ABSTRACT
Much of the border between Canada and the United States traverses dense forest. A six-meter clear-cut marks the international boundary through this territory, one that needs continual maintenance as a large-scale landscaping project to keep the borderline visible. This Sisyphean task has been performed twice yearly since 1925. In aerial views, the deforested strip resembles an earthwork from the 1960s, an aesthetic statement about the spatial production of landscape rather than the mundane, ongoing groundwork of the International Boundary Commission. Earthworks were named as such in the 1960s when the American artist Robert Smithson attempted to define an emerging form of land-based art, one that spoke to the conceit of human endeavor in the face of the entropic forces of nature, physical change and transformation. Earthworks were monu - mental statements that juxtaposed art’s temporary and ephemeral qualities against our desire for permanence and certainty. North American borders share in this seemingly futile game of will, temporarily manipulating the landscape in order to partition, control and define a physical boundary that is continually erased by the region’s dominant ecosystems. But the line through the forest that forms the Canada-US border appears like an earthwork through its conceptual simplicity and scale as well as the way it changes our perception of the landscape.
