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.~. Beyond Perception: The Ethics of Contemporary Earth Art Amanda Boetzkes Dep

.~. Beyond Perception: The Ethics of Contemporary Earth Art Amanda Boetzkes Department of Art History and Communications Studies McGill University, Montreal October, 2006 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of PhD © Amanda Boetzkes, 2006 1+1 Library and Archives Canada Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Published Heritage Branch Direction du Patrimoine de l'édition 395 Wellington Street Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada NOTICE: The author has granted a non- exclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell th es es worldwide, for commercial or non- commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. ln compliance with the Canadian Privacy Act some supporting forms may have been removed from this thesis. While these forms may be included in the document page count, their removal does not represent any loss of content from the thesis. • •• Canada AVIS: Your file Votre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-32151-5 Our file Notre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-32151-5 L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive permettant à la Bibliothèque et Archives Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public par télécommunication ou par l'Internet, prêter, distribuer et vendre des thèses partout dans le monde, à des fins commerciales ou autres, sur support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou autres formats. L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur et des droits moraux qui protège cette thèse. Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement reproduits sans son autorisation. Conformément à la loi canadienne sur la protection de la vie privée, quelques formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de cette thèse. Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. Abstract This dissertation considers the aesthetic strategies and ethical implications of contemporary earth art. Drawing from feminist and ecological critiques of phenomenology, it posits that an ethical preoccupation with the earth is identifiable in works that stage the artist's inability to condense natural phenomena into an intelligible art object thereby evidencing the earth's excess beyond the field of perception. Contemporary earth art has the paradoxical goal of evoking the sensorial plenitude of the earth without representing it as such. The first chapter analyzes Robert Smithson's monumental sculpture, the Spiral Jetty (1970), and suggests that the artist deploys the emblem of the whirlpool to express the artwork's constitutive rupture from the earth, a loss that the artwork subsequently discloses in its textual modes, including an essay and a film that document the construction of the sculpture. Chapter two examines the recurrence of the whirlpool motif and other anagrammatic shapes such as black holes, tomadoes, shells and nests, in earth art from the last three decades. In contemporary practices the whirlpool allegorizes an ethical attentiveness to the earth's alterity; not only does it thematize the artwork's separation from perpetuai natural regeneration, it signaIs the artist's withdrawal from the attempt to construct a totalizing perspective of the site. Chapter three addresses performance and installation works that feature the contact between the artist's body and the earth, and in particular, the body's role in delineating the point of friction between the earth's sensorial plenitude and its resistance to representation. Earth artists thereby assert the body as a surface that separates itself out from the earth and receives sensation of it as other. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the previous chapters through a discussion of a three-part installation by Chris Drury entitled Whorls (2005). Acknowledgments This dissertation was written with the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture, and McGill University. 1 would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Christine Ross, whose advice and feedback were invaluable. Many thanks go to Aron Vinegar, whose insistent belief in the power of imaginative thinking is an inspiration to me, and whose encouragement of this project and critical eye have been indispensable. Thanks also to Alexandra Boutros for her astute comments and recommendations for various parts of this thesis. 