Where to See the World’s Most Remote Land Art
In the 1980 BBC series The Shock of the New, art critic Robert Hughes described land art as “one of the last acts of modernism.” By taking artworks out of white-cube galleries and into the wilderness, the practice rejects the idea of art as an object to be sold, collected, exhibited or reproduced. Instead of masses swarming a museum, land art prefers a smaller audience and their undivided attention. “Remoteness gives all efforts to see it the character of a pilgrimage,” Hughes said.
Emerging in the mid-1960s, land art was never a formalized movement, so its boundaries are hard to define—overlapping with sculpture, architecture and landscape design—though its style is typically minimalist and abstract. In essence, land art is earthbound, literally and metaphorically. The natural environment serves as the artist’s canvas, gallery, muse and source of materials. If landscape painting depicts the beauty of nature from afar, land art shatters the frame and takes you to the source of sublimity. If landscape painting is flat and picturesque, land art is spatial and theatrical.
A magnum opus, 50 years in the making, is James Turrell’s Roden Crater, built on an extinct volcano in Arizona. The observatory complex connects several of his Skyspaces via tunnels that capture light from celestial bodies and project it onto water or stone. Though the work was slated to be finished in 2024, keen observers remain hopeful that it will open any year now.
At its best, viewing a work of land art is an awe-inspiring spiritual experience that recalls the mystique of ancient monuments. It makes us humans feel tiny as we reconnect with the grandeur of the planet our species has despoiled. Michael Heizer, a pioneer of land art, said in a 1970 interview with Avalanche magazine that the genre represents a departure from art as commodity and a return to art as religion. Fittingly, given how many of these artists have gone to great lengths to guard their sites from crowds, the following works reward the traveler willing to seek them out on their own terms.
