Ancient People of the Andes, Malpass Michael A.

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

This book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site - Hans Haacke's Conceptual art - Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks - Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks - Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, - Robert Morris's environments - Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field - David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments - Hamish Fulton's walks and words - Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles - Richard Long and his art of walking - Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures - Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes - Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions - Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads - Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures - and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

This book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site - Hans Haacke's Conceptual art - Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks - Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks - Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, - Robert Morris's environments - Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field - David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments - Hamish Fulton's walks and words - Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles - Richard Long and his art of walking - Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures - Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes - Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions - Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads - Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures - and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 971861714039. 280 pages.

www.crmoon.com

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714015. 352 pages.

www.crmoon.com

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

One wonders whether Andy Goldsworthy would like to work in snow and ice more than in any other medium. In temperate snowlands one feels Goldsworthy is very much at home. Snow has all the right sorts of qualities Goldsworthy looks for in a material: it is malleable, it melts and changes, its whiteness makes for good, contrasty imagery photographically, and it seasonally alters the landscape, and later dissolves into it.

In Goldsworthy's snowworks one senses also the sheer fun working with snow. For people in most of Britain, snow is not a occurrence each year, as it is in, say, Northern Russia or Alaska. Snow can be an exciting event (but British adults usually gripe it). Snow was a perennial delight and 'shock' for Goldsworthy. In Midsummer Snowballs he wrote that 'even in winter each snowfall is a shock, unpredictable and unexpected.'

Goldsworthy retained the child-like enjoyment of snow falling in Britain throughout his life. While much of the U.K. grinds to a halt at the sight of a snowflake, Goldsworthy has the child's joy when it snows (school's cancelled, snowball fights, ice skating, sledging, and making snowmen and snowballs).

Andy Goldsworthy speaks in wonder and awe of 'the effect, the excitement' of the first snowfall. Some of this excitement comes across in Goldsworthy's snowworks. He has made, for example, patterns in the snow by rolling a snowball around a field, exactly as kids do when it snows (1982 and 1987).

Some of Goldsworthy's earliest works with snow were large snowballs. In some of these early snow pieces, Goldsworthy placed snowballs in areas such as woods and fields which didn't have any snow, so the snowballs stood out in the trees and grass (as in Ilkley, Yorkshire, 1981).

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

This book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site - Hans Haacke's Conceptual art - Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks - Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks - Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, - Robert Morris's environments - Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field - David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments - Hamish Fulton's walks and words - Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles - Richard Long and his art of walking - Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures - Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes - Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions - Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads - Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures - and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

This book explores all of the major American land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, as well as European land artists working in North America. The book includes chapters on James Turrell and his vast volcano site - Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks - Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks - Robert Morris's environments and observatories - Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field and Earth Room - Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles - Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes - Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions - Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures - and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre. And Europeans such as: Hans Haacke's Conceptual art - Richard Long and his art of walking - Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures - and Christo's wrapped buildings and islands.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714053. 328 pages.

www.crmoon.com

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he's been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were 'the more compelling artists today, concerned with 'Place' or 'Site''. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith's vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith 'the agent of endlessness'. Smith's aesthetic became part of Smithson's view of art as a complete 'site', not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were 'in some way disrupted or pulverized'. He said he was looking for a 'denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty'.

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: 'I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation'. Smithson's theory of the 'non-site' was based on 'absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence'. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the 'non-site' and 'site' are both interacting. In the 'non-site' work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. '