Malcolm Andrews Landscape and Western Art chapter 9 Landscape into Land

From the outset of this chapter I felt that Andrews was against or at least he felt politically biased against the American land artists including artists such as Robert Smithson, I too have the same compulsion as I feel the work is macho and about dominance/containment/control – looking back at my underlining and notes in the margins I am concerned with acts of environmental change to the land through excavation and moving huge rocks, fundamentally I don’t have a problem with the concept (Neolithic man did it) but there is a political dimension, take nothing but pictures leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time therefore don't leave huge holes in a desert with alien geological rocks stuffed into them (even though the idea is good and the result quite pleasing) 

There is a sympathy with Finlay, Fulton and Long although he does question making work in unfamiliar landscapes – art tourism (my italics) ‘Longs work employs what he calls ‘the vocabulary of universal and common means;’ walking (‘my art is the act of walking itself’), wind, stones, sticks, water, roads, circles, lines. These materials are used less to represent landscape than to embody a disillusion of his experience of the land. Long has described this experience as a simplifying of life:

Like art itself (walking) is like a focus. It gets rid of a lot of things and you can actually concentrate. So getting myself into these solitary days of repetitive walking or in empty landscapes is just a certain way of emptying out or simplifying my life, just for a few days or weeks, into a fairly simple but concentrated activity...So my art is a simplification pg 215

Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfold ‘things are continuously in a state of change and flow and everything, even stone, has a sense of movement about it’ pg 220

Michael Snow pg 223 ‘I feel horror at the thought of the humanizing of the entire planet’ wrote Snow For the last 500 years western landscape art has been like a barometer of anxieties over the balance of power between nature and culture. We have come to realize that nature – that ‘out there’, that ‘other’ – is not necessarily perpetually self-renewing. It is more like ourselves than we ever feared. When it is not offering us dreams of green spaces as Utopian as ever the most artificial pastoral managed to be, landscape art in our time comes burdened with guilt.

‘I recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and machinery to a wild place, ‘wrote Snow, ‘but I didn’t colonise it, enslave it. I hardly even borrowed it.’