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.