Very Large Art
The human urge to create is sometimes expressed on a very large scale.
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For 44 years, artist Michael Heizer has labored in the remote Nevada desert on City, a vast sculpture that he hopes will inspire awe and wonder for millennia to come.
His vision is deeply personal, but his urge to use the surface of the earth as a giant canvas is far from unique. Heizer is part of a "Land Art" movement that is inspired by works that date back thousands of years.
In England, the Uffington White Horse, an elegantly abstracted equine figure, was carved into a hilltop some 3,000 years ago.
In Peru, the Nazca Lines were incised into arid slopes by people of the Nazca culture about 2,000 years ago. A variety of animal forms were created as well as long, linear features.
In the United States, the Serpent Mound has undulated across the Ohio landscape for at least a thousand years.
Fast forward to the past few decades and a brave band of artists who seek to express themselves on a grand scale.
They defy the conventions of the art market by creating works that are unsellable and, except to those who wish to travel to remote locations or to view them in photos, unseeable.
The most widely recognized work in this genre is no doubt Spiral Jetty, created in 1970 by Robert Smithson on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Changes in the lake level have caused the sculpture to be periodically inundated or left high and (nearly) dry.
A very different vision is being pursued in the Arizona desert by James Turrell, who is modifying a volcanic feature into a quasi-mystical exploration of light, space, place, and experience.
Turrell is adding structures, tunnels, ramps, and other features to Roden Crater, a 400,000-year-old cinder cone.
Turrell describes the work as "a gateway to the contemplation of light, time and landscape."
It is intended in part to be "a naked eye observatory of earthly and celestial events that are both predictable and continually in flux. Constructed to last for centuries to come, Roden Crater links the physical and the ephemeral, the objective with the subjective, in a transformative sensory experience."
Roden Crater, Spiral Jetty, and City are expressions of so-called high art. Large human-made marks on the land frequently serve less exalted purposes.
In central Turkey a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, has been rendered on a hillside.
The artist or artists cleverly elongated the portrait so that it would appear correctly proportioned when viewed from the ground.
Large art can serve business purposes as well. Coastal Dubai is the scene of several artificial island complexes, designed to maximize shoreline real estate and create a splash from above.
What from 30,000 feet looks like a stylized palm frond morphs, up close, into a massive luxury housing development.
Among the oldest and grandest forms of large art is, of course, the garden.
Islands of tranquillity and manicured natural beauty on the ground, they can become striking geometric abstractions from above. The French are especially adept at this art form...
A renowned example is at Château de Villandry in the Loire Valley of France.
On a more grand scale are the grounds of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris...
...where Rococo patterns are writ large across the vast palatial estate.
Not far away, in the heart of Paris, the old and new architectural geometries of the Louvre serve the cause of high art.
Some would argue that Paris itself is a form of very large art. Its grand boulevards and radial avenues are masterpieces of urban design.
Another genre of large art is the modern airport.
Airport structures and taxiways, like this terminal at Paris's Charles deGaulle Airport, form dramatic abstractions in themselves.
Some airports feature their own large art installations. Outside Schiphol International Airport near Amsterdam is the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a network of ridges and hedges which serves double duty as art and noise buffer. the piece's repeated ridges deflect and absorb sound, significantly reducing noise levels.
Island in Time, near the Munich airport, serves a less utilitarian purpose. It aims to surprise and delight travelers gazing from airplane windows.
The largest land art of all is the collective work of countless thousands of farmers and surveyors who have painted vast agricultural landscapes across much of the planet.
The United States' township and range system sliced and diced the heart of the North American continent, defying natural barriers in creating a sprawling grid of square-mile townships. This checkerboard in eastern Kansas is typical.
In drier areas of the Great Plains, center-pivot irrigation systems (this array is in western Kansas near Colby) superimpose circles onto the grid.
Older agricultural lands were parceled out over the centuries. In the Aran Islands of Ireland, stone walls fragment a rocky landscape.
Mosst breathtaking of all, perhaps, are the terraced rice paddies of Southeast Asia, as epitomized by these paddies in Yunnan, China. Photo: Jialang Gao
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