Issues: The Rediscovery of the Site

"It may prove, in hindsight," wrote John Beardsley in Earthworks: The Landscape after Modernism, "that nothing signalled the end of the modern era in art so much as the restoration of the landscape to an important position among artists of a particularly venturesome character in the latter half of the 1960s." Beardsley's article, written for a conference at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1991, predicted that artists such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson had really superseded 'modern' art. For a variety of complex motives, these artists had abandoned the studio and started to work directly on vacant land. Other artists, such as Donald Judd and Richard Serra, made similar objects in streets and derelict warehouses in New York. In fact, New York and Los Angeles formed much of the subject as well as the location of their work. It seemed that art was beginning to inhabit the territory of architecture. In architecture as in art, what was currently called 'modernism' bore little relation to the work of the masters; the foundations and rationale of Modernism were by then universally recognised as myths. Architecture had been absorbed willingly within the industries which traded in images - low-cost popular house-building, developers, and magazines. Those architects who stood outside this mainstream started to use forms remarkably similar to 'land' artists. They negated the image as a common currency and stressed the experience of the building - material, spatial, environmental, and contextual. Above all, it seems that what signalled the end of the Modern era in architecture was the restoration of the importance of site."