Artists working in the expanding field can be subdivided into the various categories discussed in the essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanding Field’. I didn’t divide my findings this way though in my previous posting, but it is a useful exercise to help understand what the concept of the ‘expanding field’ actually means for art. These below are the artists and artworks my fellow students came up with for their homework, divided into categories.

Marked Sites

Michael Hiezer ‘Double Negative’. This work is a piece of land art to be found in the Moapa Valley in Nevada. It is a good example of artwork that is created out of the landscape. Double Negative was completed in 1969. The negative here refers in part to both the natural and man-made negative space that forms the work. It shows both what is not there and what has been displaced.

Negative space in the landscape

Dennis Oppenheim ‘Cancelled Crop’. A field was harvested in the form of an X where the grain was isolated in it’s raw state, without being processed. The crop was planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of withholding it from intervention.

Not a crop circle but a crop ‘X’

Walter de Maria ‘The Lightning Field’. This artwork, from 1979, was comprised of a number of polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid one mile by one kilometer. The poles were spaced 220 feet apart. This work was intended to be experienced over an extended period of time.

I hear thunder, I hear thunder…

Michael Hansen ‘Organic Highway’. This piece of work, constructed in 1989 by Danish artist, Hansen, is a good example of a marked site; sculpture or art in the landscape.

The organic highway – a bumpy road

Andy Goldsworthy, ‘Five Men, Seventeen Days, Fifteen Boulders, One Wall’. The title says it all really.

One JCB?

 Site Construction

Robert Smithson ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’. This is an example of a work of art created within the landscape, or blended into the landscape rather than out of the landscape. This piece was created in 1970.

Partially Buried Woodshed

Charles Simonds, ‘Dwellings’. Since the early 1970s, Simonds has been carving hidden dwellings for a race of nomadic ‘Little People’ out of the urban landscape in places such as Paris, New York and Shanghai.

Houses hidden in the bricks

Axiomatic Structures

Christo, ‘Reichtstag’. Christo’s silver foil wrapped Reichtstag is a good example of an artwork that lies between architecture and not-architecture (an artwork that transforms the architectural space).

Reichtstag covered in silver

Sol LeWitt ‘Four-sided Pyramid’. This construction was installed in Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art sculpture garden in 1999.

A four-sided pyramid

 Modular Structures

Rachel Whiteread, ‘House’. This strange structure made in 1993 stood in the East End of London. The sculpture was made by taking the Victorian building and filling it with liquid concrete and then stripping away the walls and roof. The result is a rather spooky ‘negative’ of the original building.

A house’s innards

James Turrell, ‘Skyspace’. In the 1970s, Turrell began to construct his ‘skyspaces’ which were enclosed spaces open to the sky through a precise hole in the ceiling. Inside the room, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof.

Perchance to stare at the sky and dream…

Antony Gormley, ‘Field for the British Isles’. In 1993 Gormley created this amazing sea of little people. ‘Field for the British Isles’ was created as a huge assembly of around 40,000 terracotta people.

We’re all individuals!

All these are examples of art that isn’t just something to look at. The art is integrated into the landscape or the gallery space. It is site-specific and interactive.

References:

Tutorial Notes