Documents 2: Juliane Rebentisch on Land Art

September 17, 2025

What is a document? A lesson, a specimen, a fragment of evidence—perhaps even a warning. Our blog series “Documents” is dedicated to bringing texts from outside the Anglophone world into renewed scholarly circulation through critical translation.

Critical Introduction: Juliane Rebentisch’s Theory of Contemporary Art

This translated text is taken from the concluding section of Juliane Rebentisch’s 2013 book, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung. Although the title itself labels the monograph as an “introduction,” its arguments are complex and ambitious, articulating a theoretical structure to understand contemporary art as it has developed since its apparent break with modernism in the 1960s.

Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory appears repeatedly in Rebentisch’s text, both as inspiration and as foil.[i] Adorno’s philosophy crystallizes the developmental arc of modernist art theory with all its contradictions and internal tensions, which, in Rebentisch’s account, do not simply disappear in contemporary art but reemerge transformed. Questions of history and developmental progress, of aesthetic experience and its relation to universality, of artistic autonomy and politics—all these remain motivating issues for contemporary art, Rebentisch suggests. But Adorno’s answers to these quandaries do not necessarily survive the empirical evidence of artistic practice in the decades since his death.

Many of the dialectical tensions of modernism now appear as the site of a continual motion back and forth across opposed terms, as “boundary crossings” or Grenzgänge (the title of the overall section from which this translation is taken). The difference between art and nonart, for example, is explicitly transgressed by “open works” that puncture Adorno’s “monadic” conception of the art object. Such is the case with Land Art works of the 1960s and 1970s, which according to Rebentisch “dissolve their boundaries into natural landscapes.”[ii] Yet the distinctiveness of art does not thereby disappear. Rather, its defining emphasis is shifted from the object itself to the aesthetic experience that arises between subject and open artwork.

This approach resonates with Minimalism’s phenomenological emphasis on embodied experience, so crucial to the challenge to artistic modernism in the 1960s, but Rebentisch emphasizes the critical and politically-reflexive dimensions of such experience. Aesthetic experience is not opposed to the conceptual; indeed, Rebentisch argues that a new comprehension of philosophical concepts such as nature and culture is precisely what is at stake in our experiential apprehension of Land Art. The question of the art / nonart distinction appears here in an even more fundamental form, as the relation between the products of culture and those of nature, which human cultivation is meant to master and transcend.

In Robert Smithson’s Earthworks, we witness the boundary crossings of nature and culture. According to Rebentisch, Smithson shows that the forces of nature “assert themselves in culture itself—namely, as culture’s own transience.”[iii] This gloss of Smithson’s anti-idealist critique recalls the concept of Naturgeschichte (natural history) developed by Adorno and Walter Benjamin, which similarly emphasized the radical impermanence of all historical achievement as a kind of return of nature within the presumed triumph of idealist narratives of progress.[iv]

As Rebentisch notes, however, Smithson does not understand his art as a projection of some rational reconciliation of humans and nature—the task for art set by Adorno’s aesthetic theory. This new peace between nature and culture, presaged in works of art, would arise once civilization has advanced beyond the destructive mode of instrumental domination into which Enlightenment reason had degenerated. But Smithson’s antihumanist instincts were too strong to put faith in the power of human reason, however reformed, against the ultimate laws of natural entropy and dissolution.

Neither is such a reconciliation to be found in Pierre Huyghe’s more recent artistic work with living nature, also considered by Rebentisch. Rather, we again find a characteristic “fluctuation” of dialectical opposites, where nature and culture assume the other’s identity without resolution. The question, perhaps, is whether such a perspective allows for the radically posthumanist implications that might be extracted from Huyghe’s artwork, where the cultural, historical, and ethical aspects of nonhuman life exist even independently of human mediation.

Adorno observed in the 1960s that “natural beauty, which was still the occasion of the most penetrating insights in [Kant’s] Critique of Judgment, is now scarcely even a topic of theory.”[v] By contrast, Rebentisch’s text suggests that the aesthetic experience of nature gains new pertinence in the twenty-first century, when the disastrous results of humanity’s “domination of nature” have become inescapably palpable in daily life. For Immanuel Kant as for many contemporary artists, natural aesthetics is not just a matter of pleasure but raises questions about the ethical status of nature itself, and humanity’s relation to it. It is here, in the ongoing dialectic of nature and culture revealed in aesthetic experience, that contemporary art intervenes.

Notes

[i] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.

