LAND ART IN TIMES OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Over the last decades, Mongolia has mastered an unparalleled political, economical and social transition in the apparent shift of Mongol identity between past and present in blending a rich and ancient nomadic heritage with all the advances of modern society. Wedged between Russia and China with a particularly deep rooted connection with the land bearing both scarcity and riches, its landlocked territory is most suitable for the radical rethinking of the relationship between Land art and socio-political agency brought forward by sustainable development.

It is telling that around the same time that BHP Billiton began their detailed exploration of natural resources of the Oyu Tolgoi area in the very south of Mongolia, the renowned Land artist Richard Long set the stones for his Nomad circle – Mongolia 1996. In 1997 there were already six geophysical surveys under way totalling 1100 drilled meters, and over the course of the next decades, the exploration and development of mineral resources would contribute in a substantial way to Mongolia’s economy.

The Dundgobi aimag, host of this year’s venue, is situated right at the middle of the complex relationship between rural and urban orientation. On the one hand, there is the extremely low population density concentrates nearly half of the population within an urban context, which thus leaves local policies of the remote areas at risk of being completely in the hands of corporate decisions. On the other hand, the fragile ecosystems of the Gobi desert call for a sustainable regional development.

In light of recent eco-critical discourse, the Land art movement must appropriate environmental modes of thinking because of its essential premise of intricately interlocking landscape and the work of art. But on the contrary, an eco-crisis – or more broadly the advent of a cultural crisis, even a crisis of representation itself – arose. Land artists had been challenged ever since by the disparity between facts and values, and more broadly, between nature and culture.

When three Englishmen embarked on a journey across the Alps in the 18th century, one of them, Joseph Addison, experienced the horrors and harmony not as an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. Immanual Kant coined this aesthetic quality distinct from beauty in his critical philosophy as the sublime – a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.

Yet – as Alain de Botton put it – fear of environmental destruction has forever changed our relationship with nature. In a landscape we explore no longer only how the mind works through its interpretation of the power, danger, and limitations posed by nature, but also the impact of global warming, the irreversibility of pollution, and the final destruction of our ecosystem. These concerns have become an inextricable part of our experience of what is considered nature or wilderness.

With the emergence of this so-called ecological sublime, Land art entered unknown territory and with that a much broader cultural context of shifting identities of social responsibility and political agency. The remote site specific to Land art, therefore, becomes focal point to the appropriation of the ecological and the environmental, as a signifier of a real, material ecological crisis.

The site-specific artwork has thus already begun to contextualize far more than its mere place. Materiality and the artistic concept are paired with socio-political realities at the intersection of environmental thought and empathetic powers of activism. The manipulation of landscape amounts to both a real, material land use and a conceptual convergence: land becomes metaphor.

By embarking on a journey both in a conceptual and a literal sense we continuously balance the metaphorical dimension of the artwork in a landscape, which eventually will lead us into past and/or future locations that are characterized by their remote qualities to build upon an unhindered relationship to the land – thus constructing and reconstructing eco-critical identities.

Land Art Mongolia set out for Ikh Gazriin Chuluu in the Dundgobi aimag in order to present this challenge to a selection of Mongolian and international artists.


Anna Aurelia Brietzke, curator

Book