Philip Ursprung: Political Landscape. Land Art’s Heritage

The short lived artistic movement of Earth Art – a phenomenon that reaches from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s and comprises the artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Walter De Maria and some others –, remains a source of inspiration up to the present day. Starting with an interpretation of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), Ursprung will discuss the relations of art, architecture, territory and economy. The work of art consisted of an old shed on a university campus that was covered with dirt until the roof collapsed. The act of building – digging a hole and constructing a structure – is reversed. The now dysfunctional building allows to recall that an earlier economy – agriculture – was ousted by the newly built campus. The structure remains as a phantom of an earlier economy that cannot find rest. Agriculture is latently present within the spaces of higher education.

Ursprung will argue that Earth Art is based on the encounter of Smithson with the practice of architecture and planning. He will focus on Smithson’s oeuvre and heritage under the aspect of “political landscape” (Martin Warnke), namely the relation between power and artistic representation, and he will ask what architects, artists, planners and theoreticians can learn today from the historic phenomenon of Earth Art, and how it can be applied in the context of logistics as well. Earth Art mirrors the context and contingencies of architectural practice. It is effective, Ursprung will argue, as a substitute for an absent theory of architecture.

Philip Ursprung is Dean of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich and Professor for the History of Art and Architecture. Born in Baltimore (USA), he studied in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin, and taught at Universität der Künste in Berlin, the GSAPP of Columbia University New York, the University of Zurich and the Barcelona Institute of Architecture. His research deals with the history of modern and contemporary art and architecture with a focus on North American art in the 1960s and 1970s and European architecture since the 1980s. As a visiting curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal he curated “Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the Mind” and edited the catalogue “Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History” (Montréal, CCA, 2002). Ursprung’s most recent books are “Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art” (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013) and “Representation of Labor / Performative Historiography” (Santiago de Chile, Arq Ediciones, 2018). A collection of the writings by Gordon Matta-Clark, edited together with Gwendolyn Owens, is forthcoming with University of California Press.