Sitemarker 4 - One and Three Piles (After Boettger)
Sitemarker 4 - One and Three Piles (After Boettger) 2017. Inkjet print, 582x702mm, laserjet print, 297x420mm, topsoil, star pickets, flagline, post caps, dimensions variable.
Site specific and ephemeral works of art are often reliant on their photographic and printed mediation to substantiate their ongoing cultural and art historical significance. As with the land and earth artists of the sixties and seventies, their place within the ecoart grandnarrative and continuing influence on undergraduate fine art students in the twenty-first century has largely been due to the inclusion of texts such as Suzaan Boettger’s Earthworks: art and the landscape of the sixties (2002), providing a standard retrospective examination of the genres. The monumentality of the works contained therein surrender to a historically documentary reading in cases such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Dennis Oppenheim’s Sitemarker series.
Residential development sites were and are analogous with earthworks, and continue to provide structurally similar forms. Within the contemporary Australian landscape, the familiar urban sprawl rhetoric requires the clearing of acres of land for the country’s continually expanding population.
In Sitemarker 4 – One and Three Piles, Eyles compares the earthworks metanarrative outlined above to that of the sprawling landscape of Brisbane’s northern suburbs, by creating an earthworks pastiche or visual allegory.
Photo credit: Tiana Jefferies, Tristan Eyles 2017.