Research: Photography & Land Art

As Land Art is often ephemeral photography can play an integral role.

Hamish Fulton attempts to turn the act of walking into an artwork. As there is no tangible product, the photographs taken become the only record of that the act happened.

Richard Long‘s walk based work leaves an ephemeral trace upon the landscape which he photographs. His progress through the landscape is marked in a physical way even if those markers do not last long. There is something reminiscent of the creation of stone rings and more recent crop circles which have a primitive mythos associated.

The Richard Long curators talk discusses the fact that Long’s photography moves from documentation to becoming the work of art itself. This change was surely only due to Long’s intentions when taking the photographs. Listening to this talk, time and place appear to be crucial to Long’s work but more than being themes that he investigates within his work, I was struck by the vital influence that attending St. Martin’s has had on his success. By studying at St. Martin’s in the 1960s, he was able to capitalise on the cultural movement for redefining art and pop culture in general. The curator even expresses the opinion that there were critical meetings with other figures that influenced Long’s work. Had Long attended St. Martin’s at another time or indeed not attended at all, would his work have been taken so seriously? Had Long been an Outsider artist creating the same work would the art community have seen him as so influential? Perhaps much art is a product of the artist’s time and place within their broader lives rather than just that of the subject or physical materials used.

Keith Arnatt’s Self-burial (Television Interference Project) (1969) is a sequence of images that record the artist disappearing into the ground. This representation of time is a commonly used technique known as stop frame animation. The artist has chosen to use 9 stills to complete the “burial” and this gives a sense of him slowly sinking into the ground as the viewer discerns a significant gap in time between the images.

Aleksandra Mir’s 1999 project First Woman on the Moon seems just as relevant in 2017 as it was when it was conceived. The notes on the progress of the project are, to me, just as relevant as the photography of this event. After spending her entire commission budget on advertising, she was determined to build her own lunar landscape using invention, volunteers and by convincing corporations to sponsor the project. This was an incredibly bold move and if Richard Long and Hamish Fulton’s walking can be part of their art, then surely this decision was just as much part of Mir’s artwork. That act underscores her premise: “At this point in history, it is still clear that if a woman wants to land on the moon, she will have to build it for herself.”

As an aside, looking at Hamish Fulton’s entry on the Tate website, it can be seen that the majority of the works that the Tate have purchased were done so within two years of their creation. Richard Long’s pieces have largely been donated to the Tate either by the artist himself or others. By contrast, according to Mir’s website, in 2013 “14 years after its’ realization and 7 years after it’s acquisition, Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer announces the video to finally go on an 18 month long display in the permanent collection”. Whilst it can be argued that this is coincidental or that there are other factors such as Fulton and Long being British artists etc, it would be interesting to do a study about the proportion of acquisitions by gender and also whether the acquisitions were/are available to the public. Of the 15 artists recommended by the Tate website for people viewing Mir’s webpage, only 4 are women (27%) which when you consider that since the 1960s women outnumber men the UK (and the USA) it is surprising that the representation of artists does not more accurately reflect the national demographic. There is not even a still from Mir’s work on the Tate’s webpage for the artist, nor is the work on display to the public. The only way to view the work is on Aleksandra Mir’s own website. Perhaps if a woman wants to display her own work online, she will have to build the website herself?