Land art

Land art is a reaction to limit art to enclosed spaces such as galleries, museums, lounges or walls. The art form started to begin in 1960s in America. The main aim of land art is to bring in a new meaning and save the demolished nature. In addition, it is a reaction to metropolitan lifestyle and urbanization. It implies the importance of nature against to concretization. Land art artists see nature itself as a work of art and try to contribute to it. This art form creates by using natural materials such as rocks, stones, soil, organic materials such as leaves, flowers or water. In addition, earth moving elements are included.

The artists of land art think that art cannot be limited, it is all about nature and related to the Earth itself. They also protest contemporary artists and their materialist arts. Land art inspired from modern art such as cubism, minimalism or De Stijl. It also related with Minimalism and Conceptualism. It has a lot of contributions to contemporary architecture and create examples to utopic architecture.

The pioneer of the land art, Robert Smithson (1938-1973) published an essay called The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects and thus, the art form showed itself. In April 1970, he built his one of the most important work, Spiral Jetty on the freezing coasts of the northernmost of Salt Lake, Utah.

Michael Heizer, (1944-), another important artist of land art, aimed to create geometric abstractions. For this aim, he stated to build a kind of earthworks city consisting of massive earth and concrete forms in 1970s.

The other pioneers of land art have gone to the distinction of form, space, material and philosophy in their works but the common aim of all is to avoid limitation in art. Joseph Beuys, Andy Goldsworthy, Walter de Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, Mel Chin and Carl Andre tried to create artworks for this purpose.