Suzaan Boettger. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 316 pp.

Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties is a well-researched book that traces the development of earthworks from their emergence in the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. The book is organized chronologically, with occasional looks backward. Boettger defines earthworks as “sculptors’ direct manipulations of soil and terrain” (23). She documents earthworks from little-known gestures to early gallery exhibitions to large-scale independent projects in remote locations. One of the book’s strengths is the way in which the author repositions earthworks in relation to the turbulent social and political climate in which they were conceived. Examining their relationship to the zeitgeist of the 1960s, particularly to the anti-war and the environmental movements, Boettger observes that “earthworks can be retrospectively understood as multidimensional and conflicted, ambivalently ecological, political and artistic” (152). She makes room for these contradictions throughout the book.

Through detailed documentation, Boettger partially debunks the notion that artists created earthworks in order to sever ties with the commercialism of the art world. While the works were often unsaleable, they were also, in many cases, heavily dependent on funding from private sources. In the chapter titled “Nurture and Nature,” Boettger shows how patronage was an essential part of the earth art endeavor, and indeed often involved closer relationships between artists and patrons than those forged around more traditional media. Boettger also challenges the notion that earthworks were the art world’s answer to the back-to-nature movement. The connection between earthworks and the environmental movement has been an easy explanation for this genre’s evolution and positive reception. While earthworks and the environmental movement occurred simultaneously, Boettger shows the connection between them to be complex and ambivalent. Earthworks can involve reverence for nature, but also the desire to destroy and dominate it. However, critics often read earthworks as pastoral, as being “back to nature,” even when discussing a work as aggressive as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), or one of Robert Smithson’s non-sites consisting of material taken from an industrial site. In tune with the times, critics projected environmentalism and ecological commentary onto the work.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of the Hole, a 1967 work by Claes Oldenburg in which he had a trench dug and then filled up in the ground of New York’s Central Park. This work is an important departure point in the study. Not only was it an early example of artistic engagement with earth, but there was an implied anti-war statement in Oldenburg’s grave-like configuration of the piece. The timing of the Hole has a particular significance. Robert Smithson’s now legendary drive through New Jersey, resulting in his writing of "The Monuments of Passaic" (published in Artforum at the end of 1967), took place on the same weekend. The pivotal role played by Smithson in the development of earthworks is examined throughout the book. The second chapter looks at his non-sites, which he first showed at the Dwan Gallery in 1968. The third chapter investigates the role played by Smithson’s involvement with T.A.M.S. (Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton), a Manhattan-based architectural and engineering firm. Smithson became a consultant for T.A.M.S. in 1966 (a few months before he made his first contact with Virginia Dwan). He was hired to find art works that could be placed out-of-doors, in between the runways at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where they would be viewed aerially. In time he encouraged other artists to submit proposals to T.A.M.S., including Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. Their proposals are discussed in the fourth chapter, titled “The Stimulus of Aerial Art.” These proposals, as Boettger demonstrates, are helpful for understanding each artist’s thinking and contributions to the practice of earthworks.

Chapter Five, “The West as Site and Spirit,” provides an account of the importance of the western United States for “earthworkers.” Many of the artists creating earthworks in America had personal ties to the West, although they were pursuing careers on the East Coast. The mystique of the West, an entrenched aspect of American culture, made the region strongly attractive to critics and patrons as well. Boettger examines Heizer’s association with New York businessman Robert Scull, his major patron. She points out the embrace in the Eastern press of Heizer’s “Marlboro Man” cowboy image.

Chapters Six and Seven look at pioneering gallery exhibitions of earthworks. "Earth Works", the landmark 1968 Dwan Gallery show, was the first group presentation of the early form of earthworks. Held at the gallery’s prominent Fifty-seventh Street location in New York City, the exhibition included the work of ten American male artists. This exhibition was followed in 1969 by "Earth Art" at Cornell University, in Ithaca New York. Guest-curated by Willoughby Sharp, the Cornell exhibition included many of the same artists as the Dwan Gallery exhibition. However, Sharp also included Jan Dibbets and Richard Long, important Europeans whose work would have fit in with the earlier exhibition as well. Sharp wanted to correct the nationalistic chauvinism of the Dwan show. Throughout the book, Boettger herself seeks to correct a historically imbalanced focus on American earthworks. She explores European correspondences to the American use of natural and organic materials, including Arte Povera and other contemporaneous parallels. At times the transition between her discussion of the American works and the European works is weak, and the switches between the United States and Europe occasionally detract from the flow of the narrative. But ultimately the importance of including a broader international picture overrides these issues.

Earthworks flourished in America during an era in which there was a great sense of openness and limitless possibility. This was gradually replaced by disappointment; a bleaker outlook that also affected the art world. The auction of Robert Scull’s art collection in 1973 is cited in the book as an indication of the end of an era, as huge prices pushed up the market for cutting edge works, turning it into big business. Earthworks changed as well, becoming more institutionalized and commission-driven. The terminology itself changed, becoming the broader category of Land Art. Boettger concludes with the ambiguities and contradictions that she has demanded we accept throughout the book: earthworks “refuse to be precious art objects while still being aesthetically mediated creations funded by art patrons. They are not about nature, but bring viewers closer to it through illustrations of their landscapes and direct experience of wilderness locales. . . . they can be considered monumental anti-monument memorials” (245). This complex view succeeds in bringing life not only to the works, but to the artists who created them, the patrons that supported them, and the times in which they were created.