American conceptual and performance artist.
He studied art at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA (1959–64) and at Stanford University, Stanford, CA (1964–5). His early work was LAND ART and involved large-scale outdoor projects documented by photographs. In Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop (1969; see 1974 exh. cat.), he organized the planting of a field of wheat at Finsterwolde in Holland according to a specific pattern and then had a huge cross shape harvested out of the grown crop. He prevented any of the crop from being sold, an act he likened to ‘stopping raw pigment from becoming an illusionistic force on canvas’ (1974 exh. cat.). In the early 1970s he turned to such performance works as Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970; see 1974 exh. cat.), in which he lay in the sun for five hours with a book across his chest so that his skin burned, leaving a silhouette of the book. He saw this as a form of painting. From about 1973 he became increasingly interested in mechanical installations: in Attempt to Raise Hell (1974), for example, he constructed a mannequin that banged its head against a silver bell every 100 seconds. From 1979 he began making what he called ‘Factories’, which were permanent or temporary machine constructions similar to the works of Jean Tinguely. Final Stroke: Project for a Glass Factory (1980; San Francisco, CA, MOMA) consists of an elaborate metal construction incorporating moving electrical parts and a butane heater. It was accompanied by a narrative describing a mechanomorphic encounter between a man and a woman, thus relating it to Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23). The ‘Factories’ were succeeded by the spectacular ‘Fireworks’ series of mechanical constructions (1981–2), which used electric motors and fireworks. He also produced more traditional assemblages in the 1980s using metal fragments and other materials, as in Roots in Cubism, Hearts in the Stars (Forest for Cézanne) (1983–4; see 1984 exh. cat., p. 59).