Landscape and land art

Landscape and Land Art focuses on so-called ‘Land Art' in Britain in the period from the mid-1960s to the present day. The dissertation concentrates particularly on Richard Long who, it is argued, functions as the definitive index of British Land Art.
Land Art Beginning investigates how Land Art's earliest instances have shaped its subsequent discourse and introduces the methodological approaches employed in the dissertation. Land Art is then studied through a series of frames or milieus in the following chapters.
Land Art Sculpture defends the necessity of viewing Land Art in the context of the practice and theory of sculpture. Land Art Repetition examines repetition as one of the most prevalent and informing strategies of Land Art practice and theory. Land Art Body focuses on one of the most overlooked and yet crucial components of Land Art, the body. Through identifying and delineating the different kinds of bodies and representations of bodies included in (and excluded from) Land Art discourse and practice, this chapter considers the ways in which the body has been suppressed in Land Art and the possibilities for a bodily re-engagement. Land Art Landscape views critically the landscape aspect of British Land Art which serves to link it to past art and particularly to a British 'Landscape Tradition'. The final chapter considers Land Art in relation to gardening and laughter through the construct of the ha-ha.
The dissertation thus ends on a humorous note, but also an intensely serious one. Laughter and humour are powerful strategies against the most resistant orthodoxy, and British Land Art is perhaps best characterised in that way, as an orthodoxy, a dogma or an institution. This study aims to uncover and reveal the ways in which that orthodoxy has been constructed and is sustained, offering along the way some suggestions as to how it might be construed otherwise.