Land and Environmental Art

Reviews / Votes

"This extraordinary book... In his Survey, Brian Wallis gives a good overview of the art historical context of the early works, demonstrating their genesis in relation to minimalism and the modernist ideologies of critics such as Greenberg and Michael Fried. He also manages to give a sense of the radical ferment of the time: the earliest earthworks were made at the height of the Vietnam War, around the time of the student riots in Paris... What makes the book invaluable is the comprehensiveness of its illustrations and the fascinating collection of documents in its final section. Divided by the colour of their headlines into artist's statements, critical comment, and writings on the cultural contexts of land and environmental art, these documents vastly expand the sweep of the book. From contemporary reviews and interviews with artists to extracts from historical texts, novels and exhibition catalogues, this section could have stood alone as a source-book and an evocation of the times and thinking behind this art."-Modern Painters

"The inclusiveness of this compendium of sparkling photographs and previously published texts... is practically encyclopaedic."-College Art Association U.A.

"Land and Environmental Art is a wonderfully conceived and lavishly packaged survey of environmental art from the 1960s to the present. It provides a rich array of resources to help readers to understand and appreciate this tradition... Were Land and Environmental Art to end here, it would already be a splendid book, but a third section, titled Documents;, offers some 100 pages of excerpts from a variety of sources, all of which have a bearing on the works presented earlier. Most of the excerpts are brief and they constitute a wonderful intellectual smorgasbord... What an enticing book this is. It is great fun to browse through at leisure and it also serves as a serious scholarly reference."-The Art Newspaper

"This worthy tome... A good coffee table book to impress those art college and environmentalist friends."-Harvey Nichols Magazine

"An excellent introductory essay by the critic Brian Wallis lists the key artists (Christo, Holt, Long, etc.), works and issues that define Land Art historically, as well as its later ramifications."-Venue

"This volume appears in a new Phaidon series, Themes and Movements, concerned with the documentation, both verbal and visual, of post-war art... All the key practitioners are here (Smithson, Heizer, De Maria, Christo, Long etc), along with some less familiar names, and the photographs - for most of us, the only access to these works - are accompanied by a generous, imaginative selection from contemporary texts."-Architects' Journal

"Land and Environmental Art is so massive it's almost land art itself... Huge, handsomely designed... The photographs in the book are gorgeous (the opening panorama of De Maria's The Lightning Field is worth the book's price alone)."-Azure Magazine

"The chief merit of this stout volume is its documentary value. Anyone interested in this sphere of art-making should acquire the book forthwith."-Burlington Magazine

"How, then, will this sumptuous offering from Phaidon be used in Britain? The hope is that it will rapidly take its place as the big book on the subject and gradually inject critical rigour and a sense of history into current British art in and about landscape. Certainly it deserves that role. Here at last are all the vital texts and images in the field gathered together and attractively arranged."-Paul Usherwood, Art Monthly