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Much discussion of performance or Land Art from the 1960s and 70s
considers whether the art consists of the work itself or its documentation.
Could it really be experienced secondhand? Was the art the idea … or
the stuff of it? Such recondite questions had to be put in the closet when
it came to making saleable works in order to live, and few artists of note
have ever proven themselves capable of true disinterest in the career
element of being an artist.
In 1974, the artist Robert Kinmont
walked away from a successful practice to support his family by other
means, first of all by founding a school of sorts, then devoting time to
the study of meditation, and later working as a carpenter. His return to
making art was not for three decades, but, despite that lacuna, his work
has rapidly re-found an audience. It's the first time his art has been seen
in Europe, and at that, in three shows: here in Switzerland at
RaebervonStenglin; though an exhibition at the Fundación La Caixa in
Barcelona, which will travel to Madrid hot on its heels; and the LA MOCA
exhibition "Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974" will be shown at
the Haus der Kunst in Munich later this year.
In light of
Kinmont's engagement with Buddhism during his time away from making art,
it's easy to conceive of his work being koan-like, a reading that allows it
an inexplicable core, but the work continues where he left off, indeed
expanding on previous series, to challenge any easy outs. "Wait" opens with
the 1972 work Copper Pots (given a chance), a group of copper
vessels and the box for their storage, on which their purpose is
chronicled. Kinmont had placed them upright in the desert and filled them
with water that was to drip slowly into the arid land, with the hope
of germinating dormant seeds. As he fed the containers, this ambition
(which was never realized) became secondary to his method of marking and
finding his way back to them on each visit with the least possible scarring
of the landscape. The piece has been shown before in its case, but here it
forms a miniature lighting field rooted in the bruised concrete floor of
the gallery.
Kinmont's backyard in northern California is harsh,
endless, and extreme, though beautiful and fertile, in a manner, too. It is
omnipresent here—in the images, the materials, the physical dryness
of it all. Another early work, My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969 (remade
in 2008) further elucidates Kinmont's relationship with his home; sixteen
black-and-white images of roads run away from the artist and the viewer.
The land takes center stage, barren but mediated, charted by the roads
running through it. Here in Switzerland, the contrast between the European
and the North American understanding of land is marked—beyond
RaebervonStenglin's industrial space, rural Switzerland is dramatic,
verdant, and closely managed, with barely a square meter that is not part
of a concentrated agricultural ecosystem, yet generally more accessible
than American wildernesses. A further remade piece suggests that the two
locations are not, however, worlds apart culturally: Standing here in
front of these mountains is success (1970/2012) spells out the work's
title in copper tubing that is being chilled to the point that ice gathers
on it. The mountains are absent but we stand in front of an imagined,
experienced, landscape (and note man's modest triumph of interaction).
Kinmont's contemporary practice retains the appearance of his older
work, but its patina is now advantageous, for if environmental damage has
increased in the meanwhile, popular conceptions of the planet have
conversely become ever more romanticized. Kinmont's work is grounded and
realistic; it claims neither impotence nor omnipotence, but an unassuming
engagement with the quotidian. His quotidian is both raw matter and the
ideas that we bring to it, as a recent continuation of his log series
suggests: Log Filled with Dirt (2007) is a stripped tree trunk with
two sections cut out. Inside one end, we are told, is dirt, inside the
other, toys, but both openings have been resealed. To the viewer, the
contents are as present as the mountains summoned by writing in ice.
Aoife Rosenmeyer is a freelance writer and curator, and
organizes an irregular series of debates under the banner Art +
Argument. She has been based in Zürich since 2008.
 
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