In 1970, to commemorate the first Earth Day, the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg made a photomontage, setting an American bald eagle atop documentation of urban pollution and deforestation. Produced as a lithograph and distributed by the American Environment Foundation, his print made a strong statement about the state of the planet, all the more poignant because the eagle was an endangered species, threatened by DDT.
Forty-eight years after it was created, Earth Day remains an icon of environmental art. It also represents a turning point in Nature鈥檚 Nation, a major new book and accompanying exhibition on the history of art and environment in the US. Upsetting classical depictions of pristine nature, Rauschenberg鈥檚 picture was a work of political activism designed to shame viewers into responsible behaviour.
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I applaud Rauschenberg鈥檚 motivations, and am politically sympathetic toward the polemical art that has followed his lead. However, as I flip through the pages of Nature鈥檚 Nation, I find much more vigour in an equally radical break, nearly concurrent with Rauschenberg鈥檚, represented by the work of Robert Smithson and Ana Mendieta.
One of the leading American land artists, Smithson moved earth as others might push paint. Works such as Spiral Jetty, built on the Great Salt Lake in 1970, are so vast that they鈥檙e often viewed from an aeroplane. Scale was essential, as was location. As Smithson wrote in 1972, 鈥淭he artist must come out of the isolation of galleries and museums and provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists.鈥�
The work that would most fully have embodied this vision was never realised because of the artist鈥檚 premature death. In 1973, Smithson proposed to build four jetties at the bottom of Utah鈥檚 Bingham Canyon Mine, an open pit nearly half a mile deep (pictured) that filled with toxic yellow water whenever it rained. Smithson鈥檚 curling jetties were designed to transform pollution into an unforgettable visual experience. Bingham Copper Mining Pit was a sort of monument to the Anthropocene avant la lettre.
Mendieta also moved earth, but only with her own hands. Beginning in 1973, she embedded herself in natural settings, and documented her naked body covered in dirt. 鈥淚 have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),鈥� she explained in 1981. 鈥淭hrough my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth.鈥�
Captured in photography and on film, Mendieta鈥檚 works are both intimate and archetypal. In works such as her Silueta series, the artist and the earth act on one another 鈥� a mash-up of visceral experience and dreamy metaphor that transcends the exhausted clich茅 of Earth as nurturing mother.
Admittedly, Smithson and Mendieta make for an odd couple. Smithson was dismissive of the spiritual eco-feminism embraced by Mendieta, and Mendieta shrugged off the stereotypically masculine monumentalism that drove Smithson. However both stand in stark contrast to Rauschenberg for their direct engagement with their subject.
I find their differences exhilarating. The abyss between Mendieta and Smithson is the open space where environmental art can flourish today.
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Nature鈥檚 Nation: American Art and Environment by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock is published on 8 January by Yale University Press.
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