The series of protests in these years reflect the turbulent times that the world was living. Society was exhausted after its high expectations and ideals following the ceasing of the tragic episode of World War II and its devastating consequences were crushed. As behind these rebellions there was a desire to leave the stagnation behind, revolutions were being forged, planning to fight against social conflicts and political repression and to transform cultural paradigms. With people questioning civil codes and societal structures, everything was pointing to a radical change.

Artists played an essential role in showing social discontent. Contemporary were speaking about the issues that were shaking the world but also to show unconformity against their own institution. Some of them thought that galleries were too limited and restricted  their possibilities of expression largely because of their economic interests. They were highly against the institutions controlling them each on their own. This led them to start questioning curatorial practices of the time and consequently to explore possibilities outside the traditional frames of art practices.

In the beginning of the decade. The American art scene was only about Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. With artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Frank Stella, the primary structures and systematic painting of minimalism were at its peak. A young generation of artists wanted to go against the appraisal of manufacturing and technology and was exploring more intimate ways to connect with the world in its purest state. and against the anesthetization of high art.

Max’s Kansas City, a nightclub and restaurant, was a gathering spot for artists, poets and politicians. Artists Robert Smithson, his wife Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer and Carl Andre would frequently go and have informal talks about projects they wanted to work on. Meanwhile, Italy was completely destroyed due to World War II. Unemployment was a major issue, agriculture was in crisis, and the division between North and South was getting bigger. Post-war Italy was facing dramatic changes. In front of untacked social inequalities, inefficient social services there were a couple of reforms but they didn’t improve anything and the reformist drive was lost soon. Nevertheless this post war Italy was apparently heading to a series of dramatic changes.

The political atmosphere brought about a critical and experimental art scene. There was a lot of sensibility and flexibility with trying new materials. Jannis Kounellis transcended from the flat surface of the canvas to the space and the environment around it, this way, he started incorporating found objects in his works from organic elements to inorganic, living animals, earth, burlap sacks, gold, coal, wood, fire, metal bed frames, cotton, earth coffee, plants His approaches were closer to installations.

Giuseppe Penone’s work was focusing on representing the interaction between human beings and the world. He thought of the world as ecologically and anthropologically grounded and was making associations between nature and culture. The tree became a central piece in his work. By the mid 60s he began to sculpt industrial wooden logs into trees. By stripping away layers of softer wood following growth rings he could reach the shape of a younger tree at an early moment in its life, prior to being manufactured into becoming a beam.3

In 1964, the American artist Michael Heizer started using flat outdoor spaces as a canvas and worked  on  several  big  scale  installations  around  the  desert4.  They  were  sculptural  in their engagement with space and mass but were sited and not contained in the space of the gallery or civic space anymore. He was later joined by his colleague Walter de Maria and now working with white chalk they made pieces that could be seen from the air.5

Denis Oppenheim whose work at the time was being associated with body art and performance said about the galleries: “I used to feel a kind of lethargy but then we broke through the floor and found right underneath a vast new world: the earth”. Robert Morris was developing his concept of antifoam for his sculptures. They were process oriented and the morphology/materiality was more intuitive and accidental.

Halfway through 1967 Smithson was informally planning proposals made by him, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt and Robert Morris for aerial art situated on the earth between runways. The materials he used varied from industrial materials to natural ones.

In 1967 Claes Oldenburg started digging what he would call an “underground sculpture” in Central Park. “Hole” was an anti war piece of art conceived as a recession into the ground instead of a projection upward from it. His piece had a funerary allusion but at the same time made the user look down to earth, the mother of life, a virgin, fertile, uncultivated soil. It was a piece meeting both life and death.7

It was no surprise to find these allegories. With the Cold War was at its height, living its most fragile moment. There was widespread disapproval by the American society of having the troops in Viet Nam. Out of 464,800 soldiers that went to war, more than 13000 had died. Death was a recurring topic in the news: Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, so was Martin Luther King and of course, the Manson murders were in the spotlight. Added to this, there was general fear of nuclear warfare that could burst at any moment and could have disastrous consequences.

In Italy Pascali did something complementary to Oldenburg’s gesture, with “1m3 of earth, 2m3 of earth” presented in “Fire, Image, Water and Earth” exhibition, he displayed smooth rectangular bricks of compacted soil. This basic entity of nature and earth compressed into a machine looking mold. The same year, Kounellis presented Untitled, an installation made of troughs with earth and cacti.

