Grass Mound of Aspen

Grass Mound

Artist: Herbert Bayer

What: Herbert Bayer argued that, “In respecting nature, the artist will not imitate nature but create a spiritual world of itself side-by-side with nature, since both the natural environment and man-made environment can exist with each other if their boundaries are understood.” Grass Mound, located in Aspen is a forty-five foot diameter grass mound with a heap, a pit, and aa rock of raw marble in its midst.

So What:
Bayer believed that it signifies a human space in nature upon which to reflect on the potentials of artistic agency.
Agency was to Bayer an issues of mobilizing the full human potential, understood through the Freudian model of conscious and unconscious psychological drives. Humans could only see the world from a human perspective, and experience of real or imagined agencies in nature were thus be analyzed according to the principles of psychology

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/12.2/anker.html