geology
introduction | why now ? by stephanie white
from David Suzuki’s activism to Greenpeace – was often a subtext to these investigations of space at the scale of the earth, rather than the canvas or studio or gallery. Land Arts of the American West, for example, has a program that tours installations in the southwest states of the USA, combining land art (visiting Heiser’s Double Negative for example) with the use of the American West’s vast, ‘empty’ territories for military testing – craters and irradiated landscapes, and for infrastructural projects – water management and mining. In On Site review 26:DIRT we looked at the surface of the earth as the tray upon which we conduct our lives and work, but surface is just the top thin layer of the deep geology of the earth. When the crust is cracked open, either by meteors, or volcanoes, by heat from an over-thin atmosphere, or by mining, which is by definition below the surface – when the surface is cracked, life as we know it is changed and often endangered. Environmentalism has moved beyond just the reclamation of small brownfield sites or disused mines and is now engaged at the scale of the planet; the inevitability of climate change is a global issue that transcends national projects and local political issues. The local invariably refers to the global, so one can see a similar escalation of scale in environmental art. The conversations are linked. There appears to be a recognition that surface intervention, at the scale of dirt, is only the top layer.
This issue , on architecture and things geologic, was suggested by the work of Smudge Studio and the Friends of the Pleistocene website. I came across them at a Musagetes Foundation café in Sudbury in September 2011, where they handed out their guidebook to New York, Geologic City: a field guide to the geo- architecture of New York . This was followed by the symposium The Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance , curated by Etienne Turpin of Scapegoat . The geologic turn. No doubt it is happening, this interest in identifying deep history through geology, but why is it happening? and in the sense that new art is often activist, or critical, why now? Land art has had a large influence on architecture ever since Robert Smithson’s jetties and islands of the 1960s, Alan Sonfist’s forests and Michael Heiser’s earthworks, encoded in critical books such as Lucy Lippard’s 1983 Overlay . Parallel, or co- incident to, were Richard Long’s walking projects in Britain and Andy Goldsworthy’s leaf assemblages. These were all artists who intervened in the landscape either at an uncommodifiable scale, or else to draw attention to some condition, such as the loss of the countryside in Britain. The Boyle Family’s forty years of cast sections of the earth’s surface is a record of something we sense is under threat. The growth of environmentalism and awareness of climate change – from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to the Sierra Club,
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