Pine Barrens, Nancy Holt. 1975.

Recorded in the south of New Yersey. It is an aproximately half an hour travelling about the pine woods in the area. While pines and pines are appearing we can hear the voices of the population talking about their experiences in relation with their country.

One one hand, we can perceive it as a representation of a landscape. Even it´s not the traditional way, we could say that the frames composition is in a pictoric way. The objective video representation is complemented with the subjective voices of people talking about their experiences. Telling about the place which is being recorded, the film works as a kind of antropologyc experiment. So, this objective-subjective piece, can be considered as well as a document.

Documentation as a piece of art brings the possibility to be closer to the public, showing them a process, in case than an finished object. Something similar happens with descriptions in novels. The narrator arrives to a place and if it is going to be relevant, he will try to tell how is it. This help us to situate ourselves. To sum up, we are invited to take part.

Sometimes the art work can be considered as its own documentation. For example, Hanne Darboven drawings, are the description of its implementation process. Looking at the line thickness and the number of pages, we can have the idea of how much time she was writing on the papers. 

Existenz. Hanne Daeboven. 1966-88.

This is an extract from an interview made by Avalanch to Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson in 1970. This is what Smithson said about Pine Barrens area. He as well developped there one of his artworks. Let´s see another point of view.

"[...]The first non-site that I did was the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey. This place was in a state of equilibrium, it had a kind of tranquility and it was discontinuous from the surrounding area because of its stunted pine trees. There was a hexagon airfield there which lent itself very well to the application of certain crystalline structures which had preoccupied me in my earlier work. A crystal can be mapped out, and in fact I think that it was crystallography which led me to map-making. Initially I went to the Pine Barrens to set up a system of outdoor pavements but in the process I became interested in the abstract aspects of mapping. At the same time I was working with maps and aerial photography for an architectural company. I had great access to them. So I decided to use the Pine Barrens site as a piece of paper and draw a crystalline structure over the landmass rather than on a 20x30 sheet of paper. In this way I was applying my conceptual thinking directly to the disruption of the site over an area of several miles. So you might say my Non-Site was a three-dimensional map of the site."