Study Questions: Week Eleven: Earthworks, Golf Courses, and Other Contemporary Landscapes

• Land Art, also known as Earthworks, challenges fundamental ideas about the nature of art. Explain the premises of this art form and the ways it serves as a form of protest.
• What is Conceptual Art, and how do Earthworks constitute such art? How do they transcend it?
• How do some Earthworks pose new considerations of the nature of time and space?
• Discuss Robert Smithson as a seminal figure in the Land Art movement. What was Smithson's attitude toward technology and the environment?
• Compare the Earthworks of contemporary artists with those of prehistoric peoples.
• What is Postmodernism in landscape design, and how does the garden of Charles Jencks in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, express the new theory of cosmogenesis?
• Discuss the evolution of golf as a popular sport and the golf course as a landscape type from its origins in the fifteenth century up to the present.
• Discuss golf in terms of land use, urban planning, and the environment.
• Discuss deconstructivism as an anti-representational form of landscape design.
• Explain how the design theory Bernard Tschumi employed at Parc La Villette in Paris differs from traditional theories of park design.
• Contrast Parc Citroën in Paris with Parc La Villette and the respective notions of space and place each evokes.
• Like William Shenstone's Leasowes or Henry Hoare's Stourhead, two 18th-century English gardens, Little Sparta, the garden of Ian Hamilton Findlay, is a garden of association. Explain.
• Maya Ying Lin is a conceptual artist whose medium has been landscape. Explain the nature of her work and how it differs from that of other Earthworks artists.
• Discuss and compare the use of inscribed words in the landscapes of Findlay and Lin.
• Discuss how scientific instruments of perception (microscopes, telescopes, satellite cameras) influence Lin's landscape poetics