earthwork

“It was going to be almost a vocal earthwork,” said Aitken, who tends to think and speak in floating, unearthly concepts.

Land art in Malibu gets a second chance, as the artist Lita Albuquerque redraws her “Malibu Line,” an ultra-vivid blue earthwork that connects earth, ocean and sky.

It’s now celebrated for bridging Light and Space art — like the perceptual experiments of Robert Irwin — and the Earthwork movement, which was, for too long, defined by male artists of the 1960s and ’70s such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, who used heavy machinery like bulldozers to transform — some say scar — the land.

In a separate, cavernous space, large mounds of earth displaced by the digging materialize like a massive earthwork.

“To be honest, it’s hard to evaluate that number,” he says of the study’s earthwork prediction.