The work beyond itself: the land art seized by the cinematographic eye, a gesture that documents to do work

Abstract

In 1970, the American artist Robert Smithson built at the end of the Great Salt Lake a work that became emblematic of Land art: the Spiral Jetty. By flying in his eponymous film the Spiral Jetty over the helicopter, the artist grasps a scale report that disorients the viewer as well as prevents the work from being definitively fixed to its museum fate. In Casting a Glance, the American artist James Benning develops a reflection on the gaze, that works in the contemporary age. In a fragmentary way, the film follows Benning’s repeated stays at the Great Salt Lake to see the Spiral Jetty. Finally, the visual artist Tacita Dean also follows the steps of the Spiral Jetty in the film she dedicates to the science fiction writer JG Ballard, whose work The Voices of Time built in a future – where there is a threat of a disappearance of the species (human, animal or vegetal) –, a huge mandala in the desert. In front of these three examples, it will be necessary to wonder about this astonishing aesthetic experience of a work that does work beyond itself. In an epistemological overthrow of its own ontology, the Land art finds by the cinematographic recording, a place in the heterodox places to art and nature as inseparable entity (the cinema, the exhibition gallery...). From the various filmic modalities cited as examples, we will question the aporia of this approach.