What do you think is the relationship (differences and similarities) between Land Art and what I refer to as “Art of the Land” and/or Environmental Art? (you will need to do a bit of your own research into Environmental art.) What do you imagine to be the “psychological texture” (conflicts, atmosphere, point of view) of “site” and how can that be made visible through artistic and materially-aware intervention?
Land Art and Environmental Art involve the interactions between nature and human. Often dipping into site-specificity and ephemerality.
Land art is usually large-scale, site-specific work created with and on the landscape. Similar to installation art, land art formed to fight against commercializing art and traditional galleries. And are site-specific since they can hardly be recreated or moved to another site. One interesting conflict here, pointed out by Jason Abenap, is the alteration of land without its permission. The action indicates seeing land as property and modifying it like painting on a blank canvas. However, I am not sure how to feel about this since sometimes slight changes of the land would draw attention to it without causing much harm on it. For example, architecture and public constructions are also human’s “hubris”, only that they are more utilitarian.
Environmental art, on a broader sense, incorporates nature, land, climate, and other related topics. It focuses on ecological awareness and calls attention to the nature. Often using sustainable materials (such as biodegradable or recycled materials) or attempting to revive the environment. In contrast to land art, environmental art is taking the research and materials to form a narrative or concept.
I believe the psychological texture of site is mainly the atmosphere of the place. It can trigger different reactions to the land. And the point of view of the artist can lead the artwork to two directions, from activism to aesthetic. So conflict is also a significant aspect in natural sites, depending on to what extent humans intervenes with the environment. It may seem natural (wheatfield - a confrontation by Agnes Denes) or industrial (luminous earth grid by Stuart Williams).
In order to make the psychological texture visible, the artist can play with scale of the artwork (making something enormous or tiny), use impermanent materials to reveal the change of environment, or adding on-site interactions to the artworks that create both mental and physical experience.