“I Think the Best Art Feeds the Soul of Civilization. Think About All of the Art, from Day One, That Has Transcended Wars, Famines, the Fall of Empires
“I THINK THE BEST ART FEEDS THE SOUL OF CIVILIZATION. THINK ABOUT ALL OF THE ART, FROM DAY ONE, THAT HAS TRANSCENDED WARS, FAMINES, THE FALL OF EMPIRES. I THINK THAT ARTISTS CAN DIRECTLY AND INDIRECTLY ADDRESS THIS EXISTENTIAL MOMENT.” —RICHARD MISRACH 300 301 Above: Lawrence Gipe, Bisbee, large version, 2012–13, oil on unstretched canvas, 84 by 120 inches; Previous page: Lawrence Gipe, Russian Drone Painting #1 (Mir, Siberia), 2018–19, oil on canvas, 72 by 96 inches Lawrence Gipe, Study for Bisbee, 2012, oil on panel, 14 by 17 inches 302 303 Excerpt from cations, which are critical to earth art’s esthetic im- pact and dissemination. Early land artists without UNDERMINING frequent access to the “timeless” western deserts of- Lucy R. Lippard ten adopted readymade pits (quarries in New Jersey, for instance), where the “timeliness” of nearby sky- Somewhere in an indeterminate time zone between scrapers could be ignored. Smithson, Michelle Stu- the Old and New Wests loom the massive outdoor art, and Charles Simonds, among others, employed sculptures dubbed earthworks in the late 1960s, these geographically ambiguous sites as temporary now more broadly defined as land art. In the U.S., substitutes for the West. Their works are sometimes the best known of these sculptures drawn or cut inspired by the ruins of great monumental civiliza- from the earth itself, or made from its products, tions of the past. Some also visited, and lusted after, are Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun the gigantic western open pit mines (epitomized by Tunnels, the late Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, the Santa Rita/Chino pit in New Mexico, the Bing- Charles Ross’s Star Axis, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, ham pit in Nevada, and the Berkeley pit in Butte, and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and City Com- Montana).
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