Land art speculation

To the Editors:

I appreciate Carter Ratcliff's recognition of "large cultural connections" in his Dec. '04 review of my book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. That nod in itself contradicts his assertion that my historical account lacks authorial analysis. I share his valuing of interpretation, so much so that it is a major critical thrust of my study. Thus I am baffled that he did not acknowledge its many instances and evaluate them. Contrary to his reductive account:

I offer a new definition of Earthworks as the earliest, though still distinct, precursor of Land Art (Chapter 10).

Against the rationales customarily given for Earthworks, I argue that the artists were not opposed to the commodification of art (they had a close relationship to their dealers, and sold ancillary work and indoor sculptures), and not interested in going "back to nature" or connecting with "Mother Nature." Indeed, they were not environmentalist but took advantage of that nascent public concern (Chapter 9).

I attribute latent content to this movement and identify its focus on death. Grouping together Andre's Grave, LeWitt's Buried Cube, Oldenburg's coffin-shaped Hole, Heizer's coffin-shaped Displaced/Replaced Mass, Smithson's spiral in a blood-red dead sea and Oppenheim's Cancelled Crop, I term these works elegiac pastorals, icons of the "demoralization of America" characteristic of the late 1960s and early '70s (Chapter 9).

Astonishingly, Ratcliff asserts that I take artists' statements as an "external axiomatic truth." Yet instances of my challenging artists' claims are too widespread to list exhaustively. Here are just a few: Michael Heizer (p. 237 and p. 287, n. 28) and Walter De Maria (pp. 236-37) on their priority; Dennis Oppenheim (p. 124) on his extra-gallery intention; Sol LeWitt (p. 277, n. 44) on the political meaning of his Buried Cube; and Robert Morris (p. 245) on the unacknowledged retitling, and thus critical updating, of his Earthwork pile for his Guggenhelm Museum retrospective. Also, I bring psychological analysis to bear on Heizer's and Smithson's works. Discussing the latter, for example, I emphasize his frequent references to death and expose biographical sources for this tendency in a childhood trauma--an issue that he himself has not acknowledged and that, to date, no other critic has examined.

Suzaan Boettger

New York City

Carter Ratcliff replies:

I said in my review that it's a mistake to take artists' statements at face value, as reliable keys to the meanings of artworks. These statements are products of the imagination, and so need to be interpreted along with the art they pretend to explicate. To put it in a phrase: the artist's statement is a genre of fiction. Suzaan Boettger's letter shows that she doesn't get this. Nonetheless, she is--as my piece notes--a serious art writer and her letter raises some serious questions about this craft. For example: where do we find the conventional wisdom that ambitious art writers try to overturn with new interpretations?

Boettger claims that a resistance to the art market and a wish to go "back to nature" are among "the rationales customarily given for Earthworks." Meanwhile, the "latent content" of these works, in her assessment, includes "a focus on death." If so, then she has indeed challenged conventional wisdom. The trouble is that a focus on death is explicit, not latent, in Robert Smithson's obsessive talk of ruins, inertia and entropy--and in the very look of his art. This "content" is explicit, as well, in the title of Andre's Grave, and hovers on the verge of explicitness in works by Heizer, Oldenburg and Oppenheim that Boettger mentions.

According to Boettger, it is "customarily" said that the Earthworkers' resisted "the commodification of art." Smithson, Heizer and the other Earthworkers indulged in occasional bursts of anti-market rhetoric, true enough, but they didn't pass up the chance to show their work in prominent galleries. Why should they? Gestures in defiance of the marketplace are less slaps in the face of would-be collectors than ironic caresses of the kind that innovative artists have been dispensing since the middle of the 19th century.

As for going 'back to nature"--no one customarily offers that as a rationale for Earthworks. So it is not news that Smithson railed against environmentalism's appeals to pristine nature. He and his fellow earthworkers were too much the sons or younger brothers of the Minimalists to view "Nature" as anything but a sappy abstraction.

When Boettger challenges what she considers to be the conventional wisdom, she arrives at conclusions that, in my view, actually constitute the conventional wisdom--a milling crowd of received ideas that cry out for fresh and rigorous interpretation. Thus, with page references, she points to "instances of [her] challenging artists' claims." But she doesn't challenge these claims so much as report the shifts they underwent. Dennis Oppenheim once said he wanted to get out of the gallery; a month later, his work appeared in a 57th Street gallery. So what? In other words, what does the first statement mean, and what is the meaning of its contradiction? Boettger never even tries to say. In 1968, she notes, Robert Morris devised a formalist rationale for Earthwork, a heap of dirt and other materials. When the same work, retitled Dirt, appeared in Morris's 1994 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Morris gave it a fresh rationale, this one a politicized variation on l'informe, a newly stylish theme of art theory: "Guts and offal ... strewn, piled, pulled out ... entropic collapse ... sickness of the times. Falling bodies. Cambodia. Kent State.... " Now, each of these rationales is immensely interesting, and the shift from one to the other has a dark brilliance. By and large, the artist's statement is a dull sort of fiction, yet Morris inflicts virtuoso changes on this tired genre. The meaning of his art owes much to chameleon revisions in what he says about it. Yet Boettger, taking his statements at face value, thinks it's enough to note--aha!--that there are inconsistencies, as if Morris were a public official and she were the sharp-eyed reporter who had caught him contradicting himself.

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