Digital Collection: Earthworks & Installations
Often ephemeral by nature and meant to erode or change over time, earthworks and land-based installations present a challenge to the formal cataloging processes that museums use to express descriptive and administrative data about more stable sculpture pieces. Time, space, and the changing natural environment are essential factors in perceptions of land-based art. This digital collection represents our group’s effort to account for these factors in the cataloging of three sample pieces: the New York City Waterfalls installations, the Storm King Wall, and The New York Earth Room.
It is our hope that these three examples, taken together, present some guidelines for the description and documentation of land-based art. We also hope to highlight and address the uncertain place of environmental art in the object-based museum collection, and give some guidance as to how these works may be preserved without physical disturbance of natural processes.