Land art films at Anthology this weekend
This weekend, Anthology Film Archives presents Site Recordings: Land Art on Film and Video, a series devoted to films by and about artists associated with the Land Art/Earthworks movement.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, modernism’s affirmation of fixity, permanence, and autonomy lost its hold on the Western imagination, shaping the manner in which a whole host of artists engaged with the moving image. Jan Dibbets, Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Walter de Maria, Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson among others, long known for their interest in the landscape, sought a means of communicating this experience across time and space, while others like Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Anthony McCall offered insightful counter-perspectives on Land Art. Alongside canonical films like Smithson’s SPIRAL JETTY and documentaries capturing the ambitions of figures from this period like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, we will be showing little-seen shorts and contemporary films that address the significance of the movement’s monuments and anti-monuments.
In addition to screenings of James Bening’s Casting a Glance and a collection of films by Nancy Holt, the series is broken up into five programs: Markings, Trajectories, Excavations, Islands and Interventions. Included in the Excavations program on Saturday at 9:30pm is Gordon Matta Clark’s Fresh Kill, shot at the Fresh Kills Landfill in 1972.
November 19th-21st, 2010
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd St.)
New York, NY
