Timeline of Art History

Body/Landscape: Photography and the Reconfiguration of the Sculptural Object

At the same time that some sculptors turned outward toward the wider landscape, others turned in upon their own bodies as both the subject and object of sculptural activity.
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Leap into the Void, Yves Klein  French, Gelatin silver print
Multiple artists/makers
1960
Untitled, from the performance "Hochzeit" (Marriage), Rudolf Schwarzkogler  Austrian, Gelatin silver print
Rudolf Schwarzkogler
Ludwig Hoffenreich
1965
Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica, Robert Smithson  American, Photostat
Robert Smithson
1966
Annual Rings, Dennis Oppenheim  American, Gelatin silver print(s), ink on paper, photomechanical prints, wax crayon
Dennis Oppenheim
1968
Toe-Touch, Vito Acconci  American, Gelatin silver print
Vito Acconci
1969
Svolgere la propria pelle, Giuseppe Penone  Italian, Gelatin silver print
Giuseppe Penone
1970–71
Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah / Reclamation Project, Robert Smithson  American, Photostat and plastic overlay with wax pencil
Robert Smithson
1973
Untitled, Charles Ray  American, Gelatin silver print
Charles Ray
1973, printed 1989
Splitting, Gordon Matta-Clark  American, Chromogenic prints mounted on board
Gordon Matta-Clark
1974

Just as photography had introduced ideas of seriality and industrial processes into the practice of painting, the medium was similarly crucial in recasting the idea of sculpture in the 1960s and early 1970s. In place of the hard-edged geometries of Minimalism, artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Lynda Benglis began working with a wider array of malleable materials, from molten lead and neon to felt and dirt—substances that retained traces of the artist’s forming gestures and clung to or sullied the space that they occupied, in opposition to Minimalism’s smooth, ordered forms. Others similarly trained in Minimalism tried to liberate sculpture from the gallery and museum altogether, making works that were inextricably bound to their site. Like Serra and Bruce Nauman, earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Michael Heizer were also fascinated by process and gesture, but installed their works in ravaged industrial sites and far-flung corners of the world, creating pieces that were largely dependent upon photography as witness to their existence; the most famous earthwork is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)—a 1,500-foot sculpture made of mud, salt crystals, and rock coiling over ten acres of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

At the same time that some sculptors turned outward toward the wider landscape, others turned in upon their own bodies as both the subject and object of sculptural activity. One work that brilliantly moved in both directions simultaneously was Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking from 1967, in which the artist repeatedly trod across a field in the English countryside to form a temporary imprint in the earth that was given longer life in the act of photographic documentation. Between 1966 and 1968, Nauman retreated to the studio to make a landmark series of films, videos, and photographs in which he performed complex series of movements or activities such as keeping two balls bouncing simultaneously over long periods of time, juxtaposing the clarity and simplicity of the conceptual directive with the body’s attempts to keep pace.

Vito Acconci moved from the practice of poetry into video, performance, and photography not simply to document an ephemeral event but within a systematic exploration of his body’s “occupancy” of public space (the street, theater proscenium) through the execution of preconceived actions or activities. Acconci created his perhaps best-known work over the course of three weeks in October 1969, during which time he followed a stranger until that person entered a private space; the artist recorded these pursuits in photographs (made by a third party) and a written log. By keying his own movements to the perambulations of randomly chosen pedestrians, Acconci attempted to reconceive the role of the artist as a keenly attentive mirror to the world; as the artist described it, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of [the] scheme.”


Contributors

Douglas Eklund
Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004


Further Reading

Warr, Tracey, ed. The Artist's Body. London: Phaidon, 2000.


Citation

View Citations

Eklund, Douglas. “Body/Landscape: Photography and the Reconfiguration of the Sculptural Object.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bola/hd_bola.htm (October 2004)