Calzolari on the other hand was using natural materials such as tobacco leaves, lead moss, water and ice, mixed with technological and mechanical tools such as neon light and electric powered ice forming structures. Along with the Kounellis, he was making a statement about transformation between organic and inorganic, as well as different states of malleability.8

Germano Celant, who was working as a critic and a writer saw potential in these pieces and wrote a manifesto about a contingent movement: Arte Povera drawing partially on Jerzy Grotowsky’s concept of a Theater of poverty.9 Along with it he curated Im Spazio – Arte Povera  an exhibition showing the artworks of twelve artists: Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Emilio Prini, Umberto Bignardi, Mario Ceroli, Paolo Icaro, Renato Mambor, Eliseo Matiacci and Cesare Tacchi.

The exhibition pursued to understand how nature and culture are related. It was a nostalgic anti consumerism movement that sought to link modernity to the primitive. The artists would collect everyday life objects, an action similar to the objet trouvé tendency, only that this time the materials were “poor” and “insignificant”, banality at its greatest form. With this they were aiming to explore basic substances and physical processes to emphasize a human connection to everyday life.

One year after Im Spazio-Arte Povera debuted, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt traveled with gallery owner Virgina Dwan and fellow artist Dan Graham and visited the Slate Quarries in Bangor, Pennsylvania. Just as Celant did, he wrote an essay called “A sedimentation of the mind: Earth Projects”. Based on his trip, he talked about the irresolvable tension between exterior and interior to develop his concept of non site and proposed a new kind of art based on environmental experiences with allusion to works of Heizer, De Maria, Robert Morris and others.10

Virginia Dawn got interested in Michael Heizer’s work after seeing a portfolio of photographs he showed her of his Western Works and read Smihtson’s essay; she borrowed a term from the text and organized an exhibition with it as a tittle. “Earthworks” which would included works by: Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Michael Heizer, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Stephen Kaltenbach and Herbert Bayer.

Earthworks presented the work of ten artists doing sculpture in the natural environment. They were of earth and stone but there was also documentation (both completed and potential). Diverse media and materials. Spice specificity was a major concern, therefore many pieces were created on site. As Andre Dickson points out, the artists renounced the creation of art objects in favor of the creation of art experiences related to a broad physical and sociological environment thus there projects were closer to installation art.11

The exhibition had earth as its main topic and presented sculpture in the natural environment. This earth along with stones and other materials in nature were materials to work on and to work with. That said, the curatorship was focused on projects in and about landscape, many of them were created on site so their location and how they were exhibited were a prime focus. The works put the viewer in a different setting as there was not a specific imposed perspective to look at them, nor a particular visual focus; therefore, appreciation and meaning could shift depending on the observer’s position and confrontation with the work. Some works were ephemeral and could be absorbed by erosion, silting or transformation.

Im Spazio-Arte Povera debuted on September 27 of 1967 and was on for less than a month. Divided in two sections: Arte Povera and Im Spazio, the exhibition contained installations juxtaposing mundane manufactured materials and organic materials both found in daily life. The wide aseptic looking space contrasted with the rawness of the materials. Entering the exhibit Pascali’s “1m3 of earth 2m3 of earth” was mounted on the gallery’s wall, projecting horizontally from it. These two measurements of earth in geometric form mounted on the gallery walls, created a tension between order and chaos by contrasting the natural quality of the material with the artificial look of the shape.

While entering a period known as Miracolo Economico, Italy’s center left government’s programs brought about sources of employment which led to a rise in consumer demand. As a consequence, the country entered a stage of modernization and became one of the greatest industrial nations of Europe. Fiat was created and the electric power industry was nationalized. With factories on the rise, Italy became one of the most industrialized nations in Europe. Poor and dehumanizing conditions for workers and aggression to landscape had as a result the rejection to an industrialized country grew bigger and bigger, especially among students and intellectuals.12

Some artists refused to acclaim the iconography of consumerism, and were looking to portray a more humanist side through an anti technological stance. There was a strong friction between new manufacturing techniques and rural nostalgic lifestyles.

Boetti for example displayed a pile of asbesto cement tubes as part of his piece “Catasta”. It was a critique to modern manufacturing and with this a way of bringing the audience to that reality. Cleat says about Boetti’s piece “His gestures are no longer an accumulation or an interweaving of signs, but the signs of accumulation and of interweaving”13

The spatial component was very latent, especially in the works by Paolini and Prini. For “Perimetro d’aria” (Perimeter of air), Paolini made a deep reading of the space focusing on the physical perception of the room itself, and spelled out the title of the exhibition in white letters hanging on the gallery walls. Prini marked the perimeter of the room using a relay of sound and light. Celant noted :

“A room is, and resounds with, four corners, a man remains blocked in a meter-long stride, a floor turns into stairs, a chair is a flat image; each of Prini’s gestures concludes by simply presenting itself.”14

Fabro attempted to test the spectators’ awareness of its surroundings and the world that was developing in front of him. In his work that main focus is the relationship between the audience and the works, his piece is a bodily experience with a common found object. Fabio was polishing the floor to the realm of art. Celant wrote ”The difficulty of knowledge, or of taking possession of things, is enormous: conditioning prevents us from seeing a pavement, a corner, or a daily space “ he then added “re-proposes the rediscovery of a pavement, a corner, or the axis that unites the floor and ceiling of a room.”15

The country was facing an atmosphere of political tensions and rearrangements that caused riots between extremist left and right groups with violent repercussions and a large number of deaths. This along with murders related to mafia were being covered by all media and drove the country to an episode called the terrorist years where death was in the minds of everyone.

