Land Art och landskap : en studie av tre Land Art-projekt ochderas förhållande till landskapet

Abstract: My purpose with this thesis has been tostudy the intersection between Landscapearchitecture and Land Art. They both relateto the landscape in some way whetherit is to the urban landscape or thenatural landscape.What tangent points are there betweenthese two subjects, and can you learnsomething of the artists approach to thelandscape?Land Art is an art movement that began inthe late 60’s, what links are there to thecurrent landscape?Last summer, I travelled around the U.S.for a month and visited the three classicLand Art projects. Lightning Field in NewMexico, by Walter De Maria, Sun Tunnels inUtah, by Nancy Holt and the Spiral Jetty,also in Utah, by Robert Smithson.The sites where visited from half a day upto 24 hours and was described and analyzedwith text and photographs.To visit these sites has been crucial formy thesis and will affect my future workas a landscape architect. The use of themethod has been a thought of mine for along time, particularly to analyze ordescribe a landscape with images. But itis only in this work that I started totest it for real.I use photography as a way to describe oranalyze the landscape and it’s in one wayit’s my Claude glass, my way to catch theessence of the landscape in images.Photography is interesting because we areused to read pictures in our daily livesand work.My texts are written in a simple way butsomehow they have been an important toolas they have preserved things that areotherwise easy to forget.Colour, sound, smell, time and temperature,but above all, my impressions areimportant.It is also a way to remember and reflect ofones experience months later when you readthe text.They feel even more relevant when I laterread De Maria, Holt and Smithsons texts.They are linking the landscape and sculpturetogether in their texts and make theexperience for the spectator stronger withthat knowledge.The interviews with Jonas, Anders, Thorbjörnand Cecilia has been very interestingand opened for other inputs to thesubject than I originally thought. It wasimportant for me to be able to land an artmovement from the late 60’s in my landscapearchitecture world 2009 and to seethat it is still important now in manyways.We are still people who experience thelandscapes.In some way landscape and Land Art has thesame basic elements, but does not relateto the landscape in the same way.I think there are things to learn fromLand Art. How the artists expanded theirown discipline and found a personal inputin how to relate to the landscape and alsoa curiosity and presence in the landscape.To create a tension between the subtle,time-bound and the large-scale landscape.A Tension between the city and theisolated landscape.Landscape architecture has often a socialaspect to the landscape, interactionsbetween people. By creating a relationshipand presence to the surrounding landscape,you make the landscape more colourful.There is always a landscape to relate towhether it’s a cityscape or landscape.We need a landscapearchitecture that createspresence, experiences with our body’ssenses. Too much of the city is callingfor our attention, which affects our presencein a negative way.It is an even greater challenge to createpresence in the city.