"Isolation may be the
essence of land art, as the director and art historian James Crump says,
but if the soaring views of earthworks — straddling canyons; riddled
with lightning — in his new documentary are any indication, the genre’s
second nature is wonder. Premiering exclusively on T, the trailer for
the film “Troublemakers” reveals an intersecting group of artists in the
late ’60s and early ’70s, united equally by their communion with the
elements and their anti-authoritarian attitudes. Often shirtless and
shot in grainy black-and-white footage, some of which has never before
been shown, the literal groundbreakers profiled — such as Michael
Heizer, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson — do little to undercut
their mythologies as “difficult or headstrong or rebellious,” Crump
says. But “troublemaking can also mean instigation or stirring up the
waters, and it implies critique,” he adds, noting that land art emerged
at the same time Americans were confronting images of bombed-out
landscapes from the Vietnam War and of the cratered surface of the moon.
“There was an urgency to make the work,” Crump says — even if the
artworks, like the open vistas that animated them, defied collecting as
“an investable asset class.”
Instead, the
documentary shows how the land artists relied on free drinks at Max’s
Kansas City and on the prescience of the gallerist Virginia Dwan, whose
support (and predilection for wearing Yves Saint Laurent) grounds the
more metaphysical ambitions of trying to move heaven and earth.
Traveling from Soho to the Southwest on quintessentially American road
trips, the “Troublemakers” found larger canvases on which to create
landmarks, including Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” and her husband
Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” 1,500 feet of basalt and mud unfurling into
the krill-red northern waters of the Great Salt Lake. Other pieces are
still incomplete, more than 40 years after inception, their precise
locations guarded by the artists. For many of the earthworks, the
difficulty of getting there is part of the intention, Crump says. “The
element of not knowing where you’re going, the possibility of getting
lost or of not even finding the place.”"
This exceprt taken from the article by Su Wu via The New York Times Style Magazine
To read the full articles go to http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/land-art-smithson-holt-heizer-troublemakers-movie/?ref=t-magazine&_r=0