[ii] Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung, 208 (translation is mine).

[iii] Rebentisch, 210 (translation is mine).

[iv] See Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” as well as Pensky, “Natural History,” and Buck-Morss, “Dialectics without Identity.”

[v] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2002.

——. “The Idea of Natural History.” Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Telos 60 (1984): 111–24.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “Chapter 3. Dialectics without Identity: The Idea of Natural History.” In The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute, 43–62. New York: The Free Press, 1977.

Pensky, Max. “Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno.” Critical Horizons 5, no. 1 (2004): 227–58.

Rebentisch, Juliane. Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2013.

 

The Dialectic of Nature and Culture: The Legacy of Land Art

From Theorien der Gegenwartskunst by Juliane Rebentisch, translated by Mitchell Herrmann

Natural beauty, as modernist art theory already knew, is not simply the other of culture; rather, its perception must be understood as the product of a “highly civilized phase,” as Adorno says.[1] For the beauty of nature could only come into consciousness in the moment when it is no longer perceived as threatening: “the beauty of nature as something untamed and infinite,” says Adorno, “came about only in a world where the social fabric had spread so far that the contrast to this, namely that which had not been completely taken, not completely dominated and domesticated, was properly perceived in its beauty for the first time.”[2] As much as the perception of natural beauty must thus be understood, on the one hand, as a result of the domination of nature, on the other hand it communicates the notion of a “world without domination.”[3] Nevertheless, argues Adorno, it would be a mistake to desire, as it were, to recollect in natural beauty the utopia of a state of reconciliation. For the romanticization of nature as lost paradise forgets that humans were in no way free before the development of their capacity for the rational domination of nature, but rather unfree, overcome by a nature experienced as fate. According to Adorno, it must therefore be a matter of anticipating a condition which does not yet exist, a condition in which rationality, freeing humans from their unfree powerlessness before nature, would be more and other than mastery over (inner and outer) nature.[4] That is why, so Adorno, the experience of the anticipation of a rationality reconciled with nature cannot be provided by nature itself, but rather only by art—an art that takes up the utopian promise of natural beauty on the level of developed rationality.

Adorno’s idea of a sublation of natural beauty through art not only has a historical-philosophical aspect, but also an aesthetic one. For the latter it is crucial that natural beauty evades instrumental control. As something that appears, natural beauty is not reproducible, not reifiable. Adorno explains this by using the well-known experience according to which natural beauty (in the form of a sunset, for example) is “removed,” degenerates into kitsch, precisely through any attempt to capture it.[5] With Walter Benjamin, Adorno also calls these moments of disappearance “aura.” Benjamin had defined aura in his famous artwork essay as, among other things, the “unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be” and illustrated this with phenomena of natural beauty.[6] “This character of distance even in what is closest,” comments Adorno, “is undoubtedly connected to the special element of the transient, the ephemeral, the impossible-to-pin-down and the not-quite-graspable.”[7] However, continues Adorno, this special element belongs not only to the experience of nature, but is also a constitutive part of “authentic” art. For Adorno, the proximity between natural beauty and artistic beauty does not arise through an objective imitation of natural beauty, which could only miss the phenomenon that it wants to capture. What art should take up or imitate from natural beauty is rather its phenomenal, fleeting aura itself: “Art,” says Adorno, “does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable.”[8]

If Adorno imposes a veritable “prohibition of images” of natural beauty, then certainly not only because nature as appearance cannot be captured in an image, but also because already in the 1950s and 1960s, the experience of nature can hardly be thought of as uncorrupted.[9] Consequently, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory has no shortage of polemics against any naïve enthusiasm for nature. Natural beauty is, in the end, commercially exploited by an entire (tourist) industry. For Adorno, its experience is the privilege of the well-off bourgeoisie, who either affirm their special sensitivity through a conventional “appreciation for nature” or who, driven to the corresponding delusions of grandeur through idealistic philosophy (more precisely: the Kantian theory of the sublime), feel a resonance of their own designs and categories in the magnificence of natural phenomena.[10] With this in mind, Adorno emphasizes, art should take from nature only the negativity of its appearance: from natural beauty the ephemeral, from the sublime the work of formlessness. Only thus should it be in the position to save the utopian promise of natural beauty. Adorno’s argument can then be summarized as follows: for modern art, nature may only be of structural, rather than content-related interest.

