Some of the most famous works of land art are here in the Southwest, James Turrell’s Roden Crater in northern Arizona’s painted desert or City by Michael Heizer in Central Eastern Nevada. Massive works like these have been influential in the art world. But, today the conversation around land art in general is changing.
As a recent piece in High Country News points out, land art in the era of land acknowledgments and conversations about the land back movement is something of a conundrum. What does it mean to imprint the earth and call it art when Indigenous people have been doing that for centuries?
Cristóbal Martínez, creative director of Arizona State University’s school of Art and member of the artist collective Postcommodity, has a different take on what land art can be and said his version of land art doesn’t necessarily have to permanently alter the land.
In 2015, Postcommodity created a work called “Repellent Fence” – a miles-long line of floating balloons that stretched across the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, and only stayed up for four days.
Martinez joined The Show to discuss what land art means today and how it’s changing.
Full conversation
CRÍSTOBAL MARTÍNEZ: A lot of times when people think about land art, they think about these iconic figures in art and these figures are, are canonical. And there are artists that include Michael Heizer, Robert Smith and Nancy Holt, James Turrell. And we, we oftentimes think of their work when land art is, is sort of called to mind. And these artists have demonstrated a history of altering land in a large scale manner as a way to create art.
And so, at the time that a lot of these artists were up to doing this work, many of them did have a sense of wanting to draw attention to natural ecologies and were interested in thinking about land preservation. But, the contradiction of course, embedded in a lot of their work is that what they did do in their work was they, they altered the land and intervened or created interventions onto the land that irrevocably altered natural ecology.
And so, even though some of the artists intentions were to draw our attention to and bring us into a relationship with natural ecologies and land to be situated and to be mindful, they also created this irreconcilable dilemma where there the artworks themselves actually contradicted in many ways, the message or the situation that they were trying to create for audiences.
LAUREN GILGER: I want to ask you specifically about this idea of land art of that kind or earthwork in that way, right, in the age of land acknowledgments, right? Like, if we're saying often in culture today, “we know we're on this land that has belonged for millennia to these indigenous peoples”. Like what does it mean to alter that land, but also to sort of lay claim to it in that way?
MARTÍNEZ: Yes. So the meaning, the meaning of these works is shifting. And of course, if, if you try to contextualize land art of this era, it suddenly takes on a new meaning and these meanings are problematic. And it's a complex question to ask, because it's been noted by indigenous peoples that land acknowledgments, in and of themselves, are also problematic.
And so you sort of have, like, a stacked set of problems. The land acknowledgment itself is problematic. But at the same time, this land artwork situated within a time of land acknowledgment is problematic on top of that because it doesn't actually function in any way, oftentimes does not function as a land acknowledgment in and of itself. And it couldn't because it has created destruction onto the land. And so I think that the question you're asking, it's a problematising question.
And I think it's an important question because it leads to, to us having capacity for evaluating and understanding and thinking about this art in ways that perhaps it wasn't originally intended, which I think is good, a good thing. But, it also could lead to opportunities for deeper education around art and contemporary art and future directions for contemporary art, which would be more able to represent, to support a larger variety of human experiences.
GILGER: Right. Right. So let's talk about what that would look like and, and this idea of, of land art in a different way, thinking about it in a different way. Like you say it doesn't necessarily need to be something that permanently alters the land, right? And you've participated in projects that, that do this differently. Tell us about Repellent Fence, this project you did in 2015 and the way that that used land in a very different kind of sense.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. So, I'm an artist in the collective Postcommodity and “Repellent Fence” is a work of Postcommodity. And together, we collaborated with the cities of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora, to create a two mile long ephemeral monument, land artwork, that was lifted and intersecting the U.S.-Mexico border with one mile in the United States and one mile in Mexico over the duration of four days. The idea was to create a metaphor where all stakeholders within the region could see themselves a part of.
And so it was a generative metaphor, a metaphor that it was not a protest, it was a metaphor that allowed a diversity of people, of a diversity of stakeholders at the US Mexico border to see themselves in regardless of their political views on the border in order to come together in a highly diplomatic, generative and productive way to think a little bit about the meaning of the border. So, it was a land art work that was essentially a tool for knowing.
And so the, the idea of creating something ephemeral, something that would be up for a few days and then go away was to establish, not, not to mark the land, not to try to claim “genius” to an idea, but to catalyze a, a peaceful and respectful conversation about what it meant to be alive and living in that particular region of the world.
GILGER: It sounds like it was a really collaborative process as well. And you described it in this beautiful way that I want to ask you about, that it lives on as a, as a public memory, even though it was something that only was there for a couple of days. Talk about what that meant and what you hope it meant, I guess.
MARTÍNEZ: I think what it meant is that, art can be something much greater and we know this many of us in the field know this, so it's not, it's not an epiphany or anything, it's not a revelation of any sort. It is it that we understand that art is much, much greater than mere commodity and that we would not try to as a collective, as an indigenous collective, we were not interested in commodified the land.
And so it provides a working example of what art can be and do in the world, within the genre of land art or within any kind of art at all. So, when we get to do things like that, it leads to new ways of thinking, new ways of valuing, new ways of doing and new ways of believing.