On the corner of a gallery was “Senza Titolo» by Janis Kounellis. a steel bin containing a heap of coal, Celant wrote about Kounellis “he loves to surround himself with banal but natural objects like coal, cotton, or a parrot… everything is reduced to a concrete knowledge that struggles against all conceptual reductions of itself, and the important thing for Kounellis is to focus on the fact that Kounellis is alive and the rest of the world can go to hell.”16

Earthworks opened on October 5th of the following year. The Virginia Dwan Gallery was a big white space with grey carpeting, the homogeneous lighting worked perfectly to display the works in their own individuality. There was an interesting opposition between the neutral character of the space and the non neutral condition of the pieces.

On one right side of the gallery was “A Nonsite Franklin”, Five floorboard trapezoidal bins made of wood painted light beige and filled with irregularly shaped limestone rocks from 5  places in the Franklin Furnace Mines. Smithson stated “this Non Site will display physical disintegration within exact limits, fractured material within an artificial topographic structure.”17 The bins together formed an acute triangle with the spaces between the bins. The roughness of the rocks contained and tensions by the bins worked as an allusion to the instability of the social order.

This worked as an allegory for the situation in the country which had a series of revolts. Many of them were demonstrating against war. Two months before the exhibition there was civil disorder and violence reprisals at the Democratic National Convention in downtown Chicago. The idealism of the early 1960s opened a door to profound discontent and a deep paradox between idealism and trauma.

Behind Smithson’s work, there was an aerial map of the Franklin Furnace Mines and instamatic photographs of the site cut in the same segmented trapezoidal shape with a label promoting tours to the site, inviting the audience to get out of the gallery and visit the space of the work of art and an aerial map  of the site in the shape of the onsite next to it.

Next to these was the blueprint for Stephen Kaltenbach. “Earth Mound for a Kidney Shaped swimming pool” was a document for a potential project depicting a drained concrete pool filled with earth, the top contour of which is the convex inverse of the bottom concavity of the pool. The illustration was close to an utopia of a work integrating a habitable architectural space and landscape.

In the middle of the gallery there was an embankment, a large pile of earth with a diameter of almost six feet reinforced with industrial detritus such ad metal bars and plastic tubes along with pieces of felt wood, wire rolls and yellow industrial grease over everything; Morris’s Earthwork was a clear representation of sculpture´s degeneration into anti form. Morris tautologically titled Earthwork. It was an improvisational shaped sculpture that went from fecund earth to disgusting dirt.

Many of the works were not entirely visible due to their monumental scale and some of them were located in remote locations, hence, a big part of the exhibition consisted of photographs and graphic material hanging on the walls documenting the results and process of the work. The artists exhibiting considered medium, message and process all as art.

Oldenburg showed a short film from his “Hole” work he did the previous year in the work he was excavating the earth where seeds let the plants grow and give them life but also that one where life decomposes . Instead of projecting earth upward he chose to go to its foundations by excavating  and re-filling.Sol Lewitt did something similar by burying a stainless steel cubic box into the ground in a Dutch collector’s garden. A beautiful thing was withheld from sight and enjoyment and taken down to the dirt of the world.

Carl Andre, displayed a “Log piece” which consisted of chunks of lumber placed end to end on a forest floor. In the photograph there was the snake shaped sculpture with Andre standing atop it. He also presented “Rock Pile”, a pile of moss covered sandstone located near Woody Creek Canyon (outside Aspen). It was a return to the primitive manner of generating form and an unnatural disposition of a natural material.

Dennis Oppenheim’s monochrome maquete was a relief map of a volcano on a rectangular floorboard base. Reconstruction of a Volcano in Ecuador. The model was executed in Cocoa mat to simulate a Kansas wheatfield. This mat was incised with irregular graduating concentric circles from the top to the bottom of the volcano. It was a morphological transfer of a topographical projection onto a flat mutable terrain of entropic process represented by a model and photo documentation.

