Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art

Filmmaker James Crump repeatedly invokes Stonehenge as evidence that monumental “land art” has been a mode of human expression for thousands of years, but his documentary focuses on much more recent examples—the work of American artists who, beginning in the 1960s, went into virgin areas of the continent and used the landscape itself for their medium. Troublemakers explores the work of several members of this semi-organized movement, including Charles Ross, who talks about how he chose—in the early ‘70s—the location for his earthwork sculpture Star Axis (still in progress), and it discusses the motivations for these artists (which range from theoretical questions about what constitutes art and a concern for the environment, to more self-serving ploys to grab the attention of the art world). In addition to Ross, the primary focus here is on Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Nancy Holt—along with important patron Virginia Dwan—and their works, including Smithson's Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake, Heizer's Double Negative (a huge trench in Nevada that cuts through a canyon), De Maria's The Lightning Field (involving hundreds of steel poles arranged on the New Mexico plain) and Holt's Sun Tunnels (with tubes aligned to sunrises and sunsets on the horizon). Along the way, Crumb emphasizes the practical difficulties involved in molding the terrain to the artists' visionary ambitions. Of course, one can debate the artistic value of these pieces, but Troublemakers certainly makes a strong case for their significance. Recommended. (F. Swietek)