Beginning in the mid-20th century, humans began to move more soil than the natural forces of erosion and volcanic activity combined – we became geological agents, as the historian of Earth wrote. environment John McNeill in Something new under the sun (2000). Land art took off around the same time, with artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria altering the outlines of remote places. Decades later, we grapple with the consequences of our past actions as diggers with a limited understanding of soils and their history. But as historian Gabrielle Hecht said argued, to say that “we” are terraforming agents responsible for the erosion or collapse of ecosystems obscures extractive histories and their uneven distribution among communities. Today’s artists often refrain from imprinting their vision on the earth, instead bringing the earth into the gallery as an archive of nature-human interactions: a cultural record of dispossession and abject ecologies, but also of resilience.
Earth artists of the previous century have also brought earth into the gallery on occasion – in the case of Walter De Maria’s recently reopened “New York Earth Room” of 1977, no less than 250 cubic meters of earth weighing 280,000 pounds. But while the provenance of the soil was not important to De Maria, it is essential for many artists working today. Kiyan Williams uses earth collected from African diaspora sites: slave castles and sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean and the southern United States. Williams’ “Meditation on the Making of America” (2019), currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., is made from soil collected around the home of the artist’s great-great-grandmother at Sainte-Croix, as well as a nearby plantation, where she was a bonded laborer. The soil is a migrant and the substructure of the nation, entwined with the lives and remains of the people who worked hard to build it.
Many 20th-century earth artists avoided the gallery to create monumental works in remote and hard-to-reach places. Their remote geographies challenged both the institutional and physical confinement of the museum and the capacity of the art market to make their work “collectible”. A striking departure was that of Robert Smithson Non-sites, bins containing rocks and other items from specific New Jersey locations that were displayed in the gallery along with maps and photos of the original site. Smithson’s Non-sites bridged the outer space and the gallery through ideas of deep time and geological processes rather than human stories. Today’s artists continue to reshape the relationship between the exterior and the interior of the gallery while rethinking visitor access and even participation in their clay works. Kapwani Kiwanga unearthed the material for her installation “Positive-Negative (Morphology)” (2018) right in front of the Musée d’art de Joliette, in Quebec, where it was exhibited.
The museum is located on Nitaskinan territory, home of the Atikamekw First Nation, which is still negotiating its land claim with the governments of Quebec and Canada. Kiwanga removed earth in front of the museum and placed it in the gallery to highlight the colonial legacies that still shape relationships with the earth. Unlike Claes Oldenburg, who dug a hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the help of two gravediggers, then filled it in the same day to create “Placid Civic Monument” (1967), the floor of the Kiwanga’s excavation was ‘cooked’ to remove all living organisms and then brought back inside. Viewers were pushed out of their placidity by being given a bucket and a protocol to return the dirt to its source. Yet the soil sterilized behaves differently once reincorporated in its original location.The artist’s intervention has thus left a scarring mark on the institutional terrain.
The current importance of soil was evident at the recent Venice Biennale. In Delcy Morelos’ “Earthly Paradise” (2022), a dark, damp floor rose above the ground to surround the viewer. Inspired by Andean and Amazonian cosmologies, the tomb-like experience was infused with the ever-present, intoxicating scent of earth mixed with cassava, cocoa, cinnamon and cloves. These are plants that have circumnavigated the globe, bringing human migrations in their wake and transforming ecosystems; they are also a reminder of the soil’s ability to absorb the dead to feed the living.
In “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” (2022) by Precious Okoyomon, the floor of the gallery that supported an ecosystem of kudzu, candy cane and swallowtail butterflies was punctuated with sculptures composed of brown wool and blood. The installation restored the ghostly presence of the laboring bodies of the past in a landscape of abundance that celebrated the resilience of non-human nature.
Artists today are rethinking the role of humans as geological agents transforming biota and landscapes. Their works are a reminder that the ground is a finite and precious bridge between the animate and inanimate worlds, the foundry of life. Unlike the monumentality of iconic land art works, these artists often engage in performative and ephemeral practices that invite the public to participate in gestures of reparation and testimony. They resist the idea of a dead earth-resource, choosing instead to reanimate the soil with past stories and future imaginaries.
