Nobody's Property: Art, Land, Space

Hardcover | 23.5 x 1.9 x 28.6 cm | 136 pp

Princeton University Art Museum | 2010 | 9780300149289

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth.

Discussed are nine case studies by seven artists and two artist teams - Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra.

While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. By no means confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.

An intriguing introductory text offers a historical context for the works in Nobody's Property and provides a broad overview of the projects involved. Also included are an essay on the relationship between historical land art and new media technologies; the transcript of a roundtable discussion; and essays by various contributors on the featured works of art.