Land & Environmental Art.

In the post this morning I received my recent purchase 'Land & Environmental Art.

The book was reccomended by Paula in my recent tutorial.Published by Phaidon press, as with all of their publications it offers a really fascinating and well constructed, insight into the subject matter.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is it's definitions of the art-form, in particular it's distinctions of categories.

Being such a vast topic the book is split into 5 sections, each dealing with a specific thread of the movement, displaying the relevant works and artists that link to the specific movements.

Integration

Interruption

Involvement

Implementation

and Imagining

It is interesting to apply these groupings to my own work and see where the lie with this field.

Whilst I see the 'Presence Through Absence' series to be Involvement as it was a series where upon I utilised a 'one-to-one relationship with the land' to  draw upon 'conceptual strategies' and evoke a 'physical experience'.

I have found that whilst setting these boundaries, it doesn't essentially mean that they can't be merged, and from this I have developed a greateer understanding of the connotations of the medium, and also the influence it's practitioners have.

Whilst reading the book an obvious question kept popping up - 'can video work that was made within the environment and displayed elsewhere, be classed as land art?'
This is an essential factor of my own work, and rather than try to answer it I deem it as a rhetorical way of spurring my work on.