Something Totally Unpredictable

The Art Journal Award, CAA's annual prize for the best article published in the magazine, has been awarded to the current issue's feature on Land art, a group of essays collected and introduced by Kirsten Swenson. It is interesting that the Land art projects discussed by Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott eschew the extremely long view taken by Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and other Land artists looked back into prehistory, imagining a epochal stretch so long and slow that it hardly moved, so vast that human civilization was just a flicker within its expanse. The more recent generation considered here focuses on a shorter-term history, directly or obliquely addressing modern life's interaction with nature: airports and the evacuation of rural America, economic injustice in communities along the highway, global tourism and utopia in rural Thailand. Santiago Sierra's Submission, discussed in a separate essay by Kelly Baum, attacks power relationships ...