was used to construct it. The work of art was created in the landscape and stayed there. It's existence is in the landscape.


So, in the case of many examples at the Cardiff exhibition, because the original work of art had gone, the photograph of the art became the work of art itself.

I've mentioned this because I am intrigued by the changing nature of a photograph's existence. For example, what might have been a shocking image of poverty in the 1900s loses over time its initial impact as a commentary on Edwardian society, but gains a new aesthetic value. As commentator Susan Sontag wrote in her book 'On Photography', photographs are 'doomed' to become beautiful.

In the land art example, each photograph has been transformed from a simple record to a work of art in its own right that has been framed and presented on a gallery wall.

It's just one more reason why I find photography so fascinating.

Going back to the Cardiff display, the exhibit that I most enjoyed was by John Hilliard. It featured a series of photographs taken in a park showing a man holding a balloon, being smiled at by a pretty girl and being unwittingly attacked by another man. It is only when the viewer has taken in the whole sequence that they realise that all the photos are actually part of a single image. I thought that was rather clever!

· Uncommon Ground, Land Art in Britain 1966-1978, continues at the National Museum, Cardiff, Wales until January 5, 2014. This Arts Council touring exhibition will then visit Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, from January 18 to March 8 and will move to the Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, between April 5 and June 15. Visit the exhibition website for more details.