The first part of the title of “Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art,” which opens at the IFC Center on January 8, comes from the artist Michael Heizer, who is quoted as claiming the term for himself and a group of artists, mostly based in New York, who in the mid-1960s began using the earth as their canvas. The move away from the studio and the gallery system stemmed from, as the critic Barbara Rose claimed in a 1969 article for Artforum, a “dissatisfaction with the current social and political system,” leading to “an unwillingness to produce commodities which gratify and perpetuate that system.”But as the documentary, directed by James Crump, shows, “trouble” is a strange way to describe what was happening with the land artists at the time. For a movement (a strong word to describe it) built, at least in the language of critics, on rejecting the systems of money that structure the art world, those involved certainly relied quite a bit on the generosity of gallerists such as Virginia Dwan, who helped finance, among other works, Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” and staged the monumental “Earth Works” show at her gallery in New York in 1969.This introduces an interesting contradiction at the heart of “Troublemakers,” and one the film is not interested in exploring. On the one hand, it refuses to hide the contributions made by Dwan, who was instrumental in the creation of this work through her deep reservoir of funding (she is the heiress to the 3M fortune). On the other hand, it minimizes her role by placing her squarely as the person with the money. The film goes even further by pushing to the side the artist Nancy Holt, who, if we were to take the film at its word, was simply the wife of Robert Smithson. She was around but just hadn’t found her voice, the artist Lawrence Weiner claims, before reminding the viewer, twice, that it had nothing to do with gender.The film finally gets around to discussing Holt’s work with roughly 10 minutes left in its running time. Along with an unfortunate comment from Carl Andre — looking extra creepy with a neck beard — about the number of beautiful ladies that frequented the club Max’s Kansas City, where he and many of the other artists of the period would spend their nights, these factors all add to the general discomfort around the narrative “Troublemakers” is pushing about the brilliance of the male artist. There are no women allowed in the story of the cowboy conceptualists, apparently. Maybe they didn’t cause enough trouble.This film is really about Smithson and Heizer, and the competition between them that seemed to exist solely in the latter’s head. There is some mention of Walter de Maria, the most fascinating land artist, and some words late in the film about Dennis Oppenheim (including Weiner’s claim that he was “the least interested in aesthetics”). Smithson is the artist most associated with land art, partly because of the prominence of “Spiral Jetty” and also because of his death in 1973 in an airplane crash in Texas, where he was surveying space to make a new work. Heizer is still working, most notably on his ongoing “City” project in the Nevada desert, 44 years in the making, as if he’s trying to mythologize his former sparring partner.But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a story worth telling, especially visually. These works stand out when presented on the screen, and movement through and around them with a camera adds to the sense of awe they’re meant to provoke. But there needs to be more context and more criticism. From where did these artists emerge? What did their work push other artists to do in the following years, up until the present day? Are there things that they did wrong? Very little of this is addressed in “Troublemakers,” which takes a narrow focus and tells the same story we’ve heard before.
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