Publisher Description

Catalogue printed on the occasion of the exhibition 'Robert Smithson in Texas' at the Dallas Museum of Art, November 24, 2013 - April 27, 2014

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most important artists of his generation, produced sculpture, drawings, photographs, films, and paintings in addition to the writings collected here.

A comprehensive history of the Earthworks movement provides an in-depth analysis of the forms that initiated Land Art, profiling top contributors and achievements within a context of the social and political climate of the 1960s, and noting the form's relationship to ecological movements. (Fine Arts)

This volume contains all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site, Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks, Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, Robert Morris's environments and Hamish Fulton's walks and words.

The untimely death of Robert Smithson in 1973 at age 34 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks and installations of the 1960s and '70s anticipated concerns with environmentalism and site-specific artistic production. Gary Shapiro's insightful study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity.

Publisher Description

Newly available in paperback, this landmark volume is the definitive study of the work of visionary American artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014). Since the late 1960s, Holt’s wide-ranging production has included Land art—particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973–76)—as well as significant projects in sculpture, installation, photography, film, and video. A comprehensive representation of Holt’s working process in both word and image, Alena J. Williams’s momentous publication illuminates the artist’s interest in physical space and reveals how the geographic variety and boundlessness of the American landscape afforded her numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City’s gallery walls. Contributions by a distinguished group of writers—including Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Ines Schaber, and Matthew Coolidge—chart Holt’s fascinating trajectory from her initial experiments with sound, light, and industrial materials to major site interventions and environmental sculpture. James Meyer’s valuable interview with Holt and Julia Alderson’s illustrated chronology expand our knowledge of this groundbreaking artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked. More than twenty original writings by the artist and a rare selection of her concrete poetry, documentary photographs, and preparatory drawings reveal Holt’s revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, and scale.

The work of mid-twentieth century art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig is explored in this original and timely study. An analysis of the dynamic and invigorating intellectual influences, institutional framework and legacy of his work, Between Art Practice and Psychoanalysis reveals the context within which Ehrenzweig worked, how that influenced him and those artists with whom he worked closely. Beth Williamson looks to the writing of Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes and others to elaborate Ehrenzweig?s theory of art, a theory that extends beyond the visual arts to music. In this first full-length study on his work, including an inventory of his library, previously unexamined archival material and unseen artworks sit at the heart of a book that examines Ehrenzweig?s working relationships with important British artists such as Bridget Riley, Eduardo Paolozzi and other members of the Independent Group in London in the 1950s and 1960s. In Ehrenzweig?s second book The Hidden Order of Art (1967) his thinking on Jackson Pollock is important too. It was this book that inspired American artists Robert Smithson and Robert Morris when they deployed his concept of ?dedifferentiation?. Here Williamson offers new readings of process art c. 1970 showing how Ehrenzweig?s aesthetic retains relevance beyond the immediate post-war era.

The theme is related to “Large Parks on Post-industrial Sites in Contemporary Urban Landscape Conceptions”, which is expounded in the fields of landscape architecture, landscape ecology and urban planning. A worldwide perspective is created so as to conduct cross-cultural research on the theories and practices of large-scale urban parks in North America, Germany and China. Through the scientific approach of ‘critical rationalism’, three design paradigms of large parks in different conceptions of contemporary urban landscapes are formulated based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, which are classified as the organic parks of North American ‘landscape urbanism’, the structural parks of German ‘landscape structuralism’ and the large parks of Chinese ‘urban inventory renewal’. By means of critical thinking in diverse cultural interpretations, the research aims to reveal remarkable similarities and differences between the cultures in the Western world according to their understanding of landscapes (coherent vs. creative), landscape and ecology (representation vs. metaphor), and landscape and life (diversity vs. unpredictability). Through theoretical analysis and case studies, it demonstrates that the international park paradigms characterised by complexity, diversity, sustainability, appropriation and identity can influence various socio-cultural, ecological, and aesthetic developments. Finally, the analytical results of the two park paradigms in Western countries are adopted in the examination of landscape architectural park models and urbanistic theoretical frameworks in China. This monograph is written primarily for scholars, professionals and students in the fields of landscape architecture, urban planning and architecture. The book, involving in-depth analysis about urban parks, green open spaces, green infrastructure and post-industrial landscapes, will have international appeal. It will appeal to readers at different levels. Above all, it may be of interest to professionals who are concerned with the topics urban parks and post-industrial landscapes, as well as Chinese scholars and experts, particularly those looking at China’s urban renewal and the ongoing transformation of post-industrial sites at different scales. This book will have strong implications for relevant urban landscape practices in China. Furthermore, it will be supported by the author’s colleagues from various countries such as Germany, Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil and China. Moreover, students to whom the author teaches courses of Landscape Architecture History and Theory and Landscape Planning and Design at BUCEA, as well as the international students at Collaborative Classes organized by BUCEA, TUM, and POLIMI (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), are encouraged to read this book.