The navel of the world was just one more stone in the road: land art and body art: modes of artistic horizontalization

Abstract

Based on two works belonging to land art (A circle in Huesca by Richard Long) and to body art (Psyché by Gina Pane), we present a reading based on the concept of rhizome, extracted from Deleuze-Guattari, which will lead us to the concept of horizontalization. Imbricating art and politics, we will have an impact on the radically democratic implications of these artistic proposals. We will extract three functions shared by both: anti-hierarchy, immediacy and openness. By raising the concept of rhizome, we will build bridges between the aforementioned works by conjugating the analysis of the Gina Pane's navel as center and Richard Long's perimeter of stones as connective boundary. The center, symbol of authority, the vertebral axis of a closed system, will be diluted, that is to say, criticized and destroyed by the always open perimeter that makes every border porous. In the final conclusions we will highlight the dissolution of the classic-modern subject-object paradigm and, above all, the function of art as an experiential signaling, advocating open communication as the axis of all artistic signification.