Land art and the culture of landscape

 

Aims and Objectives

The aim of this network is to explore the question of how and why landscape came to be the focus of innovative practices and thinking in the visual arts in the late 1960's - 70's. It will also address the relationship of land art and landscape study in Britain to developments elsewhere in Europe and North America.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

Year 1

• Three meetings were held in the Slade School of Art's project space, the Tate Store and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park . Participants have reflected the full range of background and perspectives originally envisaged, and a younger generation of artists, researchers and scholars has also been involved in the activities of the network, a measure of the extent of current interest in land art and its continuing legacy.

• The network's activities have extended far more widely than the schedule of meetings including the presentation of joint papers by Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleeman at two conferences ( Sculpture in Arcadia at the University of Reading and the RGS/IBG annual conference in London ).

Year 2

• This year meetings were organised in Nottingham and Bristol , both featuring invited speakers as well as the Network's regular participants.

• Continuing a theme of the first year's activities, the Nottingham meeting focused on a direct encounter with art objects in the form of Simon Cutts's personal collection of artists' publications from Tarasque, Coracle and other small presses.

• The Bristol meeting involved a conventional, paper-and-discussion based element at the Arnolfini and a peripatetic aspect, with participants walking the scenic route through the Avon Gorge in the footsteps of Richard Long, in order to reach a fuller understanding of a particular landscape as a site of performance and a space in which natural forces, technology and memory intersect in complex ways.

• The Network continues to extend its range of contacts, and in particular to develop exchanges between practitioners and historians of different generations, and these are feeding in to the development of exhibition proposals.

• Inparticular, this year's activities have seen significant extensions to our collective understanding of the research theme by the involvement of participants from the field of small press publishing and from photography. These new participants have also helped clarify the place of specific regional networks in the formation of Land Art.