The Buddhas and Land Art

William Cobbing on drawing on ideas from Arte Povera and Land Art

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More subjectively, I saw in the Buddha niches a link to notions of ruin and entropic dispersal of earthly material present in Land Art and Arte Povera works from the sixties, which has recently informed my art practice. From Michael Heizer’s City monument that referenced pre-Columbian forms, to Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown with its displacement of geological strata, Land Art resonates with the shifting appearance of the Buddhas in the landscape since their creation. Even the scaffolding structure which holds up one of the arched Buddha niches has a quality to the igloo sculptures of Mario Merz.

Valuing the ever-changing nature of landscape rather than preserving it is key to Land Art, and is potentially instructive to the debate about rebuilding the Buddhas that has been going on since their final destruction. The Buddhas have shifted in appearance over the centuries, from the more refined stucco and jewelled surface of the original versions, which had eroded over time well before the Taliban’s final obliteration of them. Dynamiting them becomes woven into their story, with the niches memorialising the recent turmoil.  Besides, investing in their reconstruction could well be insensitive to a country that needs aid and infrastructural improvements much more urgently.

I was particularly aware of Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacement series from 1969 when making the mirror photographs in Bamiyan, but avoided consulting this work before travelling to Kabul, so as to be more independently minded in my approach. Since returning I have explored Smithson’s series in more depth, finding both parallels and differences with what I did.

The American land artist drove down to Yucatan on Highway 261 in a rented Dodge Dart, recording the journey in his inimitable writing style. Smithson evokes the presence of the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca who acts like a guide from the ancient past, saying, “you must travel at random, like the first Mayans; you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art.” Smithson arranged groups of a dozen mirrors (each 12 inches squared) by partially burying them in the ground, so that their reflection was often obscured by soil, stones or ash.  Smithson stressed that the mirrors were in rather than on the ground.  Each of the nine Mirror Displacements were arranged in very different terrains, from the silt by the edge of a lake, to dense undergrowth in a jungle.

The camera that documents the temporary installations is used as a metaphor for shifting registers of time, with Smithson evoking the geological timescale of the Carboniferous period, and the ancient Mayan gods. He imagines Tezcatlipoca saying “that a camera is a portable tomb, you must remember that.” Smithson reaches back as far as the southern hemisphere continent of Gondwanaland 200 million years ago, and how it exists as a memory, in the form of a map rather than an actual landscape. Tezcatlipoca is imagined gazing into a “black obsidian mirror” to reveal the future. Smithson closes by noting that of his visit to Yucatan that all that remains are “memory traces” because the mirror works were taken away immediately after the photographs were taken of them.

Return to the start of the Bamiyan Mirror series:
>> Bamiyan Mirror Series

Further material:
>> Will Cobbing interviewed about the Bamiyan Mirror series