Within the text, Land and Environmental Art, the prefacing survey by Bryan Wallis discusses how social practices can determine and evolutionize the site and therefore the experience. In the section, “Radical Dislocation”, Wallis characterizes early earthworks as “based upon on geographical or economic decentering..that were mostly urban oriented and were concerned with patterns of everyday life as well as the social organizations of space.” Projects such as Stanley Brouwns’s “This Way Brouwn” in which Brouwn instructed strangers to draw maps to varied locations addressed these new conceptual spatial interpretations.
Frieze Magazine provides a thoughtful review of Brouwn’s 2005 retrospective a the Van Abbe Museum that best captures Brouwn’s relationship with spatial representation and recording:
“This remarkable retrospective of this peripatetic artist’s career afforded an opportunity not only to reconsider Brouwn’s often overlooked work, with its origins in 1960s Conceptualism, but also to reflect on the legacy of that tradition in an age that seems less concerned with that period’s major preoccupations. Among these could be cited: the dematerialization of the work; the impersonality of creative processes, or the disappearance of the author; and, like the experimental literary group Oulipo, an interest in contingent rules and the permutations of a simple pattern. All of these things also appear in contemporary work, but today the focus seems to be on the personal life and self-exhibition, a desire to be immersed in experience without mediation, and the flaunting of rules, systems and codes.
Brouwn’s habitual obsessions are with geography, distance and direction, scale, measure and dimension. He is a meticulous recorder, giving every indication of keeping his counter and measuring stick close at hand. Between 1960 and 1964 he produced the seminal series ‘This Way Brouwn’, asking passers-by to sketch for him on paper the way from A to B, then appropriating their drawing by adding his stamp ‘This Way Brouwn’. Whether the artist is dealing with his own meanderings, comparing different units of measurement –1 royal cubit: old egyptian measuring unit of length 2500 b.c. (1998) and division of 1m and 1 wari (kenya) according to the golden section (1994) – proposing short walks in the direction of world cities – walk 4m in the direction of havana distance: 7396584.7166m (2005), measured from the very spot where you standing in the museum – or detailing in exact terms what lies behind a square metre section of the museum wall – ‘a 28mm cushion of air separates brick from sand-lime brick’ (1x1m wall exhibition space van abbemuseum eindhoven, 1979-2005) – a cool passion for precision seems to reign."
Wallis likens Brouwn’s mapping as well as other project confronting traditional ideas of spatial analysis, to what Edward Soja’s “spatialization of cultural politics, a radical rethinking of the intersections between social relations, space and the body..Soja cites in particular, French Sociologist Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practices to describe the way a physical place is embodied through social actions, such as peoples movements through it. Certeau’s analysis allows one to recognize in the work of 1960s Conceptual Artist ‘the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of the groups or individual s already caught in the nets of the discipline”. These ideas of the site understood through its social activation became important to understanding and recreating the vernacular landscape. Many of the artists where confronting or addressing “specific historical and social environmental contexts even as they transformed the space”.
Dennis Oppenhiem’s Annual Rings, an earthwork that involved the artist etching concentric rings into the ice on the U.S.-Canada border. Oppenheim’s photographic documentation of Annual Rings is currently part of the Measure of Time Exhibit at the UC Berkley Art Museum and below is the curator's description of the photos:
“Cutting back and forth across the boundary line, his massive artistic marks on the land (certainly mocking the Abstract Expressionist–era dominance of the artist’s gesture) not only breached political borders, but also traversed time zones."
The concept of “geopolitical boundaries” in land art is especially interesting to me because of my mild obsession with mapping. The idea of moving along and redefining physical and conceptual boundary lines coupled with the realization that natural processes would shortly reestablish their own permanence and boundaries was a central concept in earthworks and spatial representation in the landscape.
