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Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. It was created in 1970 and still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt ,earth and salt.

Michael Heizer, One complex in City, photo by Tom Vinetz, The New York Times c.1999

Earthworks is a form of art created in nature that uses natural materials such as stones, leaves, or soil.

The most well-known example is probably the enormous four-mile-long human figure in northern South Australia known as Marree Man which is both the largest example and also unique because it was created with apparently no witnesses whatsoever to the, presumably extensive, creative activity involved, and no artist or artists have ever come forward to claim it or been identified.

The term was coined by Robert Smithson, a major figure of the Land Art movement. Earthworks was first a science-fiction novel by Brian Aldiss, published in 1965, set in a world of environmental catastrophe. In 1967, Smithson took a copy of the novel with him on a trip to the Passaic River in New Jersey (where he created The Monuments of Passaic, 1967). He reused the title to describe some of his works, based on natural materials like earth and rocks, and infused with his ideas about entropy and environmental catastrophe.^[1]. Also in 1967 art critic Grace Glueck writing in the New York Times declared the first earthworks were done by Richard Saba and Douglas Leichter at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine.^[2]

See also

• Land art

External links

• ArtLex entry.
• Artist Hideout, Art of the Ancients

References

1. ^ Tiberghien, Gilles (1995). Land Art. Princeton Architectural Press. p. 18. ISBN 156898040X.  
2. ^ Grace Glueck, NY Times, October 15, 1967, Sunday, Section: Arts & Leisure, P. 138