Alongside these primordial references to the fundamental purity of Mother Earth, Oldenburg also professed to have had a more contemporary message in mind. As Susan Boettger points out, Placid Civic Monument was dug in a period of intense anxiety and paranoia in the United States, generated by – amongst other things – the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the ongoing climate of political protest during the late 1960s. Defending his work against further charges of “preposterousness,” Oldenburg remarked that his grave was “the perfect anti-war monument: like saying nothing.” In a statement he wrote: “The BM (Burial Monument) is not frivolous. In fact, it is a frightening introduction to a year of burials (don’t be melodramatic).” Evoking at once a grave, a trench and an underground bunker, Placid Civil Monument tapped into an undercurrent of nervousness and disquiet in the face of real and imagined threats, running through the United States in 1967.

Describing the atmosphere of the subterranean chamber in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard linked the space of the cellar with feelings of “exaggerated fear” and “buried madness.” The irrational psychic pressure exerted by the underground chamber has been comprehensively explored by Alice Aycock, an American sculptor who began making what she describes as “psycho-sculpture” in the early 1970s. Low Building with Dirt Roof (for Mary) was built by Aycock and her mother on a farm just outside Pennsylvania – once again in sharp contrast to the remote locations, teams of contractors and heavy machinery involved in much Land Art. Twenty feet wide and twelve feet long but only thirty inches high, visitors were forced to crawl inside this tomb-like space, under seven tonnes of earth supported by its roof. Low Building with Dirt Roof was technically a space made subterranean by covering an architectural structure with earth, but other works by Aycock, like Project for a Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels (1975), delved deeper underground. Citing a range of influences, from Bachelard’s description of “underground manoeuvres” to book entitled The Architecture of War, Aycock likened her subterranean psycho-sculpture to the oppressive spaces of “burial holes… underground bunkers…dug-outs, cellars, sarcophagi.” By holding back the earth, she suggested that the walls of the tunnels indicated a repressed anxiety that brute matter might penetrate the space, thus suffocating its inhabitants. Protector and potential aggressor, earth in Aycock’s work threatens the viewer not with contamination, but with total obliteration.

If the United States of the 1960s and early 70s were characterized by paranoia and social unrest, then the same period in Italy saw a major economic downturn, and the emergence of Arte Povera – literally ‘poor art’ – a movement christened by critic Germano Celant, who described the artist in evocative terms as a “guerrilla warrior” battling exploitation. In 1967 one of the lesser known artists of the group, Pino Pascali, exhibited two works related to, yet distinct in intention from, Oldenburg’s Placid Civil Monument of the same year. One Metre Cube of Earth and Two Metre Cube of Earth (the second title is not, strictly speaking, geometrically correct) were two compacted blocks of earth attached to the wall of the gallery, jutting into its pristine white space. With their clean lines and wall-bound location reminiscent of the work of Donald Judd, these mechanically-produced cubes conflate the logic of industrial production evident in much Minimal art with materials drawn from nature. While Celant described the cubes as “natural synecdoches in a natural world,” I would suggest that the technological precision of these objects is what makes them so compelling. Their eerie uniformality and seriality makes the cubes appear fresh off the production line – suggesting that even the supposedly “natural” might be manufactured. The term “Earthworks” – the title of an exhibition curated by Smithson in 1968 – was in fact appropriated from the 1965 Sci-Fi novel of the same name by British writer Brian Aldiss. Here the term refers to the manufacture of artificial soil, in a future where even earth has become a scarce commodity. While it’s unsurprising that this dystopian vision appealed to Smithson, it seems also to permeate Pascali’s box-fresh units of earth, undercutting Celant’s utopian rhetoric of a return to authenticity. Rather than offering an escape from Italy’s economic problems, I would argue – contrary to Celant – that Pascali’s cubes have the failed logic of post-war industrialization pressed into every particle of their soil.

Displacement
While Pascali bought earth into the gallery, the rigid geometry of his forms mimics, rather than threatens, the organisation of the white cube space. His Metre Cubes of Earth stand in sharp contrast to Asta Gröting’s Acker (2007), a massive, mulchy, fetid heap which confronts the viewer head-on, like some enormous flying cowpat. Against the clean white walls of the gallery it looks repulsive – abject even – in Julia Kristeva’s sense of that term as that which transgresses boundaries, threatening the physical or psychic integrity of the subject. Very much “matter in the wrong place,” this earthy intruder disrupts the hushed sanctum of the gallery, defiling its apparent purity and neutrality. If the white cube space was seen by Smithson and others to sanitize and “politically lobotomise” the work of art, Acker appears at first like a dirty protest against the regulations of the art institution. Yet coming closer, Acker doesn’t smell, or crumble, or threaten to soil the viewer’s clothes. Made of epoxied resin, it is a carefully constructed facsimile, in reality far less earthy than Pascali’s industrially-processed cubes. Alongside other works in Gröting’s exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute [8th February – 26th April 2009], including metallic potatoes and a futuristic, stylised fireplace, this artificiality is anything but comforting. If these objects represent the fundamentals of human survival, we quickly realise that they are useless – nothing will grow in this fake soil. Another version of Acker is even more sinister: imbued with a phosphorescent pigment, the soil glows as if contaminated with a radioactive substance. Like Oldenburg, Gröting’s soil sculptures suggest that we defile the earth – and not vice versa.