In the spring of 1970, Robert Smithson directed the construction of a 460-metre spiral of black basalt rocks, earth, and salt crystals into the north-eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The project, which required a front loader, a tractor, a dump truck, and approximately 6,650 tons of material over six days, created a shape visible in its entirety only from the air. At ground level, walking the coil from its outer edge to its centre and back takes about fifteen minutes and involves the continual presence of the lake on one side, the salt flats on the other, and the peculiar quality of light that comes from walking on a white crystalline surface in the high desert.
Spiral Jetty is one of a group of large-scale works made in the American West in the late 1960s and early 1970s that are now collected under the term "Land Art" or "Earth Art." The other principal works in this category include Walter De Maria's "The Lightning Field" (1977) in New Mexico, a grid of 400 stainless steel poles across a flat plain designed to attract lightning during summer storms; Michael Heizer's "Double Negative" (1969-70), a 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone creating two facing cuts in the Nevada desert; and Heizer's ongoing "City" project, begun in 1972 and still under construction in the Nevada desert, which at completion will be the largest contemporary art installation ever made.
These works have almost nothing in common with a painting hung in a gallery or a sculpture placed on a plinth. They are not portable. They cannot be purchased and owned in the conventional sense. They require significant physical effort to visit. They change over time as weather, water, and erosion act on them. They raise fundamental questions about what a work of art is, where it is, and who it is for.
Origins: The Late 1960s and the Escape from the Gallery
Land art emerged in the context of a broader reaction against the gallery system and the commodity status of art objects in the late 1960s. Conceptual art, Minimalism, and Performance art were all, in different ways, attempting to make work that could not be commodified by dealers and collectors, that existed outside the white cube gallery and its market structures. Land art took this impulse literally: by making work that was physically located in remote landscapes, monumental in scale, and inseparable from its site, artists like Smithson, Heizer, De Maria, and Robert Morris challenged the entire institutional framework of contemporary art at once.
The gallery system adapted, as it always does. Land art was documented with photographs and films that circulated through galleries and museums; proposals, drawings, and maps for unrealised or ongoing projects were sold; the artists became celebrated figures within the institutional art world even as their work remained physically remote. The tension between the idea of escape from the market and the reality of the art world's absorptive capacity is one of the themes that Land art has generated as an ongoing conversation.
Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was the most theoretically sophisticated of the Land art movement's central figures, and Spiral Jetty is his masterwork. The spiral form was not chosen arbitrarily: Smithson was interested in entropy, the tendency of systems to move from order toward disorder, and in geological time as a framework for thinking about art's relationship to permanence and change. The Great Salt Lake site was selected for its reddish water (caused by halobacteria in the high-salinity water) and its association with historical failed industrial projects: the area had been the site of a failed oil extraction attempt, and the remnants of that failure were visible in the landscape.
The jetty has been submerged, emerged, and changed colour multiple times since its construction, depending on the water level of the lake. When Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, while surveying a potential site for a new land art project in Texas, Spiral Jetty passed to the Dia Art Foundation, which manages it today. In 2002, after years of submersion, the jetty emerged again as the lake level dropped, and it has been accessible to visitors since. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Robert Smithson, "Spiral Jetty" (1970), Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. 460 metres of black basalt, limestone rocks, earth, and salt crystals. The reddish colour of the surrounding water is caused by halobacteria. Managed by the Dia Art Foundation. Photo: CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapping the World
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935-2020) and his wife and creative partner Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) developed a practice of wrapping objects and structures in fabric: small objects in the 1950s and 1960s, then larger and larger projects culminating in the wrapping of entire buildings and landscapes. The Wrapped Reichstag (Berlin, 1995), which covered the German parliament building in 100,000 square metres of silvery fabric and 15 kilometres of rope for two weeks, and The Gates (Central Park, New York, 2005), which installed 7,503 free-hanging saffron fabric panels along 37 kilometres of walkways for sixteen days, are the most widely known.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude always insisted on three things: that no corporate or government money would be accepted, that all costs (Wrapped Reichstag cost approximately 15 million dollars) would be covered by the sale of preparatory drawings and studies; that the works would be temporary, existing for a defined period and then dismantled and the materials removed; and that the entire environmental and social impact of each project would be addressed in its planning. The scale of bureaucratic negotiation required for each project was itself a form of art-making: the Wrapped Reichstag required 24 years of negotiation with the German parliament.
After Jeanne-Claude's death in 2009, Christo continued working. His final project, "L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped" (Paris, September 2021), was completed posthumously according to his specifications, wrapping the Parisian monument in 25,000 square metres of recyclable polypropylene fabric and 3,000 metres of red rope. It attracted approximately 800,000 visitors in 16 days.
Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral and Permanent
Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) works in a quite different register from Smithson's industrial scale or Christo's monumental interventions. His practice is primarily solitary and physical: he goes to a specific place, works with materials found there (leaves, ice, stone, twigs, snow, clay, thorns), makes a sculpture or arrangement, photographs it, and then either leaves it to be changed by weather and time or dismantles it himself. Many of his works last hours or days; some, made from ice or snow, last minutes.
Goldsworthy's photographs, the primary form in which his work is collected and distributed, are therefore records of objects that no longer exist in their original form, or whose original form is already changing by the time the photograph is taken. This relationship between the physical act of making, the material presence of the work, and its inevitable transformation is central to what the work is about. A cairn of flat stones balanced in a riverbed, visible only for a few hours before the tide or current dissolves it, is not a lesser work than a permanent sculpture. It is a work specifically about the conditions of its own existence.
Andy Goldsworthy, "Coppice Room" at Hooke Park, Dorset. Unlike most of his ephemeral outdoor work, this is a permanent architectural structure. Goldsworthy's practice spans the full range from works that last minutes to permanent stone walls in museum collections. Image: CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
Land Art and Sustainability
The relationship between land art and environmental concerns is complicated and has evolved significantly since the movement's origins. The first generation of land art was often physically invasive: Heizer's "Double Negative" involved blasting and displacing enormous quantities of rock; Smithson's jetty was built with heavy machinery. The scale and physical intervention of this work sits uneasily with contemporary environmental sensibilities, however sophisticated the theoretical engagement with entropy and geological time that accompanied it.
Later practitioners, including Goldsworthy and the Finnish land artist Nils-Udo, work with materials found on site, make no permanent alterations to the landscape, and treat the land as a partner rather than a medium to be shaped. Environmental art in the broader sense, including the large-scale ecological restoration projects associated with artists like Agnes Denes (whose "Wheatfield: A Confrontation" of 1982 planted two acres of wheat on a landfill in lower Manhattan) and more recent practitioners working with rewilding, carbon sequestration, and ecological repair, extends the land art tradition into direct environmental action.
By 2026, the intersection of art and ecology is one of the most active areas in contemporary practice, with artists, scientists, landscape architects, and activists working in overlapping territory. The question of what counts as "art" in this expanded field, and who has the authority to make and maintain works in public landscapes, remains productively unresolved. For the broader context of how artists work with site and space, the installation art guide covers the gallery-based end of the same impulse. For how art engages with political and social questions including the environment, see the art and protest guide. The understanding scale guide explores why the physical size of a work changes what it means and does, a central question for any art that measures its ambition in acres.
