LAND AND ENVIRONMENTAL ART
In the 19600's the traditional landscape genre was radically transformed. Instead of seeking merely to represent nature, artists began to work directly within the landscape. Drawn by vast, uncultivated spaces of desert and mountain as well as by post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo's Running Fence and Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field. Journeys through landscapes became works of art for Richard Long, while Dennis Oppenheim used his own body to mirror the contours of the land in Parallel Stress. Taking their work outside the museum and gallery settings, artists experimented with ephemeral materials, either working with or testing the forces of nature to create sculptural, conceptual or performance works. Packed with breathtaking photographs, this is the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated book on the subject.

JEFFREY KASTNER is a New York-based critic and specialist in modern and contemporary art. Senior editor of Cabinet magazine, he was formerly a senior editor of ARTnews in New York, editor of Public Art Review in Minneapolis and a contributing editor of Art Monthly in London. As well as lecturing on art in America and Europe. Kastner has contributed reviews and essays on contemporary art and popular culture for numerous magazines, including Artforum, Art & Design, frieze and Flash Art.

BRIAN WALLIS is Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York. He has taught critical theory at Yale University and was McCracken Fellow at New York University. Wallis has authored and edited numerous books on contemporary culture, among them Art After Modernism (New Museum/David Godine, 1984) and Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995). Wallis was formerly senior editor at Art ín America and a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, where he organized several major exhibitions including a Hans Haacke retrospective in 1986. He has contributed to numerous periodicals, including Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Washington Post, New York Times, and The Village Voice.