On site, out of sight: viewing devices in Canadian land art, 1969-1980
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation addresses land art—ephemeral, site-specific works created from found materials, such as plants, stones, logs, earth, and water, in public and private outdoor locales—by Canadian artists from 1969 to 1980. I examine lesser-known artworks and writings by, and archival materials pertaining to, the N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Dean Ellis, Robin Mackenzie, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Bill Vazan. Despite the diversity of materials and settings chosen by artists, the artworks of interest to this study are united by their operation as viewing devices that transformatively mediate the beholder's view of the sites in which the works are located. My central argument is that three viewing devices featured in Canadian land art—frames, viewfinders, and apertures—deliberately destabilize the conception of site. These devices undermine the commonly assumed stability, visual coherence, fixity, and boundaries of sites by producing new, visually experienced sites displaying unstable, mutable, even contradictory appearances. I further underscore that these views respond critically to issues in Canadian culture, history, and regional politics in the post-Centenary era. To develop this argument, the Introduction situates Canadian land art in relation to existing scholarship on theories of visual perception and site specificity in 20th-century outdoor art (predominantly devoted to American and European art). The Introduction specifies this study's original contributions to previous scholarship before mapping the structure of the dissertation. Chapter One defines essential terms, concepts, and debates, and proposes a contextual definition of visually oriented land art in Canada. Each of the subsequent four chapters, chronologically and thematically ordered, analyzes a particular type of viewing device and model of site in an artwork by a Canadian artist discussed in connection with contemporaneous works by international artists. The Conclusion reprises the central argument, expands on the contextual definition, and extricates the principal characteristics defining land art's manipulation of site through sight.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".