Now, when we look at contemporary art, an entirely different picture emerges. Namely, here nature explicitly becomes a point of reference in terms of content, as shown by dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. To be sure, this is obviously not a matter of a return to the premodern task of the representational imitation of nature, nor of a new affirmation of natural beauty, whose commercial exploitation and ideological susceptibility have today, on the contrary, become irrefutable. The distance to any unmediated nature romanticism can therefore be felt in contemporary art itself, where the old project of an objective imitation of nature, at the point of the dissolution of the boundaries of art and the [individual] arts, is taken up once again, not in the medium of pictorial representation but rather in that of technical reproduction: for instance, one may think of Olafur Eliasson’s sunset, installed in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern (The Weather Project, 2003), or the four waterfalls which Eliasson installed along the East River in the New York City area (New York City Waterfalls, 2008). Even in the immersive effects of their impressive aesthetic, these projects point to the construction that makes this aesthetic possible—natural beauty: a technical effect.

Altogether, the developments in recent art can be adequately understood neither exclusively with regard to the problem of imitation, nor only with regard to the traditional aesthetic categories of natural beauty or the sublime. Their forms now quite literally open into [entgrenzen sich auf] (domesticated and undomesticated) natural landscapes, nature enters into view as the object and construction of the natural sciences and ecological politics, and attention is drawn to the decay of the manmade into nature [Naturverfallenheit]. In all these respects, it is a question of exchange and interrelationship between nature and culture,[11] whose implications move art away from the reconciliation-theoretical perspective which Adorno had intended for it. This development is, however, not only content-related, but also formal. For Adorno’s ultimately historical-philosophical idea, according to which art—in whatever way dialectically fractured—should anticipate a reconciliation between rationality and nature, is tied to the precondition of a distance which the artwork should maintain to everything else: to nature as well as to a society altogether governed by instrumental reason, as Adorno mistakenly maintained.[12] Precisely this prerequisite of the artwork’s detachment—an artwork which, for all of Adorno’s emphasis on indeterminacy, he therefore still thinks of as a monad—is no longer given with the open forms dominating art since the 1960s.

Among the most impressive open artworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s are those which dissolve their boundaries into natural landscapes. These are called “Earthworks” or “Land Art.” Among the most famous works, in this context, are Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a spiral-shaped jetty which Smithson erected with heavy equipment on the periphery of the Great Salt Lake in Utah; and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), two furrows driven, with an enormous effort involving significant amounts of explosives, into the eroded edge of a desert-like plateau near Los Angeles, each 457 meters long, nine meters wide, and fifteen meters deep. It is central for these works that art is no longer, as Smithson formulated it, regarded “in terms of an ‘object.’”[13] They cannot be perceived independently from the surroundings in which they are inscribed. This results in a “dialectic,” as Smithson says, of “Site,” meaning the conditions of a specific environment, and “Non-Site,” namely the metaphorical representation, which is itself site-independent, of a place through an artwork.[14] In the case of Spiral Jetty, “the land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Nonsite) rather than the art placed on the ground.”[15] Between both poles, the Site (salt lake and surroundings) and the Non-Site (spiral-formed jetty), a dynamic therefore is set into motion, in which open and closed boundaries, outer and inner coordinates, “Indeterminate Certainty” and “Determinate Uncertainty,” edge and center, the physical “Some Place” and the abstract “No Place” permanently turn into each other.[16] The experience that such works communicate is thus, despite their impressive size, not one of the sublime, but rather of “fluctuating resonances”:[17] because the works cannot be objectified independent from the standpoint of the observer,[18] the parameters of perception shift constantly. If here the subject of experience itself becomes thematic, then not (as in the Kantian theory of the sublime) as infinite subject of reason, but rather as finite, embodied subject of perception.

