Very Large Art
The human urge to create is sometimes expressed on a very large scale.
For 50 years, artist Michael Heizer labored in the remote Nevada desert on City, a vast sculpture that he hopes will inspire awe and wonder for millennia to come.
His vision is deeply personal, but his urge to use the surface of the earth as a giant canvas is far from unique. Heizer is part of a "Land Art" movement that is perhaps inspired by works that date back thousands of years.
In England, the Uffington White Horse, an elegantly abstracted equine figure, was carved into a hilltop some 3,000 years ago.
In Peru, the Nazca Lines were incised into arid slopes by people of the Nazca culture about 2,000 years ago. A variety of animal forms were created as well as long, linear features.
In the United States, the Serpent Mound has undulated across the Ohio landscape for at least a thousand years.
Fast forward to the past few decades, and a brave band of artists who seek to express themselves on a grand scale.
They defy the conventions of the art market by creating works that are unsellable and, except to those who wish to travel to remote locations or to view them in photos, unseeable.
The most widely recognized work in this genre is no doubt Spiral Jetty, created in 1970 by Robert Smithson on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Long-term drought in the American Southwest has lowered the level of Great Salt Lake, leaving the Spiral Jetty high and dry, at least for the time being.
A very different vision is being pursued in the Arizona desert by James Turrell, who is modifying a volcanic feature into a quasi-mystical exploration of light, space, place, and experience.
Turrell is adding structures, tunnels, ramps, and other features to Roden Crater, a 400,000-year-old cinder cone.
Turrell describes the work as "a gateway to the contemplation of light, time and landscape."
It is intended in part to be "a naked eye observatory of earthly and celestial events that are both predictable and continually in flux. Constructed to last for centuries to come, Roden Crater links the physical and the ephemeral, the objective with the subjective, in a transformative sensory experience."
Not all large art is about shaping landforms. In the Netherlands, poplars have been planted to evoke the form of a Gothic cathedral.
The "Green Cathedral" was planted in 1978 by Dutch artist Marinus Boezem; 178 tall, thin Lombardy poplars mimic the scale and shape of the in Reims, France.
A woodlot adjacent to the Green Cathedral has a cathedral-shaped clearing.
In Italy, a hillside covered in concrete commemorates a tragedy.
One of the stranger works of large-scale art is Cretto di Burri. This concrete installation by Alberto Burri memorializes the destruction of the Sicilian village of Gibellina in a 1968 earthquake. The "cracks" in the sculpture reflect the street patterns of the former town, which was abandoned and relocated to a new a few miles away.
Roden Crater, Spiral Jetty, and City are expressions of so-called high art. Large human-made marks on the land frequently serve less exalted purposes.
In central Turkey a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, has been rendered on a hillside.
The artist or artists cleverly elongated the portrait so that it would appear correctly proportioned when viewed from the ground.
Large art can serve business purposes as well. Coastal Dubai is the scene of artificial island complexes, designed to maximize shoreline real estate and create a splash from above.
What from 30,000 feet looks like a stylized palm frond morphs, up close, into a massive luxury housing development.
Among the grandest forms of large art is, of course, the garden.
A woman sunbathes in Paris's Luxembourg Gardens
Islands of tranquility and manicured natural beauty on the ground, they can become striking geometric abstractions from above. The French are especially adept at this art form.
A renowned example is at Château de Villandry in the Loire Valley of France.
On a grander scale are the grounds of the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris...
...where Rococo patterns are writ large across the sprawling estate.
Not far away, in the heart of Paris, the old and new architectural geometries of the Louvre serve the cause of high art.
Some would argue that Paris itself is a form of very large art. Its grand boulevards and radial avenues are masterpieces of urban design.
The largest land art of all is the collective work of countless thousands of farmers and surveyors who have etched vast agricultural landscapes across much of the planet.
The United States' township and range system sliced and diced the heart of the North American continent, defying natural barriers in creating a sprawling grid of square-mile townships. This checkerboard in eastern Kansas is typical.
In drier areas of the Great Plains, center-pivot irrigation systems (this array is in western Kansas) superimpose circles onto the grid.
Older agricultural lands were parceled out over the millennia. In Iraq, farms crowd the banks of the Euphrates River.
Most breathtaking of all, perhaps, are the terraced rice paddies of Southeast Asia, as epitomized by these paddies in Yuanyang, China.
Can these transformed landscapes be classified as art? Probably not. But their patterns do evoke an aesthetic response, and might serve as inspiration for the brave few artists who are compelled create works on a grand scale.
