Earth art revolutionized the traditional concept of art, right?

The art trend that emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s developed from the simple, detail-free forms of Minimalist art. Generally bored with modern urban life and highly standardized industrial civilization, earth artists advocated a return to nature, and expressed strong dissatisfaction with the minimalist art they had once loved, believing that it was a mark of the degeneration of modern civilization, and that only things like the pyramids of Egypt, the prehistoric megalithic buildings, the tombs of the Americas, and Zen stone temples and pagodas were the essence of human civilization, and that only they possessed the close and inseparable connection between human beings and nature.

So a group of artists to the earth as the object of artistic creation, or digging pits in the vast desert modeling, or to move the mountains and the sea, the base of the embankment, or splash of paint all over the barren mountains. As earth art often appears in the form of excavation and filling works, it is also known as earthworks and geoscape art. Early earth art works in the site construction, site completion, the artist to create works are not intended to give people to appreciate. 1968 from the Dewan Gallery will collect earth art photos and buried in the ground pots, iron box and other parts of the object held an earth art exhibition. The following year, Cornell University also organized a similar exhibition, after the earth art often in the form of photographs, video.

Later earth artists seldom make large-scale excavation works, more with the help of photography to complete. For example, W. De Maria's work "A Mile Long Sketch" is a photograph of two parallel lines drawn in the Nevada desert, using simple photography instead of on-site excavation to achieve the same effect of the exhibition. Important earth artists include C. Andre, R. Smithson, De Maria, M. Heizer, C. Oldenburg, R. Serra, and others.