Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts. Organized... Read more
Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts. Organized by MOCA Senior Curator Philipp Kaiser and co-curator Miwon Kwon, Professor of Art History at UCLA, the exhibition will highlight the early years of untested artistic experimentations and conclude in the mid-1970s before Land art becomes a fully institutionalized category. Rather than romanticizing notions of “return to nature” or an “escape from culture”, the exhibition will provide a comprehensive overview to reveal the complexity of the movement’s social and political engagement with the historical conditions of its time. Ends of the Earth exposes Land art as a media practice as much as a sculptural one, focusing on the extent to which language, photography, film, and television served as an integral and not a secondary or supplementary part of its formation. Over eighty artists and projects from United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Iceland, Eastern and Northern Europe, as well as North and South Americas will be included in the show. Michael Heizer’s singular work Double Negative, 1969-70, in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, will be a key feature of the programming around the exhibition. Ends of the Earth will be accompanied by a comprehensive scholarly publication featuring essays by the curators and new perspectives from younger and established art historians as well as some inserts by the most important protagonists.