Beside the effect of a heightened awareness of the phenomenology of perception, the experience of Smithson’s and Heizer’s Earthworks also have a content-related point regarding the staged interpenetration of nature and culture. For not only is the landscape here read as cultural construction, rather the construction also appears inversely as nature. This means, however, that beyond the formal interplay of Site and Non-Site, the concepts of nature and culture themselves are touched upon. Smithson gave an account of this in a series of scattered writings. Art, he emphasizes, does not bring us closer to “nature,” but rather has a denaturalizing effect; one begins to distrust even the appearance of wilderness, recognizes the work of history in it, until finally even the idea of uncultivated nature itself as a (in no way innocent) cultural achievement enters consciousness.[19] If Smithson in effect refuses to picture nature as an enclosed realm to which culture could be immediately opposed, then he by no means draws from this the conclusion to deny the forces of nature as such.[20] Rather, he draws attention to the fact that these forces assert themselves in culture itself—namely, as culture’s own transience. Smithson explains this in a text on the emergence of Spiral Jetty out of his fascination not only for the Great Salt Lake, but also the traces of human technology, debris and scrap metal on the expansive salt flats along the shore: now useless jetties, dilapidated huts, and discarded oil pumps, rusting in the salty air.[21] Against the ideological desire for a lost paradise of untouched nature, Smithson is interested expressly in such “dialectical sites of the present,”[22] where nature clearly cannot be objectified beyond culture and technology, but rather appears in the latter itself, namely in the traces of culture’s and technology’s own transience. Even, Smithson emphasizes, in the rugged tools that he and other land artists preferred, that are made from the “raw material of the earth” into which they sooner or later again will disintegrate. Heavy equipment like shovels, picks, or spades, or so-called “dumb tools” as Michael Heizer referred to them,[23] were, in their destructiveness, reminiscent less of the wonder of human engineering than of the way this engineering collapses under the grip of nature [Naturverfallenheit]. “The most beautiful world,” says Smithson, citing Heraclitus, “is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.”[24]

That “nature’s development is grounded in the dialectical, and not the metaphysical,”[25] as Smithson puts it, therefore means that it should not be misunderstood simply as the other of culture and history. Smithson thus polemicizes vehemently against those parts of the eco-movement that want to come to the defense of a “Mother Nature,” as untouched as possible, against “mankind,” as if the latter were not itself part of nature. For this only increases the “gulf between man and nature” and obstructs the necessary work on concrete forms of its mediation.[26] This means also that the awareness of the cultural mediatedness of nature must necessarily include an awareness of nature’s grip [Naturverfallenheit] on culture. It is striking how much Smithson’s position here resembles that of Adorno, who, if notably not in the context of his aesthetic theory, declared the awareness of this very nature-culture dialectic to be the epitome of an emphatically critical attitude.[27] In fact, this proximity between Smithson and Adorno is possible only on the basis of a departure from the reconciliatory motives of the latter’s aesthetic theory: it is only to the extent that Land Art is no longer understood as the utopian other of culture and society that it opens the possibility of asserting, in the field of art, the insight into the dialectical relation between nature and culture. While modernist art theory—not only that of Adorno, but also that of Greenberg—wanted to sublate nature into abstraction, Smithson insists that “there is no escaping nature through abstract representation”; rather, “abstraction can only be valid if it accepts nature’s dialectic.”[28]

Nevertheless, the relation that Land Art maintains to Adorno’s aesthetic should not be misunderstood as an absolute break with it. While Land Art indeed has nothing more to do with Greenbergian modernism, which Smithson decisively rejects, it coincides perfectly with those Adornian aesthetic intuitions which cannot be reduced to his philosophy of history. Namely, it in no way negates the work’s moment of indeterminacy and the corresponding dynamics of intangible appearance [Schein], which Adorno rightly placed in the center of his aesthetics, but which he immobilized in his historical-philosophical interpretation. Land Art, on the contrary, brings both to fruition. In fact, Land Art occupies a special position here, because in experiencing it, the fleeting character of nature as appearance intersects with that of the artwork to a degree where both can hardly be distinguished from each other. In terms of aesthetics, it is not this intersection that is systematically decisive, but rather the fact that Earthworks, too, are open artworks. As we have already seen in other contexts,[29] open, constitutively indeterminate artworks emphasize what is already latent in closed works: that the aesthetic, the appearing [erscheinende] character of a work cannot be objectified beyond the experiences it evokes. Contemporary open works teach that work and experience are equiprimordial [gleichursprünglich]. Aesthetic appearance [Schein] cannot be interpreted here, to be sure, as the anticipation [Vorschein] of an abstract reconciliation of rationality and nature, but rather must now be understood as the product, itself intangible, of a very concrete process unfolding between observer and work—a process whose dynamics necessarily reflect an insight as fundamental as that of the dialectical relation between nature and culture back to the embodied entity of perception, that is, the observer. For, and this is not the least effect of these works, the observer cannot escape the fluctuations of this dynamic either in form or in content: the observer is rather—as a thinking creature—part of it.

