'Not the romantic West': Site-specific art, globalization, and contemporary landscapes

Thirty years alter Earthworks artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim attempted to escape the New York art world by creating large-scale, site-specific projects in remote landscapes, a number of artists at the turn of the twenty-first century are exhibiting renewed interest in the land. In 1999 Andrea Zittel moved her studio from New York City to an abandoned homesteading cabin in the Mojave desert in order to publicly pursue her desire for a "more experimental life;" Rirkrit Tiravanij a purchased an unproductive rice paddy in a remote region of his native Thailand in 1998 to create a self-sustaining experimental "gathering place" for some of the international art world's best known artists; Matthew Coolidge founded The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Oakland, CA in 1994 and regularly takes viewers on extended bus tours of the "unusual and exemplary" land forms on the outskirts of American cities; Francis Alys recruited 500 volunteers to move a sand dune on the periphery of Lima, Peru in 2002; and since 2000 Stefano Boeri's Milan-based collective Multiplicity displays the results of its "territorial investigations" in international exhibitions. Coinciding with a moment of unprecedented art world expansion, the renewed interest in land-based projects marks both a coming to terms with the utopian impulses of early Land art and a conspicuous effort to find new methods of critically engaging with both an art world and world system assumed to have lost their "outside" positions.;Taking this trend as its object of study, this dissertation argues that the (re)turn to land-based projects today is best understood as both a product of and a response to globalization, a paradoxical phenomenon that has had significant impact on the structure and mechanisms of the art world in recent years. Globalization's influence has been particularly dramatic in the case of site-specific art, a category of artistic production exemplified by the ideals of 1970s Earthworks art, whose radical transformation from an anti-commodity, utopian practice in the 1970s to a global institutionalized working method in the 1990s has been discussed as problematically paralleling broader economic shifts associated with post-Fordism and an increasingly service-driven economy. Now requiring travel-ready artists to perform artistic "services" for various institutions around the world, site-specificity today often fends its practitioners repeating only slightly varied projects from one institution or international exhibition to the next, frequently with the interests of local tourism building initiatives in mind. While the retrograde---and often nostalgic---definitions of site, place, and locality that such work encourages is appealing to localities seeking to maximize on the aura of "uniqueness" site-specific art can offer, it has troublesome implications for the on-going relevance of the practice's historically avant-garde status.;In light of these shifts in site-specific work, this dissertation focuses on contemporary projects that seek to re-conceptualize the role of the site-specific artist by drawing on the seemingly outmoded strategies of 1970s Land art. Curiously, in a reversal of historic assumptions perpetuated in both art historical discourses and deeply entrenched cultural imaginaries (as described most notably by theorists like Raymond Williams) today's projects turn to locations coded as peripheral, rural, or otherwise remote not for the romanticized bucolic settings or simpler ways of life they suggest, but rather for their status as chaotic, indeterminate, and uncertain. Land is accordingly called upon for the complex ways it signifies, not only as a utopian symbol of escape and self determination, but also as a variable in on-going reconfigurations of local/global and center/periphery relationships, and as a locus for geopolitical debates over national borders, identity, and social change. For practitioners concerned with the politics of contemporary site-based work, these factors make the peripheral an ideal setting in which to test more complex and multivalent definitions of site appropriate to the spatial confusions and disorientations of an increasingly globalized world. More than an alluring background against which artistic practice is staged, then, land becomes a site from which to question, examine, and take the measure of globalization's influence on both the art world and the world beyond its borders.