Words: Ella Ramrayka Rogers (she/her)
Think of the fantastical idea of the American West: a vast, empty plain, available for deconstruction.
Is there a difference between colonial-era “conquistadors” and the land artists of the 1970s? Both looked out across the expansive American land and saw opportunity. Is it ethical to deconstruct something for the sake of art? An untouched grassland – a fantasy of virgin territory – yet here, purity is both an aesthetic ideal and colonial erasure. What does it mean to claim land as pure, and whose presence must be erased for that claim to hold?
In Western thought, the construction of landscape is gendered: feminine, fertile, passive – awaiting inscription. Here, “Mother Earth” operates as justification for extractive use. Historically, the land artists of 1960s and 1970s America used language like ‘working with’ and ‘collaborating with’ the natural world, whilst performing acts of mass destruction. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative is a prime example: two enormous trenches carved into a Nevada mesa, aestheticising extraction, and treating land as raw material rather than a living relation. The paradox of purity is evident here: land art mirrors industrial practices, even as its artists claimed to critique them – these works required destruction to create spaces framed as elemental, timeless, and somehow beyond human corruption. The rhetoric of artistic vision naturalises the appropriation, positioning the white, male artist as creator, rather than coloniser.
Think of the fantastical idea of the American West: a vast, empty plain, available for deconstruction. Works like Heizer’s were constructed on land with millennia of Indigenous history: the “blank canvas” is not natural but produced through active forgetting. The ecological purity of these sites depends on their portrayal as uninhabited and untouched before the artist’s intervention. This is nothing new; evocative of common patterns of settler colonial logic like “terra nullius” (empty land) and “Manifest Destiny” (the West as the final frontier of conquest). The scale and permanence of these interventions assert a particular claim, echoing the monumentalism of colonial conquest. The irony here is that these works were, and still often are, positioned as counter-cultural alternatives to gallery systems and commodified art, all while reenacting the most fundamental colonial gesture.
This hubris is inseparable from the sociopolitical context in which these works were produced. The most prominent figures of the land art movement were predominantly white, East Coast-educated men, who approached the deserts and plains of the American West as blank, empty canvases. Yet, these landscapes were, and remain, Indigenous land, shaped by histories of treaty violations, displacement, and ongoing contestation.
When asked about Double Negative in High Country News’ What to Make of Land Art in the Era of Landback, Paiute artist Fawn Douglas recalled ‘how beautiful the land was before Heizer made his mark’, and compared the artwork to ‘someone stabbing the earth and leaving a scar.’ Against this backdrop, Heizer’s later project City – a sprawling, concrete complex intended to last ‘forever’ and maintained so that it appears untouched – reads less as sculptural ambition and more as a declaration of conquest.
The disconnection is magnified when compared with Indigenous ontologies of land, aptly articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and writer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer explains land not as an object that can be owned or commodified, but as a living being with which one should enjoy a reciprocal relationship, which is part and parcel of a ‘gift economy’. In this ideology, land nurtures, teaches, and gives life to humans, and in turn, they must embody care, thankfulness, and self-control. Instead of rights, there are responsibilities.
This perspective shares very little with that of land art, where the interventionist and extractive logic is dominant, and the land is viewed as something that passively awaits to be worked. Indigenous land-based art practices decisively alter the relationship between art, land, and responsibility. They operate in a radically different ethical register from canonical land art principles, which do not treat land as a site or material that can be transformed. Instead, they acknowledge land as a living being with which the human is interdependent in the spheres of reciprocity, memory, and care.
Who decides what land is pure, and what sullies it? Purity ideology is always a weapon. The colonial logic that produced land art’s ideology of the blank canvas finds its contemporary echo in mass deportations and border security. When land is presented as devoid of indigenous history, able to be changed and formed by specific people requiring protection from contamination (the ‘other’), the next step is determining which bodies belong and which will be removed. Heizer’s trenches and current removal operations enforce a violent amnesia about who was already there. The ethical alternative is a counter-colonial abandonment of purity itself as a framework, embracing instead the irreducible reality of inhabited, interdependent ground, and the equally irreducible dignity of people who move across it.
