Comparisons

• W.H. Bartlett, Niagara Falls 
• Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

Americans discovered innate power and spiritual inspiration in natural resources of their vast landscape during the nineteenth century. This underscored the Puritan and Protestant tendencies to eschew the elaborate religious imagery of the Catholic Church and to replace icons with the real world, such as visits to Niagara Falls. This fascination with the sheer magnitude and profound influence of the American landscape was revisited in the twentieth century by artists who recalled the monuments of ancient peoples in their giant earthwork projects such as Smithson’s abstract symbolic form on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Key Topics

The natural world at the center of human artistic consciousness. How the earth has been used by artists worldwide across the last five millennia.

• The first monumental earthworks: mounds and henges and their practical and symbolic purposes, including use in burial rites, for marking out sacred spaces, and reflecting celestial orientations.

• Construction of monumental earthworks: evidence of engineering and mathematical ingenuity in early societies.

• Modern earthworks: once altering the earth itself no longer presented great difficulties, post-Industrial Revolution artists returned to the earth as a medium to express ecological concerns and to examine humanity’s place in the cosmos.