1 am etemally grateful to the many family members and friends who have unfailingly stood by me over the course of the PhD program: my mother, Elisabeth Gedge; my father, Gus Boetzkes and his partner Marian Morry; my grandparents Lloyd and Airini Gedge; Pauline Gedge; Tim, Dayna and Rachel Boetzkes; Deirdre and Malcolm Quemey; Wendy London; Roger Harrison; Ami Brodribb; Karine Tsoumis; and Clara Khudaverdian. A special recognition goes to Tant-pis, whose gende presence at my side every day made me look forward to another day of writing. Résumé Cette dissertation analyse les stratégies esthétiques et les implications éthiques du mouvement d'art contemporain « earth art». En s'appuyant sur les critiques féministes et écologiques de la phénoménologie, il y est démontré qu'une préoccupation éthique de la terre peut être identifiée dans le contexte d'œuvres mettant en scène l'incapacité de l'artiste à condenser les phénomènes naturels en objets d'art intelligibles, démontrant ainsi l'excès de la terre hors du champ de perception. Au cœur de l'objectif du« earth art» s'articule un paradoxe: évoquer la plénitude sensorielle de la terre sans toutefois la représenter. Le premier chapitre présente une analyse de la sculpture monumentale Spiral Jetty (1970), oeuvre de Robert Smithson. Il est suggéré que l'artiste utilise l'emblème du tourbillon afin d'exprimer la rupture constitutive de l'œuvre d'art par rapport à la terre. Cette perte est révélée dans le cadre des documents textuels accompagnant l' œuvre: un essai et un film documentant la construction de la sculpture. Le second chapitre explore la récurrence du motif du tourbillon et d'autres formes anagrammatiques, comme par exemple le trou noir, la tornade, le coquillage et le nid tels qu'ils apparaissent dans les ouvrages du « earth art» des trente dernières années. En pratiques contemporaines le tourbillon est employé comme allégorie d'une préoccupation éthique pour l'altérité de la terre. Le tourbillon incarne simultanément la séparation de l'œuvre par rapport à la régénération perpétuelle de la nature et le renoncement de l'artiste face à la construction d'une perspective totalisante du site. Le chapitre final se penche sur des performances et des installations présentant un point de contact entre le corps de l'artiste et la terre. Une attention particulière est dirigée vers le rôle du corps dans la démarcation du point de friction entre la plénitude sensorielle de la terre et sa résistance à la représentation. Conséquemment, chaque artiste présente le corps en tant que surface se séparant de la terre et recevant une sensation en tant qu'autre. La conclusion offre un résumé des principaux arguments soulevés à travers une discussion de l'œuvre Whorls (2005), une installation en trois parties de l'artiste Chris Drury. Table of Contents Introduction - Contemporary Art, Earth and the Nature of Site 1 The Limits of Site-Specificity 6 Ecology and Site-Specifie Art 14 Phenomenology and the Excess of the Barth 27 Text, Allegory and the Nature of Discursive Sites 42 Barth Art - Representing the Unrepresentable 47 Chapter 1- The Spiral Jetty: Allegory and the Loss of Site 51 The Textualization of Art 57 Allegory and the Textualization of the Spiral Jetty 65 Entropy and the Temporal Loss of Site 87 The Spiral Jetty as an Allegory of Loss 101 Conclusion 106 Chapter 2 - Contemporary Earth Art: Hollow Sculptures and the Excess of S~ Iffi The Material Object and the Intangible Site 122 The Black Hole - Passage to the Boundlessness of Site 130 Hollow Sculptures and Structural Disruptions 148 Being In and Looking at Nature 156 Conclusion 172 Chapter 3 - Facing Nature Ethically: Involutions in the Elemental 174 The Body Receiving and Surfacing the Site - Ana Mendieta's Siluetas 191 Facing the Barth as Other 202 Receptive Surfaces - Susan Derges' Photograms 206 The Ethics of Receiving - Jackie Brookner's Gift 214 Touching (Within) the Elemental Barth - Ichi Ikeda's Big Hands 220 Conclusion 225 Conclusion - Whorls 227 l Introduction - Earth, Art and the Nature of Site Since the inception of the earth art movement of the late nineteen-sixties, there has been a proliferation of new aesthetic strategies that evidence the earth in terms of its spontaneous changes, its temporality, and the intangible qualities that constitute the environments in which we live. More than just using the land as a sculptural medium, contemporary earth artists question how the elusive presence of nature informs the ways we define ourselves in relation to the planet. Though it would seem that the monumental sculptures that characterize late-sixties earthworks, and the diverse practices of contemporary earth art (including performance, photography and installation) are so different as to warrant separate aesthetic and historie categorizations, these two generations are connected by their elucidation of the earth uploads/s3/ beyond-perception-the-ethics-of-contemporary-earth-art.pdf