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beyond earth art: contemporary artists and the environment
HERBERT F. JOHNSON MUSEUM OF ART
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
ITHACA, NEW YORK
JANUARY 25-JUNE 8,2014
In February 1969, Willoughby Sharp, an independent curator, publisher, and artist, curated Earth Art at Cornell's Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. Initially conceived as part of Sharp's planned series of exhibitions devoted to the natural elementsair, earth, fire, and water-Earth Art was groundbreaking as one of the first major American university exhibitions dedicated to the production and display of land art.1 Tapping into a significant shift taking place in the art world since the early 1960s, the exhibition foregrounded dislocation: the transfer of art production and presentation to sites outside of the artist's studio and the gallerist's white cube. As critic Craig Owens wrote, viewers no longer encountered art physically, given inaccessibility or ephemerality, but through other modes such as photography, cinema, and text.2
With recent walks across the moon's surface, the far-flung Vietnam War, and student protests around the world mediated through television broadcasts, newspapers, and magazines, land art was part of a broader terrain in which embodied experience and encounter was splintered across a host of media. The use of land or earth as a medium on and through which to create art was thus fit for a practice that shuttled between mediation, dislocation, and impermanence. Undercutting minimalism's ethos and its adherence to objecthood, the artists of Sharp's Earth Art (including Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, and Günther Uecker) pushed the envelope concerning where and how viewers encountered works, and fractured the locus of site between the gallery, Cornell's campus, and the area surrounding Ithaca. Smithson exemplified the relationship between "sites" and "non-sites" with his addition to the 1969 exhibition, Mirror Displacement, an installation of mirrors in the Cayuga Salt Mine with photographic documentation inside the White Museum.
beyond earth art: contemporary artists and the environment, staged at the White Museum's successor, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, nods to Sharp's landmark exhibition. Much like the blockbuster Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, curated by Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2012, beyond earth art revisits 1960s and...