In the past, GDP and resources use have always been tightly correlated. But this is just drawing a line through some data — it’s not based on any deep theory. And in fact, these correlations can change very quickly. Just as one example, here’s energy use versus GDP since 1949.
If you were sitting in 1970, you could look at this curve and claim, very confidently, that economic growth requires concomitant increases in energy use. And you’d be wrong. Because the trend is your friend til the bend at the end.
Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them.
The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own."