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Nature, Art, ACTIVISM 229
could not be handled, except in the form of photo documentation. The action was
a direct protest against the commodification of the art market. The title also implied
this, with its reference to a sci-fi novel titled Earthworks, which takes place in a future
America where earth is also a valuable commodity. Another novel aspect of the
exhibition was its inquiry into the essence of art (Pepper 1996; Thorsen 2008: 400).
The early land-art projects followed the path of radically rethinking the concept of
art. They aimed to liberate land art from galleries and museums — and from confined
and controlled settings in general — and to take artistic practice outdoors — into
“natural” or relatively untouched spaces, or also into marginal or neglected areas such
as freeways or despoiled and polluted sites, such as landfills and rustbelts. Their choice
of outdoor sites signaled a conscious rejection of the commercialism of the mainstream
art world and a growing awareness of environmental problems (Wylie 2007).
Land art often typically appeared in monumental works, or site-specific sculpture
projects, in the course of which the artists used the matter of the environment to
create new forms and reshape the landscape (Agnes Denes’s works), or they introduced
external materials or objects to nature to the same end (that of new forms and a
changed landscape). See, e.g. Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977).
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Several of the latter have incurred severe criticism — for the way they were created.
For the construction of Robert Smithson’s work Spiral Jetty (1970)'' in the Great
Salt Lake, 6783 tons of rock, earth and salt crystal were moved and a lot of machines
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