Land art, which was born in late 1967 and could be considered an effective supporter of E. A. T. (Experiments in Art merd Technology) in the United States, draws the artist's attention to the uninhabited nature.
Towards the end of the sixties, artists began to engage in various creative activities outside the walls of well-appointed galleries and museums. There were those who carried out the departure with such momentum that they did not stop until the deserts of Nevada or Utah. Some were able to use graders and diggers to dig huge trenches or raise monumental ramps — perhaps to give aeronauts and astronauts signals that could be registered from a cosmic distance.
The initial and timid orientation towards the “non-gallery art” that can be realized on a landscape scale has led many artists to look for new possibilities for visual culture here in this area. and the expanses of space all first entered the now-expanded village studios of modern American artists as real creative "materials."
Land art, (landscape art)
The philosophical definitions and conclusions of minimal art that prophesy the disappearance and immateriality of art foreshadowed attempts to break free from the grip of "social determination." Nature, still seemingly independent of man, has eerily revived a romantic worldview, the projection of which may have been embodied in the atmosphere, in the relationship between large-scale landscape and celestial bodies, in the mystique of untouched "places", and in secret formations suggesting cultic acts.
Characteristics of the trend
Land-art again appears only as part of postmodern development. Throughout the postmodern, there has been an exodus from the gallery space (rational, sterile, "white-cube"), an opposition to the traditional gallery system (the delimitation of the physical and mental dimensions of the work), and a huge role for nature. -art also.
In land art, the geometric forms and basic features of minimal-art appear for the first time on a huge scale (exposed to the destructive veins of nature).
In general, it can be said that the artists saw the last clean material untouched by human activity in the landscape. The artists wanted to move out into the untouched areas and find clean material and opportunity for themselves. It is also about reusing the landscape. The landscape is seen as the last clean area for creation.
At the same time, it is a contradiction that these landscapes cannot be considered ecologically clean, unassailable. (In the case of Christo, the original natural balance is always restored, - but not in the case of the previous ones, in the case of Heizer and Smthson). In any case, these are extremely radical interventions in nature.
Land art also acts in defense of the spiritual past, they want to awaken the pantheistic sacrament.
Process art, land art and minimal art:
Process art is closely related to land art in order to maintain a close relationship with nature and both trends are very strongly tied to the current time.
Process art and land art were created in opposition to the last trend of modernism, the minimal arts, and to its factory-like production, structural purity, sterility, and timelessness.
Process art:
The essence of the process art: the artist's personality, shaping gestures, the artist's ego is pushed into the background as much as possible, it follows the ideas of minimalism, but opposes performance), but instead uses the internal properties of the material, metaphorically the properties of the material's movements. interprets (in this respect, Eva Hesse, who connects and interprets these transformation processes with human existence, will be important). The emphasis is on the process of creation. Nature creates works, destroys them, changes them.
In addition to the third dimension, time also appears. The direct, active, temporal dialogue of the material creates the work. Instead of a finished, finished work of art, the trend is to make time visible, especially through a series of photographs.
Process art is closely related to conceptual attitudes, as here, as in conceptual art, the work is not so much about “reality” but, above all, about itself.
Process art is an artistic attitude
In contrast to performance, which was created in the same way against minimalism (highly personal acts, personalities appeared), process artists make much more use of the impersonal means of natural processes. Organic, natural materials are used: rubber, wood, grass, ice, sawdust, oil, volatile substances, etc. Nature itself creates the work - time itself (which we have already seen in Beuys' art). Changes in matter; the importance of a personal relationship with the material; active and temporal struggle; - has already appeared in abstract expressionism and tache¬ism.
So a new process of artwork can be observed from the ’60s, again coming only from Duchamp. This is the kind of creative method that does not directly, with limited, artistic, high-artistic means, create a work of art, but on the contrary: it uses industrial work, leisure work, play, and non-artistic principles.
Artistic gestures: stacking, hanging, scattering, gluing.
Specialists: Ildi Tóth, Dénes Maróti