A glance at one of the most discussed works of dOCUMENTA (13) shows how central Robert Smithson’s position still is for more current positions of contemporary art:[30] Pierre Huyghe’s installation Untilled (2011–2012), temporarily installed in Kassel’s Karlsaue Park. As in Smithson’s sense of a dialectical site, Huyghe had chosen for his installation a spot situated on the edge of the highly cultivated baroque park, used for composting the waste generated in the maintenance of the park. The elements of the installation included, among other things: piles of rubble and earth as a homage to Land Art as well as minimalist-seeming concrete components, the traditional sculpture of a female figure with a lively beehive covering her face, plants with hallucinogenic effects, an uprooted (Beuys) oak tree,[31] two dogs whose fur on different parts of their bodies was dyed pink (a leg in one case, a paw in the other), as well as a person in charge of maintaining the entire work. The title of the work, though, was “Untilled,” which means something like uncultivated or undeveloped. However, the work by no means aimed at making tangible a supposedly untouched nature, freed from its cultural mediation. Rather, the fluctuations of the dialectic of nature and culture were made perceptible in the resonances between Site (composting location for the park) and Non-Site (the elements installed there by the artist): on the one hand, the wildest, least cultivated detail still appeared as the result of a cultivating construction, but on the other hand, domesticated nature still appeared (as in the form of the two dogs) in an uncultured creatureliness—an effect which did not exclude the human being, neither the caretaker/gardener employed in the installation nor the visitors who gathered in this out-of-the-way place. The fact that within the framework of this dialectic, human and nature prove to be part of one context opened the space of associations to, among other things, the relations of species to each other (between human, dog, bees, microorganisms)—a theme (Interspecies Ethics) which in the context of dOCUMENTA (13) also received some attention.

Certainly, the two sides of the nature-culture dialectic—the construction of nature on the one side, and nature’s grip [Naturverfallenheit] on construction on the other—are not always, as with Smithson or Huyghe, thematized in their interrelationship. Rather, both sides of this dialectic are also treated separately from each other, such that further aesthetic-political aspects come into view. Thus, the sensibility for the transience, indeed for the decay [Verfall] of construction since the 1960s also affects artistic construction itself. Besides Smithson and Heizer, one could also name in this context artists like Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Dieter Roth and many others, whose works are partly composed of organic materials and therefore take on a processual, variable, transient character. Formally and content-wise, the relevant works in their own way oppose—and this above all marks them as works of contemporary art, according to the understanding presented in this text—the idea of the monadic, self-contained work that is valid independent of experience. The mutable form of the work brings into awareness not only the singularity but also the historical moment of the work’s experience, a moment which is, for its part, reminded in its transience of its inherent naturalness.

The other side of the dialectic, the one which concerns the cultural mediatedness of nature, undoubtedly stands in the center of the alliances with the ecology movement that recent art enters. Like in Smithson, this alliance stands under the sign of an “end of nature”—if one understands by this the end of an idea, namely the idea of nature as an enclosed realm. Not by chance does a certain author occupy an especially important position in this context, an author who passionately opposes the (mis)understanding of political ecology as “nature conservation”: Bruno Latour. Latour, whose intellectual influence on dOCUMENTA (13), among others, could clearly be felt, argued in his book Politics of Nature[32] that we can learn from recent ecological crises how epistemologically and politically misleading it is to talk of a “nature” which must be protected against “politics.” For these crises showed that the objects with which they are associated—for example, the prions likely responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the so-called Mad Cow Disease—can no longer be “limited to the natural world alone, that is, naturalized.”[33] It is rather a matter of “fuzzy objects,” whose reality cannot at all be thought independently from their entanglement with human praxis (agriculture, science, politics, consumption).[34] It is therefore “completely superfluous to include [them] in an inhuman and ahistorical nature.”[35] Political ecology must therefore, says Latour, address the mediations. Instead of limiting itself to a confrontation, led in the name of “nature,” with established political institutions, it should expand the field of its possible interventions by gaining clarity about the networks, institutions, and scientific apparatuses in which such objects appear and become publicly discussable (while important alternatives are possibly marginalized).

