Art before Life,

1969

Art before Life pairs a photograph of the moon's surface with an aerial view of Ground Incision/Loop Drawing, one of the many works that Michael Heizer created in the Nevada desert in 1968.

First active in the late 1960s, artists like Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim are best known for the projects they realized outdoors, ones in which tools and earth-moving equipment were used to shape, carve, displace, and inscribe raw matter, transforming landscape into sculpture. Although remote and often ephemeral, such projects were usually accompanied by models or photographic documentation that the artists displayed in museums and galleries. Such contradictions were at the heart of Earth Art, for which outside and inside, impermanence and permanence, presence and absence, immediacy and mediation were inextricably connected.