The newly globalized world of the 21st Century was supposed to have been newly free of borders and barriers, yet industrialization, urbanization, and political disputes are increasingly redefining our understanding of territory. It is in this context, that Baum identifies a sociological connection to land as a unique aspect of the land art seen over the first decade of the new Millennium. The Earth artists of the late 1960’s and early 70’s were largely apolitical, she argues, with Robert Smithson as an exception. Generally speaking, their objective was to create sculpture out of the materials found in nature or to build on-site in remote areas. “Contemporary land artists understand land less so as nature than as culture,” says Baum. “Land is never divorced from politics, from history, from struggle, from conflict.”
      Contested ownership of land is at the center of many of the works on display. The Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s contribution to the show is Kings of the Hill (2003), a video shot at the resort town Herzliya Pituach, near her home in Tel Aviv. It documents the weekly pastime of a group of Israeli men who ride their SUV’s across the sand dunes, which for all of its competition and aggression brings to mind the region’s territorial conflicts. Along a different border in the American Southwest, the artist Santiago Sierra hired a group of men to inscribe the word “Submisión” into a plot of land in Anapra, Mexico, just west of Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Sierra chose this location, one of the most impoverished and polluted in Mexico, to denote the disproportionate burden carried by the poor when it comes to environmental degradation.