LAND ART AT THE PRINCETON ART MUSEUM IN OCTOBER

Nobody's Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000–2010
WHEN: October 23, 2010–February 20, 2011
WHERE: Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
609.258.3788
OPEN Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Thursday, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 PM

Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000–2010 is the first exhibition to explore an important development in contemporary art: a new generation of land artists. Forty years ago, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and others started carving, displacing and rearranging raw earth, transforming landscape into sculpture. Today, we witness this tradition’s fruition, as artists working across the globe once again embrace land and space as both material and subject matter. (Left: Yael Bartana, Kings of the Hill, still, 2003. Video, 7:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv)

Nobody’s Property features the work of seven artists and two artist teams, all of them based in Europe, the Middle East or the Americas. Some explore the representation of space in military, scientific and utopian discourse. Others parse the legal, political and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juárez, and the city of Jerusalem.

Contemporary art often reflects the present day, and the works in Nobody’s Property are no exception. In the videos, digital slide shows, photographs, performances and assemblages featured, viewers will glimpse the physical and geopolitical landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries, but not always in familiar or comforting form. Land and space have been irrevocably altered by conflict, urbanization, industrialization and globalization. It is these pressures that have driven artists to adopt “the environment” as a subject deserving of both aesthetic and critical investigation.