Like Latour’s political ecology, contemporary art is increasingly interested in such “fuzzy objects.” However, art (unlike political ecology) does not do this primarily to intervene in the name of other, better mediations; but rather, to reflect on the institutions and media of mediation itself. This is perhaps especially clear where the borders between ecological engagement and performance blur, as in the case of artist Amy Balkin’s efforts, supported by dOCUMENTA (13), to have Earth’s atmosphere recognized as UNESCO World Heritage (Public Smog, ongoing since 2004). Because of the unclear status of this request, oscillating between literalness and poetry, what came particularly into view were the juridical and political mechanisms of recognition themselves. The last border crossing to be mentioned here, a crossing into the field of the natural sciences, also demonstrates the specific politics of art in this context. If, for instance, the members of an artist collective, clad in white coats, appear in the context of a participatory performance as representatives of a biotech firm which invites visitors in its PR laboratory tent to produce transgenetic bacteria themselves and in the end consider the possibility of their release—as happened in the context of the GenTerra performance (2001–2003) by the Critical Art Ensemble, in cooperation with Beatriz da Costa—then, evidently, it is not in fact a question of putting new “fuzzy objects” into the world. Rather, such an action aims to move the public to a mental confrontation with the ecological, technological, and moral dimensions of such productions. Insofar as this succeeds, it does so because the artistic play with the borders between science and art unsettles the situational perception of its audience: does it concern a scientific setting, or an artistic production? What does participation mean here? Does it concern responsible action, or an action in the theatrical mode of “as if”? And are the objects that are produced here fact or fiction? Again, art associates itself here with politics precisely through the difference that it simultaneously maintains to it: even a work as didactic as that by the Critical Art Ensemble does not replace science nor political ecology, which intervenes into the relations between science and economy. Rather, like other recent performative works, it acquires its political potential from the reflective distance to the spheres of knowledge and action that it produces, precisely where it brings their weight into play.

Once more, we see that the boundary crossings of art in no way sublate the difference of the aesthetic. On the contrary, this difference only comes into its own where it is no longer misunderstood as the difference of the self-contained work to its exterior: in contemporary art.

Notes

[1] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 65 (translation has been modified).

[2] Adorno, Aesthetics: 1958/59, 27.

[3] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 66.

[4] This argument traces back to the theses developed with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

[5] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 67 (translation has been modified).

[6] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version],” 15.

[7] Adorno, Aesthetics: 1958/59, 25.

[8] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 72.

[9] Adorno, 67 (translation has been modified).

[10] See Adorno, 68–70.

[11] This commitment—notwithstanding the diversity of the contributions—also becomes clear in Kastner, Nature.

[12] For a critique of the totalizing characteristics of Adorno’s critique of reason, see in particular Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society.

[13] Smithson, The Spiral Jetty (1972),” 147.

[14] Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968),” 364.

[15] Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty (1972),” 153.

[16] Smithson, 152–53.

[17] Smithson, 147.

[18] Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 280.

[19] See Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1969).”

[20] See Smithson, “Art and Dialectics (1971),” 370.

[21] Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty (1972),” 145–46.

[22] Smithson, “Cultural Confinement (1972),” 155.

[23] Michael Heizer, cited in Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968),” 101.

[24] Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968),” 102.

[25] Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape (1973),” 161.

[26] Smithson, 163.

[27] See Adorno, History and Freedom.

[28] Smithson, “Olmsted,” 162.

[29] Translator’s Note: As described in other sections of Theorien der Gegenwartskunst.

[30] For further details, see also Bishop, “Remote.”

[31] With this, Huyghe refers to Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Oaks—City Forestation Instead of City Administration, developed for documenta 7 (1982), for which Beuys planted 7000 trees over the course of several years in different locations in Kassel, with the help of volunteers.

[32] Latour, Politics of Nature.

[33]Latour, 25; Latour, Politiques de la nature, 41 (translation has been modified).

[34] Latour, 25; Latour, 41 (translation has been modified).

[35] Latour, Politics of Nature, 21.

Works Cited

 Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2002.

——. Aesthetics: 1958/59. Edited by Eberhard Ortland. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

——. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version].” Translated by Michael W. Jennings. Grey Room 39 (2010): 11–38.

Bishop, Claire, Lynne Cooke, Pierre Huyghe, Pamela M. Lee, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittel, and Tim Griffin. “Remote Possibilities: A Roundtable Discussion on Land Art’s Changing Terrain.” Artforum (2005): 289–95.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action: 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.

Kastner, Jeffrey, ed. Nature. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

——. Politiques de la nature: comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris: La Découverte, 2008.

Smithson, Robert. “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 364. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 100–113. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——. “Art and Dialectics (1971).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 370. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——. “Cultural Confinement (1972).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 154–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——.  “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape (1973).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 157–71. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——.  “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1969).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 119–33. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——.  “The Spiral Jetty (1972).” In Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 143–53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.