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  1. Land art is an art direction in which an artist uses natural materials and the surrounding landscape to create an object. This movement emerged in the United States in the late 1960s as an artistic protest against the elitism of traditional art, commerce in the art environment, and galleries and museums as exhibition spaces.

    The founder of land art is considered to be the artist Robert Smithson. He believed that in the distant future, the universe will transform, and its key characteristic will be all-encompassing uniformity. Based on this, he aspired to minimalism and mathematical impersonality in the author's self-expression: he first used industrial materials in his works,and later even called on nature as co-authors.

    In October 1968, New York hosted the Earth Works exhibition, dedicated to American post-war art, where Smithson, Walter de Maria, Michael Heiser and other artists presented their art objects made from natural materials-soil, sand, water. In the same year, Robert Smithson's essay “The Sediment of Thinking: Earth Projects” was published, which became a theoretical justification for land art.

    According to the critic and editor of Bookforum magazine Nicole Rudik, the main idea of land art was the relationship between nature and man, the idea of nature as a workshop that provides both space and materials for the implementation of the idea.

    Disillusionment with the power of technology and the complexity of urban life also pushed artists to live in nature. In land art, there is a return to the roots, a turn to the mythological way of thinking, the artist turns to the creator, which is expressed in the scale of land artists ' projects. The creations of land artists do not imply the viewer, and the artist's figure itself does not matter – land art denies the author, he merges with nature. The artist tries to reorganize the environment into a huge canvas, where nature is not a passive decoration, but a full-fledged participant. The artist no longer tries to transform the world, to bring it to perfection, but turns to the search for lost values, trying to return art to nature.

    Land art festivals are now held all over the world, the largest of them-in Lithuania, Denmark, Germany, the USA. The most famous Russian festival is the Archstoyanie festival in Nikola-Lenivets, where thousands of artists from all over the world come every summer. The village itself, according to land art artist Nikolai Polissky, has become an example of the transformation of a dying village into a fashionable cultural platform.

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