Heizer’s piece consisted of slides. A 6 feet square color transparency with a six and a half inch deep light box behind it. “Dissipate 2” is one of the works created in a southern desert the previous summer. Scale and brilliant illuminated colors in three horizontal bands made it stand out among the neutral, black and white tone of other works

Walter De Maria showed photographs of his Mile Long Drawing and Munich Earth Room. At the same time, the artist confronts the purity of a minimalist history by punctuating the canvas with a stainless steel plaque engraved with the ambiguous, yet violent inscription, “The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth.” as an environmentalist statement.  references minimalism and color-field painting. At the same time, the artist confronts the purity of a minimalist history by punctuating the canvas with a stainless steel plaque engraved with the ambiguous, yet violent inscription, “The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth.” Against the color of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment, the cryptic phrase was read as an environmentalist statement.

One year later, many of the European and American land artists were portrayed together in a documentary for German television called “Land Art” directed by Gerry Schum. With works made on moors, coasts, stone quarries and deserts. The artworks were now displayed on the living rooms of houses by the tv this time they shared the space with artists like Jan Dibbets and Richard Long.18

It was not the first time the outdoors landscape entered the realm of art. Ancient pastoral poetry would be settled in the idyllic setting of rural life, in the 14th Century on paintings and in the 18th Century on philosophical writings. But artists never apprehended landscape as artistic material before and they were becoming part of the process of the pieces they were creating. There was a physical commitment from them to convert landscape into their works of art with an in.person experience.

For Arte Povera, the interest in using elementary materials and processes was not to represent nature but the insurrection and magical value of natural elements. They were aiming for the audience to take a second look at nature and its banal conception of it.

One year after the exhibitions, in the Documenta IV at Kassel, artists were working with materials and natural processes fascinated by their evolution and organic decomposition. Many of these works were documented in the big scale landscape. Land Arte and Arte Povera then influenced many artists.

Heizer pointed out that with Earthworks they were trying to make “something radical, something american”19. Many critics considered these attempts of environmental art authentically

American was to make something american, yet several european were producing environments with organic or naturally occurring materials. Earthworks became the generic term for environmental sculpture having to do with earth. and maybe this is the reason why many critics later coined the term “Land Art” as it was more universal.

The exhibition itself gathered the trajectory of american only artists. Dave McConathy points out that this may have been a conventional attitude for the time as the United States had a history of trying to get out from under Europe’s historical and cultural influence and amidst this post war period it was a moment when culture was seeking its independence. of European models.

Long himself said he felt closer to the Arte Povera movement as he thought that because of the ambitious projects of the “Earthworks” artist in terms of space, the exhibition and works inside it had a capitalist approach by looking for collectors financing their works. For him this condition was contradictory with their discourse.

On talking about “Earth Room” by Smithson, Domus writer wrote: Here in Italy, 25 year old Carlo Bonfa uses earth the same way as a fluid medium in a sort of artistic sit in” he added “Young artists all over Europe are modeling the physical landscape, concrete materials and human behavior itself”

Italy wanted to stay away from any connection to American art too. Rather they were influenced by futurism (in terms of movement and process, futurism was more focused on speed). They wanted to recuperate the dialectics of futurism and PINTURA metafisica. PASCAL even talked about being invited by Illiana Sonabend to the United States, promising him to be as successful as Roy Lichtenstein.  Pascali  refused20,  Italian  nationalism  was  as  strong  as  American  and  they  were refusing to become part of the other nation’s market.

They were taking an anti technological stance whereas for american minimalist sculpture, technology is it primary mode of production. They were rebellions to the anesthetization of high art.

Both exhibitions talked on industrial materials meeting nature but also about the contrast between death and life with examples carried out in nature. Both used natural materials and brought them to the space of the gallery, their pieces involved spatial interactions, and consisted of spatial interactions. Both movements had outdoor interventions. In the two galleries, the audience was exposed to raw, gritty, geological matter.

Unlike most Land Art, Arte Povera was not monumental and the scale of the works were of a human scale thought to give a bodily experience. Most of Arte Povera works were installations whereas Land Art also used documents like photography, videos and diagrams. Land art was thematic, it looked to control territory and act on landscape, Arte Povera was not concerned with a signature style and only occasionally dealt with this topic. Arte Povera was more focused on showing the everyday, the banal through manufactured and natural objects. Land Art was concerned in intervening nature and landscape by using natural materials.

These almost simultaneous exhibitions represented the starting point of two movements that proliferated for less than a decade and then left a strong heritage influencing much of contemporary art. They both emerged in a moment of intensive cultural and artistic debate and revolutionary practices in Europe and America. Both pronounced themselves as anti art movements and as such, were shifting the aesthetic codes. This time, the scale was non pictorial and by providing the spectator bodily interaction with the works, the experience was comparable to apprehending architecture. The spaces of their works were meant to reflect on us as part of the natural environment and on life. By that, they reflected the general social aspiration of reconstructing the future.