What is Land Art?

Art can evoke a range of emotions in people. Land Art perhaps even more so. So TICKON is used to reactions that run in two very different directions.

The art in Tranekær Castle Park is particularly praised and celebrated in foreign journals and magazines. However, on TICKON’s Facebook page, there are also comments from visitors who simply complain that the sculptures in the park are falling into disrepair and are not being restored.

An understanding of Land Art is therefore not a given. Many people imagine sculptures as something permanent, made of stone or bronze – works that will stand for thousands of years, untouched by the passage of time.

But in Land Art, the very purpose of the work is for it to become part of nature’s cycle and to decay, just as humans do from the age of 25 onwards. We are born, grow up, reach old age and fade away, only to die in the end.

This human process can be beautiful or grotesque. In Land Art, the timescale may be seconds, minutes or years, but the artist nevertheless strives to ensure that the work retains its sculptural qualities as it decays, whether, as in TICKON, it is a ‘motorway’ of branches (Organic Highway by Mikael Hansen) or a fleeting, dry imprint of a human figure on a rain-soaked road (Rain Shadow, Andy Goldsworthy).

Cannot be moved or sold

In the 1960s, the first Land Art artists began creating their works in often completely desolate and inaccessible locations. The works were site-specific and could neither be moved nor sold – as a rebuke to the commercialism of the art world. Nor did they represent any material value, as the sculptures were constructed from materials found at the geographical location: branches, stones, earth.

The use of natural materials is a principle, but one that can be bent slightly when it comes to safety.

When the late artist Lars Wilks created his work ‘Textus’ in 1993 – a jumble of planks and branches forming a fantastic, trippy playhouse – there wasn’t a great deal of focus on safety, even though children loved to climb into this constructed chaos. Fortunately, no one was injured, and even our Queen, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe, has climbed Textus and poked her head out from between the planks for a photograph.

Since then, however, TICKON has been very mindful that the artworks must be safe for the public. It turns out that the public has a completely different relationship with the park’s sculptures than they would if they were situated on the lawns of the Louisiana Museum.

In the park, the public climbs and crawls all over the place. Dan Snow’s ‘Diamond Mine’ – or ‘The Labyrinth’, as the work is affectionately known – is constantly subjected to ‘loving vandalism’, as visitors regularly take the view that the originally very precisely constructed rubble walls within the faceted triangle are simply an invitation to add to the structure or even to remove stones from the work.

Designed to withstand heavy use

When Chris Drury built his “Linden Cloud Chamber” in 2019, the focus was therefore on ensuring the work could withstand heavy use; so, with cast floors and walls and a solid roof made of debarked larch trunks, this gigantic ‘camera obscura’ can now stand for hundreds of years – without decaying, as was otherwise the original intention of Land Arts. Antti Ylönen’s work “Hidden Power”, consisting of a large boulder that peeks out from the mound like an eye, has also required reinforcement, in the realisation that children and adults will undoubtedly run right over the eye’s “eyelid”.

An artist such as the Norwegian Helge Röed took a completely opposite approach to the Land Art concept when, in 1993, he installed yellow tubes in the trees along the lake’s edge. Together, the tubes formed a perfect oval when the structure was viewed from a specific vantage point, and he called it ‘Wood and Water – a Space Exploration’, because, despite the use of industrially manufactured, non-natural elements, it nevertheless gave nature the leading role. Incidentally, the work was removed the following year, in accordance with an agreement with the artist.

Sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world)

As its hallmark, Land Art draws attention to nature and our scarce resources. At the same time, this art form dispels the notion of immortality. For we shall all die – animals, humans, plants and… art.

By accepting that eternity does not exist, a sense of presence and of living in the here and now emerges.

In TICKON Park, visitors can thus experience how the approximately 20 existing works – some new and bursting with vitality, others quite literally on their way to the grave – offer the opportunity not only to see nature in art, but also to spot art in nature.

A quivering, fallen leaf in a spider’s web is suddenly perceived as a ‘dance of death’, whilst a roe deer’s droppings are, of course, still droppings, but also sculptural, spherical, dark pearls set against the green grass.