Troublemakers. The Story of Land Art (2015): a questionable story of Land Art

Abstract

As remarked by the artistic literature, our knowledge of Land Art mostly depends on what photographs, films and videos recount of it. If media have the merit of having contributed to the diffusion, among the public, of the knowledge of this ephemeral, site-specific art (for example, we remind Gerry Schum’s pioneering experiment of TV dissemination of Land Art in 1969), however they also contributed to shape a specific type of “public image” of this artistic movement by focusing their attention mostly on the artworks able to fascinate the public’s eye as well as on the “epic” actions of the most revolutionary artists. In line with this assumption, the essay aims to analyze the latest filmic narration about Land Art, James Crump’s documentary film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015). On the one hand, this film continues a discourse of mediation and “virtualization” of the experience of the work of art, but on the other it drafts a narration based on a general dramatization and spectacularization, outlining a critical interpretation of  Land Art that gives space only to several artists, establishing in this way a partial – and questionable – reconstruction of this artistic movement.