When researching Smithson and his Spiral Jetty, I stumbled across ‘Troublemakers’ the 2020 documentary about the land art movement.

From the start, the title intrigued me. I had an idea as to why they were labelled troublemakers from the reading I had done about the anti-establishment principles the movement was based on, but I wanted to find out more.

Notes

• The Land Art movement was s group in the mid 1960s who used land as both the subject and the material
• The works remain impressive even today
• Everyone at that time was an explorer and there was a hunt for as bigger canvas
• There was also a desire to end galleries and dealers and the influence they had, to give the voice back to the artist
• There was a mixed reaction with some even labelling it Satanic and Violent
• The idea was to be able to experience art
• Links to the time – Vietnam War
• Munich depression by Michael Heizer was one of the first
• The era of space travel had an influence as we saw Earth in a new perspective
• As did aerial views in general
• Duchamp’s work was all aerial

• The USA was the prime country for this to happen due to the space available out West
• Was the movement anti-gallery? Or was it a need for space?
• It alsmost created a new type of religion where people had to make pilgrimages out to see the works
• However, artists still used galleries as meeting points, to make connections and exchange ideas
• To people like Smithson, the idea was often more important than the doing
• Smithson originally tried to find land in New Jersey but nowhere was suitable
• Instead, the Earthworks show was born

• Earthworks took its name from a sci-fi book, but the show was literally art using dirt. It gave the movement the massive publicity it needed
• Walter De Maria filled the entire room with dirt

• The art is linked to ecological concerns
• Heizer’s double negative links to time as you see sirectly the layers that are in the cut outs through time
• Also has themes of process and labour too