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below from the top: Robert Smithson. Copper Mining Pit – Utah Recla- mation Project, 1973 Fosses 7 & 7 bis, Courcelles-lès-Lens. from Mines et Cités Minières du Nord et du Pas de Calais, photographies aériennes de 1920 à nos jours. Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990 Terril de la fosse Agache, Fenain, France. In both these photographs, the terril is literally at the end of the road.

Morris refers to Robert Smithson, whose writing and art work of the early 1970s addressed these issues directly. ‘It seems that the reclamation laws really don’t deal with specific sites, they deal with a general dream or an ideal world long gone… we have to accept the entropic condition and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly. There’s a conflict of interests. On the one side you have the idealistic ecologist and on the other side you have the profit desiring miner and you get all kinds of strange twists of landscape consciousness from such people.’ He believed that the artist had a vital role to play in negotiating this conflict. ‘Such devastated places as strip mines could be recycled in terms of earth art… Art can become a physical resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.’ 2 In 1973 Smithson sent the Kennecott Mining Company an unsolicited proposal for a reclamation artwork at the world’s largest open cast copper mine, Bingham Canyon in Utah. His proposal capitalised on the monumental nature of the site, leaving the vast spiralling ramps untouched, and simply creating a pool of bright yellow water (due to the acidity of the site) at the bottom, with four jetties that would submerge and appear in response to rain and water levels. The company never responded to his proposition as the mine was active at the time and remains so today. But it is interesting to note that the site has become an important tourist attraction; since 1992 the visitor centre has had over three million tourists and the sheer monumentality of the mine is an attraction in and of itself. Robert Morris suggested that it ‘should stand unregenerate as a powerful monument to a one-day nonexistent resource’ and he goes on to note that ‘all great monuments celebrate the leading faith of the age – or in retrospect, the prevailing idiocy.’ 3 It is not surprising that the land artists were attracted to mining sites, as the scale of industrial interventions on the land exceeded anything they could hope to achieve on limited arts funding budgets. An abandoned mine could be considered to be a ready-made art work – the artist’s job was to rethink it from mine to artwork, and find a means to communicate this transformation.

© Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montréal / VAGA, New-York (2015)

Mines et Cités Minières du Nord

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