RURAL Contemporánea: What is land art?

Land art or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is also an art form that is created in nature, using natural materials such as soil, rock (bed rock, boulders, stones), organic media (logs, branches, leaves), and water with introduced materials such as concrete, metal, asphalt, mineral pigments. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather, the landscape is the means of their creation. Often earth moving equipment is involved. The works frequently exist in the open, located well away from civilization, left to change and erode under natural conditions. Many of the first works, created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.
The artists carry out a series of manipulations and transformations of the landscape. Usually the artworks are with a very great size and its presentation in the galleries is done through a dossier of photographs, videos or text. Great artists in this movement: Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Walter de Maria, Christo, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.
This new movement was not only leaving the workshop and the direct involvement of artists in large open spaces, but a radical change in concept and in the objectivity of the work of art that, in most cases, could only survive in time and be perceived by the observer through filter media such as photography, films, video or television, which triggered an intense debate about the nature of art and its dissemination and marketing arrangements.