It was predictable that Alloway would welcome not only variant objects, but also the variant locations of Land or Earth art. The movement— including artists like Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson—had emerged around 1968 as part of the reaction against compact art work and the gallery environment. Smithson, Heizer, and Oppenheim also all expressed serious reservations about the art market system: Heizer declared that “One aspect of earth orientation is that the works circumvent the galleries and the artist has no sense of the commercial and the utilitarian.” But, as Alloway points out, “the production of Earthworks was never severed from the support system for gallery-bound painting and sculpture.” Finance was frequently given, and planning undertaken, by gallery owners; land was sometimes donated by patrons and collectors. Documentation of works was invariably shown in galleries.

Alloway was prompt in his response to the new tendency with its expanded aesthetic, writing about Smithson's Non-Sites and Heizer's “primal and purist” cuts into the ground in his Options essay in 1968. A year later Smithson was elevated to the category of artists “who ostentatiously pulled as many methodological rugs from under art as possible”—a distinguished category that included Jasper Johns, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Morris. In November 1972 Alloway contributed a lengthy article on “Robert Smithson's Development” to Artforum, praising the artist's avoidance of simple categories: “The sites/nonsites are not a dualistic system, such as, nature and art, true and false. On the contrary the same unstoppable rate of change and threat of entropy permeates both terms: ‘It is the back-and-forth thing,’ as Smithson has observed. Neither site nor nonsite is a reliable source of fixed value, neither completely elucidates the other.” Entropy, Alloway remarks, is a significant term in Smithson's vocabulary, tending to be used to describe “not only the deterioration of order… ‘but rather the clash of uncoordinated orders,’ to quote a formulation of Rudolph Arnheim's.” Alloway thought Smithson “held the most rational view of the Earthwork/art gallery situation, handling it by his general theory of site/non-site. He saw a relation between ‘some place (physical),’ the site, and ‘no place (abstraction),’ the nonsite, which constitutes, of course, the relation between the thing signified and the signifier in language.