Environmental Artists - Site Specificity

Year 10 essay task using your research of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson and one other land/environmental artist:
Site specificity is a form of late modernism art created to exist in a certain place, typically taking the location into account whilst undergoing planning and creating methods. One of the most broadly used site specific art techniques is out-door landscaping, which combines permanently sited sculptural elements into the artwork – this kind of art is better known as environmental land art. We can see from this that the conceptual and making process of an artwork considerably involve site specific art, and interlaces with how land artists of today develop ideas, concepts and themes. It also significantly affects the influence of their global and personal world and other artists and their movements.
Three of the most widely known artists, renowned for their land art, are Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy and Christo Javacheff.   This essay will discuss their artist’s practice and how site specificity has influenced their art making.
Firstly, Robert Smithson was a formidable writer, critic and American sculptural artist, famous for coining the term "land art” and giving birth to the movement itself.   He defined the name given to works as involving changing the land with heavy equipment in order to create a sculptural form. Smithson responded to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the early 1960s and he started to expand his work out of galleries and into the landscape, interested in manipulating the formal elements of the land. By this, site specificity played a major role in his works.   The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist and his non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular location, as well as the geological artefacts displaced from those sites.
"I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation." The...