Alan Sonfist (ed.): Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art (1983)

Seminal collection of texts on land art and environmental art.

“A growing concern for nature has appeared worldwide over the last two decades. Art has always reflected the questioning of a society by itself and often takes an active role in the search for the answers to those questions.

A group of artists whose work makes a statement about man’s relation to nature has appeared over the last decade. These artists have at one time or another used natural substances such as earth, rocks, and plants in much of their work and have frequently constructed the work outside on natural sites. Although these artworks refer to nature, the artists’ methods, styles, and even intentions vary widely. They really cannot be said to form distinct groups but to occupy places on a broad spectrum.

At one end of the spectrum the idea of monumentality, of earth moving, is made possible by industrial tools: bulldozers, dump trucks, and so forth. These artworks were built to speak of themselves, not the land they occupy. At the other end of the spectrum there are artists pursuing the relatively new idea of cooperation with the environment, which they see as necessary because of the threat of its destruction. These artists respond sensitively to the work’s site, changing it as little as possible. This group is especially interested in stimulating an awareness of nature and the Earth.”

Texts by Joshua C. Taylor, Mark Rosenthal, Elizabeth C. Baker, Jeffrey Deitch, Michael Auping, Jack Burnham, Lawrence Alloway, Jonathan Carpenter, Pierre Restany, Donald B. Kuspit, Diana Shaffer, Grace Glueck, Kate Linker, Harold Rosenberg, Charles Traub,
Robert Rosenblum, Michael McDonough, Kenneth S. Friedman, and Jeffrey Wechsler.

Publisher Dutton, New York, 1983
ISBN 0525477020, 9780525477020
xii+274 pages
via rumblebee

WorldCat

PDF (21 MB)

Maja Fowkes: The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology Under Socialism (2015)

“Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, The Green Bloc uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, Maja Fowkes’s innovative research brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale. ”

Publisher Central European University Press, New York and Budapest, 2015
ISBN 9789633860687, 9633860687
viii+299 pages
via Memory of the World

Reviews: Katalin Cseh-Varga (Springerin, 2015, DE), Juliane Debeusscher (Critique d’art, 2018).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (32 MB)

Henry M. Sayre: The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (1989)

Looks at the development of American avant-garde art. Considers feminist performance, particularly by Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, and Carolee Schneemann; dance and collaboration as a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk; poets of the vernacular landscape and the postmodern sublime; and the application of Roland Barthes’s theories to Sayre’s own concepts of the relationship between photography and live art (ch 7).

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1989
ISBN 0226735575, 9780226735573
xvi+308 pages

Reviews: Roger F. Malina (Leonardo, 1992), George J. Leonard (LA Times, 1989).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (93 MB, no OCR)